Category: Publications

June 2016 update

Heyyyy, it’s monthly update time! Everyone’s favorite time.

Maybe someone’s favorite time?

Either way, it’s been a good month! Chock-full of exclamation points:

  1. My story “The First Confirmed Case of Non-Corporeal Recursion: Patient Anita R.” came out in Strange Horizons! I’m super proud of this one!
  2. I sold two stories! “The Time Cookie Wars” to Flash Fiction Online, and “Shiplight” to Metaphorosis.
  3. I returned to the Fourth Street Fantasy convention. I got to speak on a panel! I learned tons of things (including 45 specific action items for my novel)! I got to talk to lots of amazing people!
  4. I revised 2 short stories, and drafted one new piece of flash!
  5. The novel is on track! Currently at 76,000 words, and I’m hoping to finish the first draft at the end of July, if it doesn’t end up running long.

Story Sale: Time Cookie Wars

Have you ever had one of those “Past Self, why did you mess this up for me?” moments? Of course you have. Past Self is a jerk.

Well, the time has come to get your vengeance on Past Self, because my story “The Time Cookie Wars”1 has sold to Flash Fiction Online!

Publication date not yet set, but I’ll certainly let you all know as soon as I have an estimate.

This week has been stuffed with writing success, between this acceptance, last week’s one, and a Revise & Resubmit offer from one of my favorite markets. I am here to rock your short fiction universe!

Story Sale: Shiplight

I’m thrilled to announce the sale of my story “Shiplight” to Metaphorosis, a magazine focused on beautifully written speculative fiction!

This is a story about humanity’s first extrasolar colony, and about generational divides. When a lucky few escape the bounds of Earth to settle on an uninhabited planet, what becomes of their children, who never knew the world that defines their parents?

Publication is planned for August or September, and I’ll let you all know when I have an exact date!

Non-Corporeal Recursion

My story “The First Confirmed Case of Non-Corporeal Recursion: Patient Anita R.” is up today on Strange Horizons!

(These author notes contain no spoilers for anything beyond the story’s first page.)

This piece doesn’t have a lot of secrets, no extensive authors’ notes. I might clarify that none of Anita’s science references are things I personally do; other than the choice of institution, her science life is not a window into mine. Well, except for the windowless basement lab. TRUE SUFFERINGS of a scientist’s life.

This story means a lot to me, but I don’t want to feed you an interpretation. Hopefully it touches you in some way that resonates with your own life. So rather than telling you what the story means to me, I can give a bit of its history:

I wrote this piece in fall of 2015, for the Codex 12th Annual Halloween Contest, where it took second place. The contest had a time limit and two rules: include something halloween-related (however vaguely or thematically), and use seeds given by fellow writers. I received the seed “the Halloween candy that you liked the least,” thus the role of candy corn2. I was more inspired by the chance to write something halloween-ish. When I began, I didn’t yet have a conflict or a plot, but I did have a character concept, one that had percolated in the back of my mind for a while:

In so many classic ghost stories, the spirit repeats and reenacts the moment of their death, again and again. I wondered: what – if anything – would that be like from the ghost’s point of view? And is there any way the ghost could move beyond that haunting state?

Meltwater

My first pro short story, Meltwater, is up today on Strange Horizons!

This is possibly the weirdest story I’ve ever written, despite its short length, but I love it all the more for that. Below the fold you’ll find some author’s notes. Contains some spoilers, so go read (or listen to) the story first .

Continue reading Meltwater

February 2016 Update

Not too much to report this month! I had a ton of non-writing things to overfill my time. Two long-weekend vacations (including a 16-hour drive transformed into 25 by a rockslide, oy), and running a giant historical fantasy live-action roleplaying game. Which went awesomely! All the contingencies happened, both political and esoteric!

I did sell a story to Strange Horizons at the beginning of the month, but if you’re reading this blog, you already know that! What else? I launched two pieces out for critique, and I began outlining my novel. I have one short story that everyone says “this should be a novel,” and it’s time to put the money where my words are3. Of course, I still need to figure out Acts 4-5 before I dig into the prose, but it’s coming along!

Friends of the Merrill contest

Normally I don’t participate in pay-to-enter writing contests, but I decided last month to go in on  the Friends of the Merrill short story contest, where those entry fees support the Friends of the Merrill, “a volunteer organization to support and promote the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy, a public access collection consisting of science fiction, fantasy, gaming materials, graphic novels, and other related items. The Collection is named after acclaimed SF author Judith Merril, who’s original donation of material formed its nucleus.”

I’m thrilled to see that my story is one of the twelve finalists! We’re off to an exciting panel of judges4, who should announce the winner and two runners-up at the end of January.

The Wind and the Spark

My first publication, “The Wind and the Spark,” is now for sale as part of Fictionvale Episode 6, alongside a host of other amazing authors and stories!

“Fifty years into the Napoleonic Wars, a British scientist investigates automata that act not like machines, but like thinking creatures.”

You can buy the direct from the Fictionvale website, or from Amazon.

If you enjoy this story, wait until you see something I’ve written since 2013. Edited Oct 21: …including more upcoming stories set in the same universe!

~

This was one of my earlier-written stories, perhaps my third ever. Inspired by a late-night conversation back in Oregon, where I mentioned some piece of scientific history, and my friend’s jaw hit the floor5. I said, “Oh, that’s not common knowledge, is it?” And this story was born…

For some more thoughts inspired by the odd mix of characters in this story, see my previous post.

Surviving the Shortlist

Right now, three of my stories have been shortlisted for publication: two pro markets, and one semi-pro. This is great! But it’s also incredibly stressful.

One of the major sources of stress is uncertainty. Short story submissions are always uncertain, but being on the shortlist means the stakes are higher. Obviously there’s nothing I can do now to increase my odds, but is there something I could’ve done, should’ve done? Some element of my story that makes it more or less likely than its excellent competitors?

The two pro markets have each given me an estimated acceptance rate from their shortlist: one is 30%, the other is 50%. No data from the semi-pro, but based on my experience with the market, I’ll guess a rate of 33%. (Remember, these are rates for already-on-the-shortlist. Total acceptance rates run about 1/4/15%.)

Why bog down so much in the probabilities? Because for me, it helps to look at this stage of the process like a numbers game. From the editor’s side, it’s not stochastic; they’re making judgments based on all kinds of factors. Some are even semi-quantifiable: if you had to rank a set of stories by “prose quality” you probably could (even though your list would differ from the next reader’s). So, in theory, it’s possible to know which story is more likely to get selected.

But there are also a host of factors that are completely unknowable. Is your story too similar to another one? Or do they have parallel themes in a way that’ll make the issue/anthology stronger? Have they read too many robot romances lately? Or do they crave something more science-fantasy this week? All these things depend on the whole suite of submitted stories, and the editors’ tastes and moods. From the writer’s side, unpredictable. Might as well be stochastic, really.

So at this point, forget worrying about how good your story is. Doesn’t matter anymore. It’s all blind statistics, inside the black box of the editorial world/brain.

I find it quite liberating to know that I have a 73.05% chance of getting at least one of these three published soon.