Aidan Moher's Blog
December 8, 2015
Get Tide of Shadows and Other Stories for free!
About the book
From Aidan Moher—Hugo Award-winning editor of A Dribble of Ink—comes Tide of Shadows and Other Stories, a collection of five science fiction and fantasy stories spanning adventure, comic whimsy, and powerful drama—from a star-faring military science fiction tale of love and sacrifice, to a romp through the dragon-infested Kingdom of Copperkettle Vale.
“A Night for Spirits and Snowflakes” is the story of a young man reliving the last moments of his fellow soldiers’ lives; “The Girl with Wings of Iron and Down” tells the tale of a broken family and a girl with mechanical wings; “Of Parnassus and Princes, Damsels and Dragons” introduces a typical prince, princess, and dragon—and a not-so-typical love triangle; “The Colour of the Sky on the Day the World Ended” follows a girl and her ghost dog as they search for a bright light in the darkness; and “Tide of Shadows” is about a soldier and his lover, a mother, and planetwide genocide.
Reviews
One of the "May Science Fiction And Fantasy Books Everyone Will Be Talking About." - io9
"Each of the stories is like a little clock: beautifully crafted, intricate, distinctively handmade, with a dozen tiny complications in its inner workings. The range is unreal: space stations, angel wings, fairytale dragons, ancient shadow monsters...all unconnected, and yet it feels like it's all part of a bigger whole. It's exquisite." - Rob Boffard, author of Tracer
"The greatest strengths of this delightful collection lie in its variety and scope. There are only five stories, but Moher makes the most of them, moving easily between rhetorical modes, narrative structures, and invented voices." - Brian Staveley, author of The Emperor's Blades
"Offering a little something for everyone, Tide of Shadows and Other Stories is a collection of tales that know precisely how to engage the reader, and exactly how to find a climax without overstaying their welcome." - Beauty in Ruins
"A brilliant piece of writing, beautiful and surreal." - We the Nerdy
Get Tide of Shadows and Other Stories on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and iTunes.
(Unfortunately, Amazon has been dragging their heels in price matching the other stores, so I've set the price there to $0.99 (the lowest possible), and I'll be donating all proceeds from sales to Room to Read, a terrific charity dedicated to youth education and literacy.)
September 1, 2015
So long, and thanks for all the books
It is with an equal helping of bittersweet melancholy and bright-eyed excitement that I am announcing the closure of A Dribble of Ink today.
A Dribble of Ink first opened in 2007, when I was a freshly graduated web development student, and in the intervening years has turned into the most passionate and rewarding professional and personal project of my life so far. The energy and enthusiasm I poured into A Dribble of Ink was rewarded in 2014 when I won a Hugo Award for “Best Fanzine,” an accolade that’s still sinking in, and in the many, many people who have read and commented on the news bits, reviews, interviews, essays, and more that have been posted here.
However, in the past year, since the birth of my daughter and the release of my first book, Tide of Shadows and Other Stories, my personal and professional goals have begun to find themselves at odds with the time and attention it takes to run an SFF publication to the standard I expect of myself and A Dribble of Ink. I want to focus more on writing fiction and, even more so, on spending time with my growing family.
I can’t tell you how many people I spoke to at LonCon 3 who said something along the lines of: “Hey! I love A Dribble of Ink, but, dude, you need to write more yourself!” So, I’m taking those words to heart.
Fun Stats
Since 2007, over 1.6 million people have read A Dribble of Ink, generating 3.7 million pageviews.
The most popular posts are:
“We Have Always Fought: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative” by Kameron Hurley (Hugo Award Winner);
A map of Middle Earth as you’ve never seen it before; and
Shockingly, Christopher Tolkien hates the Lord of the Rings films.
Other notable posts include:
My review of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug;
A spotlight on the art of Veronique Meignaud;
Women fighters in reasonable armour;
My review of Avatar: The Last Airbender;
“It’s Amazing the Things We Know, That Are Actually Wrong” by Kate Elliott;
“Concerning Historical Authenticity in Fantasy, or Truth Forgives You Nothing” by Daniel Abraham;
“They Are Not Ghosts: On the Representation of the Indigenous Peoples of North America in Science Fiction & Fantasy” by Maureen Kincaid Speller;
“Gene Wolfe: The Reliably Unreliable Author” by Chris Gerwel;
and many, many more.
And, of course, the height of the site’s journalism:
Tar Valon looks like a vagina.
Aside from myself, 73 different writers have published at least one article or review on A Dribble of Ink. Each and every one of them have been integral in keeping this blog interesting, relevant, and diverse.
Thanks
I would like to thank, of course, all of my lovely readers—those who have been with me since the start, and those who have just discovered A Dribble of Ink—and all of the incredible people who have collaborated with me over the years to make A Dribble of Ink one of the most popular science fiction and fantasy watering holes. The success of this venture far exceeds even the wildest dreams I had when I published my first post.
I would also like to pay special thanks to a few people in particular: Foz Meadows, for her inspiring and incisive reviews, which have made A Dribble of Ink a much richer publication; Justin Landon, for his endless advice and friendship; Kameron Hurley, for her hand in bringing tens of thousands of new readers to A Dribble of Ink thanks to her Hugo-winning essay; Anne Perry, Jared Shurin, Thea James, and Ana Grilo for pushing me to be bigger, better, and smarter; and The G., founder and Editor of Nerds of a Feather, for instilling me with confidence that the SFF blogosphere is in good hands.
What’s Next?
Just because A Dribble of Ink is closing doesn’t mean I won’t be around—in fact, I’m writing more than ever. Which is, like, the point, right? I’m a regular contributor to the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, I’ve got an ongoing series on Tor.com, publish regularly on Medium, and I plan to keep both my Twitter and Facebook feeds alive and vibrant. I also have several unannounced things that should come to light over the next several months. One door is closing, but many more await, open and inviting.
So, adios, and thanks again for all the wonderful years and opportunities. I won’t forget them.
The post So long, and thanks for all the books appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.
August 31, 2015
“Beauty in the ruins” by Aliette de Bodard
Juxtaposition is one of the most powerful tools in a writer’s arsenal
One of my favourite novels is Cao Xuequin and Gao E’s Dream of Red Mansions, which has nothing we would recognise as a plot by modern standards: it follows the “twelve beauties of Jinling”, the main characters of a decaying household in China under the Qing dynasty; and juxtaposes and contrasts their experiences to achieve a powerful and moving tapestry of narratives that speak both to the female and human experience.
This act of juxtaposition is one of the most powerful tools in a writer’s arsenal, and one that I’m particularly affectionate towards. A common example is dichotomies for characters: X being a foil for protagonist Y, or the opposites antagonist/protagonist, hero/villain. I prefer to think of it in terms of contrasts, to decentre the story—I go for moral ambiguity very often, and therefore my fiction tends to function in terms of POV characters rather than heroes.
The first use of juxtaposition is to create calls and answers within a work: characters that might be mirror images of each other, heightening and highlighting both similarities and differences between them. One effect I particularly like is going for multiple pairs. In my novel The House of Shattered Wings, I contrast Selene, the head of House Silverspires (the main magical faction in the ruined Paris of the book), with her lover Emmanuelle: Emmanuelle is gentle and motherly where Selene is harsh and to the point. But I also contrast Selene with Madeleine, the House alchemist—where the former navigates currents of power and shows a decisive face to the world heedless of the turmoil within her, the latter wears her heart on her sleeve, and has a tendency to sentimentality and decisions that Selene views as foolish. In turn, Emmanuelle and Madeleine share the common point of drug addiction, with the difference of it being in the past for one and in the present for the other. And so on for many of the characters of the novel: they act as foils for one another, never quite in the same configuration, and this network of contrasts and similarities is what gives the universe heft and depth (at least as far as I am concerned!).
A slightly different trick I use is having nested opposites and reversals: my tag line for the book is “beauty in the ruins”, and I use the fascination and surprise that comes when you expect something in line with a given setting, and find instead its complete inverse.
A lot of these reversals are spoilers, but to take just an early example: the Paris of the novel is completely devastated, its monuments ruined and blackened, its magical factions at each other’s throat, fighting for depleted resources; and the House of Hawthorn is a faction emblematic of this new order, ruthless and never hesitating to kill. And yet, its grounds are still beautiful; and its gardens are green and watered and a pleasant place to wander in…
The last and most powerful use of juxtaposition is that it allows for thematic spread. Fiction, like many human endeavours, strives to reproduce the infinite complexity of real life, but is always inherently reductive: out of all the stories we can tell, we have to choose only a few; out of the myriad people we could follow through the course of a book, we can only touch on a handful.1 For me, this runs the risk of simplistic answers to complex themes: presenting only, say, two points of view on matters such as colonialism, for instance, eludes the diversity of reactions that historically occurred; and risks having the reader take away a simplistic image. On the other hand, having multiple points and counterpoints around the same theme strengthens it for me, by presenting as much as possible to the reader, and letting them, in the end, make their own decisions on which point of view they’re more sympathetic to.
Buy The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard: Book/eBook
One of the themes of The House of Shattered Wings is the necessity of survival; and what people will do to survive in an environment with scarce resources. I deliberately chose characters and factions with very different attitudes to this: House Silverspires, the faction that is the focal point of the novel, believes in doing whatever is necessary to survive, and many of the characters that belong to it share that attitude to some extent (Selene, the current head of the House, draws the line at some actions that she feels are going too far, such as giving up an innocent to a horrible death; her predecessor Morningstar had no such compunctions). By contrast, its rival, House Hawthorn—outwardly ruthless and without scruples—refuses to abandon its own as a matter of principle. Other characters have different attitudes: former conscript Philippe, a foreigner in France and an outsider to the House system, merely wants to be left alone, and refuses to make any compromises that would bring him in collusion with a House—and yet, of all the characters, he is the one who readily commits an atrocity that will haunt him later.
This is why I like juxtaposition, and how I use it to create mood and characters as well as move the plot forward—the resulting novel is deeper and more haunting because of this underlying structure. At least, I hope that worked out: if it didn’t, I’ll still be happy with paying homage to Dream of Red Mansions and other Chinese/Vietnamese classics—no mean inspiration for a book!
The post “Beauty in the ruins” by Aliette de Bodard appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.
August 28, 2015
“How to Kickstart Your Own Magazine in 728 Easy Steps” by the Uncanny Editors
As we are currently running the Uncanny Magazine Year Two Kickstarter, here’s a look back at how we accomplished the first one.
The Pithy Version
Decide you really enjoy spending quality time with spreadsheets.
Spend 150% more time sending email than you planned. You are now a professional emailer.
Come up with an awesome mascot as an off-the-cuff joke to your designer.
Love short SF/F. A lot. To the point of unreasonableness. Recommend and promote the stories you love in other venues for years, so people begin to trust your exquisite taste.
Make peace with the notion that you will not be up to date on any of the latest TV series or films.
Develop a stubborn streak (if you don’t have one already).
Work as a submissions editor, or an associate editor, or just buy an established editor a drink or an appetizer so you can learn more about what they do.
Learn about taxes.
Learn about running small businesses.
Learn about ebook formatting. In a minimum of 3 file types.
Learn to lie about deadlines to contributors. Always.
Have a plan B, C, D, and E for when things inevitably fall apart. Probably F, just in case.
Buy plenty of bourbon and/or chocolate.
Publish an issue you’re proud of featuring your best work, but always strive to make the next issue even better.
Another 712 things we’re trying to remember. We know we wrote them down somewhere.
The Less Pithy Version
When we decided to Kickstart our own magazine, Uncanny Magazine, we’d been building up the skills to do it for many years. We had worked as editors on several nonfiction anthologies and Apex Magazine. We felt we knew how to edit a magazine that would be special based on our vision and previous successes (award nominations and increased sales wherever we were). We quite successfully Kickstarted an anthology, Glitter & Mayhem, with John Klima, who had some Kickstarter experience already. We learned a lot about Kickstarter from that project, but it’s always a challenge to move from a one-and-done project model to an ongoing magazine. We talked to magazine editors and publishers about how they did things, including John Joseph Adams, Christie Yant, Neil Clarke, Sheila Williams, C. C. Finlay, Irene Gallo, Julia Rios, and Sonya Taaffe. We talked to authors like Tobias Buckell, who has done some excellent analysis of how to Kickstart a project.
Tobias has three things he believes make a Kickstarter successful:
An intriguing product
Created by an entity that has proven it can deliver it
Created by an entity that has a following (or publicity reach)
Stunning cover art, passionate SFF fiction and poetry, gorgeous prose, and provocative nonfiction
We felt the concept of Uncanny Magazine—stunning cover art, passionate science fiction and fantasy fiction and poetry, gorgeous prose, and provocative nonfiction by writers from every conceivable diverse background with an emphasis on making the reader feel —made the product intriguing. We had established a track record through our other projects, delivering what we promised on time. And finally, we had already developed a certain social media presence (Lynne had even co-authored an academic book on the subject for special collections librarians).
We tried everything we could to succeed with our first Uncanny Magazine Kickstarter. We created a careful budget, brought in contributors who represented what we saw as the magazine’s mission, created nifty backer rewards, and most importantly, surrounded ourselves with a magnificent team to make the magazine as spectacular as possible. Our Managing Editor Michi Trota was a Managing Editor in her day job and possessed many skills complementary to ours. Our Podcast Editors Steven Schapansky and Erika Ensign had tremendous amounts of successful podcast production experience, Deborah Stanish has been a fantastic interviewer on podcasts and at conventions, and our readers Amal El-Mohtar and C. S. E. Cooney were well-regarded for their readings.
We absolutely couldn’t have done it without the help of dozens of other friends and colleagues, too. They created art, offered generous backer rewards, filmed and edited our video, boosted our signal, and generally provided all kinds of cheerleading and logistical support that was hugely important to our success.
We bought URLs and set up social media accounts on multiple platforms. We hired Katy Shuttleworth to develop the Space Unicorn mascot and Uncanny wordmark, came up with the moniker of the Space Unicorn Ranger Corps for our backers, and did a million daily ridiculous things involving costumes, drawings, guest blog posts, and other silly Internet tricks so we could keep talking about the Kickstarter without repeating ourselves too much. The Kickstarter, once launched, was wildly successful. What looked like instant success out of nowhere — we hit nearly $10K on our first day and hit every stretch goal by the end of the campaign — was the result of months of planning and laying groundwork.
Art by Carrie Ann Baade
We really didn’t anticipate how much of our lives would be devoted to nothing but Kickstarter for a month.
What we really didn’t anticipate was how much of our lives would be devoted to nothing but Kickstarter for a month. The entire Uncanny Magazine team pitched in, and we essentially worked around the clock to keep things from losing momentum. But we had no time to be exhausted.
Once the Kickstarter was over, the real work began, including working with our excellent web developer Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios to create our website from scratch, setting ourselves up as a small business, wrangling bank accounts, taxes (get an accountant!), contracts and payment methods, and the like. We found submissions editors. We figured out how we wanted our monthly podcast structured, and we worked with our producers to get it set up for distribution.
Eventually, we even got to open to submissions and select content for the magazine.
After which there was the ebook-creation learning curve (3 different formats!), and getting set up to sell subscriptions through Weightless Books and single issues through major ebook retailers, all of which had slightly different format and submission requirements that needed to be met. Plus we reached out to advertisers.
In our copious spare time, we worked on putting together our backer rewards, and getting them out to our backers. We promoted the magazine, set up a Patreon, solicited advertising, did a subscription drive, and put out 5 (shortly 6) issues of the magazine on time.
We are very, very proud of the work that we’ve put out in Uncanny Year One. We think it’s some of the best work we’ve ever produced. We’d very much like to keep going. More than that, we think we can do even better. We’ve learned a lot, and know we can keep improving.
So, we’re doing another Kickstarter to fund Uncanny Magazine Year Two— this time for much less money than last year. As we keep expanding our other revenue sources, we would like to run smaller and smaller Kickstarters until we don’t need them anymore. Though we think we could use this model for many years to come, we would like to watch some TV in August one of these years.
The Space Unicorn Ranger Corps is always recruiting, and we are extremely grateful for all the support we’ve received. We believe in this glorious SF/F community and want to add more art, beauty, and kindness to it. Thank you, Space Unicorns, for making that possible.
The post “How to Kickstart Your Own Magazine in 728 Easy Steps” by the Uncanny Editors appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.
August 25, 2015
Fight like a woman
The Shadow Throne is the second volume in Django Wexler’s ongoing Shadow Campaign series, picking up right where the events of The Thousand Names left off: with protagonists Winter Ihernglass and Marcus d’Ivoire returning home to Vordan from Khandar under the leadership of Colonel Jahnus bet Vhalnich, there to continue the latter’s secret campaign against the sinister Duke Orlanko. It’s a flintlock fantasy series, full of secret magic, roaring battles and deadly politics: excellently written, superbly paced and all-round good fun. The Thousand Names was so polished, I had trouble believing it was Wexler’s first novel, and The Shadow Throne only improves from there, the shift in setting from foreign desert to home city managed with aplomb. Wexler is a master at writing battles, tactics and political intrigue with just the right level of detail: everything feels believable and, even more impressively, cunning, and despite the change in location between the two books, the consistent characterisation and martial focus means it never feels like we’ve leapt genres.
All of which is a way of saying that both The Thousand Names and The Shadow Throne are excellent books – and I have similarly high hopes of the recently released third volume, The Price of Valour – and that you should go read them immediately. But what I really want to talk about here is Wexler’s excellent and varied characterisation of women, and why it throws into stark relief just how many other writers in the same genre fail to pass the seemingly reasonable benchmark of Treating Ladies Like People.
Specifically: in fantasy novels whose settings are based, whether loosely or closely, on real periods in human history, there’s a tendency to privilege sexism and homophobia, among other forms of bigotry, as cultural defaults, their presence an unquestioned facet of the worldbuilding. As such, whether consciously or unconsciously, the writers of such stories have a commensurate tendency to either severely limit their female characters to occupying traditionally feminine roles – frequently in such a way as to limit their impact on the narrative, to say nothing of their agency – or to make a Big Honking Deal about how a girl! is doing! masculine things!, usually with a side-order of Special Snowflake internalised misogyny about how this makes her not like other girls, because liking dresses is stupid, and she just wants to fight like a man because (the implicit, simplistic logic goes) that means she’s better.
In both instances, the end result is the same: a glut of female characters whose presence in the story is defined either wholly or predominantly by their relationships with men, and a marked lack of women interacting with other women. If the story restricts women to exclusively feminine spheres – and if, as is often the case, the author deems those spheres to be of little narrative interest in their own right – then even when women have ample opportunity to interact with one another, it goes undepicted; but if, on the other hand, the story includes only a few, exceptional women within masculine spheres, then the chances are that we’ll never see them talk to each other, either – or if we do, they’ll be competing for male attention.
Far too many fantasy novels have this problem, because all too often, even by well-meaning authors, it’s excused as a necessary consequence of the setting. Never mind that the decision to write about a sexist culture was theirs in the first place, which makes this justification rather like arguing that there’s no possible way to break, bend or alter the rules of a game that they invented, even when they’re the only ones playing, as though they could never have made any different choices; the sexism exists, they say, and therefore their female characters must be either unimportant, exceptional or isolated from each other, and preferably all three at once.
It’s a problem that predominantly affects male authors, not because men are inherently sexist or unsympathetic or bad at writing or any such rubbish, but because we live in a culture that relentlessly privileges male narratives, and especially straight white male narratives, over everything and everyone else, such that there doesn’t even have to be any malice in the action: it’s generations worth of monkey-see, monkey-do, absorbed from childhood onwards about the right way to tell a story, and if you’re someone who’s never felt the imbalance of it on a personal level – if you’ve always seen yourself depicted in multitudes, never as an absence or a stereotyped minority, and have therefore never felt that reflexive flash of anger at the dissonance between who you are and what the hero looks like – if, in other words, you’re a straight white dude – then you’re at a much higher risk of simply not realising that such absences are a problem, because they’ve never negatively impacted you, and are therefore much more likely to perpetuate them in turn, whether consciously or not.
Art by Maciej Kuciara
But Django Wexler – despite having chosen to write about a male-dominated military in a sexist culture; despite being, to the best of my knowledge, a straight white dude – doesn’t do this. He writes women who talk to each other, women who are complicated and real and flawed and sometimes queer and sometimes not; women who feel to me like actual goddamn people, their expressions of femininity as nuanced and complex as their relationships, and this should be such a fucking low bar for books of this ilk, by writers like him, to hurdle, and yet the number of failures I’ve seen still far exceeds the successes. It’s not just that Wexler is an exceptionally good writer, period; after all, there are plenty of otherwise technically and thematically accomplished classics that persist in treating women as aliens who exist to either get knocked up or knocked down by the male protagonists. It’s that he’s writing as someone who clearly understands that the widespread acceptance of sexism doesn’t stop women from being people.
By which I mean: the most pernicious myth about cultural sexism is that women have only ever had a simplex, binary response to it, as if we either stay wholly inside the lines that patriarchy has drawn for us, or else inhabit specifically masculine roles as exceptional outsiders. Not only doesn’t this accounting allow for flexibility in women’s roles – as though, to pick just one historical example, the same woman who faithfully keeps house for her merchant husband might never take over his business as a widow – but, far more importantly, it doesn’t allow for flexibility in women’s thoughts. A woman who loves her husband and her domestic duties might nonetheless chafe at laws that restrict her legal rights without ever wanting to pick up a sword, just as a childless woman who excels at swordsmanship might nonetheless have a great respect for mothers. This attitude leads to a situation where, at base, women are portrayed as having only one of two reasons for their behaviour – that they accept the rules of patriarchy, or else reject them utterly – which in turn means that such female characters lack a complexity of motive. Following this logic, for instance, a girl who runs away to join the army must never have wanted to do anything else, because her whole persona is defined by Fighting Sexism; accordingly, there can’t be two such characters in the same story, because under this system, they’d essentially be the same character.
But in The Thousand Names, Wexler’s Winter Ihernglass – a woman who joined the army while pretending to be a man – did so, not to fulfil any lifelong dreams of soldiering, but to escape her specific, unpleasant circumstances, while another disguised woman under her command is revealed to have signed up after being explicitly inspired by rumours of Winter’s example. Following this pattern, in The Shadow Throne, a group of girls follow the example of both Winter and Jane – their nominal leader and Winter’s lover – to fight in turn, their decision a direct response to the context in which they find themselves. Even when taking similar paths, Wexler’s women remain distinct and complicated, because their motives are guided by their individual personalities, and not because they’ve been scripted to act in ultimate reference to what they think of men.
Art by Ben Wootten
Which is the other important thing about Wexler’s characterisation: the many and varied reactions his male characters have to the women in their midst. Again, in more simplistic stories about sexist cultures, there’s a tendency for men to treat women in binary, simplistic ways: either they’re accepting of women in non-traditional roles (good guys), or they’re overtly hostile to it (bad guys), with the only complexity coming from whether or not the guy in question wants to fuck the girl in question, assuming she’s not a relative. The problem being, I suspect, that as the men writing these novels have never had the experience of being a woman who’s had to deal with sexism and haven’t bothered to ask about it, they’re defaulting to their own perception of how things work when they’re around to see it: namely, that misogyny is either so overt as to be unmistakeable (bitches should get back in the kitchen and make me a sammich), or else completely non-existent (some of my best friends are women!). The exception here, if there is one, tends to come from traditional quarters, wherein old-school chivalry is conflated with good manners without ever really articulating or disentangling itself, and tends to come out in the kind of male characters who’ll hesitate to hit a highly competent female assassin because she’s a woman, the actual reasoning behind ‘good men don’t hit women’ be damned.
What this neglects, in other words, is the existence of microagressions, and the idea that men can have sufficiently complicated relationships with women – and with the idea of women – that the question of how they’ll respond to an individual lady acting beyond her cultural remit isn’t a cut-and-dried question of misogyny, but rather one of context. As such, it’s not just Wexler’s women who benefit from his decision to include them in the narrative, but his men, too – because they, just like real guys, are allowed to have complex reactions to women, instead of being shoehorned into the binary boxes of Sexist or Saint.
Which is part of why Wexler’s books have struck such a chord with me: they’ve helped me to identify a bugbear I didn’t realise I had. Growing up, I was often referred to as a tomboy: I had female friends, but I hung around with guys a lot, too, and often preferred to do stereotypically masculine things in a way that was remarked upon. As such, from the day I started primary school, when I tried to sit down at a table full of unknown boys in my very first classroom, only to have them all get up and move to a different desk because girl germs, I’ve become well-versed in the many types of male reaction to women who enter their spaces.
Yes, some boys never questioned my presence – championed me, even – while others did the traditional sneer-and-slur. But in between those extremes has always been a fascinating range of variation, and one I’ve seldom seen portrayed with any degree of accuracy in novels, in the sense of being the default: an unpredictable, ever-shifting variant that women in male-centric environments have to deal with all the fucking time. Some guys warmed up to me as a person and a friend, but would still make endless cracks about which of our mutual male friends wanted to date/kiss/fuck me. Some guys bullied me relentlessly at school, but defended me fiercely from bullies who came from elsewhere, because I was, in some sense, theirs. Some guys crushed on me quietly, then got angry when I failed to interpret their friendship as an effort at romance. Some openly valued me for being not like other girls, but still made jokes about how I was typically feminine. Some questioned my presence in otherwise all-male groups, but were perfectly civil; some saw me as a potentially disruptive element, not because we didn’t get along, but because they worried the potential drama of multiple male friends being interested in me would cause a rift. On and on and on.
Buy The Shadow Throne by Django Wexler: Book/eBook
And in Wexler’s books, this complexity is reflected in the male characters. Marcus, who we otherwise view as a good man, is a benevolent sexist: chivalrous in a way that leads him to devalue female competence through a desire to protect women as special. Janus, though he champions Winter and other female soldiers, does so, not due to any special feminist sentiment that we can see, but because he’s a fierce pragmatist, willing and able to recognise talent – and to put it to use – however it presents itself. The men who accept Jane’s authority in the Docks still want their daughters to stay at home, because recognising Jane’s specific value doesn’t translate to championing all women in all spheres. The university students Raesinia consorts with unquestioningly treat her and Cora as equals, but Duke Orlanko, despite employing many talented female spies, never considers that Raesinia might have a will of her own.
In short, and in addition to everything else that recommends them as excellent reading material, Wexler’s books are a masterclass on how writing a sexist culture – and sexist men, even – doesn’t have to restrict the significance and range of your female characters. So go forth, everyone: read them, enjoy them – and, if possible, learn from them. Because god knows, I’m tired of reading about women with all the individuality of Duplo bricks.
Also, queer ladies being awesome. Yes please: more of this!
The post Fight like a woman appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.
August 24, 2015
“A Fantasy Foodie Bakers’ Dozen” by Fran Wilde
Last time I visited A Dribble of Ink, I wrote about worldbuilding in the air and monsters. Aidan asked me to return and talk about food in fantasy, which I do fairly regularly for my interview series Cooking the Books.
Running a food-oriented interview series makes me think really hard about food in every book I write, including Updraft (Tor 2015), because I don’t want to suddenly have a cow-based product (like milk) appear in a world that has not seen a cow in forever, and where a cow would have to scale a sky-high tower made of bone to get that milk there. NO that would be bad and has never happened, ever. (Thank you again, brilliant copy editor Ana Deboo, for, ehrm … Completely Unrelated Reasons.)
So when Aidan asked, I began to think about those Fantasy Foodies who get it right — and who make our mouths water in the process. Here are thirteen1 of my favorites (there are many more, but the list grew unmanageable), in alphabetical order, and I’ve given you some amuse-bouche quotes to go with them.
Saladin Ahmed
In Saladin Ahmed’s collected stories, Engraved on the Eye, and his novel Throne of the Crescent Moon, the character Adoullah — a ghul hunter — is a tea aficionado, but we also witness his skill at marketplace bartering (through the inexperience of his assistant) and the messes he makes when he eats. Ahmed often uses food and access to food to delineate political and economic status. For instance, Ahmed described a scene from one of his short stories to Cooking the Books like so:
“Haggling is still the way in a lot of the world, and across a vast majority of the past. Adoullah knows that he can go out with this many coins and can expect to come back with this many vegetables of this quality. Rashid comes back with wilted half-full baskets of vegetables and Adoullah looks at him like, “You’re an idiot.” That says a lot about class and food and economics.”
Natalie Babbitt
The role of food (and water) in Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting is subtle, and important. It builds community and family. Some lasts forever, some does not. But (brought to my attention this year by Rose Fox, and I thank them for it) her short novel The Search for Delicious is something else again — a kingdom torn apart by the need to define the word “delicious” universally.
“But then we got to ‘Delicious is fried fish’ and he said no, I’d have to change that. He doesn’t care for fried fish. The General of the Armies was standing there and he said that, as far as he was concerned, Delicious is a mug of beer, and the Queen said no, Delicious is a Christmas pudding, and then the King said nonsense, everyone knew the most delicious thing is an apple, and they all began quarreling.”
Elizabeth Bear
With her line-of-supply discipline, her willingness to go to the ground for food information, and her amazing skill with mixology, Bear’s books serve food that is substantive and delightful. In her latest, Karen Memory, what the title character eats carries many details about the world of the steampunk Pacific Northwest. About the food in Range of Ghosts (Eternal Sky series), Bear said on Cooking the Books:
Cooking a marmot goes something like this: ‘First, catch marmot. Skin marmot and remove meat from the carcass. Then put the edible offal and meat back inside the skin and sew the skin shut.’ In modern Mongolia, they sew the skin shut with wire. A hundred years ago, they would have used some sort of twine or tendons. Then you take a blowtorch or acetylene torch, and blowtorch it until it’s crispy and blackened. You have marmot stewed a la blowtorch – you serve up the insides. In Range of Ghosts, they bury it in the coals of their fire to cook it.
When I’m doing research for a story, there’s that moment in the research when I stumble across something so completely wonderful – I remember coming across this marmot cooking technique, and I knew that I had to put it into the story, as long as it didn’t distract from the narrative. (read more)
(… I still get searches for “mistress marmot blowtorch”. True story.)
Aliette de Bodard
I’ve said publicly a number of times that when de Bodard talks about food in her stories, watch out. She feeds her audiences complex world information and characterization details by the spoonful. This is especially true of her latest book The House of Shattered Wings (Roc/Gollancz 2015), where she ties food scarcity to the ability to procure rare foods as an intimidation tactic. Don’t miss de Bodard’s regular feats of cooking on her blog. Of special notice right now, Aliette’s Cooking the Books roundtable with Zen Cho and me, where she shares her recipe for TÔM RANG THỊT BA CHỈ (Grilled Shrimp and Pork Belly) .
Wu Long tea: those teas are carefully prepared by the tea masters to create a range of tastes and appearances. The brew is sweet with a hint of strength, each subsequent steeping revealing new nuances. – From Three Cups of Grief, By Starlight ( Clarkesworld )
Steven Brust
First, what you need to know is that Vlad Taltos is a cook, and a darn fine one. Well you also probably need to know that Vlad’s an assassin, but that’s not important, nevermind! Have a sit down and try the goulash! Brust’s recipes from Dragaera have been tested in the Food through the Pages kitchen. He’s also visited Cooking the Books and talked about his writing and his cooking processes. He says: “The parallels between food and writing are so obvious and clear. It’s hard to talk about them because they’re inherent.”
Beth Cato
From herb magic, to cheeses, to the types of foods served aboard an airship and beyond, Beth Cato’s clockwork empire takes steampunk cookery to new levels. Cato is a member of the Holy Taco Church (with Jaye Wells, Chuck Wendig, Kevin Hearne, Delia Dawson and many others) and a fantastic cook. Check out her blog Bready or Not for proof. From the first chapter of Clockwork Dagger, Cato issues a warning that she may be made of magic and steam, but she’ll pull absolutely zero punches when her heroine Octavia Leander risks her life to save a puppy. She hands it back to its young owner in the excerpt available at Tor.com:
“The girl lowered in a clumsy curtsy. “Oh, thank you, ma’am,” she said. “Now we won’t go hungry tonight and Pa won’t beat me or nothing.” Her eyes shone, bright and happy.” (read more)
Beth’s latest book is The Clockwork Crown (Voyager, 2015).
Robin Hobb
Rosehip preserve, elfbark tea, nettle tea, wintergreen berries…. All of Robin Hobb’s books are flavored by her familiarity with both kitchen and farm. Hobb’s character Fitz (Farseer Trilogy) observes early that food tastes better the closer you are to the kitchen. Unfortunately, he observes this while seated at a courtier’s table, staring at cooling food. Hobb’s foods have been turned to recipes by Food Through The Pages, and she spoke with me in 2014 for Cooking the Books:
“It is, of course, inevitable that we judge the status of characters or people by if they are seated below or above the salt, if they eat in a pick-up truck at a drive-thru parking lot or in a restaurant with a maître d. But I think that details like that just naturally fall into place in a tale, as do descriptions of dress or the room where one sleeps.” – Robin Hobb, from “Magic Needs to be Fed: Cooking the Books”
Nalo Hopkinson
When I first interviewed Nalo in 2012 for the Strange Horizons Cooking the Books Roundtable (along with Elizabeth Bear, Scott Lynch, and Gregory Frost), she reminded me of the food in “Goblin Market”, and how the tastes sang. She also said that real food is often stranger than fantasy food:
“Real food is where I tend to get inspiration because I don’t think I can dream up anything stranger than what people actually eat. Talking about things that many people wouldn’t eat, but actually have—mannish water. Also an aphrodisiac. Mannish water is a soup made with all the parts of the goat that you usually don’t eat….” (read more)
Hopkinson’s second job, aside from writing amazing novels like Sister, Mine (Grand Central, 2013), The Salt Roads (Open Road, 2015) and Falling in Love with Hominids (Tachyon, 2015) is making people hungry on twitter.
N.K. Jemisin
From her short story “Non-Zero Probabilities,” to The Killing Moon (Orbit, 2012) and beyond, Jemisin plays with food and taste like an expert chef. Take a look:
“On the platter lay a profusion of delicacies for the taking: crisp vegetables flecked with hekeh-seed and sea salt, balls of grain held together with honey and aromatic oil, medallions of fresh fish tied into bundles around wine-soaked raisins. And more, each arranged in neat rows of four — forty in all. An auspicious number by Gujaareen reckoning.” (more)
(I can’t wait to read The Fifth Season (Orbit 2015).)
Diana Wynne Jones
The author of The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Howl’s Moving Castle, The Chrestomanci Series, The Dalemark Quartet, and much more, Jones is the patron saint of fantasy food for encouraging writers to venture beyond stew and waybread, into exciting realms like Vegetables and Things That Don’t Require Twenty-Four Hours To Cook While On A Quest.
STEW: … Given the disturbed nature of life in this land, where in CAMP you are likely to be attacked without warning.. and in an INN prone to be the centre of a TAVERN BRAWL, Stew seems to be an odd choice as a staple food, since, on a rough calculation, it takes forty times as long to prepare as steak…. (From The Tough Guide to Fantasyland)
Norton Juster
Juster is on this list for this reason: Subtraction Soup and the Word Market from the Phantom Tollbooth. After all these years, I can remember Milo eating his words and feeling hungrier after his meal with the mathemagician and so yes, Juster goes on this list.
“These are for people who like to make their own words,” the man in charge informed him. “You can pick any assortment you like or buy a special box complete with all letters, punctuation marks, and a book of instructions. Here, taste an A; they’re very good.”
Milo nibbled carefully at the letter and discovered that it was quite sweet and delicious—just the way you’d expect an A to taste. (From The Phantom Tollbooth)
C.S. Lewis2
The Narnia series is filled to the brim with food – from Mr. Tumnus’ tea and the Beavers’ feast, to dining on the Dawn Treader. There are several Narnia Cookbooks.
“The Queen let another drop fall from her bottle on to the snow, and instantly there appeared a round box, tied with green silk ribbon, which, when opened, turned out to contain several pounds of the best Turkish Delight. Each piece was sweet and light to the very centre and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious. He was quite warm now, and very comfortable.” from The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe
Buy Updraft by Fran Wilde: Book/eBook
Shveta Thakrar
Her Kaleidoscope color vampire eats paint. Her poem “Shadowskin” (Strange Horizons 2015) explores the if/then of foods and how one cultures’ food can erase another’s. And Thrakar’s cooking skills are readily apparent in the succulent sensory overload that is The Rainbow Flame (Uncanny Magazine 2015). Keep an eye on this kind of food writing, for example:
“The sweet–tart mango dribbled cool juices over her eager lips, while the plump cherries burst between her teeth. Rupali imagined consuming a heart, then broke off mid–chew. Would that thought be taken from her, too?” (more)
Who are your favorite foodies?
The post “A Fantasy Foodie Bakers’ Dozen” by Fran Wilde appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.
August 6, 2015
“Anatomy of a Sale, Pt. 2” by Sunil Patel
Previously on “Anatomy of a Sale,” I made my first short story sale and then had no luck for almost five months. But then I made sale after sale after sale, I got an anthology invite, and I was asked to be Assistant Editor of a magazine. Things were happening!
And then nothing happened for a couple months.
Draft 1: 6/5/2014
Draft 2: 1/5/2015
Final (Draft 6): 2/9/2015
Submission: 89
Rejections: 2 (80 lifetime, 2 from this market)
Rewrite Request: 4/20/2015 (30 days)
Resubmission: 4/25/2015
Acceptance: 4/28/2015 (38 days)
Draft 1 to Sale: 327 days
Final to Sale: 78 days
Sale #5 – “Marcie’s Waffles Are the Best in Town”
Last June several of us Bay Area writers formed a small community on Twitter, dubbed #baywriters by Christie Yant (who is not in the Bay Area but is generally a positive influence on writers). We organized writing sprints, and one night when we were getting ready to write 1000 words in half an hour, I asked for a prompt. I got this.
Sometimes a bizarre Twitter prompt turns into a silly story about a psychic alligator, and sometimes it turns into an emotionally devastating story about a woman in a post-apocalyptic diner. I cranked out a first draft (826 words) that night.
And then I didn’t touch it for six months. I worked on other projects, but in the back of my head, I knew that I had a viable, compelling piece there that I wanted to revise one day. Normally I don’t wait so long to revise because it can be hard to recapture the voice and the world, and I may have lost my initial grip on the narrative, but I was very pleased to be able to come back to this piece in January and whip it into shape over the course of a month.
“Marcie’s Waffles Is the Best in Town” is my fastest sale since my first, selling on its third time out, and it illustrates what I was saying above about personal rejections.
The first market rejected the story because they felt that it relied heavily on characterization, but they didn’t connect to the characters as much as they should have, and they wanted it to be longer to have more emotional impact.
The second market specifically said that the characterization was well done, particularly for a story this short. (As a note, this was also my first personal rejection after a string of forms from this market, so I considered it a small victory.)
This is why it’s dangerous to revise in response to personal rejections: each slush reader and editor has different tastes and will react differently. Believe in your story.
By this time, I was at a point where I had multiple stories in submission, and since most markets don’t take multiple submissions, that limited where I could send the story next. I went down my list, and I identified Flash Fiction Online as the next open market and the one I felt was a good fit.
Thirty days later, I received an e-mail that the editor would love to buy it…if I were to make some revisions. My first rewrite request! I asked for the feedback, and the major thing she wanted me to do was better foreshadow an abrupt shift in the main character’s behavior.
So…so you’re saying I need to improve something about the characterization.
I made the requested changes and ran it past a few readers before resubmitting, and it was accepted, less than three months after it went out into the wild.
Lessons Learned: Twitter provides the best writing prompts! Don’t make knee-jerk revisions in response to personal rejections, but do make requested revisions if an editor wants to buy your story! I was able to identify a point in the story that I had thought was foreshadowing and strengthen it. And as your submissions become more robust, be aware that it’s more likely for your markets to be tied up with other stories, but unless you are a prophet with the uncanny ability to know that a market is guaranteed to take your story, just move on to an open market. Any market you send to should be one you would be happy to have take your story.
Draft 1: 7/13/2014
Draft 2: 8/27/2014
Final (Draft 5): 10/30/2014
Submission: 73
Rejections: 5 (80 lifetime, 3 from this market)
Acceptance: 4/29/2015 (95 days)
Draft 1 to Sale: 290 days
Final to Sale: 181 days
Sale #6 – “The Robot Who Couldn’t Lie”
Sometimes I ask Twitter for writing prompts, and sometimes I accidentally give myself one. On June 11, 2014, I made a stupid joke.
I decided I needed some change in my life so I swallowed these quarters. — Sunil Patel (@ghostwritingcow) June 11, 2014
It was not a very popular Tweet! But a couple weeks later, for reasons unknown, perhaps because I thought it was better than the Twitterverse, I used it to start writing one night, and suddenly the robot who couldn’t lie came into existence. The idea took over my brain, and I had a first draft by mid-July. This story also sat a fair bit; I didn’t revise it until late August, and the feedback on that second draft caused me so much angst I didn’t come back to it until mid-October. The impetus? The Fireside submission window (the same one I sold “Sally the Psychic Alligator” during) was closing at the end of the month, and I needed something to submit.
Like “Marcie’s Waffles,” “Robot” ended up at Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show at the time it did because it was the next story-market combination that was available to me after my fifth rejection. It was my 73rd submission, whereas “Marcie’s Waffles” was my 89th submission, yet the acceptance came one day after it. I queried after 90 days per the submission guidelines, and the editor could have sworn he’d accepted my story long ago!
Lessons Learned: Anything you say on Twitter may be turned into a story in a court of law. Markets with limited submission windows are great for artificially imposing deadlines on yourself. Do not be afraid to query after a reasonable amount of time!
Draft 1: 5/4/2014
Draft 2: 6/8/2014
Final (Draft 4): 6/24/2014
Submission: 92
Rejections: 8 (83 lifetime, 2 from this market)
Acceptance: 5/19/2015 (35 days)
Draft 1 to Sale: 380 days
Final to Sale: 329 days
Sale # 7 – “The Attic of Memories”
Cat Rambo teaches a number of online writing workshops, and since I was writing a lot of flash fiction, I took her flash fiction workshop, a two-hour course on May 4, 2014. One of the exercises involving mixing and matching clauses to generate prompts, and I ended up with “If you were the only person left on this space station, my attic would be in trouble.”
Causality broke down into a black hole with that sentence, but I had to write something, and the only way to make that sentence make sense was if a dude really needed to collect a memory for his attic. Because of course.
After the workshop, the classmate who had saddled me with that ridiculous prompt issued a mutual challenge for us to write first drafts that afternoon. I sat down and wrote a first draft based on that attic of memories. It was about a completely different character and had a completely different tone, but the idea came out of that exercise (the same exercise, by the way, that produced Nebula winner “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”).
I revised the story in June in order to have something to submit to the Fireside submission window (this is a recurring theme, you might notice). It’s one of my strangest stories (it’s about a sentient attic!), and some people described it as slipstream-y, so I knew it might have a tough time finding a home. It got several nice personals, though, and made it all the way to the editor-in-chief’s desk at one market, but every time it came back, I just sent it right back out. After eight rejections, it was finally accepted by Fantastic Stories of the Imagination on May 19, 2015, over a year since the attic of memories popped into my head.
Lessons Learned: Writing workshops can be very valuable for generating new material and connecting with other writers who will pressure you to write a story that will end up selling. The more challenging a writing prompt is, the harder your brain has to work to come up with a unique solution, and this will likely be more rewarding.
Draft 1: 1/31/2015
Draft 2: 2/1/2015
Final (Draft 5): 2/25/2015
Submission: 93
Rejections: 2 (90 lifetime, 5 from this market)
Acceptance: 6/23/2015 (69 days)
Draft 1 to Sale: 143 days
Final to Sale: 118 days
Sale # 8 – “A Partial List of Lists I Have Lost Over Time”
One of the best things a new writer can do is join Codex, a community of neo-professional writers who offer advice, support, and encouragement to each other. Membership requirements are more diverse and less exacting than SFWA’s, but in general, you may join after your first pro sale to a qualifying market. While the people themselves are wonderful, a key benefit comes in the form of frequent contests, whose main goal is inspiring you to produce new work.
This year, I participated in the Weekend Warrior contest, which forced me to write a new flash piece (maximum 750 words) every weekend for a month. Vylar Kaftan provided the prompts, which for the last weekend of January included a list of interesting and evocative titles to choose from. “A Partial List of Lists I Have Lost Over Time” grabbed me because I had been wanting to write a humorous flash piece and one in an unusual format, and I enjoy list stories, so how could I resist an amusing title that suggested a list story made up of lists. Before I staked my claim on that incredible title, however, I brainstormed to ensure I could do it justice. A mad scientist in conflict with their duplicate from another dimension? Sure, that sounded good. It was a challenge to write, but it was my best received story in the contest—the other good thing about contests is a huge amount of feedback from different perspectives, so it’s like a writing workshop as well. (Several people did not find the story funny. I ignored them because many people did. Humor is subjective, after all.)
I ended Weekend Warrior with four flash drafts, and I prioritized “Partial List” to revise because it appeared to be the strongest one. Using people’s feedback along with the ability to expand to 1000 words, I tweaked the core narrative and made the lists even funnier. It’s a story where the story happens in between the lines, so I struggled to make it comprehensible to beta readers, who all had different interpretations, despite heaping praise upon it (I actually requested a couple beta readers to be mean to the story because I knew there had to be room for improvement). Finally, I gave up and submitted it to what I considered the perfect market for it, based on the sort of stories they published.
Rejected. But it was my first personal rejection from that market! I got a highest-tier rejection from the next market too, another market I expected it to sell to given my knowledge of the editor’s tastes. For the third submission, my options were limited because I had stories out at various markets (hilariously, three of the stories that were out at the time I submitted sold). I settled on Asimov’s because, through Codex, I had learned that Sheila Williams was burning through slush like wildfire: what was usually a 40-day market was suddenly a 4-day market (“The Attic of Memories” had just racked up its own 4-day rejection). Submission Grinder data bore this out, so I figured it would be a quick rejection and I could move on to the next market.
Here are two relevant excerpts from the Asimov’s submission guidelines:
We seldom buy stories shorter than 1,000 words
and
Serious, thoughtful, yet accessible fiction will constitute the majority of our purchases, but there’s always room for the humorous as well.
A humorous flash piece was the longest of longshots, especially given that the market had under a 1% acceptance rate on Submission Grinder. But the editor who had given me an encouraging personal rejection for “Sally the Psychic Alligator,” a humorous flash piece? Sheila Williams. I had nothing to lose but 4 days. Don’t self-reject.
Imagine my surprise when 55 days later, Sheila responded with a request for me to clarify something about the ending (I confirmed that she was one of the few people who followed the core narrative as I had written it, to make sure I could address her question correctly). As with my previous rewrite request, I quickly made a fix and showed it to beta readers old and new before sending her the revised version. More than a week went by, which worried me because my last rewrite request had been accepted faster. But on June 23, 2015 (the day “The Merger” was released, which made that quite a day), she accepted the story as long as I made one minor change, which I was happy to do because Asimov’s.
I had sold a 985-word kale joke to Asimov’s.
Lessons Learned: Join Codex! Think of Codex as all the data you can get from Submission Grinder but with actual people attached. It’s a useful resource, and contests ensure you’re writing new things to submit. When you challenge yourself, you produce your best work. Get to know editors’ tastes. Make fun of kale?
Draft 1: 8/22/2014
Draft 2: 9/7/2014
Final (Draft 4): 9/20/2014
Final (Draft 4.1): 9/21/2014
Submission: 105
Rejections: 5 (96 lifetime, 2 from this market)
Acceptance: 7/29/2015 (47 days)
Draft 1 to Sale: 341 days
Final to Sale: 311 days
Sale # 9 – “Girl in Blue Dress (1881)”
Before Loncon last year, I visited Paris for the first time. In the Musée d’Orsay, I saw many generically titled paintings of women and wondered about their subjects. What about a flash piece from the perspective of one of them? I wanted to be an amazing cliché and write a story in Paris, but all I managed to do was sketch out my idea. At least I had been inspired in Paris!
A few days after returning home, I banged out the first draft. I wanted to write the prose equivalent of an Impressionist painting, but, as usual, what hit the page didn’t reach the aspirations of my mind. When I cleaned it up and sent it to my writing group, however, they said it was the best thing they’d read from me, the piece they connected most with emotionally. A couple drafts later, I had something submittable, and it began making the rounds on September 21, 2014.
Because my story was about a painting, I wanted to sell to a market that did art, or at the very least provided an accompanying image. I shuffled around my normal order, even taking a chance on Tor.com (don’t self-reject!). The markets I thought it was most suitable for content-wise didn’t think it did enough with the concept, which was fair, as it was a very short piece, more of an idea than a story. While it was making the rounds, I sold “The Attic of Memories” to Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, which is also more of an idea than a story and has a similar focus on evocative, slightly surreal imagery. “Girl” just might be up Warren Lapine’s alley.
It was.
Two months after selling to Warren, I sold to him again on July 29, 2015. This was my first sale to a repeat market, and it was also my best response to an acceptance. Behold:
Sunil, I’ll be honest and tell you that I didn’t think I was going to buy this one at the halfway point, but I kept reading because it was short and I like your work. And then, of course, you nailed the ending. I’d like to use this in an upcoming issue. I’ll have a contract and check out in a few days.
Warren
I replied:
Warren, I’ll be honest and say that I thought this was a rejection but I kept reading because it was short and I like your work, and you nailed the ending.
Very happy to sell to you again! I am fond of this story.
Best regards,
Sunil Patel
Warren had rejected two stories of mine before accepting “The Attic of Memories,” so whether or not he had read any of my other published work, he was familiar enough with me to trust me to the end. (And I was familiar enough with him to trust he’d take my cheeky response in kind.)
As a bonus, Warren pays fifteen cents a word! Guess that Musée d’Orsay admission paid for itself, and then some.
Lessons Learned: Know your market, know your editor! If an editor has bought from you already, they may look past an opening that doesn’t grab them to get to the ending that seals the deal. If an editor has rejected stories of yours already, they may also do this! Build and nurture relationships with editors. Go to Paris?
Publication: 6/23/2015
Submission (Reprint): 8
Rejections (Reprint): 0 (7 lifetime, 0 from this market)
Acceptance: 8/5/2015 (44 days)
Publication to Sale: 43 days
Reprint # 1 – “The Merger”
Wait a second, “The Merger”? Didn’t we cover that story already? We did! I sold it to The Book Smugglers, and they paid me a lot of money, and I was very happy. But the beautiful thing about short fiction is that you can sell stories more than once. Or “sell” them.
Here’s the deal: when I got my Book Smugglers contract for “The Merger,” they asked for exclusive audio rights in addition to print and electronic rights. They had not done podcasts for the last season’s stories, and they had no definite plans to podcast this season’s stories, but they wanted to in the future. One thing I had learned about contracts was not to give up rights that wouldn’t be exercised, so I asked to retain audio rights, with the caveat that if they did make concrete plans to podcast, of course we could revisit those rights then because I, too, wanted this story to be produced in audio. It wasn’t as if I intended to submit the story to podcasts before I could sell it as a regular reprint anyway, but I wanted to keep my options open. What if an exciting opportunity came along?
Then in June I learned via Codex that Hugo-winning podcast StarShipSofa was accepting submissions for the first time ever. Normally they solicit reprints, so this was a big deal! Although they don’t pay, they’re one of the rare cases where “for exposure” is worth it, thanks to their reputation and legions of listeners (over ten thousand downloads a week!). Unlike most podcasts, however, they had one restriction: the story could not have appeared in audio previously. The submission window was a mere two weeks.
What if an exciting opportunity came along?
This was exactly the situation that warranted keeping audio rights: StarShipSofa was only asking for audio rights—the text would not be printed online—and so the fact that “The Merger” was still under print and electronic exclusivity didn’t matter. Even though I was confident I had interpreted the terms of the contract correctly, I e-mailed the Book Smugglers to make sure they were okay with it, and they gave me their blessing to submit away.
On June 22, 2015, the day before “The Merger” was officially published—though it had been available as an ebook for a week—I submitted it as a reprint. The Grinder was reporting some very fast acceptances, so I was secretly hoping to sell the reprint before the story went live because that would have been hilarious. Alas, no. But just before midnight on August 5, 2015, I received an acceptance for my first audio reprint! Technically not a sale, since I got no money; technically not a reprint, since there would be no printing; definitely audio, since it’s a podcast.
This is the brave new world of publishing.
Lessons Learned: Read your contracts carefully and negotiate wisely. Keep rights that won’t be exercised. The reprint market can be hugely beneficial and sometimes even profitable (people have sold reprints for more than they received for the original sale), so make sure the exclusivity and rights granted work in your favor. And while it is not necessary, it’s a courtesy to confer with editors before submitting a reprint if exclusivity has not ended. Keep your ears open for exciting opportunities!
When it comes to statistics, there seems to be little pattern, if any, which goes to show how erratic and unpredictable the submission game can be: pairing the right story with the right editor at the right time is mostly providence shining upon your submission strategy. A story can take months to sell or a year to sell. Though I, personally, have a weird sweet spot around 8 rejections such that now I eye any story with 8 or more rejections and wonder what’s going wrong, sometimes it can take dozens of rejections before a story sells.
Some trends do emerge, however. Twitter has been invaluable in my writing career, both in keeping me apprised of submission opportunities and inspiring my work. For some people, it can even directly lead to a sale. Writing workshops of various kinds (and conventions) have also proven useful, both in improving my work and getting submission advice from colleagues. Using limited submission windows as deadlines to finish revising stories, despite never having worked for those particular submission windows, results in a finished story, and that’s more important.
And, most importantly, those two magical words, the simple piece of advice every writer should carry with them: don’t self-reject.
As Assistant Editor of Mothership Zeta, I’ve gotten to see the other side, and honestly I have no idea how I made any sales at all. It’s a miracle that any story stands out among hundreds of submissions. I’ve sent more rejections in the last month than I’ve received in all my time submitting stories. I’ve rejected beautifully written stories that weren’t right for us. I’ve rejected perfectly good stories that I’m sure will find homes elsewhere. But one of my favorite things is when an author receives a rejection and then submits a new story. Each story is another chance to make that story-slusher-editor-market magic happen. I’ve fallen in love with several stories, and I am always chasing that feeling. And I can’t get it if authors don’t send in their stories, if they don’t keep trying with everything they’ve got.
I’m Sunil Patel, and these are my first nine sales (and one reprint). If you’re just starting out, may my experience make yours even smoother and more fruitful. If you’ve been in the game a while, I hope you’ve learned something. Truly, there is no Big Secret to selling short stories; there are only two things you need to do, and the more you do them, the more you increase your chance of selling.
Write short stories.
Submit short stories.
The post “Anatomy of a Sale, Pt. 2” by Sunil Patel appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.
“Anatomy of a Sale, Pt. 2″ by Sunil Patel
Previously on “Anatomy of a Sale,” I made my first short story sale and then had no luck for almost five months. But then I made sale after sale after sale, I got an anthology invite, and I was asked to be Assistant Editor of a magazine. Things were happening!
And then nothing happened for a couple months.
Draft 1: 6/5/2014
Draft 2: 1/5/2015
Final (Draft 6): 2/9/2015
Submission: 89
Rejections: 2 (80 lifetime, 2 from this market)
Rewrite Request: 4/20/2015 (30 days)
Resubmission: 4/25/2015
Acceptance: 4/28/2015 (38 days)
Draft 1 to Sale: 327 days
Final to Sale: 78 days
Sale #5 – “Marcie’s Waffles Are the Best in Town”
Last June several of us Bay Area writers formed a small community on Twitter, dubbed #baywriters by Christie Yant (who is not in the Bay Area but is generally a positive influence on writers). We organized writing sprints, and one night when we were getting ready to write 1000 words in half an hour, I asked for a prompt. I got this.
Sometimes a bizarre Twitter prompt turns into a silly story about a psychic alligator, and sometimes it turns into an emotionally devastating story about a woman in a post-apocalyptic diner. I cranked out a first draft (826 words) that night.
And then I didn’t touch it for six months. I worked on other projects, but in the back of my head, I knew that I had a viable, compelling piece there that I wanted to revise one day. Normally I don’t wait so long to revise because it can be hard to recapture the voice and the world, and I may have lost my initial grip on the narrative, but I was very pleased to be able to come back to this piece in January and whip it into shape over the course of a month.
“Marcie’s Waffles Is the Best in Town” is my fastest sale since my first, selling on its third time out, and it illustrates what I was saying above about personal rejections.
The first market rejected the story because they felt that it relied heavily on characterization, but they didn’t connect to the characters as much as they should have, and they wanted it to be longer to have more emotional impact.
The second market specifically said that the characterization was well done, particularly for a story this short. (As a note, this was also my first personal rejection after a string of forms from this market, so I considered it a small victory.)
This is why it’s dangerous to revise in response to personal rejections: each slush reader and editor has different tastes and will react differently. Believe in your story.
By this time, I was at a point where I had multiple stories in submission, and since most markets don’t take multiple submissions, that limited where I could send the story next. I went down my list, and I identified Flash Fiction Online as the next open market and the one I felt was a good fit.
Thirty days later, I received an e-mail that the editor would love to buy it…if I were to make some revisions. My first rewrite request! I asked for the feedback, and the major thing she wanted me to do was better foreshadow an abrupt shift in the main character’s behavior.
So…so you’re saying I need to improve something about the characterization.
I made the requested changes and ran it past a few readers before resubmitting, and it was accepted, less than three months after it went out into the wild.
Lessons Learned: Twitter provides the best writing prompts! Don’t make knee-jerk revisions in response to personal rejections, but do make requested revisions if an editor wants to buy your story! I was able to identify a point in the story that I had thought was foreshadowing and strengthen it. And as your submissions become more robust, be aware that it’s more likely for your markets to be tied up with other stories, but unless you are a prophet with the uncanny ability to know that a market is guaranteed to take your story, just move on to an open market. Any market you send to should be one you would be happy to have take your story.
Draft 1: 7/13/2014
Draft 2: 8/27/2014
Final (Draft 5): 10/30/2014
Submission: 73
Rejections: 5 (80 lifetime, 3 from this market)
Acceptance: 4/29/2015 (95 days)
Draft 1 to Sale: 290 days
Final to Sale: 181 days
Sale #6 – “The Robot Who Couldn’t Lie”
Sometimes I ask Twitter for writing prompts, and sometimes I accidentally give myself one. On June 11, 2014, I made a stupid joke.
I decided I needed some change in my life so I swallowed these quarters. — Sunil Patel (@ghostwritingcow) June 11, 2014
It was not a very popular Tweet! But a couple weeks later, for reasons unknown, perhaps because I thought it was better than the Twitterverse, I used it to start writing one night, and suddenly the robot who couldn’t lie came into existence. The idea took over my brain, and I had a first draft by mid-July. This story also sat a fair bit; I didn’t revise it until late August, and the feedback on that second draft caused me so much angst I didn’t come back to it until mid-October. The impetus? The Fireside submission window (the same one I sold “Sally the Psychic Alligator” during) was closing at the end of the month, and I needed something to submit.
Like “Marcie’s Waffles,” “Robot” ended up at Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show at the time it did because it was the next story-market combination that was available to me after my fifth rejection. It was my 73rd submission, whereas “Marcie’s Waffles” was my 89th submission, yet the acceptance came one day after it. I queried after 90 days per the submission guidelines, and the editor could have sworn he’d accepted my story long ago!
Lessons Learned: Anything you say on Twitter may be turned into a story in a court of law. Markets with limited submission windows are great for artificially imposing deadlines on yourself. Do not be afraid to query after a reasonable amount of time!
Draft 1: 5/4/2014
Draft 2: 6/8/2014
Final (Draft 4): 6/24/2014
Submission: 92
Rejections: 8 (83 lifetime, 2 from this market)
Acceptance: 5/19/2015 (35 days)
Draft 1 to Sale: 380 days
Final to Sale: 329 days
Sale # 7 – “The Attic of Memories”
Cat Rambo teaches a number of online writing workshops, and since I was writing a lot of flash fiction, I took her flash fiction workshop, a two-hour course on May 4, 2014. One of the exercises involving mixing and matching clauses to generate prompts, and I ended up with “If you were the only person left on this space station, my attic would be in trouble.”
Causality broke down into a black hole with that sentence, but I had to write something, and the only way to make that sentence make sense was if a dude really needed to collect a memory for his attic. Because of course.
After the workshop, the classmate who had saddled me with that ridiculous prompt issued a mutual challenge for us to write first drafts that afternoon. I sat down and wrote a first draft based on that attic of memories. It was about a completely different character and had a completely different tone, but the idea came out of that exercise (the same exercise, by the way, that produced Nebula winner “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”).
I revised the story in June in order to have something to submit to the Fireside submission window (this is a recurring theme, you might notice). It’s one of my strangest stories (it’s about a sentient attic!), and some people described it as slipstream-y, so I knew it might have a tough time finding a home. It got several nice personals, though, and made it all the way to the editor-in-chief’s desk at one market, but every time it came back, I just sent it right back out. After eight rejections, it was finally accepted by Fantastic Stories of the Imagination on May 19, 2015, over a year since the attic of memories popped into my head.
Lessons Learned: Writing workshops can be very valuable for generating new material and connecting with other writers who will pressure you to write a story that will end up selling. The more challenging a writing prompt is, the harder your brain has to work to come up with a unique solution, and this will likely be more rewarding.
Draft 1: 1/31/2015
Draft 2: 2/1/2015
Final (Draft 5): 2/25/2015
Submission: 93
Rejections: 2 (90 lifetime, 5 from this market)
Acceptance: 6/23/2015 (69 days)
Draft 1 to Sale: 143 days
Final to Sale: 118 days
Sale # 8 – “A Partial List of Lists I Have Lost Over Time”
One of the best things a new writer can do is join Codex, a community of neo-professional writers who offer advice, support, and encouragement to each other. Membership requirements are more diverse and less exacting than SFWA’s, but in general, you may join after your first pro sale to a qualifying market. While the people themselves are wonderful, a key benefit comes in the form of frequent contests, whose main goal is inspiring you to produce new work.
This year, I participated in the Weekend Warrior contest, which forced me to write a new flash piece (maximum 750 words) every weekend for a month. Vylar Kaftan provided the prompts, which for the last weekend of January included a list of interesting and evocative titles to choose from. “A Partial List of Lists I Have Lost Over Time” grabbed me because I had been wanting to write a humorous flash piece and one in an unusual format, and I enjoy list stories, so how could I resist an amusing title that suggested a list story made up of lists. Before I staked my claim on that incredible title, however, I brainstormed to ensure I could do it justice. A mad scientist in conflict with their duplicate from another dimension? Sure, that sounded good. It was a challenge to write, but it was my best received story in the contest—the other good thing about contests is a huge amount of feedback from different perspectives, so it’s like a writing workshop as well. (Several people did not find the story funny. I ignored them because many people did. Humor is subjective, after all.)
I ended Weekend Warrior with four flash drafts, and I prioritized “Partial List” to revise because it appeared to be the strongest one. Using people’s feedback along with the ability to expand to 1000 words, I tweaked the core narrative and made the lists even funnier. It’s a story where the story happens in between the lines, so I struggled to make it comprehensible to beta readers, who all had different interpretations, despite heaping praise upon it (I actually requested a couple beta readers to be mean to the story because I knew there had to be room for improvement). Finally, I gave up and submitted it to what I considered the perfect market for it, based on the sort of stories they published.
Rejected. But it was my first personal rejection from that market! I got a highest-tier rejection from the next market too, another market I expected it to sell to given my knowledge of the editor’s tastes. For the third submission, my options were limited because I had stories out at various markets (hilariously, three of the stories that were out at the time I submitted sold). I settled on Asimov’s because, through Codex, I had learned that Sheila Williams was burning through slush like wildfire: what was usually a 40-day market was suddenly a 4-day market (“The Attic of Memories” had just racked up its own 4-day rejection). Submission Grinder data bore this out, so I figured it would be a quick rejection and I could move on to the next market.
Here are two relevant excerpts from the Asimov’s submission guidelines:
We seldom buy stories shorter than 1,000 words
and
Serious, thoughtful, yet accessible fiction will constitute the majority of our purchases, but there’s always room for the humorous as well.
A humorous flash piece was the longest of longshots, especially given that the market had under a 1% acceptance rate on Submission Grinder. But the editor who had given me an encouraging personal rejection for “Sally the Psychic Alligator,” a humorous flash piece? Sheila Williams. I had nothing to lose but 4 days. Don’t self-reject.
Imagine my surprise when 55 days later, Sheila responded with a request for me to clarify something about the ending (I confirmed that she was one of the few people who followed the core narrative as I had written it, to make sure I could address her question correctly). As with my previous rewrite request, I quickly made a fix and showed it to beta readers old and new before sending her the revised version. More than a week went by, which worried me because my last rewrite request had been accepted faster. But on June 23, 2015 (the day “The Merger” was released, which made that quite a day), she accepted the story as long as I made one minor change, which I was happy to do because Asimov’s.
I had sold a 985-word kale joke to Asimov’s.
Lessons Learned: Join Codex! Think of Codex as all the data you can get from Submission Grinder but with actual people attached. It’s a useful resource, and contests ensure you’re writing new things to submit. When you challenge yourself, you produce your best work. Get to know editors’ tastes. Make fun of kale?
Draft 1: 8/22/2014
Draft 2: 9/7/2014
Final (Draft 4): 9/20/2014
Final (Draft 4.1): 9/21/2014
Submission: 105
Rejections: 5 (96 lifetime, 2 from this market)
Acceptance: 7/29/2015 (47 days)
Draft 1 to Sale: 341 days
Final to Sale: 311 days
Sale # 9 – “Girl in Blue Dress (1881)”
Before Loncon last year, I visited Paris for the first time. In the Musée d’Orsay, I saw many generically titled paintings of women and wondered about their subjects. What about a flash piece from the perspective of one of them? I wanted to be an amazing cliché and write a story in Paris, but all I managed to do was sketch out my idea. At least I had been inspired in Paris!
A few days after returning home, I banged out the first draft. I wanted to write the prose equivalent of an Impressionist painting, but, as usual, what hit the page didn’t reach the aspirations of my mind. When I cleaned it up and sent it to my writing group, however, they said it was the best thing they’d read from me, the piece they connected most with emotionally. A couple drafts later, I had something submittable, and it began making the rounds on September 21, 2014.
Because my story was about a painting, I wanted to sell to a market that did art, or at the very least provided an accompanying image. I shuffled around my normal order, even taking a chance on Tor.com (don’t self-reject!). The markets I thought it was most suitable for content-wise didn’t think it did enough with the concept, which was fair, as it was a very short piece, more of an idea than a story. While it was making the rounds, I sold “The Attic of Memories” to Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, which is also more of an idea than a story and has a similar focus on evocative, slightly surreal imagery. “Girl” just might be up Warren Lapine’s alley.
It was.
Two months after selling to Warren, I sold to him again on July 29, 2015. This was my first sale to a repeat market, and it was also my best response to an acceptance. Behold:
Sunil, I’ll be honest and tell you that I didn’t think I was going to buy this one at the halfway point, but I kept reading because it was short and I like your work. And then, of course, you nailed the ending. I’d like to use this in an upcoming issue. I’ll have a contract and check out in a few days.
Warren
I replied:
Warren, I’ll be honest and say that I thought this was a rejection but I kept reading because it was short and I like your work, and you nailed the ending.
Very happy to sell to you again! I am fond of this story.
Best regards,
Sunil Patel
Warren had rejected two stories of mine before accepting “The Attic of Memories,” so whether or not he had read any of my other published work, he was familiar enough with me to trust me to the end. (And I was familiar enough with him to trust he’d take my cheeky response in kind.)
As a bonus, Warren pays fifteen cents a word! Guess that Musée d’Orsay admission paid for itself, and then some.
Lessons Learned: Know your market, know your editor! If an editor has bought from you already, they may look past an opening that doesn’t grab them to get to the ending that seals the deal. If an editor has rejected stories of yours already, they may also do this! Build and nurture relationships with editors. Go to Paris?
Publication: 6/23/2015
Submission (Reprint): 8
Rejections (Reprint): 0 (7 lifetime, 0 from this market)
Acceptance: 8/5/2015 (44 days)
Publication to Sale: 43 days
Reprint # 1 – “The Merger”
Wait a second, “The Merger”? Didn’t we cover that story already? We did! I sold it to The Book Smugglers, and they paid me a lot of money, and I was very happy. But the beautiful thing about short fiction is that you can sell stories more than once. Or “sell” them.
Here’s the deal: when I got my Book Smugglers contract for “The Merger,” they asked for exclusive audio rights in addition to print and electronic rights. They had not done podcasts for the last season’s stories, and they had no definite plans to podcast this season’s stories, but they wanted to in the future. One thing I had learned about contracts was not to give up rights that wouldn’t be exercised, so I asked to retain audio rights, with the caveat that if they did make concrete plans to podcast, of course we could revisit those rights then because I, too, wanted this story to be produced in audio. It wasn’t as if I intended to submit the story to podcasts before I could sell it as a regular reprint anyway, but I wanted to keep my options open. What if an exciting opportunity came along?
Then in June I learned via Codex that Hugo-winning podcast StarShipSofa was accepting submissions for the first time ever. Normally they solicit reprints, so this was a big deal! Although they don’t pay, they’re one of the rare cases where “for exposure” is worth it, thanks to their reputation and legions of listeners (over ten thousand downloads a week!). Unlike most podcasts, however, they had one restriction: the story could not have appeared in audio previously. The submission window was a mere two weeks.
What if an exciting opportunity came along?
This was exactly the situation that warranted keeping audio rights: StarShipSofa was only asking for audio rights—the text would not be printed online—and so the fact that “The Merger” was still under print and electronic exclusivity didn’t matter. Even though I was confident I had interpreted the terms of the contract correctly, I e-mailed the Book Smugglers to make sure they were okay with it, and they gave me their blessing to submit away.
On June 22, 2015, the day before “The Merger” was officially published—though it had been available as an ebook for a week—I submitted it as a reprint. The Grinder was reporting some very fast acceptances, so I was secretly hoping to sell the reprint before the story went live because that would have been hilarious. Alas, no. But just before midnight on August 5, 2015, I received an acceptance for my first audio reprint! Technically not a sale, since I got no money; technically not a reprint, since there would be no printing; definitely audio, since it’s a podcast.
This is the brave new world of publishing.
Lessons Learned: Read your contracts carefully and negotiate wisely. Keep rights that won’t be exercised. The reprint market can be hugely beneficial and sometimes even profitable (people have sold reprints for more than they received for the original sale), so make sure the exclusivity and rights granted work in your favor. And while it is not necessary, it’s a courtesy to confer with editors before submitting a reprint if exclusivity has not ended. Keep your ears open for exciting opportunities!
When it comes to statistics, there seems to be little pattern, if any, which goes to show how erratic and unpredictable the submission game can be: pairing the right story with the right editor at the right time is mostly providence shining upon your submission strategy. A story can take months to sell or a year to sell. Though I, personally, have a weird sweet spot around 8 rejections such that now I eye any story with 8 or more rejections and wonder what’s going wrong, sometimes it can take dozens of rejections before a story sells.
Some trends do emerge, however. Twitter has been invaluable in my writing career, both in keeping me apprised of submission opportunities and inspiring my work. For some people, it can even directly lead to a sale. Writing workshops of various kinds (and conventions) have also proven useful, both in improving my work and getting submission advice from colleagues. Using limited submission windows as deadlines to finish revising stories, despite never having worked for those particular submission windows, results in a finished story, and that’s more important.
And, most importantly, those two magical words, the simple piece of advice every writer should carry with them: don’t self-reject.
As Assistant Editor of Mothership Zeta, I’ve gotten to see the other side, and honestly I have no idea how I made any sales at all. It’s a miracle that any story stands out among hundreds of submissions. I’ve sent more rejections in the last month than I’ve received in all my time submitting stories. I’ve rejected beautifully written stories that weren’t right for us. I’ve rejected perfectly good stories that I’m sure will find homes elsewhere. But one of my favorite things is when an author receives a rejection and then submits a new story. Each story is another chance to make that story-slusher-editor-market magic happen. I’ve fallen in love with several stories, and I am always chasing that feeling. And I can’t get it if authors don’t send in their stories, if they don’t keep trying with everything they’ve got.
I’m Sunil Patel, and these are my first nine sales (and one reprint). If you’re just starting out, may my experience make yours even smoother and more fruitful. If you’ve been in the game a while, I hope you’ve learned something. Truly, there is no Big Secret to selling short stories; there are only two things you need to do, and the more you do them, the more you increase your chance of selling.
Write short stories.
Submit short stories.
The post “Anatomy of a Sale, Pt. 2″ by Sunil Patel appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.
August 5, 2015
“Anatomy of a Sale, Pt. 1” by Sunil Patel
On September 12, 2013, I declared in front of God and Facebook that by that time next year, I was going to be a published author. Ten months later, I made my first short story sale (at pro rates), and since then I’ve made eight more, all but one to pro markets. There are a number of factors to which I could attribute my rapid success—one being that I have been writing for decades, I simply had not been submitting to SFF markets, so my craft was fairly well honed by that point—but the most important, in my opinion, was that I received advice from more seasoned writers on how and where to submit. In fact, one reason I even decided to try my hand at becoming published was because the SFF community is so supportive of new authors, and I knew I had a network of people to show me the ropes. And show me they did.
Now, I am hardly seasoned (I just got here! is my constant refrain), but I want to be a knowledge conduit. In this post I will examine each one of my sales and provide statistics and numbers, dissecting the process to extract vital information that you can use in your own career. But more than that, I hope that my experience can be both inspiring and comforting: a bibliography does not tell you how many times a story was rejected, how long a story took to sell from its inception (either idea or first draft), how many submissions the writer made. If you are a new writer, if you are about to begin submitting to magazines, you should be aware of these things. I made my first submission in December 2013, but I did not begin submitting in earnest until March since, well, I didn’t have more things to submit! Since then, however, I’ve been submitting constantly. Come with me as I break down the mystery.
Sale #1 – “The Gramadevi’s Lament”
My first sale came about because I happened to be on Twitter at just the right time. On March 26, 2014, editor Jaym Gates Tweeted about a hypothetical anthology.
Thanks to @BBolander, we’re tossing around an anthology based on creepy forests and forgotten towns. Who’d be interested?
— Jaym Gates (@jaymgates) March 26, 2014
Who’d be interested? I’d be interested! In fact, I had recently been itching to write a horror story, so this opportunity was quite opportune. Jaym e-mailed people who were interested with basic guidelines and told us to feel free to pass on the information, though there would be no public announcement yet.
I began brainstorming, using the Internet and my grandmother as research for a story about a gramadevi, the village spirit in India. Whatever everyone else was writing about, I figured they wouldn’t be writing about that. I had a first draft done on April 10.
By the time submission guidelines were publicly posted on May 9, I was already working on Draft 4. I’d gotten a monthlong headstart.
I completed the final draft (Draft 5) on May 21 and submitted it the next day.
(A quick aside on my writing process. Typically, my final draft and my first draft are not drastically different. I write a first draft, and then I polish it into a second draft that more closely resembles what the story is supposed to be and begin sending to beta readers. Usually after three or four rounds of revising in response to comments, I feel that I have gotten the story as good as I can possibly get it, and that is when it goes into submission. Every writer has a different process, though, so do what works for you!)
My cover letter was sparse:
I have attached my submission for Genius Loci, “The Gramadevi’s Lament,” approximately 2800 words. Thank you for your consideration.
I did not call any attention to the fact that I had no publication credits. I did not list the stories I had published in my high school literary magazine. Here is my story, thank you. For more guidance on cover letters, see Christie Yant and Rose Lemberg.
I kept up with Jaym and other writers who had submitted to the anthology, so I was aware that, bafflingly, I survived the first round of rejections, and then the second round of rejections. On July 21, 61 days after submitting, I received my very first short story acceptance.
“The Gramadevi’s Lament,” a story I wrote specifically for this anthology, was only my 9th submission, and although it was never rejected, by the time it sold, I had gotten 18 rejections for other stories.
I do not recommend that your first sale is a story that sells to its first market because then you think that is the only way you can sell a story, that a story must sell immediately or it will never sell. As the rest of this post will attest to, that is far from true.
Draft 1: 4/10/2014
Final (Draft 5): 5/21/2014
Submission: 9
Rejections: 0 (18 lifetime, 0 from this market)
Acceptance: 7/21/2014 (61 days)
Draft 1 to Sale: 102 days
Final to Sale: 61 days
Lessons Learned: “Be on Twitter 24/7” is not the most helpful piece of advice, but I can’t overstate how important Twitter has been to my career. Editors are on Twitter, and they connect with writers, and you can find out about many submission opportunities. Anthologies in particular are great because they provide story seeds and inspiration, though the downside to writing a story for an anthology is that if it’s particularly niche, it can be hard to sell to other markets afterward as fellow rejectees flood submissions with stories about cyborg vampires.
Sale #2 – “Sally the Psychic Alligator”
In February 2014 I decided to try writing a flash piece every day. As I said, I had very little to submit! While I didn’t reach that goal at all (I wrote…5), it was a worthy project, as I got two sales out of it. On February 4, I asked Twitter for a prompt. A friend replied with this image.
Portland seemed like the kind of city that would have a missing alligator. I began writing, and somehow the alligator became psychic, and I finished the piece the next day.
And then I let it sit, because I had just written a story about a psychic alligator, and that was ridiculous, no one was going to buy that. Also my focus that month was generating as many first drafts as possible. A couple months later, however, when I needed a story to workshop for Cat Rambo’s Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction Workshop at the end of April, I pulled it out and gave it a polish. I took workshop comments to heart and had a third draft in early June, and then I let it sit again for reasons I cannot explain. I think I still didn’t believe anyone would buy it; it was humorous science fiction, which is usually a hard sell. A month later, I changed one adverb and decided it was ready to submit, and I sent it out to a reputable pro market.
To my complete surprise, it came back with a personal rejection. It was “cute” but not right for the market, and the editor looked forward to my next submission. That was encouraging!
Why did I submit to a pro market first? How did I choose where to submit to next? An interlude!
Mary Robinette Kowal, who’s won more awards and acclaim for her short fiction than any writer could ever dream of, has a concise and robust way of evaluating markets: pay rate, size of audience, and shininess.
Markets are categorized by pay rates: pro ($0.06/word or more), semi-pro (a per-word rate less than pro, but at least $0.01/word), token (a non-zero amount of money regardless of length, less than $0.01/word), and free (zero dollars). You may choose to target markets that will pay you more because you like money. This is perfectly reasonable and I encourage it because money buys you ice cream.
Size of audience relates to eyeballs, and there is often a direct correlation between pay rate and size of audience: long-running pro markets like Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction reach lots of readers, whereas an obscure literary magazine that pays nothing may not be read by more than your friends and family.
Shininess is a catch-all for any intangible reason you like a market. You like the site design. It’s prestigious and tends to show up on awards ballots. You grew up reading it. As an example, even though Shimmer doesn’t pay pro rates, I submit to them ahead of other pro markets because of shininess: I have enjoyed many stories in the magazine and would love to be published there.
There are other important factors to consider. What is the market’s response time? I always recommend throwing any new story into the Clarkesworld Reject-O-Matic because they respond so quickly that you lose little time in giving them a shot. Does the market frequently give personal rejections? Shimmer gives very kind personal rejections, which is another reason I enjoy submitting to them.
A word on personal rejections: they are a mixed bag. Some can be encouraging, if they praise the story but indicate that it’s not right for the magazine. Some can be helpful, if they point out flaws in the story you didn’t see. Some can be discouraging, if the criticisms hit harder than expected. Some can be bewildering. But treat any comments in a personal rejection the same way you would treat a comment from a beta reader: if you agree with it and think acting on it would improve the story, go ahead. Otherwise, leave your story alone.
How do you get all this information about markets? By using one of the greatest, most useful, free tools for a writer: Submission Grinder.
Submission Grinder, created and maintained by David Steffen as a free alternative to Duotrope when it went paid, allows you to track your submissions, identify appropriate markets for your stories, and, through user-reported data, learn average response times, acceptance rates, and percentage of personal rejections, among other things. It’s an indispensable resource. The aforementioned Duotrope can provide more in-depth data from a different user pool, but it requires a fee; some writers use both for a more comprehensive picture of markets. Ralan.com also posts information on markets, including helpful tips from users that you won’t find on the submission guidelines.
Using a combination of all of these factors, I make a list of markets I will submit a story to, generally ordered by where I think the story has the best chance of selling. But the list gets tweaked for each story. For instance, I had one story I thought would benefit from having art, so I submitted it to markets that did art first.
Here’s the number one rule of submitting: don’t self-reject. It’s advice Rose Lemberg gave to marginalized writers—who tend to self-reject more than your confidently privileged individual—but it applies to all writers. As long as your story meets the submission guidelines (genre, word count, not specifically excluded [“hard sells” are just that, nothing more]), let the editor decide whether to accept your story. You don’t think you’re “good enough” for pro markets? I certainly didn’t think I was good enough to be in an anthology with authors like Seanan McGuire, Ken Liu, and Cat Rambo, but I submitted anyway.
Submit anyway. Don’t self-reject. Start at the top and work your way down, however you define those directions.
Although I let “Sally the Psychic Alligator” sit for months between drafts, once I began submitting it, I never let it sit between submissions. Every time a rejection came in, I sent it out to the next market that was open. Once I did skip the line to try a semi-pro market that I thought would be a good fit (I still didn’t really believe it would sell to a pro market) but they didn’t bite. My writing group has a game where you get a point for each submission and a point for each rejection, but an acceptance sends you all the way back to zero. This encourages you to keep submitting and racking up rejections and points, because the higher your score, the more you’re in the game. (I was almost mad to get an acceptance because I was gunning for a triple-digit score.) You can play your own game on Sink or Submit!
Fireside opened up for submissions in October, and I strategically chose two markets with quick response times to rack up a couple more rejections before the submission window closed at the end of the month. By that time, the story had been rejected 7 times. Amusingly enough, one of those last two rejections was the only personal that gave specific criticism beyond “not right for us,” but I shrugged it off and didn’t change a thing.
Draft 1: 2/5/2014
Draft 2: 4/30/2014
Final (Draft 3.1): 7/3/2014
Submission: 49
Rejections: 7 (47 lifetime, 1 from this market)
Acceptance: 12/2/2014 (37 days)
Draft 1 to Sale: 300 days
Final to Sale: 152 days
On December 2, I received an acceptance. When the rest of the stories bought during that submission period were revealed, it became clear that of course “Sally the Psychic Alligator” had found the perfect home alongside stories like “Fluffy Harbinger of Death” and “Betty and the Squelchy Saurus.” When I read more of the flash fiction in the magazine, I saw that I was wrong in my assumption that no pro market would buy a story about a psychic alligator: this was totally that market, and I just had to wait until it was open.
Lessons Learned: Don’t self-reject! It is not up to you to decide whether someone will buy your story; that’s the editor’s job. Also keep an eye out for magazines that have limited submission windows. I had already had one flash piece rejected by Fireside, and this second time, I selected one that had more of a plot to it, per their guidelines. Know your market.
Sale #3 – “Stranger”
During Flash Fiction February, I knocked out a piece of microfiction about a girl who finds a strange creature in her bedroom at night. It was very short, with a nice punch at the end, but I didn’t think much of it.
When I got a reading slot at FOGcon in March, I chose to read several flash pieces, including the aforementioned “Sally the Psychic Alligator” and this one. After the reading, Cliff Winnig came up to me and told me to submit it, as is. At the time, I had only made one submission, so I was baffled and scared. I asked my friend Seanan McGuire’s advice, and she told me to cut one word. I argued and she insisted. I listened. (I think it could have stayed, but at least this way it looks like I did some revision.)
“Stranger” presented a unique challenge because it was 329 words, which narrowed the market considerably. I looked for magazines that specifically published microfiction, bouncing between pro markets, semi-pro markets, and token markets depending on who was available to submit to. I received nothing but form rejections until I finally got a very detailed personal rejection with comments that, while insightful, would have changed the shape of the story. I was confident that someone would want it just as it was.
While I use Submission Grinder to track my submissions, I also use it to discover new markets. The home page has the most recent rejections and acceptances, and one day I clicked on a market with a catchy name, Saturday Night Reader. I really liked the website design (shiny!) and put it on my list as an option. On a whim, after eight rejections, I sent “Stranger” to SNR and received an acceptance in 12 days. Although they only paid $5, for a story that short, it worked out to semi-pro rates!
Draft 1: 2/13/2014
Final (Draft 2): 3/9/2014
Submission: 65
Rejections: 8 (56 lifetime, 0 from this market)
Acceptance: 1/4/2015 (12 days)
Draft 1 to Sale: 325 days
Final to Sale: 301 days
Despite being my third sale, it became my first publication, going up in March, and it was also my first print publication, featured in the Summer issue of the magazine. My name was on the cover!
Lessons Learned: Sometimes self-reject? I didn’t have high hopes that this story would sell to a pro market because it was so short and not creatively daring enough to make a splash. Instead I was looking for markets that took stories that did what mine did, and I was less concerned with payment as I was with fit. But the real lesson here is to listen to the advice of more experienced writers: I don’t think I ever would have submitted this story if Cliff Winnig hadn’t told me to. He saw in it what I didn’t, just like the editor who finally bought it.
Sale #4 – “The Merger”
In the fall of 2013, I began writing a funny story to deal with the stress of going through a corporate merger. It was called, astoundingly, “The Merger.” The premise was simple: alien possession as corporate merger. I wrote it over the course of several months, even taking time during Christmas vacation to bang out a few words each day. Even while on a cruise. I wanted to submit it to the FOGcon writing workshop, and the deadline was January 31, 2014.
The draft I submitted to the workshop was about 7500 words, and it was essentially my first draft with a bit of a spit-shine. It was well received. Ellen Klages, professional writer and leader of our workshop, thought it was close to salable already, but it was too long for a humorous piece. She thought I should cut it down to 4K or 5K, which I didn’t think I could do. Right after the workshop, however, I went to dinner and a friend told me about Unidentified Funny Objects, an anthology of humorous science fiction and fantasy stories. The perfect market, and the submission window was open till the end of the month! Their limit was 6K, so now I had a real incentive to cut my story down. I lopped off 2K and added 100 words to have a leaner, 5.6K version to revise. The final version ended up 5.9K, and I happily submitted it to the anthology only to get a form rejection within 3 days.
Out of all my sales, “The Merger” is the only story I let sit more than a couple days between submissions. It did collect rejections for months, but at one point I held it for a month because C.C. Finlay was doing a guest issue for Fantasy and Science Fiction, and his submission window was only two weeks. I didn’t have any pro markets I could count on to reject me in time, so I waited. I held it again after receiving one of Finlay’s legendary personal rejections, mulling over whether to act on any of his comments. I had met an editor at Worldcon who said I could submit the story directly to her, so I wanted to make sure it was in tip-top shape. In the end, I made some minor changes, but I believed in my story as it was, on a macro level.
In the fall of 2014, The Book Smugglers were accepting submissions for their First Contact season until the end of the year. Up until May 2014, I only knew The Book Smugglers as a book review blog, but I followed them on Twitter, so I became aware of their foray into publishing. Based on their selections for the Subversive Fairy Tales season, I knew they were publishing interesting, challenging stories. The guidelines for First Contact said they would consider traditional alien stories, but they were also looking for more creative takes on the idea of First Contact. “The Merger” was nominally about First Contact: man meets alien. It didn’t explore the idea of First Contact in any meaningful way, though. Still, it fit the guidelines! Technically.
I almost didn’t submit to The Book Smugglers because my story was still with the aforementioned editor. I had never received a confirmation e-mail, so after a few months, I began to worry that she hadn’t received it, so I sent a cautious query in December. She had received it but hadn’t taken a look at it. A week later, though, she sent me a kind rejection. Did my query shake that rejection loose? If I hadn’t said anything, would it have come too late for me to submit it to The Book Smugglers? These are the questions that keep a writer up at night.
Because I immediately submitted this octorejected story to The Book Smugglers, and 43 days later, over a year since I finished the first draft, they accepted it. Not only that, but their acceptance specifically mentioned what they loved about the story, and they were what I loved about the story.
Draft 1: 1/14/2014
Draft 2: 1/25/2014
Draft 3: 3/16/2014
Final (Draft 5): 3/30/2014
Final (Draft 5.1): 9/21/2014
Submission: 62
Rejections: 8 (63 lifetime, 0 from this market)
Acceptance: 1/31/2015 (43 days)
Draft 1 to Sale: 382 days
Final to Sale: 307 days
The Book Smugglers, as a market for short stories, did not exist when I started writing this story. They did not exist when I finished the first draft. They did not exist when I finished the final draft. They came into being while I was submitting, and they were the perfect home this story was waiting for all along.
Lessons Learned: DON’T SELF-REJECT. I fully expected a rejection because I did not think this story was what they were looking for. Well, what do I know, I’m not them. Listen to experienced writers; even though The Book Smugglers would have looked at a 7.5K version of the story, the shorter version was a stronger story (especially since I took further suggestions from Ellen Klages). An editor won’t yell at you if you query after a reasonable amount of time. Don’t give up on a story if you can’t find the right market because the right market may not exist yet.
Solicitation – Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling
A mere four days after making my fourth sale, I received a startling e-mail from Monica Valentinelli. She was co-editing an anthology with Jaym Gates, and they…wanted me to contribute to it.
Not coincidentally, this invitation came after Jaym and I had completed edits for “The Gramadevi’s Lament.” I had proven myself to be easy to work with, which doesn’t mean complacent: I pushed back on several suggestions and only made changes I felt would actually improve the story. I had also asked for several changes to the contract before signing. And for the low, low price of not being a dick, I became part of a list of authors in an anthology announcement.
The editors have already approved my first draft as both “not sucking” and “sufficiently fitting the theme of the anthology,” so assuming my final draft meets with their approval, I will have another sale.
Lessons Learned: Don’t be a dick. You’ve likely noticed that anthologies by the same editor frequently have some of the same authors, and this is because they have built a good relationship with that editor. They have proven they are reliable and easy to work with. Don’t be a pushover, but act with professionalism, and you never know what opportunities will just pop into your inbox.
And speaking of professionalism, it was that quality Mur Lafferty noted in me when—a mere twelve days after my first solicitation—she asked me to be Assistant Editor of Mothership Zeta, a new SFF ezine.
Within two weeks, I sold my favorite story, received an invitation to be in an anthology, and became the kind of person who is asked to be Assistant Editor of a magazine. The tides were turning. Everything was coming up Sunil.
Or was it???
(It was. I thought it would be more exciting if I pretended I crashed and burned after this, but I already said I made nine sales, so you know there are five more to go. Foreshadowing. See? I’m a writer!)
But as any writer knows, it’s not the destination that matters, it’s the journey. Continue the journey with me tomorrow!
The post “Anatomy of a Sale, Pt. 1” by Sunil Patel appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.
“Anatomy of a Sale, Pt. 1″ by Sunil Patel
On September 12, 2013, I declared in front of God and Facebook that by that time next year, I was going to be a published author. Ten months later, I made my first short story sale (at pro rates), and since then I’ve made eight more, all but one to pro markets. There are a number of factors to which I could attribute my rapid success—one being that I have been writing for decades, I simply had not been submitting to SFF markets, so my craft was fairly well honed by that point—but the most important, in my opinion, was that I received advice from more seasoned writers on how and where to submit. In fact, one reason I even decided to try my hand at becoming published was because the SFF community is so supportive of new authors, and I knew I had a network of people to show me the ropes. And show me they did.
Now, I am hardly seasoned (I just got here! is my constant refrain), but I want to be a knowledge conduit. In this post I will examine each one of my sales and provide statistics and numbers, dissecting the process to extract vital information that you can use in your own career. But more than that, I hope that my experience can be both inspiring and comforting: a bibliography does not tell you how many times a story was rejected, how long a story took to sell from its inception (either idea or first draft), how many submissions the writer made. If you are a new writer, if you are about to begin submitting to magazines, you should be aware of these things. I made my first submission in December 2013, but I did not begin submitting in earnest until March since, well, I didn’t have more things to submit! Since then, however, I’ve been submitting constantly. Come with me as I break down the mystery.
Sale #1 – “The Gramadevi’s Lament”
My first sale came about because I happened to be on Twitter at just the right time. On March 26, 2014, editor Jaym Gates Tweeted about a hypothetical anthology.
Thanks to @BBolander, we’re tossing around an anthology based on creepy forests and forgotten towns. Who’d be interested?
— Jaym Gates (@jaymgates) March 26, 2014
Who’d be interested? I’d be interested! In fact, I had recently been itching to write a horror story, so this opportunity was quite opportune. Jaym e-mailed people who were interested with basic guidelines and told us to feel free to pass on the information, though there would be no public announcement yet. I began brainstorming, using the Internet and my grandmother as research for a story about a gramadevi, the village spirit in India. Whatever everyone else was writing about, I figured they wouldn’t be writing about that. I had a first draft done on April 10. By the time submission guidelines were publicly posted on May 9, I was already working on Draft 4. I’d gotten a monthlong headstart. I completed the final draft (Draft 5) on May 21 and submitted it the next day. (A quick aside on my writing process. Typically, my final draft and my first draft are not drastically different. I write a first draft, and then I polish it into a second draft that more closely resembles what the story is supposed to be and begin sending to beta readers. Usually after three or four rounds of revising in response to comments, I feel that I have gotten the story as good as I can possibly get it, and that is when it goes into submission. Every writer has a different process, though, so do what works for you!) My cover letter was sparse:
I have attached my submission for Genius Loci, “The Gramadevi’s Lament,” approximately 2800 words. Thank you for your consideration.
I did not call any attention to the fact that I had no publication credits. I did not list the stories I had published in my high school literary magazine. Here is my story, thank you. For more guidance on cover letters, see Christie Yant and Rose Lemberg. I kept up with Jaym and other writers who had submitted to the anthology, so I was aware that, bafflingly, I survived the first round of rejections, and then the second round of rejections. On July 21, 61 days after submitting, I received my very first short story acceptance. “The Gramadevi’s Lament,” a story I wrote specifically for this anthology, was only my 9th submission, and although it was never rejected, by the time it sold, I had gotten 18 rejections for other stories. I do not recommend that your first sale is a story that sells to its first market because then you think that is the only way you can sell a story, that a story must sell immediately or it will never sell. As the rest of this post will attest to, that is far from true.
Draft 1: 4/10/2014
Final (Draft 5): 5/21/2014
Submission: 9
Rejections: 0 (18 lifetime, 0 from this market)
Acceptance: 7/21/2014 (61 days)
Draft 1 to Sale: 102 days
Final to Sale: 61 days
Lessons Learned: “Be on Twitter 24/7” is not the most helpful piece of advice, but I can’t overstate how important Twitter has been to my career. Editors are on Twitter, and they connect with writers, and you can find out about many submission opportunities. Anthologies in particular are great because they provide story seeds and inspiration, though the downside to writing a story for an anthology is that if it’s particularly niche, it can be hard to sell to other markets afterward as fellow rejectees flood submissions with stories about cyborg vampires.
Sale #2 – “Sally the Psychic Alligator”
In February 2014 I decided to try writing a flash piece every day. As I said, I had very little to submit! While I didn’t reach that goal at all (I wrote…5), it was a worthy project, as I got two sales out of it. On February 4, I asked Twitter for a prompt. A friend replied with this image.
Portland seemed like the kind of city that would have a missing alligator. I began writing, and somehow the alligator became psychic, and I finished the piece the next day.
And then I let it sit, because I had just written a story about a psychic alligator, and that was ridiculous, no one was going to buy that. Also my focus that month was generating as many first drafts as possible. A couple months later, however, when I needed a story to workshop for Cat Rambo’s Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction Workshop at the end of April, I pulled it out and gave it a polish. I took workshop comments to heart and had a third draft in early June, and then I let it sit again for reasons I cannot explain. I think I still didn’t believe anyone would buy it; it was humorous science fiction, which is usually a hard sell. A month later, I changed one adverb and decided it was ready to submit, and I sent it out to a reputable pro market.
To my complete surprise, it came back with a personal rejection. It was “cute” but not right for the market, and the editor looked forward to my next submission. That was encouraging!
Why did I submit to a pro market first? How did I choose where to submit to next? An interlude!
Mary Robinette Kowal, who’s won more awards and acclaim for her short fiction than any writer could ever dream of, has a concise and robust way of evaluating markets: pay rate, size of audience, and shininess.
Markets are categorized by pay rates: pro ($0.06/word or more), semi-pro (a per-word rate less than pro, but at least $0.01/word), token (a non-zero amount of money regardless of length, less than $0.01/word), and free (zero dollars). You may choose to target markets that will pay you more because you like money. This is perfectly reasonable and I encourage it because money buys you ice cream.
Size of audience relates to eyeballs, and there is often a direct correlation between pay rate and size of audience: long-running pro markets like Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction reach lots of readers, whereas an obscure literary magazine that pays nothing may not be read by more than your friends and family.
Shininess is a catch-all for any intangible reason you like a market. You like the site design. It’s prestigious and tends to show up on awards ballots. You grew up reading it. As an example, even though Shimmer doesn’t pay pro rates, I submit to them ahead of other pro markets because of shininess: I have enjoyed many stories in the magazine and would love to be published there.
There are other important factors to consider. What is the market’s response time? I always recommend throwing any new story into the Clarkesworld Reject-O-Matic because they respond so quickly that you lose little time in giving them a shot. Does the market frequently give personal rejections? Shimmer gives very kind personal rejections, which is another reason I enjoy submitting to them.
A word on personal rejections: they are a mixed bag. Some can be encouraging, if they praise the story but indicate that it’s not right for the magazine. Some can be helpful, if they point out flaws in the story you didn’t see. Some can be discouraging, if the criticisms hit harder than expected. Some can be bewildering. But treat any comments in a personal rejection the same way you would treat a comment from a beta reader: if you agree with it and think acting on it would improve the story, go ahead. Otherwise, leave your story alone.
How do you get all this information about markets? By using one of the greatest, most useful, free tools for a writer: Submission Grinder.
Submission Grinder, created and maintained by David Steffen as a free alternative to Duotrope when it went paid, allows you to track your submissions, identify appropriate markets for your stories, and, through user-reported data, learn average response times, acceptance rates, and percentage of personal rejections, among other things. It’s an indispensable resource. The aforementioned Duotrope can provide more in-depth data from a different user pool, but it requires a fee; some writers use both for a more comprehensive picture of markets. Ralan.com also posts information on markets, including helpful tips from users that you won’t find on the submission guidelines.
Using a combination of all of these factors, I make a list of markets I will submit a story to, generally ordered by where I think the story has the best chance of selling. But the list gets tweaked for each story. For instance, I had one story I thought would benefit from having art, so I submitted it to markets that did art first.
Here’s the number one rule of submitting: don’t self-reject. It’s advice Rose Lemberg gave to marginalized writers—who tend to self-reject more than your confidently privileged individual—but it applies to all writers. As long as your story meets the submission guidelines (genre, word count, not specifically excluded [“hard sells” are just that, nothing more]), let the editor decide whether to accept your story. You don’t think you’re “good enough” for pro markets? I certainly didn’t think I was good enough to be in an anthology with authors like Seanan McGuire, Ken Liu, and Cat Rambo, but I submitted anyway.
Submit anyway. Don’t self-reject. Start at the top and work your way down, however you define those directions.
Although I let “Sally the Psychic Alligator” sit for months between drafts, once I began submitting it, I never let it sit between submissions. Every time a rejection came in, I sent it out to the next market that was open. Once I did skip the line to try a semi-pro market that I thought would be a good fit (I still didn’t really believe it would sell to a pro market) but they didn’t bite. My writing group has a game where you get a point for each submission and a point for each rejection, but an acceptance sends you all the way back to zero. This encourages you to keep submitting and racking up rejections and points, because the higher your score, the more you’re in the game. (I was almost mad to get an acceptance because I was gunning for a triple-digit score.) You can play your own game on Sink or Submit!
Fireside opened up for submissions in October, and I strategically chose two markets with quick response times to rack up a couple more rejections before the submission window closed at the end of the month. By that time, the story had been rejected 7 times. Amusingly enough, one of those last two rejections was the only personal that gave specific criticism beyond “not right for us,” but I shrugged it off and didn’t change a thing.
Draft 1: 2/5/2014
Draft 2: 4/30/2014
Final (Draft 3.1): 7/3/2014
Submission: 49
Rejections: 7 (47 lifetime, 1 from this market)
Acceptance: 12/2/2014 (37 days)
Draft 1 to Sale: 300 days
Final to Sale: 152 days
On December 2, I received an acceptance. When the rest of the stories bought during that submission period were revealed, it became clear that of course “Sally the Psychic Alligator” had found the perfect home alongside stories like “Fluffy Harbinger of Death” and “Betty and the Squelchy Saurus.” When I read more of the flash fiction in the magazine, I saw that I was wrong in my assumption that no pro market would buy a story about a psychic alligator: this was totally that market, and I just had to wait until it was open.
Lessons Learned: Don’t self-reject! It is not up to you to decide whether someone will buy your story; that’s the editor’s job. Also keep an eye out for magazines that have limited submission windows. I had already had one flash piece rejected by Fireside, and this second time, I selected one that had more of a plot to it, per their guidelines. Know your market.
Sale #3 – “Stranger”
During Flash Fiction February, I knocked out a piece of microfiction about a girl who finds strange creature in her bedroom at night. It was very short, with a nice punch at the end, but I didn’t think much of it.
When I got a reading slot at FOGcon in March, I chose to read several flash pieces, including the aforementioned “Sally the Psychic Alligator” and this one. After the reading, Cliff Winnig came up to me and told me to submit it, as is. At the time, I had only made one submission, so I was baffled and scared. I asked my friend Seanan McGuire’s advice, and she told me to cut one word. I argued and she insisted. I listened. (I think it could have stayed, but at least this way it looks like I did some revision.)
“Stranger” presented a unique challenge because it was 329 words, which narrowed the market considerably. I looked for magazines that specifically published microfiction, bouncing between pro markets, semi-pro markets, and token markets depending on who was available to submit to. I received nothing but form rejections until I finally got a very detailed personal rejection with comments that, while insightful, would have changed the shape of the story. I was confident that someone would want it just as it was.
While I use Submission Grinder to track my submissions, I also use it to discover new markets. The home page has the most recent rejections and acceptances, and one day I clicked on a market with a catchy name, Saturday Night Reader. I really liked the website design (shiny!) and put it on my list as an option. On a whim, after eight rejections, I sent “Stranger” to SNR and received an acceptance in 12 days. Although they only paid $5, for a story that short, it worked out to semi-pro rates!
Draft 1: 2/13/2014
Final (Draft 2): 3/9/2014
Submission: 65
Rejections: 8 (56 lifetime, 0 from this market)
Acceptance: 1/4/2015 (12 days)
Draft 1 to Sale: 325 days
Final to Sale: 301 days
Despite being my third sale, it became my first publication, going up in March, and it was also my first print publication, featured in the Summer issue of the magazine. My name was on the cover!
Lessons Learned: Sometimes self-reject? I didn’t have high hopes that this story would sell to a pro market because it was so short and not creatively daring enough to make a splash. Instead I was looking for markets that took stories that did what mine did, and I was less concerned with payment as I was with fit. But the real lesson here is to listen to the advice of more experienced writers: I don’t think I ever would have submitted this story if Cliff Winnig hadn’t told me to. He saw in it what I didn’t, just like the editor who finally bought it.
Sale #4 – “The Merger”
In the fall of 2013, I began writing a funny story to deal with the stress of going through a corporate merger. It was called, astoundingly, “The Merger.” The premise was simple: alien possession as corporate merger. I wrote it over the course of several months, even taking time during Christmas vacation to bang out a few words each day. Even while on a cruise. I wanted to submit it to the FOGcon writing workshop, and the deadline was January 31, 2014.
The draft I submitted to the workshop was about 7500 words, and it was essentially my first draft with a bit of a spit-shine. It was well received. Ellen Klages, professional writer and leader of our workshop, thought it was close to salable already, but it was too long for a humorous piece. She thought I should cut it down to 4K or 5K, which I didn’t think I could do. Right after the workshop, however, I went to dinner and a friend told me about Unidentified Funny Objects, an anthology of humorous science fiction and fantasy stories. The perfect market, and the submission window was open till the end of the month! Their limit was 6K, so now I had a real incentive to cut my story down. I lopped off 2K and added 100 words to have a leaner, 5.6K version to revise. The final version ended up 5.9K, and I happily submitted it to the anthology only to get a form rejection within 3 days.
Out of all my sales, “The Merger” is the only story I let sit more than a couple days between submissions. It did collect rejections for months, but at one point I held it for a month because C.C. Finlay was doing a guest issue for Fantasy and Science Fiction, and his submission window was only two weeks. I didn’t have any pro markets I could count on to reject me in time, so I waited. I held it again after receiving one of Finlay’s legendary personal rejections, mulling over whether to act on any of his comments. I had met an editor at Worldcon who said I could submit the story directly to her, so I wanted to make sure it was in tip-top shape. In the end, I made some minor changes, but I believed in my story as it was, on a macro level.
In the fall of 2014, The Book Smugglers were accepting submissions for their First Contact season until the end of the year. Up until May 2014, I only knew The Book Smugglers as a book review blog, but I followed them on Twitter, so I became aware of their foray into publishing. Based on their selections for the Subversive Fairy Tales season, I knew they were publishing interesting, challenging stories. The guidelines for First Contact said they would consider traditional alien stories, but they were also looking for more creative takes on the idea of First Contact. “The Merger” was nominally about First Contact: man meets alien. It didn’t explore the idea of First Contact in any meaningful way, though. Still, it fit the guidelines! Technically.
I almost didn’t submit to The Book Smugglers because my story was still with the aforementioned editor. I had never received a confirmation e-mail, so after a few months, I began to worry that she hadn’t received it, so I sent a cautious query in December. She had received it but hadn’t taken a look at it. A week later, though, she sent me a kind rejection. Did my query shake that rejection loose? If I hadn’t said anything, would it have come too late for me to submit it to The Book Smugglers? These are the questions that keep a writer up at night.
Because I immediately submitted this octorejected story to The Book Smugglers, and 43 days later, over a year since I finished the first draft, they accepted it. Not only that, but their acceptance specifically mentioned what they loved about the story, and they were what I loved about the story.
Draft 1: 1/14/2014
Draft 2: 1/25/2014
Draft 3: 3/16/2014
Final (Draft 5): 3/30/2014
Final (Draft 5.1): 9/21/2014
Submission: 62
Rejections: 8 (63 lifetime, 0 from this market)
Acceptance: 1/31/2015 (43 days)
Draft 1 to Sale: 382 days
Final to Sale: 307 days
The Book Smugglers, as a market for short stories, did not exist when I started writing this story. They did not exist when I finished the first draft. They did not exist when I finished the final draft. They came into being while I was submitting, and they were the perfect home this story was waiting for all along.
Lessons Learned: DON’T SELF-REJECT. I fully expected a rejection because I did not think this story was what they were looking for. Well, what do I know, I’m not them. Listen to experienced writers; even though The Book Smugglers would have looked at a 7.5K version of the story, the shorter version was a stronger story (especially since I took further suggestions from Ellen Klages). An editor won’t yell at you if you query after a reasonable amount of time. Don’t give up on a story if you can’t find the right market because the right market may not exist yet.
Solicitation – Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling
A mere four days after making my fourth sale, I received a startling e-mail from Monica Valentinelli. She was co-editing an anthology with Jaym Gates, and they…wanted me to contribute to it.
Not coincidentally, this invitation came after Jaym and I had completed edits for “The Gramadevi’s Lament.” I had proven myself to be easy to work with, which doesn’t mean complacent: I pushed back on several suggestions and only made changes I felt would actually improve the story. I had also asked for several changes to the contract before signing. And for the low, low price of not being a dick, I became part of a list of authors in an anthology announcement.
The editors have already approved my first draft as both “not sucking” and “sufficiently fitting the theme of the anthology,” so assuming my final draft meets with their approval, I will have another sale.
Lessons Learned: Don’t be a dick. You’ve likely noticed that anthologies by the same editor frequently have some of the same authors, and this is because they have built a good relationship with that editor. They have proven they are reliable and easy to work with. Don’t be a pushover, but act with professionalism, and you never know what opportunities will just pop into your inbox.
And speaking of professionalism, it was that quality Mur Lafferty noted in me when—a mere twelve days after my first solicitation—she asked me to be Assistant Editor of Mothership Zeta, a new SFF ezine.
Within two weeks, I sold my favorite story, received an invitation to be in an anthology, and became the kind of person who is asked to be Assistant Editor of a magazine. The tides were turning. Everything was coming up Sunil.
Or was it???
(It was. I thought it would be more exciting if I pretended I crashed and burned after this, but I already said I made nine sales, so you know there are five more to go. Foreshadowing. See? I’m a writer!)
But as any writer knows, it’s not the destination that matters, it’s the journey. Continue the journey with me tomorrow!
The post “Anatomy of a Sale, Pt. 1″ by Sunil Patel appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.
