Guest posts at Jeff VanderMeer's blog

I'm one of the guest posters for Jeff VanderMeer's blog while he's on a book tour. So check out these recent posts of mine:

Mark Pexton's art for my new Interzone story

FallingShadows One of the things I love about Interzone is they publish your stories with amazing art. So far several top-notch artists have illustrated my Interzone stories, and this trend continues with my new story "Here We Are, Falling Through Shadows."

As you can see from Mark Pexton's art, the story is rather dark and, without giving too much away, straddles the line between science fiction and horror. What impresses me most, though, is how Mark so perfectly captures the story's family dynamic.

Many thanks to Mark for the great art. To see a larger version of the artwork, go here.

Interzone 225 table of contents (includes a story by me)

I'm still recovering from an eye injury, so extensive blogging will have to wait a few more days. Until then, the good news is Interzone issue 225's out and features my story "Here We Are, Falling Through Shadows."

Cover for Interzone 225

Inside you will also find:

  • "By Starlight" by Rebecca Payne (And please note that not only is this Rebecca's first publication, this was the first time she'd ever submitted a story to a magazine or publisher. Send a big congrats her way!)
  • "Funny Pages" by Lavie Tidhar
  • "The Killing Streets" by Colin Harvey
  • "Bone Island" by Shannon Page and Jay Lake
  • And the usual reviews and features, including an amazing wrap-around cover by Adam Tredowski.

More information on the issue is available here. In addition, you can read an interview with artist Adam Tredowski on the TTA website.

Circulation of online SF/F/H magazines

In response to my recent post Online Genre Magazines: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, I received several emails asking about my circulation estimates for these magazines. Now circulation is a dated term, only truly applying to print magazines. But the question is still valid. How many people actually read online genre magazines?

As I said in that post, it's difficult todetermine the readership of online magazines. If online magazines even report the number of visitors they receive, there is a tendency to inflate their numbers. I've seen this happen several times over recent years, where an online magazine proclaims one public set of readership numbers but have admitted to me in private their traffic is actually much lower.

Based on my experience with online magazines, I believe top online genre publications like Strange Horizons likely have between 1,000 to 2,000 unique visitors per day. Most other top markets will have 400 to 1000 visitors a day, and obscure markets will have 10 to 100 visitors a day at most. For a site like Tor.com, which has an active online community and an extensive offering of unique content, their numbers will obviously go much higher. But I'd still bet the number of people who access the Tor.com fiction each day is no more than 1,000 to 2,000 unique visitors. If that.

While these numbers may pale beside high traffic websites like Boing Boing, the numbers aren't too bad. If an online genre magazine averages 1,000 visitors a day, that means they have 30,000 readers a month, which is more than the biggest SF magazine in the United States, Analog.

Still, the weak point in my analysis is I don't have access to much current data. I'm looking for a few  editors of online genre magazines to share their traffic data with me. I'll keep quiet about the who and where, and if enough places share the info, I'll use it to more accurately update my estimates above. You can find my contact information here.

Interzone 225

Issue 225 of Interzone (Nov./Dec. 2009) will be out November 12. In addition to stories by me, Lavie Tidhar, Rebecca Payne, Colin Harvey, Shannon Page and Jay Lake, the issue features an amazing wrap-around cover by Adam Tredowski.

Cover for Interzone 225I mean, that cover is flat-out a work of art.

I can't remember the last time I saw a SF magazine with a wrap-around cover. For those who don't know, wrap-around covers used to be more common in books and magazine, but have largely disappeared due to the pressures of marketing information and advertising. And in a Twitter post, TTA Press admits (with a tongue-in-cheek comment) this wrap-around cover is "a treat that disguises a major failure by the Advertising Manager." But it's still beautiful, so pick up a copy next month.

BTW, the last issue of Interzone, which contains my novella "Sublimation Angels," is now available for download as a multi-format ebook at Fictionwise.

Submit your stories, not your idiocy

When submitting your work, don't be an idiot. As a proof, two examples from my in-box:

  • One author submitted a story to storySouth by way of me back in March. I responded immediately, stating that yes, I am still listed on the masthead in that vague "founding editor" role, but I have nothing to do with the day-to-day running of the magazine. To submit a story, check out their guidelines. The idiot's response: Wait seven months then ask me for an update on his submission. When I repeated above info and also sent my earlier email, the submitter explodes in anger because I "wasted his time."
     
  • Another person is making the rounds in my in-box after submitting a story using the cc function. That is, he copied the emails of fifty magazines and sent the submission to all of us at once. This means not only does he look like an idiot, every time a rejection is sent back, every other editor also sees the message and is reminded of said idiocy.

I would not suggest either method as a path toward publication.

Update: Once the snail mail oozed its way into my mailbox today, lo and behold the snail had deposited a submission. For the record, storySouth never accepted mailed submissions, only electronic ones. So this person not only ignored the current storySouth guidelines, he ignored the old guidelines too and tracked down the physical address of the person who is no longer the storySouth editor. End result is I opened the sub, wrote note on sub, placed sub in SASE. A waste of one minute of my life and $3 postage on the submitter's part.

Don't Panic: 42 Reasons Not to Read the New Hitchhiker's Book

I've read all of Douglas Adam's original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books. They rank among my favorite novels, with the first 3 being some of the most influential SF books of all time and ones you should read before dying. But the new "authorized" sequel And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer, err no. No insult intended to the author, who has created some great works of his own, but here are 42 reasons not to read this book.

  1. It's not funny.
  2. Why pay $25.99 to read (in the author's words) "very authorized fan fiction"?
  3. "Why bother letting a CLASSIC piece of work stand on it's own merit when there are dollars to be made for retailers." (fan comment from SciFi Wire)
  4. No one should "hitch a ride to a sci-fi legacy."
  5. Even Douglas Adams wouldn't tempt the literary gods with the sixth book in a trilogy. (Okay, maybe he would, but let's pretend otherwise.)
  6. I don't want to live in a world where an author ends his series by killing all the characters and destroying every possible earth that exists, and someone can still find a way to revive the franchise.
  7. Because we don't want to replace Douglas' clipped and precise humor with humor that "is more rounded and anecdotal, and a little warmer."
  8. "I'd rather have a lightly grilled weasel on a bun, please." (One Amazon review)
  9. I don't like "extraterrestrial purple prose."
  10. Because naturally the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the most amazing electronic book to ever come out of the editorial offices of Ursa Minor Beta, isn't available on its wanna-be cousin the Kindle.
  11. If you can't make a decent movie off an amazing franchise, don't expect a second chance with a new book.
  12. "Give it a chance" isn't a reason to read a book--it's a plea for literary attention.
  13. The book is "Almost, but not quite, entirely UNLIKE Douglas Adams."
  14. Because I have no desire to breathe "a sigh of relief" when I finish a book.
  15. When you expect a book to be bad, having it be "20 percent better" than bad would still be ... bad.
  16. Imagine the uproar if someone besides Stephenie Meyer wrote another Twilight novel. Actually, that would be a selling point to me, but I digress.
  17. DON'T PANIC must be the catch-phrase of corporate publishers these days, who are milking every cash cow to death (along with their industry).
  18. When Time magazine proclaims a book "good," intelligent readers should run the other way.
  19. Because obviously we live in a world where good stories can't simply have an ending.
  20. Mostly Harmless should be a book title, not a review summary.
  21. Because this book feels like a cheap shot. It would be like me promising 42 reasons not to read a book, then delivering only 21 and telling people to double the number to reach 42. It's a shame when people do cheap stuff like that.

Best American Short Stories 2009 Lives Down to Its Old Reputation

So the other day I was in the bookstore flipping through the new Best American Short Stories 2009, edited by Alice Sebold—and notice I said flipping, not buying, a distinction which will become clear in a moment—only to discover the stories were from the usual suspects. You know, The New Yorker, The New England Review, The New Yorker again, The Southern Review, and again and again with The New Yorker.

Detecting a pattern?

None of the stories interested me, so I didn't buy the edition. However, more surprising than the low quality of the stories is that the selections were only from well-known literary magazines. No genre or online magazines were represented (except for Narrative Magazine, which is fully embraced by the old-guard literati as the only online journal worth including with the usual suspects). Still, these selections didn't bother me too much until I looked at the list of the "100 Other Distinguished Stories of 2008." Once again, no genre magazines listed. Almost no online magazines.

Guess these places didn't publish any stories last year which were worth noting.

This is shocking because in recent years the BASS series had been much improved by its guest editors widening the net, so to speak, to include stories from outside the usual suspects. Michael Chabon began this process with his brilliant 2005 edition of BASS, and the trend continued with guest editors Ann Patchett, Stephen King, and Salman Rushdie. By widening the net, these editors once again made BASS both relevant to the discussion of short fiction in this country, and fun to read.

Thanks to the 2009 edition of BASS, the series is back to being the laughing stock of anthologies.

Scoring (in the used book sense) at Barnes and Noble

Here's something I discovered the other day: select Barnes & Noble brick and mortar stores are selling used books. According to the clerk I spoke to at their Easton branch, this is a pilot program in a few places which isn't doing too well.

But from my point of view, the program is great! By way of background, I'm a bit of an amateur book scout, which is probably why I wrote a story about people who love to hunt for used first editions. Well, at this Barnes & Noble I recently found a number of hardback first edition books in great condition, including:

  • Strange Horizons by Sam Moskowitz, a 1970s collection of his SF essays
  • City of Glass by Paul Auster, volume 1 of his famed New York Trilogy as originally published by Sun and Moon Press
  • The Best Laid Schemes by Larry Eisenberg, a SF collection from a tragically forgotten author which includes his well-known story from Dangerous Visions "What Happened to Auguste Clarot?"
  • and Anthony Burgess' groundbreaking translation of Cyrano de Bergerac.

I also picked up some first editions by David Brin and Hal Duncan. Because B&N wanted to get rid of these used books, they were only a dollar each. Unfortunately, they each have a small remainder ink mark on the bottom pages, but that's minor and who cares. The Paul Auster book is almost impossible to find in a first edition and sells for hundreds of dollars in most used bookstores (at least, the bookstores which know anything about used books).

My suggestion: Get to a B&N and see if they are taking part in this used book program.

Online Genre Magazines: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Note: Below is a slightly edited version of the handout from my recent Context presentation. Not sure why it took me so long to upload it. I blame chronic laziness.

For writers, online genre magazines are not only a great way to build readership and name recognition, they also tend to be more accessible than many print magazines, with most accepting electronic submissions, featuring rapid acceptance to publication turn-around times, and a willingness to work with new writers. However, all online magazines are not equal in the exposure they bring to a writer's story.

While several top online magazines rival or surpass Analog and Asimov's in readership and "look," many others have poor design, non-existent editorial work, and a very limited readership. There's also a high mortality rate among online magazines—think SCIFiction, Baen's Universe, Farrago's Wainscot, and the almost countless smaller magazines which came and went without a notice. Duotrope Digest lists several hundred online SF, fantasy, and horror magazines in its database. It is highly unlikely the vast majority of these magazines will bring significant attention to a writer's stories.

So when writers ponder submitting to online magazines, they should consider these important points:

  1. Who are the editors? Because online magazines are so easy to create, you want to make sure that your story is noticed if it is accepted. The surest indicator of this are the editors listed on the masthead. If they're connected and known to the genre you're writing in, there's a good chance their online magazine will be noticed and read, even if it is new.  They are also less likely to publish an issue or two and then disappear.  This doesn't mean new "unknown" editors can't create a great online magazine, or that a known editor won't create a flop. But when someone puts their reputation on the line, they have a vested interest in seeing their magazine succeed. If you've never heard of an online magazine's editors, observe their magazine's track record and see what kind of reception their magazine and stories are receiving.
     
  2. Does the magazine look professional?  Anyone can create a simple website these days, but it takes time and skill to create a professional looking online magazine. If the magazine looks like it was thrown together in a hurry, or created with the latest blog software, that will reflect on how people consider the magazine's fiction. In addition, sites which are overly designed with flash movies and animation can drive people away before they have a chance to read your story, while old programming tricks like frames and massive artwork shoving text to the side makes for poor readability (especially when accessed by new technologies like iPhones). Look for online magazines with a simple but clean look.
     
  3. What is the magazine's readership? It's difficult to determine the readership of online magazines. As in the world of high finance, online magazines often inflate their numbers, if they report them at all. Based on my experience with online magazines, a top publication like Strange Horizons likely has between 1,000 to 2,000 unique visitors per day. Most other top markets will have 400 to 1000 visitors a day, and obscure markets will have 10 to 100 visitors a day at most. If a magazine has included in their site the ability to support an active online community, these numbers could go much higher. But I'd still bet this is an accurate estimate of the people actually reading that magazine's fiction. And while we can all quibble about the readership of online magazines, equally important to writers is who reads the magazines. Do the magazine's stories show up frequently in the "year's best" anthologies? Check out the honorable mentions in Gardner Dozois' Year's Best series to see a good listing of online magazines anthology editors will be reading.

Anyone desiring to explore more of the world of online fiction magazine should check out the storySouth Million Writers Award at www.storysouth.com/millionwriters. To learn more about specific genre magazines, including hundreds not mentioned here, go to Duotrope Digest at www.duotrope.com or Ralan's at www.ralan.com.

Selection of widely read SF/F/H online magazines

  • Aberrant Dreams, www.hd-image.com, SF/F/H, $.03/word to $100 maximum
    Publishes some very good fiction and pays decent rates. But their web design feels like something from the late 1990s. Also occasionally prone to delays with their new issues.
  • Abyss & Apex, www.abyssandapex.com, SF/F, $.05/word
    Publish very good fiction, but crap, improve that site design! With a site redesign, they'd likely be at the top of everyone's online magazine list.
  • Apex Magazine, www.apexbookcompany.com/apex-online, SF/F/H, SFWA Prof. Market
    Apex recently updated their design, making the look of the site equal to the great content they publish. They also offer very nice Kindle and PDF editions of their magazine, which is something all online mags should do.
  • Beneath Ceaseless Skies, beneath-ceaseless-skies.com, "literary adventure fantasy," $.05/word
    A wonderful online magazine with great stories and great design. In my opinion, they deserve to be selected as a SFWA Professional Market in the next year or so.
  • ChiZine, chizine.com, dark SF/F/H, SFWA Prof. Market
    Great design—if a little dark, which is definitely intentional—with great fiction.
  • Clarkesword Magazine, www.clarkesworldmagazine.com, SF/F, SFWA Prof.
    A near perfect mix of great fiction and great design. Hugo and World Fantasy Award nominee, republishes stories as print chapbooks and anthologies.*
  • Eclectica Magazine, www.eclectica.org, literary, but open to genre fiction
    One of the older online fiction magazines. A simple but clean design which focuses on the great fiction they publish.
  • Electric Velocipede, www.electricvelocipede.com, SF/F, leans toward steampunk. $.01/word, $25 minimum
    Good fiction, poetry and nonfiction, but the site's design could be improved (although it should be noted EV is a print magazine that posts some of its content online). But it won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Fanzine, so forget about the design and just read the great content.*
  • Fantasy Magazine, www.darkfantasy.org/fantasy, fantasy (duh!), SFWA Prof. Market
    Great fantasy, nice design.  The editors work really hard to promote the stories they publish and to create their own online community of readers and writers.
  • Grantville Gazette, www.grantvillegazette.com, shared world fanfic, SFWA Prof. Market
    Publishes fanfic tied in with Eric Flint's 1632 universe. Stories are decent fanfic, but site's poor design drives me up the wall with content-scatter overload. Very difficult to navigate, but the upside is stories published here have a shot at publication in the Grantville Gazetter anthology series.
  • Heliotrope Magazine, www.heliotropemag.com, SF/F/H, $.10/word up to 5,000 words
    Very good magazine with a very clean design—once you move past their hyper-annoying banner ad on every page. I wonder if the small ad money they raise with this is worth aggravating so many readers.
  • Ideomancer, www.ideomancer.com, idea-based SF/F/H
    I love the look of Ideomancer, and they have some good stories, but the links to find the stories and poetry are not intuitive. Don't make your readers search for the story they want.
  • Menda City Review, mendacitypress.com
    High quality literary journal which is also open to literary-style genre fiction.
  • OSC's Intergalactic Medicine Show, www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com, SF/F, SFWA Prof.
    Nice design, great stories, all available for a one-issue purchase of only $2.50, a simple price and concept which I love.  They also commission great story artwork.
  • Pedestal Magazine, www.thepedestalmagazine.com, literary fiction, but open to all genres, SFWA Prof.
    This magazine makes me want to scream. Good to great content, but the design is so bad you can barely read it. Who the hell designs sites so they compress your story into a space mere inches wide?
  • Strange Horizons, www.strangehorizons.com, SF/F/H, SFWA Prof. Market
    Founded in 2000, Strange Horizons proved that a non-profit magazine could succeed online. Very supportive of emerging writers. While site design is a bit dated, they aim to fix this in near future. I'd estimate Strange Horizons receives the most traffic of any online genre magazine (at least, until Tor.com came around).
  • Subterranean, www.subterraneanpress.com/magazine, SF/F/H, SFWA Prof. Market
    Great art and fiction plus a nice design, although the stories can be difficult to read at times due the small width of their display.  Very receptive to longer stories like novellas (which is unusual among online magazines).
  • Tor.com, www.tor.com, SF/F/H, SFWA Prof. (paying 25 cents/word to 5000 words, 15 cents next 5000, 10 after)
    The new standard by which all online magazines are judged. Also the highest paying online market. The only problem: They aren't open to submissions unless the editor invites you to submit.

* I've updated the post to reflect the fact that Clarkesworld is a Hugo and WFA nominee, not winner, and that Electric Velocipede is a print magazine that posts content online.

My new personal motto, and a review of Gaiman's Odd and the Frost Giants

I'm still offline working on a novel, but I figured three minutes to post a few items wouldn't kill my writing.

Over at SF Signal is my new review of Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman. My oldest son helped me review the book. Our take: I'd recommend this to Gaiman fans, while my son says every kid must read this book. But either way, wait for the paperback edition or buy the cheaper Kindle edition. Because $14.99 is simply too much for a story this short.

In other news, reviews of my novella "Sublimation Angels" have started to trickle out. SF Signal gave the story 5 stars and called it "A captivating story about freedom, rebellion, and seeking the truth." But over at the Internet Review of SF, Lois Tilton reams the story, calling it "straight out of the Sci-Fi Catalog of Stock Cardboard Characters." Okay, maybe I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm guessing Lois didn't like the story.

That said, I've received a number of emails and forum comments from people loving/liking the story, including one very nice reader who sent me a tip after finishing the story. If someone sending you money after reading your story isn't proof they liked it, I don't know what is.

Thanks to everyone for the positive comments and support. And as I work on my new novel over the coming months, my personal motto is to always stay true to the "Sci-Fi Catalog of Stock Cardboard Characters!"

Offline for a while

I'll be offline for a good bit over the next two months. I'm working on a novel. Since I have to slot writing around family life and work, I've decided to offer up Twitter, Facebook, and my blog to the altar of actually getting something done. So if I'm posting stuff online, feel free to yell at me ALL CAPS STYLE in a nasty email or Facebook message.

Fritz Leiber and His Classic Story "A Pail of Air"

IZ224coversm The new issue of Interzone, featuring my novella "Sublimation Angels," arrived yesterday. The issue should arrive in bookstores across the U.S. in the coming days, so keep an eye out.

My story is set on a cold planet wrenched from its orbit, causing its atmosphere to freeze and fall from the sky. Given such a setting, the story is naturally dedicated to Fritz Leiber and his famous "A Pail of Air." I remember reading that story as a child, fascinated and excited by both an earth tumbling through deep space and the desperation of the main character, who stays alive only through retrieving pails of frozen air.

Leiber's story is still a good read, although parts of it haven't aged well, such as its representation of women. I mean, seriously, what woman in her right mind asks about fashion and dresses upon first meeting other humans after years of isolation and near death? Still, this is a well-deserved science fiction classic. Read the complete story here.

Sci Fiction Lives! (in that resurrected-zombie archived way)

Sci Fiction, the great online SF/F magazine edited by Ellen Datlow, was killed by the SciFi channel almost four years ago. Naturally, this foreshadowed the many stupid things the channel would do in the years that followed, culminating in their disease-sounding rebranding of Syfy.

For a while the Sci Fiction archives remained on the SciFi Channel's website, but the rebranding and new url killed that. The good news, though, is that thanks to the Wayback Machine internet archive, you can still read all that great Sci Fiction!

This includes the Nebula Award winning stories "What I Didn't See" by Karen Joy Fowler and "The Empire of Ice Cream" by Jeffrey Ford, the Theodore Sturgeon Award winning novella "Over Yonder" by Lucius Shepard, and the World Fantasy Award winning "The Pottawatomie Giant" by Andy Duncan. The archives also include such classic reprints as "Aye, and Gomorrah" by Samuel R. Delany and "Painwise" by James Tiptree, Jr.

Anyone needing a great fiction hit should check it out.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was "That's life!"

In the beginning was the word, and the word was jerk and d#&@ and a@#hole, and the writers did not like being called such. Then came screenwriter Josh Olson with his encyclical "I Will Not Read Your F&$king Script." And the writers rejoiced. No longer would they feel guilt at refusing to read the latest draft of their Great Aunt Matilda's memoir of her life with three dozen Chihuahuas.

Then came further revelation with John Scalzi's "On The Asking of Favors From Established Writers." Much drinking to excess was witnessed among writers, happy to be freed from being thought a jerk by the unwashed wannabe masses. For the anointed, merely pointing toward Olson and Scalzi's great words washed away any sense of jerkiness. And a new day was proclaimed across all authorhood. And lo, it was good.

Except the nonwriters never received the word. And the authors went out and were still pestered by other people, who shamelessly offered such distracting comments and intrusions as:

  • "I don't care if you are a fiction writer! If you name another villain in your stories after someone in this office, you're fired!"
  • "This is the IRS. Would you mind coming down next week for a minor audit? We have some concerns about that book advance you forgot to list as income."
  • And the fearsome "Honey, can you cut the grass before I jam that keyboard up your nether regions"

And the authors went forth and rent the few hairs on their balding scalps, and screamed to the heavens, asking why the word had deserted them. And the word laughed and proclaimed, "It's nothing personal, but that's life. There are always going to be distractions, people you'd prefer not to deal with, and things you'd rather not do. If any of that bothers you, simply grow a spine and say no once in a while."

The authors nodded, seeing the wisdom of the word. And they asked, "Does this mean we're okay saying no when told to cut the grass?"

And the word shook its mighty head at the idiocy of authors. "Only if you're comfortable with a keyboard protruding from your nether regions."

Hate email to me, read by Richard Nixon!

Two weeks ago I asked if the term SciFi was still considered derogatory by the science fiction community. In response I received a number of emails from people none to pleased with my comments. I'm sure every writer gets these messages, which rant on and on about how feeble minded you are for daring to state an opinion.

Lucky for us, writer and critic Edward Champion refuses to allow such anger and venom to disappear with the emptying of our email's trash. As part of his Hate Mail Dramatic Reading Project, he's turned one of the emails I received into an amazing performance--read by none other than Richard Nixon. What was once merely an inbox irritation has been transformed into a work to stand proudly beside the best of Richard Nixon's many, many recordings.

Praise for "The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain"

I've been slow in mentioning this, but Rusty at BestScienceFictionStories.com had some very nice things to say about my story "The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain."

"Kudos, Jason, for one of the best stories I have read this year. When is Jason going to put out a collection of his short stories? I know I'll be the first in line to purchase it.

Thanks, Rusty, for the kind words! As for that collection--maybe book publishers will take note of this interest.