Issue #14 of M-Brane SF magazine is now out, featuring my hard-SF baseball story “Picking Up the Spin.”

If you’ve always wondered what SF written by me would read like, given that I have a chemistry background but always write fantasy, this is your chance to find out. :)

M-Brane is a great indie mag, now in their second year (not unlike my mag BCS). Among the many other authors in Issue #14 is my friend and colleague Cat Rambo. So definitely give this issue a look.

I’m delighted that my hard-SF baseball story “Picking Up the Spin” has found a home at M-Brane SF, an up-and-coming online SF magazine that got very good compliments in Rich Horton’s year-end review.

The story is a near-future look at what might happen to a ballplayer who had to undergo a genetically engineered treatment for retinal disease. It has lots of cool baseball jargon and my near-future baseball speculations (maybe someday there will be a major league team in Havana?).

The science is extrapolated from the retinal signal-transduction pathway I assisted with research on during an undergraduate summer. The scientific approach in the story also features a different angle than I’ve seen in SF before.

[Warning: Science Content! Many science fans don't realize how massively difficult it is to modify a biological system by changing or adding a gene. Specifically targeting one gene is trying to access a thousand base pairs of DNA among 3 billion. Even if you add a new gene, the old one is still present. The problem expands from there, as RNA transcription and translation and protein mechanics are exponentially more complex and less well understood than DNA processes. To see my neat approach that circumvented all that, you'll have to read the story. :) ]

Despite my science background, this is the only piece of true SF that I’ve ever written. I think that may be because for me, scientific concepts and personal or character things rarely mesh for me. Character is always the most important element of a story for me, so, even in hard SF, the science must take a back seat.

The good folks at M-Brane tell me that “Picking Up the Spin” is slated for the March issue. Right around when spring training games will be starting for the new season. Play ball!

My story “Keeli’s Ordeal” is now live at Crossed Genres magazine, in issue 15. Here’s the direct link.

The magazine looks quite nice! In addition to online text, it’s also available in paper format and in several ebook file formats–visit their web-store for all the options.

I’m sharing the TOC of this issue with Barbara Krasnoff, a good short story writer I met at ReaderCon last year, and my Homeless Moon cohort Jay Ridler. If you check out my story, be sure and check out theirs as well.

Over the weekend, one of my many stories wandering the wilderness found a home!

The story, “Keeli’s Ordeal,” is about a boy in a tribal society who goes on a solitary wilderness quest. It will be appearing in Crossed Genres, an online and print magazine that publishes issues with rotating themes.

One of their themes for this issue was “Child Fiction”–stories with child protagonists but intended for adult readers. That’s exactly how I intended this story–the protagonist is young, but the issues he struggles with and the concepts he sees but doesn’t understand are designed for adult readers.

Which is a very astute distinction. I had thought about it before, but I’ve never seen anyone except Crossed Genres articulate it. Their editors not only understood the story on that level, but they also enjoyed all the meticulous little bits that I built into the character and the world, and they found particular resonance in the ending.

(I did something different in the ending that I’d never done before–nothing revolutionary or uncommon, just a different approach (no spoilers) that I’d never taken. It worked for the story and it worked for them.)

This issue should be appearing quite soon! I will post the date and links as soon as I find out.

My fiction submission stats for 2009:

50 submissions (all short fiction; three more than 2008)
49 rejections (three more more than 2008)
0 new sales
1 reprint sale (audio)
1 story published

It was yet another trying year, even moreso than 2008. My stories continued to get passed up to editors at pro mags, and they continued to get a lot of “almost” rejections. Exactly like the two last years.

For the first time since I’ve been submitting, I went the whole year without selling a story. Calendar years, of course, are arbitrary demarcations, but that still was quite disappointing.

I did make my first-ever reprint sale, an audio podcast of my Weird Tales story “Excision” to Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine. Which is very cool, and I look forward to hearing their podcast.

My story “Ebb” in Space and Time #107 got two glowing reviews in “mid-list” online SF/F review magazines (here and here), which was extremely cool. But, even though Space and Time is a well-designed magazine with a known name, “Ebb” didn’t garner any other interest and has not yet sold as a (audio) reprint.

Overall, this year was pretty much the same as the last three. My brand of character-driven, secondary-world fantasy isn’t a priority for most all magazines. Editors at major mags have said that my stories are too swords & sorcery for them; editors at S&S mags have said that my stories are too character-centered with endings that are too dark. So I’m caught in between.

But I can’t blame it all on that. I’ve written several stories in other styles, and they’ve gotten the same “almost” rejections. Which suggests I still haven’t made a leap in the quality of my fiction.

In the past two years’ Stats posts, I mentioned I was working on improving a specific element in my fiction. I think I made progress on that this year, but the jury is still out on whether it’s made a difference. I unfortunately only got two new stories out the door this year, one for the Homeless Moon chapbook and the other only recently sent out, so I haven’t yet gotten editorial reaction to it.

The coming year will tell whether or not I have made a significant improvement. I’m already working to get more new stories out the door this year, while also rewriting several older ones based on pro editors’ comments. We’ll see if that makes a difference.