End of term report

Another year, another glance over my shoulder at the trail of chaos and confusion in my wake.

Last year, I didn't set myself a target of a short story submission a day, so there's no shame in only managing 206 in 2019.  As regards results, the year saw seven acceptances, 162 form rejections, and 29 with something nice to say alongside a firm 'no'.  Twenty-eight remain out in the ether, a herd of editorial Schrodinger's Cats, with an unusually high proportion (six) of 'held pending consideration', although I doubt more than a couple will bear fruit.

So, on the face of it, a good year, and the primary target of three pieces sold achieved in spades.  But, when you consider what those pieces were and where they went:

• 'Camponotus Vampiricus' and 'Tesla luvs Waymo 4Ever', two drabbles to Black Hare Press.  I'm not even sure whether these have appeared anywhere yet.
• 'The Artist and the Magician', which will appear later this month in the anthology Pride, also from Black Hare Press.
• 'The Root Canals of Mars', Harbinger Press, which hit your screens in October 2019.  I'm glad to see this personal favourite, and one over which I still await a kill fee from Carrie Cuinn, has finally made it out there.
• 'A Room With a View', in the anthology Five Minutes at Hotel Stormcove from AtthisArts, published in March.
• 'How Did They Get You?' in James Gunn's Ad Astra #7, which came out two days short of 2020, and 
• 'The Fool', in issue 9 of The New Accelerator.

Two drabbles, three pieces around 1000 words, and only two proper short stories.  All new material, granted, but that's still barely 11,000 words in a year.  Hardly Proust.  And, having written ten stories in the year, I'm still selling them slower than I'm writing them.

Plus, when looked at through the prism of my acknowledged need to get published in more professional, higher paying, greater circulating, more prestigious places - with all respect to the semi-pro venues listed here - it's not been a roaring success.

As part of that strategy, feeling that I at least had a sense of what the Writers of the Future were after, I went all out after that glittering prize, garnering two silver honourables, and two unplaced.  One of the latter pair really stuck in the craw, as I felt it architect-designed for them, but them's the breaks...  

In addition to those above, 'The Loimaa Protocol', sold in 2018, appeared back in the Spring.  And 'May Nothing But Happiness Come Through Your Door', also sold in 2018, remains slated to appear on Abyss and Apex sometime this year - and caused a minor ruffle when they chased for a signed contract, with ominous tones of 'if we don't hear from you rapidly', a year after I'd actually returned the paperwork.

Three other targets: to sell a novel, write a novel, and publish a novel.  In roughly that non-intuitive order.  Might as well sell what I've already written whilst writing more.  Right?

Less said the better on all fronts.  Irons remain in the fire on my YA Harry Potter-meets-Doctor Who novel, which I just want someone to love as much as I do, but that hasn't shown any signs of life in a while.  It remains out with a small number of agents and publishers - here's hoping that somebody lifted it off the slush pile whilst in a good mood this Yuletide.

As for my dark sci-fi thriller 'Toefoot', it's drifted along from 18,800 words to 33,000 words.  I'm in that long dark tunnel known as act two with little sign of any light at the end.  Ideas for short stories are too frequent and too enticing, and I keep reverting to the short form.  That or working for money, which is also a constant fly in my ointment.

And, as for taking the easy way out and publishing direct to Kindle, I'm still clinging to the hope that somehow a proper imprint will come along and save me from being my own publisher.

I can dream, can't I?  It's that time of year.

The Safety Shelf

You know how it is, fellas.  You've met a great girl.  Second date, third date, and you go back to her place.  There are buy-signals, but you want to remain respectful.  You've had a few drinks, but no way are you drunk.  You've just eased the tensions and are getting on really well.  In short, you're both looking forward to the fumbling.

She opens the front door, drops her keys - does that mean she's more drunk than you, or just more nervous?  She's just gone to open some wine.  You're temporarily alone.

This is the moment that you spring, nay leap, to check her CDs, blu-rays and books.  Will it be Katy Perry, Now That's What I Call Music and auto-tune merchants?  Sex in the City - 1 and 2, Maid in Manhattan, Leap Year?  On the bookshelf, tomes with airbrush soft-as-snow-porn art on the cover by authors you've never heard of: Sarah J Maas, Bethany Griffin, Cindy Flores Martinez?

If so, your heart sinks and you plan an exit strategy.  You know that, however much you think she's the one, you'll have to co-exist with a TV and cinematic diet of a gay friend that works in publishing, with an over-bearing mother, a back-stabbing boss, and a significant birthday coming up necessitating a trip to Europe.  On hard repeat, even if the faces and names change.  She'll probably expect to watch it in her PJs.  Or, worse, a onesie.

You're not asking for there to be, I don't know, Anna Meredith, obscure Paisley Underground and Lenny Kaye's Nuggets.  Tale of Tales or The Lobster or Garth Merenghi.  Maybe just some Radiohead and Chris Nolan to show that there's common ground, a zone of potential agreement.  Some Stephen King in amongst the Helen Fielding.  '2084' by your truly would be nice, but highly unusual - I see the sales figures.

At least that's how the world used to work.  It was called the 'safety shelf'.

But now?  It's all on the cloud, via apps, viewed on a tablet, listened to on a phone.  How far into a relationship do you have to get before you discover your future is more Nicolas Sparks than Werner Herzog?  How deep do you have to wade?  How close to drowning do you need to come?

I agree with the reactionaries.  The modern world is just so much more dangerous than it ever used to be.

How many sleeps to go?

Before then: An advent calendar, how nice.

Then:  Ah, this one's called a 'chocolate advent calendar'.  It has chocolates in it every time you open a window.  Just so you know its different.

Now: It says it's an advent calendar.  Where's the bloody chocolate?

Progress, huh?

Back in your kennel, PETA

...and the PDSA and RSPCA, and the rest of you.

I've been enjoying the BBC's luscious adaptation of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials.  I've even managed to keep one teenager engaged, although the other was lost after the first episode.  The daemons are particularly well rendered - there is a moment when Mrs Coulter's golden monkey jumps from the car and the seat gives in response.  Practically seamless.

But, am I the only one to notice that in Lyra's world, even if everybody has a daemon, nobody has a pet?

2084 on Amazon.com, .co.uk, .in or direct from Double Dragon

Ad astra, just not very fast

It's a long way to the stars, particularly when your one concession to hard sci-fi is the rejection on principle of faster than light travel.

But I have it on good authority that the uber-tardy issue 7 of James Gunn's Ad Astra, containing a little something from me, will be a thing of the 2010s, not the 2020s, come hell or high water.  Hmm... we've heard that before, but I have faith.

Apparently the issue has been with gathering material of a sufficient quality.  

I'll confess, I found this odd.  I like to think that my writing is of some quality - finalist and double silver honorables in Writers of the Future, two appearances in the Best of British Sci-Fi, 30 stories published - and I still fall short of Asimov's and Clarkesworld every time.  I'm good, but there are a whole army of scribblers who are obviously great.

The Grinder records 267168 submissions (since it opened, I assume? which was when? in the last decade, I guess).  That'll encompass a lot of multiple submissions, but that over-recording will be balanced by writers who don't use the Grinder at all.  There must be a five-figure number of stories in circulation, let's say 10,000 which fall under sci-fi and speculative.

Even an infinite number of monkeys would churn out something decent with those odds.  Surely.

But there is another way of looking at this.  I've blogged before than I am not a voracious reader of science fiction.  Some of the stuff that rises to the top certainty gets its turn on my bedside table - Ann Leckie, Hugh Howey - or classic Dick, Gibson, Vonnegut.  But it's rare that I'll be truly startled by the contributor's copy of whatever I'm in.  

I rationalise not reading widely within the confines of the genre as not wanting to end up parroting the voices or story arcs of other writers in the genre.  But, perhaps, subconsciously I can tell that there's genuinely a great deal of unreadable shit out there...

What? No hoover on the Millennium Falcon?

I was going to blog about how distracting and off-putting in general references in fantasy to things rooted in the real world are, and specifically a reference to 'French sleeves' in a recent (to me, that is - I think it may have been season 3) episode of Game of Thrones.  However, I've decided against it as a) it's already out there, b) apparently it's a mishearing - like hell, it is!, and c) I'm six years behind the curve.  As ever.

So, instead, I'll stick to news hot off the press that my story 'The Root Canals of Mars' has gone live on Harbinger Press website.  Enjoy!

No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Regular readers will be aware that few of these posts relate to my so-called writing career, for the simple reason that I tend to only blog narcissistically when I have something to announce, such as the publication of a new piece.  Which leads to a distinct paucity of postings of that nature.

I thought I'd make the punchline clear to save you the bother.

If you're in the short genre fiction game you have to be resilient.  It's a school of hard knocks - or, rather, frequent, short, bland rejection emails.  I'll cover the numbers in my end of year report, but I'm currently running at 4 acceptances for 154 submissions.  And that's off the back of a year when I tried to average a submission a day, so there was a surge of pitches from me in 2018 that were only ever due to fall back to earth, regardless of their fate, in 2019.

Most of the time I'm sanguine about the knock-backs, and philosophical about the scattering of successes - even they don't always bear fruit.  (God knows what's happened to James Gunn's Ad Astra.  It was slated for March, then August.  It's now October, and the home page is just a banner and a blank screen.  I've been paid for my story, which went through innumerable rewrites, that's due to appear there, but that's not the point.)

But, I'll be honest: I'm having a difficult October.  Seven rejections already (it's only the 2nd as I type), plus another than can be assumed as rejected according to the guidelines in a day or so.  Analog, Asimov's, Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Escape Pod; all apart form Analog and DSF within a day or so.  Throw in rejections from Clarkesworld and Fantasy & Science Fiction in the last few hours of September and you have some macabre professional-rate royal flush.

I'd make the classic error of getting my hopes up.  I'd just had my second consecutive silver honorable from Writers of the Future: a 14,300 word tale of the madness that can be caused by innocently taking a cutting of an unfamiliar plant; a triptych set in the 19th, 20th and 21st Centuries.  I'd written it to win Writers of the Future, and I know that I should take heart in being in the top 25 out of thousands, but all I sense is missing that rope that coulda pulled me up by my fingertips and falling back into the abyss.

I completely hold my hand up to the fact that that length of story is a tricky sell.  The Grinder only lists nine markets for sci-fi that pay over $0.03 per word at that length, some of which don't fit the story.  A lot of investment for very few tickets in the lottery.  And suddenly three are already used up - Asimov's and Clarkesworld both passed in a day.  It clearly didn't even pique their interest. 

It's enough to make you wonder why you bother: statistically, the chance of my laughing about this posting in a year with Letterman, Corden or Noah is remote.  But, to give up is to guarantee failure.

To quote Beckett, "No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better."