Beerbelly and grey hair - am I growing dystopian?

I have been having a metaphysical difference of opinion with my children.  When I talk pushing an event or an appointment ‘back’, I mean putting it to a later date.  But to the kids this is bringing something ‘forward’.  They simply don’t understand how forward could ever be back.

Of course, I am the adult and they are children, so I am right and they are wrong.  Quad erat demonstrandum.

But, of course, I think this hides a deeper truth.  I am an adult, so I want to hold back time as hair and flesh go south. I’ve seen things and been around the block.  Hence I don’t want to hurry to the next block in order to see more things.  Whereas they are children, so wish to barrel into the future.

Which, correct me, but isn’t that the very definition of utopia versus dystopia?

This got me thinking.  Maybe utopia is a young man’s (or woman’s) game, whereas dystopia is for those with both the years and the mileage, to paraphrase Professor Henry Jones.  After all, I know Anthony Burgess didn’t publish a Clockwork Orange until he was 45.  Maybe this is just one example of a general principle.

So, in a thoroughly unscientific test, I took the best utopian and dystopian science-fiction from bestsciencefictionbooks.com, and looked up both the years of publication, and the years of the authors’ births:

Utopian sci-fi

The Giver – Lois Lowry (born 1937 - published 1993 - age 56)

The Dispossessed – Ursula K LeGuin (1929 - 1974 - age 45)

Childhood’s End – Arthur C Clarke (1917 - 1953 - age 36)

Looking Backward – Edward Bellamy (1850 - 1888 - age 38)

News from Nowhere – William Morris (1834 - 1890 - age 56)

The Player of Games – Iain Banks (1954 - 1988 - age 34)

The Sunken World – Stanton Arthur Coblentz (1896 - 1948 - age 52)

Ralph 124C41+ - Hugo Gernsback (1884 - 1911 - age 27)

Andromeda – Ivan Yefremov (1908 - 1957 - age 49)

Uglies – Scott Westerfeld (1963 - 2005 - age 42)

Median 43.5, mean 43.5

Dystopian sci-fi

The Iron Heel – Jack London (1876 - 1908 - age 32)

Farenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury (1920 - 1953 - age 33)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep – Philip K Dick (1928 - 1968 - age 40)

Eight Against Utopia – Douglas R Mason (1918 - 1966  age 48)

A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess (1917 - 1962 - age 45)

1984 – George Orwell (1903 - 1949 - age 46)

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1932 - age 38)

Logan’s Run – William F Nolan & George Clayton Johnson (1928/1929 - 1967 - age 38.5)

The Marching Morons – Cyril Kornbluth (1923 - 1951 - age 28)

The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins (1962 - 2008 - age 46)

Median 39.25, mean 39.45

Obviously this is about as statistically significant as extrapolating from the voices in your head to the population of the planet, but it’s an intriguing result.  A good spread of ages; both lists have somebody in their late twenties.  But, mainly thanks to a couple of fifty-somethings, it appears that we pass through the dystopian and head towards the utopian.

Let me try and make some sense out of this most dubious of results, if it is a result at all.  So, having been around and seen a lot makes you more optimistic?  Or maybe experience of reality just makes you hanker more for a better world, dream them in greater detail and work out the mechanics?

Naivety correlates with youth.  So, perhaps, it’s naïve to think the world is as bad or paranoid as we think of it.  After all, the vast majority are kind and generous - but they’re not the ones that turn out newsworthy.

Perhaps we are we still getting over the grimness of Grimm and his ilk well into our thirties, repeating their echoes in our work?  Maybe it takes that long to overlay our fairy tale foundations with life’s silver linings?  Really?  I find that hard to believe.

Maybe dystopia is a more grown-up emo thing, when teenage eye-liner and this week’s Joy Division soundalikes no longer satisfy.  At that point we feel a greater urge to pen something akin to an early Cure album than bubblegum pop.  Seriously?

Of course, all this is as much hokum as most sci-fi.  But I’m going to take heart in the results.  Beerbelly and grey hair; I’m growing utopian by the day.

Ender's Game

I appreciate that I’m almost 40 years behind everybody else, but I’ve just finished Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.  Yes, it’s a ‘classic’ but, as I’ve said before, there’s so many ‘classics’ out there, not just sci-fi and not just novels, that if you didn’t have some holes in your reading list then I’d worry.

As I sometimes submit to Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show and cite this blog on my submissions I’m probably doing myself no favours by posting a review.  Because, I have some concerns - and one major issue - with the book.  Not that it’s not without merits: I liked the point about space not having an up or down, and it made me think how many space battles I’ve seen portrayed have been gravity-affected dogfights with the ground no longer visible.

But my issue?  Not with the language.  It’s a YA book, so I was expecting something more burger and slaw than lobster thermidor.  No, it isn’t Nabokov, but neither is it Enid Blyton in space.

I don’t - as many seem to have - a hang-up with the word ‘buggers’. As an Englishman it’s a curious word.  Yes, it means anal sex, but it’s not what first springs to mind.  It’s, say, what an elderly Yorkshireman says when he’s miles from home without an umbrella and it starts to rain.  And it’s said with resignation under the breath.  No, in calling his aliens ‘buggers’ Card has, as David Brent would say, embarrassed himself there.  (Ditto ‘Dr Device’ - just plain silly).

I could live with the storyline, which was pretty much as linear as one of those highways across the American desert.  Yes, there were hurdles to overcome, but hardly twists.

The pacing?  Well, let’s let it go.  The way the book plods along through the various games, really ends at the end of the penultimate chapter, then outlines a whole new novel-length story in the last chapter.  The last chapter, and not just through the way it zipped through years, was one of the most engaging.  However, it read like a précis of a much richer novel, one where there was a real sense of something strange going on.  Without spoiling, to me Card thought of a really intriguing plot device but then wasn’t sure what to do with it, nor had the authorial horsepower to get any decent mileage out of it.

Is my issue the idea of child soldiers?  This has stuck in the craw of many readers, to judge by goodreads.com reviews.  Yes, given the world we live in today, writing about children being brainwashed and forced to fight is potentially tricky.  But, come on people, this is fantasy.  Go with it.

I have a bigger issue (but it’s still not my key issue) about why they need to be children, anyway.  Yes, it’s explained briefly and unsatisfactorily towards the end; but I don’t remember doing anything other than taking it on trust when I embarked.  It feels like a plot device that should have been rethought after a few beers or a hot bath

No my big hang-up - and we’ve been skirting around the issue for the last couple of paragraphs - is that they’re not children.  Let me repeat that.  They’re not children.  They don’t talk, walk, act or speak like children.  The only - excuse me whilst I repeat that in capitals - ONLY thing that makes them children is that Card says they’re children, and they keep saying that they’re children.  But, apart from being a bit moody and unschooled, they read like adults.

Maybe the argument is that they’re children with adult skills.  If that’s the case, show the contradictions and conflicts.  I think I could have bought them if they’d been adolescents, unable to cope with their super-human (but not supra-human, they’re not superheroes) skills, but not as four-year olds or whatever Ender starts off as.  Again, a germ of an idea, but I suspect a lack of authorial horsepower to get it to fruition.

It’s the classic mistake.  Show don’t tell.  Sometimes we’ve got to do a bit of telling; Basil Exposition has got to keep his plot donkeys exercised on the sands of story to some degree.  Life is full of telling to embed and clarify the showing (think of school).  I have no issue with a bit of telling.  But don’t rely on the telling to do both the heavy lifting and the finessing.  Don’t forget to do the showing or, worse, make your showing fail to back up the telling.  When your showing can’t cash the cheques your telling is writing, then you have a issue.

And that’s my issue with Ender’s Game.

150

Less than a week since Britain, or at least 52% of Britain, made the maddest, saddest decision of my lifetime.

Less than a week since the blackest, bleakest day in our recent history, at least one that didn't involve loss of life.

Yes, Britain is to detach itself from the European Union and do its own thing.  Whatever that is.  Markets have already plunged.  Expect job losses next, and not just amongst evil bankers.  And when the price both on the forecourt and at the Magaluf bar lurch upwards the gormless Mail readers who led this craziness may finally work out that they put their Xs in the wrong box.

There are so many reasons for being baffled by the result.  Not least that history, from wandering the plains trying to find a mastodon for lunch through to our projections of the far future through science fiction have been all about smaller units - family, tribe - coming together into cities, states, corporations and empires.

The reasons are obvious: economies and efficiencies of scale.  As, say, building a dwelling has progressed beyond mud huts and blocks of ice stacked together the technical skills, let alone the heavy lifting, no longer resides in one man, or even a close-knit family.  If you want progress -- better harvests, better homes, longer lives -- then come together in teams, folks.

And with it comes the need to let go of some decision-making and defending-the-realm responsibility.  Let politics, policing and soldiery become professional, so I can get on with writing code or growing GMOs.  (America, you may want to review the background to your right to bear arms before another schoolkid or minority gets wasted; it comes out of the need for a citizen militia after the Revolution, since made redundant by your military-industrial complex and 2.1m armed regulars and reservists, but that's another blue-touch paper of a posting altogether).

In fact, space opera is awash with alliances, empires and federations.  Star Wars has The Empire; Star Trek the United Federation of Planets; Blake's Seven the Terran Federation.  1984 has the world divided into three megalithic nation-states; and even then there's a hint they may be colluding to prolong the war.  You never seem to get spatterings of independent states in our thought-out futures, unless they're in some chain-with-no-name arrangement.  That's not just because it gets hard to write; it's not how we see the future progressing.

And here's an oddity.  Some of these socio-political units have definite, distinct figureheads - The Emperor, or Servalan (who, from memory, seemed to work from home, albeit an ostentatious one, possibly Cheshire).  Others seem leaderless - who's in charge of the United Federation of Planets?  We see lots of statesmen, but there doesn't seem to be a single Putin, Trump or George Washington, to pick three banknote-faces at random.

But in sci-fi the ones with faces always turn out evil (is that right? - I can't think of a disproof, a happy star-cluster led by a benevolent altruist).  The EU's problem may have actually been the polar opposite; it's the fact that we're not sure who the muscles in Brussels really is that makes us distrustful: turns out we'd prefer to stick with people whose faces we recognise, even if the current team are lizard-people in human masks.  (Seriously: look at Cameron and Osborne in HD - that's not flesh.)

However, there's evidence that Britain's decision to say 'no more' to all this joining up of nations is perfectly sane and reasonable and it's our whole direction of travel that's wrong.  That we shouldn't just stop at dismantling Europe but most of our own nation; our countries, counties, even cities.  What we need to get back to is the optimal size of community.

And that's 150.

That's not my view.  It's called Dunbar's number.  And if you're an anthropologist it crops up everywhere.  It's the personal relationships that a human can typically manage and maintain.  It's the size that villages or tribes get to before somebody thinks that a second tribe or village may be a god idea and leads a contingent off over the horizon.  Think of a Roman legion of centurions and the associated upward management structure - it's that kinda number.  WL Gore found that when you had more than 150 people in a building then issues started to crop up as people stopped dealing with each other one-to-one, so they limited their organisational units to 150.

One day we may achieve enlightenment and return to the village.  I foresee a possible - although highly unlikely - future of us living in 150-person units, dealing with our own shit and ignoring everybody else.  It would be a utopia, not because everything would be rosy in the garden, but because at least we'd be in control of the weeds.

If I was brave I would map out this way of life in a sci-fi magnum opus.  But, given the happiness and lack of conflict therein, where would be the fun in that?  Long live The Empire!

Getting closer to the transom

Did I mention that I have a story that's made it as far as the story-strewn desk of the editor-in-chief of Spark?

Well, in the last day or so I've also had one enter Bill Adler's 'considering-for-publication folder' for the Binge-Watching Cure, and an 'I look forward to your next submission' from Sheila Williams at Asimov's.  I feel I'm getting closer to pitching one over the transom.

But I've had warm leads turn into near misses before and, if that's the case, from one perspective they merely add up to a straightforward rejection delayed.   Rejections that invariably tend to take the form of 'this doesn't fit with us' or 'this isn't right for me'.

Which leaves you wondering what it is that they do want.

Of course - and I've covered this before - the received wisdom is to read the magazines.  And in order to support these laudable concerns I agree.  But to identify the market... well, there are only so many hours in a day, plus work to do, and I'd like time to write too.  Plus the Euros.  Oh, and the Tour de France.  And Pakistan are touring...

My main reason for not slavishly reading the publications I submit to is that my mind is a two-way street and I don't want my story ideas sullied with what I've just read.  My strategy is to surprise, to be distinctly different.  As if to prove my point, try these submission guidelines from Analog: "We have no hard-and-fast editorial guidelines, because science fiction is such a broad field that I don't want to inhibit a new writer's thinking by imposing Thou Shalt Nots. Besides, a really good story can make an editor swallow his preconceived taboos."

Or Fantasy and Science Fiction: "F&SF has no formula for fiction. I am looking for stories that will appeal to science fiction and fantasy readers. You know what kind I'm talking about."

Daily Science Fiction even presents the counter-argument in one breath: "Read, and get a feel for what Daily Science Fiction publishes. We always want new and different work, of course..."

Of course, as long as you're not submitting your space opera to Portable Restroom Operator or Miniature Donkey Talk then rest in the knowledge that a good editor will recognise that breadth in our wonderful genre.  And, as if to prove that point, I stumbled across a new speculative fiction author I really like.

Patricia Highsmith.

Yes, author of Strangers on a Train, the Ripley stories, and a suitcase-full of other taut psychological thrillers (with enough room for a sack of money and maybe a severed limb).  Tucked away in 'Eleven' are some really weird genre-defying vignettes, particularly those involving snails, which aren't crime fiction at all, but portholes on to strange lives.  A man becomes obsessed with snails.  A small boy is driven to protect a terrapin.  A scientist sets out to find a legendary gastropod... and succeeds.  And if they don't fit any particular pigeonhole then they must be ours.

All I need to do right now is not let them influence me too much.

Lakeside Circus - epilogue

Or, possibly, coda.  Maybe an afterword.  I'm really not sure.

You may recall my communications with Carrie Cuinn, Managing Editor of Dagan Books, under whose umbrella sits Lakeside Circus.  Well, Carrie issued the following email earlier this week to all affected authors:

It is with great sadness I must announce that we've decided to close Lakeside Circus, at least for now. It has always been a labor of love, with very little funding outside of my own pocketbook. I was happy to pay for as long as I could, but recent events in my personal life - being laid off, going back to college, requiring surgery - have made it so I can no longer afford to fund this project.

I hope that changes, and one day soon, I may reopen Lakeside to submissions, but I can't guarantee when. In the meantime, I'll keep the website up for as long as I can, and continue to share those wonderful stories and poems with the world. 

All accepted authors with a signed contract will of course have those contracts honored: I will pay a 50% kill fee for declining to publish your work at this time. All authors are released from the other terms of publication, and you are free to submit your work to other markets. Please be patient, though; since we're closing due to lack of funds, it may take a few months to pay everyone off. (I'll do it as quickly as possible.)

I wish you the best of luck, and I will look for your fiction out in the world.

One of my first writing tutors told me 'nothing bad can ever happen to a writer' - although, if you're like me, a list beginning with 'persistent vegetative state' quickly forms in your mind.  On that basis, I hope that the experience has made Ms Cuinn, an outlier in terms of my experience dealing with editors, somewhat wiser and wish her all the best for the future.

In the land of the blind the one-eyed is king

You may recall that I recently thought that I’d received some fan mail, declarations of love even, only to discover that the floozy was spreading her messages far and wide, all whilst offering to make me wildly rich, but only if I could provide some upfront readies to oil the wheels of probate.  The brazen non-existent hussy.

Well, I now seem to have received some real fan mail.  He (I think it’s a he) didn’t declare his love or offer me a route to $9.5m for a modest downpayment, so I’m working on the basis that it’s genuine.  Instead, Lawson Castaldo (can I use that name? it’s very sci-fi) asked for advice on how to improve his writing.  And I thought I’d share my thoughts with you all.

Well, with a hit-rate of less than 1%, I’m not sure how valid any of my advice would be - a far better starting point would be the three articles linked here - but I’ll throw in a few thoughts of my own.  And, at the risk of being accused of mission-creep, I’ve majored on how to get sci-fi short stories published, and in so doing improve your writing.

‘Don’t get it right, get it written’

An old writerly cliché, only half-correct in that getting it right really helps, but the point is that writing is like using a muscle, the more you use it the better you get.  Just write stories.  Read them back to yourself.  Get them fit for purpose and get them out there.  Listen to any feedback your lucky enough to receive.

A lot of people get family and friends to read them, take them to writers’ groups.  Way too many cooks in my view.  If what you write reads well to you then get your babies to fly the nest and work on the next yarn.  Don’t be like the character in Camus’ The Plague who edited his life’s work down to one sentence (was it even one word in the end?).  Be productive.

For one thing, magazines and publishers may well sit on a story for six months, longer if it makes it further from slush pile to editor’s desk(top) - you need to have a dozen or so out there knocking on doors for you.  I’ve just done a quick count and I think I have about 21 stories currently in slush piles.

Know your market

The internet is brilliant.  If you don’t already know ralan.com, submissions grinder, Duotrope, check them out.  SFWA produce a list of qualifying markets.

Get to know the submissions pages of the publications you’re pitching to.  Follow the instructions - story length, format, what to include in the cover letter, what to put in the subject line of the email - to the letter.  Don’t give them a reason for an instant rejection.

…but don’t know your market too well

By which I mean - and I’ll risk the ire of editors here - don’t feel it necessary to read the magazines you send stories to - other than to support their very worthy enterprises.  The reason being that editors want some out-of-the-ordinary, extraordinary.  Feel tempted to replicate or imitate what’s gone before and your guaranteed not to be fresh or different.  I don’t want to reference myself against other stories.  If I’m in the dark as regards what’s out there then I’ll never be tempted to steer a story away or towards another’s tale.  Plus, remember, editors are maybe a year ahead in terms of what they’re reading versus what their readership is seeing.

As long as I’m not sending sci-fi to a fantasy market (You know how I tell?  The artwork.  If a website is all dragons and dwarf-tossing then it won’t get my William Gibson-esque near-future dystopia) then I’m happy not to be too well-versed in its recent output.

I recently heard Richard Hawley interviewed who said he wouldn’t listen to music when writing music as he ends up pastiching what he hears - I’m the same about writing.  In fact, I don’t think any sci-fi has ever informed my sci-fi, other than in a very peripheral, ‘mood-music’ kind of way.  I’m much more likely to take a story in a newspaper and play ‘what-if’ games with it.

For example, I was reading about automotive technology that can tell when a driver is having a heart attack, stop the car, and call the emergency services.  My mind drifted to what if the driver was an android - the car wouldn’t function at all - but didn’t know it.  Would he achieve self-knowledge through trips to the garage?  So I wrote that.

Anthologies

I find checking the anthology listings on submissions grinder particularly useful.  Some are vague as anything, but others can be bizarrely precise.  With luck I either have a story that fits or - and this is where it can really hit the sweet spot - a story can be twisted to fit in a way that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen.  That story about the intelligent car and unaware robot?  When I saw Kazka’s requirements for their Bronies anthology the car became a pony and another sale was made.  I would never have written that story straight off.

Smells

Sounds odd, but stories cover sights and sounds but rarely smells.  Add a line or two about the scents, aromas and whiffs.  It’s to writing what Worcestershire sauce is to cooking.

Lastly, forget the money

In terms of return on investment you’d be better off walking the pavements looking for dropped change.  I don’t say this to put you off, but to free you from the pressure of either trying to write to a ‘formula’ that isn’t you or judging your writing fiscally.  I think I suffer from stories that are hard to pigeonhole, but I can’t bring myself to write overblown ‘Captain Zumera pushed his hovercar over the ridge and into the canyon, fingering the trigger of his blaster, looking for shellback ya-yas’-type spaceopera.  (Actually that didn’t sound too bad, even if I don’t understand half of what I typed).

Plus, when you do get paid it’s all the sweeter.

Meditations on editorial correspondence

I’ve been having a number of interesting communications from, even exchanges with, editors in the past couple of weeks.  Oh, and I also got rejection number 28 from Clarkesworld.  ‘Nuff said about that.

On the one hand, I have a story that’s made it through the slush pile to the editor-in-chief at Spark.  Which is nice.  And I’ve been exchanging messages with the courteous and efficient Matt Buscemi at Fuzzy Hedgehog, who even sends me a new proof when I ask for an extra hard return in my contribution to Beyond the Hedge volume 1.  (As an side, I do like the way that a search for it on amazon.co.uk takes me to a cardboard cat house.)

But most curious of all have been my exchanges with Carrie Cuinn at Lakeside Circus.

You may recall that I sold a story, The Root Canals of Mars (which, I’ve just discovered, is also an ambient soundscape thing by Daniel Crommie), last May to Lakeside Circus.  My sole sale of 2015, as it turned out.  A modest $14, but it’s not the money, it’s the independent verification by somebody who doesn’t know me through anything other than my writing that it’s worth putting in print.

Well, immediately after signing and returning the contract to Carrie Cuinn, I stumbled across this blog posting regarding Lakeside Circus’ modus operandi.  It raised alarm bells with me.  Further Google searches have flagged tales such as this; although the fault doesn’t appear to be wholly on Ms Cuinn’s side, putting her name into a search engine does seem to elicit a disproportionate amount of chatter.

Well, following the signing of my story away for twelve months, what happened?  Precisely nothing.  Not a word.  Not even when, after six months, I sent an email querying Lakeside Circus’ plans for my story.  Silence.  Void.  Vacuum.

As April turned to May I thought Ms Cuinn may get in touch to clarify matters before the rights reverted to me.  But no.  Not a squeak.

So, a couple of days after the guillotine fell, I sent this email:

Carrie,

As you have chosen not to publish The Root Canals of Mars, the appropriate kill fee became payable earlier this week and the rights have now reverted to me.  Grateful if you could make payment to my PayPal account, as per this email address.

Regards,  Robert Bagnall

Clear and businesslike, I thought.  The reply, however, I found somewhat leftfield:

I did not choose not to publish this work.  Perhaps you've confused me with another publisher? 

Best,  Carrie Cuinn

Not, ‘really sorry, time ran out, I’ve been dealing with a long list of stories I want to publish but still love yours, can we talk about scheduling it for later in the year?’ or some such.  Instead, it’s ‘I don’t think you meant me’.  Does she think I’m complaining about a rejection rather than a decision not to publish something she’s bought the rights for?  Surely the reference to a ‘kill fee’ would make that clear.  So I reply:

You accepted it for Lakeside Circus on 16 March 2015, I returned the signed contract on 12 May 2015, and queried when you'll be publishing sometime around November 2015 (you didn't reply to my email).  You may wish to check your emails, but can forward you the contact (sic) if you can't find it.

Carrie replies:

I see the confusion. No, I did not decline to publish it. We had a break in publication for a while during which time we restructured (it was announced on social media and on the website). I still have every intention of publishing it, unless you want to withdraw it, which you're free to do since it has been more than 12 months. It's on my schedule for this summer, though, and I'd prefer to move forward with it if that's okay with you.

Carrie Cuinn

At this I sense a slight rat.  The contract pays a kill fee if Lakeside Circus does not run it within twelve months but, if I accept the invitation of withdrawal no kill fee is payable.  The kill fee is an even more modest $7, but there’s a principle at stake here.

To be clear, the confusion is entirely on your side.  No, I do not wish to withdraw the piece, as that nullifies the contractual kill fee.  However, the facts of the matter are that due to your actions or omissions the piece was not published in the year since I assigned the rights to you.  The idea that your publication was in hiatus somehow stops the clock is laughable.

What we will do now is that you will pay the contractual kill fee and, if you still wish to publish, you may offer a new contract, which I will consider.

Robert Bagnall

A reply pings back:

I'm not sure why you need to be rude, or misrepresent what I'm saying. If you do not wish to be published by Lakeside, that does not negate the fee due to you since it's been more than 12 months. The contract is clear, and nothing I've said contradicts that. However, since I never declined to publish it, but you said I had, I wanted to clear up that I was still willing to publish it.

I will process your payment, and take your work off our schedule.

Carrie Cuinn

Maybe I have been brusque:

Apologies if my response appeared rude; I was aiming for clarity given a year ago you 'loved' my story, after which you decline to respond to my request for an update, and then deny ever having been in contact.

Robert

And back again:

No, Mr. Bagnall, I did not "deny ever having been in contact", just like I did not decline to publish your story, I simply had not published it yet. You can look over my emails to see clearly I never said that.

Considering I wrote the contract to allow you the kill fee if you hadn't been published within a year - a deadline which had just (barely) passed - I'm not certain why you feel the need to be adversarial and repeatedly attribute things to me I've not said. It doesn't affect the fee one way or another, so it really is unnecessary. Please stop.

Carrie Cuinn

This is seriously odd.  So what if a deadline is ‘barely’ passed; it’s either passed or it hasn’t.  Maybe we’re arguing over ‘decline’.  Lakeside Circus accepted my piece and then failed - forgot? - to publish it.  I’m not using ‘decline’ in a particularly active sense here, but maybe that’s what’s confusing, just trying to be more polite than using 'failed'.  But I think she did pretty clearly deny previous contact…

Apologies for any confusion, but I was taking "I did not choose not to publish this work.  Perhaps you've confused me with another publisher?" at face value,

Robert Bagnall

Back and forth, back and forth...

Yes, I did not choose NOT to publish it. In other words, I did not decline to publish it, as I've said repeatedly.

Carrie Cuinn

‘Declined’ to publish?  ‘Failed’ to publish?  ‘Forgot’ to publish?  Whether Lakeside Circus ‘didn’t choose’ to publish or ‘chose not’ to publish the result is the same - they had the rights to publish until the calendar moved on twelve whole pages, but they didn’t.  I sense someone who’d rather debate the semantics than deal with the issue.

Hmm.  With or without the double negative, still reads like 'we've never spoken, you must have me mixed up with someone' to me.

Robert

To which she never replied.

Suffice to say that Matt Buscemi at Fuzzy Hedgehog has made payment on ‘Where do all the Accountants Come From?’, whereas Carrie Cuinn at Lakeside Circus?  Still waiting…