My fiction submission stats for 2008:

46 submissions (all short fiction; two more than 2007)
47 rejections (seven more more than 2007)
1 story under extended consideration
2 contracts offered
1 contract accepted
1 story published

It was another interesting yet trying year. I continued to get passed up to head editors at pro mags, about half the time, and I continued to get a lot of “almost” rejections from editors at semi-pro mags. Which is good, but I’d rather at least be getting those “almost” rejections from the head editors at the pro mags, if not of course actually selling some stories. I’m still not consistently able to lure editors into my dense stories of round characters and lush settings.

In my stats post last year, I mentioned two stories in unresolved submissions situations and my hope that at least one of those would result in a sale. Neither did, which was very disappointing. This year, a different near-miss situation resulted in another story remaining under extended consideration. I should hear back on that in a month or so, and I’m hopeful on that one too.

Like last year, I had a contract offered that was soon rescinded, but in this case I was the one who passed. It was from an award-nominated semi-pro venue, but the editor had just that week made offensive public comments, including some directly to or about two excellent young writers who I know and admire. I wanted to sell that story worse than I can put into words, but after what the editor had done to those two people I greatly respect, I just couldn’t accept the contract. The story is still on the submission carousel and I hope it will eventually sell.

I did make one sale this year, after a seventeen-month dry spell. That was a great relief, and I’m delighted to find a great home for a very good story that had been misunderstood by editors at several top markets. And an exciting, up-and-coming home it is–Space and Time magazine. I’m very much looking forward to seeing that one published.

My story in Weird Tales last January didn’t seem to catch much attention from bloggers or SF/F review sites, so unfortunately there hasn’t been any coattail effect from it. Perhaps I can improve on that when my story in Space and Time comes out.

Overall, this year was similar to last year, which suggests I didn’t make a significant leap in the quality of my fiction. Or that my particular brand of character-driven secondary-world short fantasy isn’t a priority right now for the major markets. Or most likely, a combination of both. In last year’s post I mentioned I was working on specific strategies to improve a major element in my fiction. That effort is ongoing, and I am making progress. The coming year will show whether it improves my submissions results.

I am slowly clawing my way out of internet desynch, having foolishly made an initial attempt right before the holidays commenced their usual brain-eating. 2147 mails in my inbox, but the good news is only 384 of them are unread!

jsridler has fallen full throttle into the livejournal thing, as I thought he would long ago, and so also made his one request before flying back to Kingston today that I manage an update, so here I am -- specifically with the news that Space and Time has purchased "Lightning Over the St. Lawrence", a poem of mine they'd been holding. It is much happiness. I picked up the summer issue of S&T at BookPeople in Austin last September, and enjoyed its poetry (and stories) greatly. In other Austin news, anguirel should, I think, be on the road toward there by now, and I have told him to hie himself to BookPeople upon arriving. I still don't have my Cold War Unicorns.

In other poem and story news, I quietly added this to my profile awhile ago, but never announced here -- I have my contract now, so I think it's officially official -- I also sold a poem, "Osteometry", to Sheila Williams at Asimov's Science Fiction, which of course I was ridiculously excited about but didn't know when I could mention it. Getting Asimov's wirelessly delivered is one of my favorite things about owning a Kindle, and it'll be decidedly weird but cool to be in its TOC. If you aren't a subscriber, you may want to pick up the current issue -- among its usual pleasing offerings it has a stirring story by Stephen King and "Lion Walk" by Mary Rosenblum, which may be the best thing I've read published this year -- I'm anxious to hunt down her Water Rites based on its excellence. After many back-and-forths, "Impress of the Hills", short hillbilly fantasy, was also officially accepted by Spacesuits and Sixguns last month or thereabouts.

Check out the new Ideomancer Livejournal group if you get a chance, too. I never mentioned largely because I wondered if we were supposed to be a sort of mysterious shadow council, but I've been reading slush for the magazine since May or so, and hopefully will be pitching in more as time goes on. Mentioned there recently is ecbatan's review of Ideomancer this year, which includes a nice note for George S. Walker's wonderful "Zorroid", the first thing I fished out for them (no credit to me; Walker wrote a great story, I was only fortunate to be a minor conduit -- I link it here mainly because you should go read it). I've always liked the magazine, from mission to content to staff and so on, so this is fun, and the LJ group is newly pretty and organized. Expect great things, if so inclined.

I'm half starved, so I think that's all for now. Hope that you all had a terrific holiday of your choice, and hopefully are still so having. I'm off until Friday, which is nice, and working on slowly un-congealing my brain. I have managed to keep fairly up on twitter, if any of you are there, and I updated dopplr with at least the next three months' planned travel. Inch by inch and all that. :)

Have fun with your new toys.

The Washington Post Book World had two interesting articles last Sunday, both of which taken together show two different data points on the ever-changing landscape of modern commerical publishing.

An essay about the recent funeral of legendary publisher Robert Giroux, of Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, used the retrospective of his long literary career buying such seminal 20th-century works as The Catcher in the Rye to comment on the very different and currently shifting nature of commercial publishing. The essay was more geared toward mainstream literary fiction rather than any specific genre, but its overall mood seems quite reflective of the current times.

And a column by Michael Dirda, noted reviewer of SF/F and a Guests of Honor at Capclave 2008, listed many of the best and brightest among the small presses that have emerged in the last decade. Most of those on his list are SF/F presses like Wildside and Night Shade–I don’t know if that’s because Dirda, with his SF/F reading experience, is more familiar with SF/F small presses or if it’s because there are more small presses in SF/F than in other genres.

The small press movement is very important to me because they publish far more short fiction than the larger publishers–not only anthologies and collections but many magazines–and also because this year I joined their ranks in my own small way by starting a magazine.

It will be fascinating to see where things go from here, especially in the world of short fiction. If Clarkesworld Magazine and its clever publisher Neil Clarke are any indication, audio short fiction may be one of the new frontiers.

via Rick Bowes.

I read a fascinating comment by non-fiction author and publisher Bruce Gehweiler, co-author of Breaking Into Fiction Writing!, in a short article in Space and Time magazine. He said, “A universal truth that I have learned is that it is easier to get published by supplying a publisher with what they need, than by trying to find a home for your original work.”

I had never thought of it that way, but all my limited experience with the business of publishing suggests that he’s right. It’s not art; it’s commerce. Decisions are not made for artistic reasons; they’re made, especially in these inceasingly lean economic times, for business ones. Whatever the suits think will sell gets published, and whatever they don’t think will sell doesn’t. They are often wrong, of course, about things on both ends of that equation, but that’s the defining principle.

But it’s also the exact opposite of what the hodres of hopeful writers out there are doing. They have their own worlds and characters, in some cases captivatingly original and in many others numbingly trite. They do yearn to be published, but I think most of that drive is to see their original material in print, not merely to publish anything they might write.

Even though I recognize the business realities, my own first reaction as a writer, as a strong proponant of originality, was dismissive. My original worlds are a huge part of my fiction. Developing their cool visuals and their interesting societies is one of the main reasons that I enjoy writing (and reading). The themes in my fiction often emerge organically from those worlds and the characters. I rarely do well with writing exercises where I’m supposed to take a setting or a theme from someone else and incorporate into a world or a story. I just don’t think in that way.

So am I writing for myself and not to get published? I certainly want my own stuff published, and I’m quite pleased that some of it has been. I do take commercial and appeal considerations into account while writing. But I don’t know that my interest or my writing process would hold while doing work that wasn’t largely original.

We’ll see if I ever get the opportunity to find out. After all, Robert Jordan did get his start with Conan novels, and it would certainly be great fun to write a D&D novel–umber hulks and Drow and shambling mounds, oh my!

Only six and a half hours to go.

I saw a History Channel documentary a few weeks ago on the July 20th 1944 bomb plot to kill Hitler. I knew the basic story as a kid–Claus von Stauffenberg was an aristocratic, combat-wounded army officer who led the plot and was executed when it failed. This program had general documentary and interviews with a few original plotters and a few wives, and lots of plotters’ daughters, sons, and grandsons.

It started with a summary of the Nazis taking over in the depression after WWI, then turning Germany into a police state, including the anti-Jew policies. They showed some excerpts from propaganda films that were freakin’ scary. There were a handful of resistance groups even in that era–politicians, leftist students, elitist aristocrats, army officers–but none ever amounted to much.

Resistance efforts picked up as the war did. One July 20th plotter said his captain overheard two drunk SS men on a train bragging that they’d killed 250,000 jews in their sector and were coming to cleanse his. I knew the Final Solution was not made public at the time, but I’d always suspected some word had to have gotten out.

The plotters cited that as a secondary motivation, but mostly said they mostly driven by the strain of the war on the country and the general murderousness of the police state. By1943 the different resistance groups started meeting together and agreed that Hitler couldn’t just be arrested; he had to be assassinated. Several attempts by army officers failed because of bad luck with logistics or fuses.

Stauffenberg was an aristocrat, a devout Catholic who’d served on Rommel’s staff in Africa. Motivated by love for his concept of an honorable Germany, he was dead set that Hitler must die but annoyed that the plotting generals hadn’t gotten it done. So he took over as a main instigator. A major part of the plot was using the army reserves to take over after Hitler was dead, code-named Valkyrie, so they could seize other Nazi leaders and overthrow the regime.

Then the program described the failed plot. The army reserve commander had been a lukewarm plotter; after the bomb failed, he arrested Stauffenberg and four others and had them executed immediately. Others were arrested at their estates; many killed themselves. The surviving plotters were tried in a sham trial and hung.

They did not mention Rommel at all. I read as a kid that Rommel was told of the plot but was not involved, and that Hitler forced him to kill himself afterwards. Knowing that Stauffenberg was on Rommel’s staff in Africa would make sense if I have that right.

The program also talked about the descendants of the plotters and reaction in postwar Germany, which still considered the plotters traitors even then. A monument was erected in Berlin in 1952 on the spot where Stauffenberg and the four others were shot, and the attitude toward the plotters warmed in modern times toward regarding them as heroes.

I find the sociology behind the whole thing fascinating–the motivations behind racism, noblesse oblige, duty, betrayal, execution, and the social reaction to all of it.  As a writer, I think those kinds of complex motivations are what make great characters.

And of course this documentary had director Bryan Singer pimping the new movie about Stauffenberg, with clips of Tom Cruise in the lead role. He looks to me to have about 1% of the kwan necessary to play a man like that. I’ll stick with the documentary, thanks.

is the title of a Peter Rowan song I’ve been kicking around in my head for awhile. Like most of Peter Rowan’s stuff, it has a certain ageless quality that makes me feel like I’ve known it all my life. When I first heard it, I sort of assumed it must belong to the same storied vernacular as songs like Whiskey in the Jar, Stagger Lee, Jack-A-Roe, Man of Constant Sorrow, songs that have existed for so long in so many different versions nobody knows who wrote them anymore, and it feels perfectly possible nobody wrote them at all, they just appeared, fully formed, out of the fabric of the universe just in time for the invention of the fiddle. Archetypal. Like the figure of a Michelangelo slave inside living granite waiting for the chisel.

There are stories like that too.

When I hear something like that for the first time, I have a tendency to go digging for its history, trying to feel out the shapes of the ideas that formed its roots. I figure for an element of story to hang on so long, to endure so many changes and keep going, is a sign that there’s some fundamental truth at its core, some lesson to be learned. The study of the horned god I undertook for last year’s solstice is an example of this; I’ve done it with King Lear, Baba Yaga, the myth of the Flood.

I tried to do this with “Fetch Wood, Carry Water”, and found out I was wrong. Rowan wrote it in 2001; that’s as far back as the song’s history goes.

Or so I believed until the other day, when I came across the following Buddhist proverb in some insane occult/new age literature, while researching the concept of spiritual ascension:

Before enlightenment, fetch wood, carry water. After enlightenment, fetch wood, carry water.

Turns out Peter Rowan, bluegrass balladeer, pulled those lyrics out of Eastern philosophy and used them to write a reggae song. That is exactly the kind of universal wisdom I’m looking for.

Now those words keep coming back to me, whatever I’m doing.

I’m pretty sure the point of these koan thingies is not to try to explicate all the wisdom out of them, but to contemplate in silence, glean from them what lessons you can without having to put it into words.

But words are kind of the point for me—both means and end, if you know what I mean.

Suffice it to say I think there’s a powerful message here for the struggling writer. It’s about perseverance, about knowing what’s essential, and about the importance of returning often to the fundamentals no matter how far one may stray. There’s no such thing as too much enlightenment. In fact, you can never have enough. But you’ll always need water and wood.

Here’s a version of the Peter Rowan song I’m pretty sure it is legal for me to share:
“Fetch Wood, Carry Water” - Peter Rowan & Donna the Buffalo, 5-2-2001 (13.5 mb)

I've been pretty bad lately in the self-promotion department.

First up, Chris Butler at The Fix has a nice over all review of The Best of Abyss & Apex, vol. 1, which includes my short prose poem "City of Beautiful Nonsense". It's a nice looking small press anthology (due out in April 2009), and the line-up is great. Once again it feels good to be in such great company.

Also at The Fix, Fábio Fernandes has many good things to say about "Fast Ships, Black Sails". This book has been getting so many good reviews from all across the Internet, and the variety of stories in it really is impressive. Seriously, there's something in here for everyone. Space pirates, animal pirates, cooking pirates, giant beasts, were-creatures, and even a passing reference to the dreaded and dire mofongo. Hats off to folks getting nice mentions like Katherine Sparrow for "Pirate Solutions" and Jayme Lynn Blaschke for "The Whale Below". Great stuff, and the book is available right now, just in time for the Holidays!

Here's the trailer:


(The pirate figures are my contribution. I probably should have put them atop a plate of dunderfunk or lobscouse or scalvagee or something...)

Hope all of you have a nice Sunday. Somehow I expect this coming work week is going to look like this.