short stories
Tonight, just after midnight, I find myself confronted with a familiar experience: I’m all ready to write, but the undisciplined couch-dwelling segment of my brain seems to believe I should goof off instead. After all, it argues, reading Iain M. Banks is like doing research, right?
And this despite having all of three pages before it’s done! And I know what that ending is and every beat along the way! It’s almost as if I lie here under the belief all the hard work–the thinking–is done, so what’s the point in bothering with the easy bit of writing?
So I’m going to conduct an experiment. I’m hungry. I’ve got all the makings for nachos in the kitchen and if there were a plate of nachos in front of me right now I would eat the hell out of those nachos. Here’s the deal, demotivated personality subset: I’m not going to eat until this story is done.
We’ll see how long he holds out.
Jason Sandford’s post on Jeff VanderMeer’s blog proves a great jumping-off point for some extremely interesting argument and discussion. Heated and circular as they sometimes get, almost all the comments are worth reading for the breadth and depth of professional opinion they provide.
It was also pretty damn cool to learn VanderMeer earned $10K from short stories this last year, and Rachel Swirsky pulled in $7K. Those are, to my understanding, fairly extreme outliers, even in their own careers–but I could live off that. If anything I think it adds more weight to Scalzi’s overall argument that people wishing to become professional writers have to value their own work as professionals, though VanderMeer makes some interesting points in the comments about the circumstances under which it might be more beneficial to sell a story to a lower-paying market.
I have no analysis to add, but absorbing all those opinions was extremely valuable.
Also cool: someone mentioned M-Brane SF as a non-pro market they’ve got a lot of respect for.
Say you’re the editor of Big Pro Magazine looking at two submissions, one from Writer A and one from Writer B. Writer A is unknown–a couple token or semipro sales, maybe, but no one that more than a handful of people have heard of. Writer B is a pro–he’s got a career of five or ten years, possibly decades; two or three or a dozen well-received novels under his belt; he’s got plenty of fans, people who will pick up a copy of Big Pro Magazinejust because his name’s on the cover.
The stories are of equal quality.
If that’s the case, and if technical details like word count are also equal, is there any circumstance under which you’ll choose Writer A’s story over Writer B? Unless, say, Writer B once said you couldn’t edit your way out of a paper bag, or last convention you attended he barfed eight whiskey sodas all over your shoes?
I mean, Writer B’s going to make you more money. He’ll bring his own established fans to the table. You’ll sell more copies.
When it comes down to Writer A competing with Writer B for the same spot, then, the only way for Unknown Writer A to win is to write a better story than Professional Writer B.
This all just occurred to me a couple minutes ago, and so I’m not ready to offer any more analysis than that just yet, and don’t mean to be making value judgments–obviously, for instance, it makes sense to go with Writer B over Writer A; also, Writer B earned those fans he’ll bring through years of hard work and quality output.
But it points to some clear potential problems for anyone trying to break in. More when I’m less crippled by fever.
The fallout from John Scalzi’s castigation of exploitive pay rates in the short fiction market was intense, frequently confrontational, but largely educational. It brought out a lot of voices big and small–famous novelists, editors of magazines with payrates anywhere between $5 and $500, midrate and fledgling and unpublished writers of all kinds. If you read it all, you learned stuff.
Brief background, the payment rates for short sci-fi/fantasy vary widely. Pro magazine rates, as defined by the SFWA, are 5 cents/word and up–e.g. a 5000-word story pays you $250. Semipros most often pay around 1 cent/word (5000 words = $50), but sometimes run in the 2-3 range. Token mags pay just that: an honorarium, usually in the realm of $5-20.
These are just for first printing rights, of course. Successful short story authors can get paid several times over for a single story once you factor in anthologies, podcasts, foreign translations, collections, etc. Still, it should be pretty obvious that, almost without exception, it’s impossible to make a living solely from the sale of short SFF.
I’ve been paid semipro rates for two of my pieces, with token rates for three others. Of course I’ve sent a lot of stuff to the big places, but they’re hard to crack–they publish, very roughly, about 1 in every 50-100 subissions they receive, and most of these are chosen from already-established writers. When I took a break from novel writing to build up some publishing credits, my goal wasn’t to crack Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF consecutively. It was just that: to have a few credits to my name. Something to put on the end of a query letter. I took a few cracks at the pro markets, changed my targets to “anywhere that pays,” found an editor who liked me over at Reflection’s Edge, and about a year into it started finding some regular success at other small markets.
After reading all those arguments about valuing your work and how the big markets don’t care about small credits, just good stories, I’m ready to shoot higher. I’ve currently got manuscripts out at six different pro markets, a couple of which I’ve never submitted to before. Though I think there were a couple blinds spots in the professional writers’ collective advice, it was good advice, especially the notion that you’ll never find the success you want unless you dedicate yourself to doing whatever it takes to get published in the pros–including, of course, submitting stories to them.
But there have been benefits. Having several stories published in paying markets (no matter how token the rates) has quelled almost all of my Am I Crazies?. Having a story get a glowing review in Tangent was exhilarating.
I’ve learned, on a small scale, to work with editors to improve the work, to know when what they’re saying is sound advice, and how their edits may not necessarily be perfect, but they’re pointing to a problem that needs to be addressed somehow.
I’ve made a couple hundred bucks. Considering I’ve got about a third of a job right now, even that much (or little) money matters.
I’ve made a few contacts that may advance my career.
And I have, quite frankly, learned a shitload about how to navigate the short SFF fiction wilderness. Without those sales to draw me into that world, I may never have paid attention to all that good advice when Scalzi’s storm broke. By and large, I think he and the others are right, which is why I’m now basically doing exactly what they recommended. But I wouldn’t undo what I’ve done before this. It’s been valuable. It’s taught me things. When competition for publishing at the top is as fierce as the stats reveal, a little knowledge could be all the difference.
I have little to add to this right now, but I’m absolutely fascinated by the math of submissions in the fiction industry. Here’s the breakdown of yearly submissions to Strange Horizons, one of the biggest sci-fi/fantasy markets out there.
If I’m reading this correctly, they bought about 0.85% of the stories submitted to them. That seems about average for the biggest markets. It’s helpful to remember that when the latest rejection letter rolls in.
This thread on sfsignal.com not only covers incredible ground on how a fledgling writer should look at building his/her career, but it brought legions of valuable perspectives out of the woodwork, including SFF novelist studs John Scalzi and Tobias Buckell, and a wave of magazine editors, among them Fantasy‘s Cat Rambo and The Future Fire‘s Djibril Alayad.* Oh yeah: also a shitload of other writers, ranging from regular pros to the completely unpublished.
It’s not all chummy, but this kind of spontaneous widespread dialogue is why not all the internet needs to be heaped in a tire yard and burned. There are a lot of comments, but everyone one of them is worth reading.
*Incidental degrees of separation: me and Ms. Rambo have both appeared in M-Brane SF; Mr. Alayad printed one of my works in The Future Fire. I haven’t yet figured out a way to hitch my wagon to Misters Scalzi and Buckell.
To Reflection’s Edge. Was a long and frustrating gap between my last sale and this one. It may release in their upcoming December issue, otherwise I don’t think they publish again until the summer.
I’m growing to love working with editor Sharon Dodge. Misleadingly, this was the first piece of short SFF I ever wrote–misleading because I’d written one fantasy and one sci-fi novel already, plus an undergrad degree’s worth of literary short stories–and even after a couple revisions, indeed due in part to those revisions, it had some bloat to it, and once she brought that to my attention, it was obvious. You know what I found out? It’s much easier to kill your toddlers than your babies. With two years of distance from the original draft, I found it no trouble at all to chop all kinds of material out, including at least one paragraph I loved, to eventually reduce it 1300 words. It now weighs in at 5400; right around a 20% decrease.
I hope this sort of info isn’t some kind of trade secret: I always believed in this story, which is why I sent it to her in the first place, but without a sharp editorial insight (and of course my brilliant decision to run with her more-brilliant suggestion), it may never have sold. I think that, like finding good entertainment critics, the key to editors is finding ones you trust. When those ones have something to say to you, you’d damned well better listen to them.
See this post for details, but Crossed Genres, a cool and recent SFF zine, is losing more money than they can handle.
If you like short sci-fi/fantasy, give them a look. Think about subscribing, or ordering their anthology. I know we’re used to getting everything on the internets for free, but the people who create and distribute quality content sometimes need a little cash to keep doing it.
Off to review New Moon for my one remaining job. Good luck, Crossed Genres.
With that new-found motivation from Nathan Bransford’s contest, here’s what I’m looking to produce next:
1) A submission for John Joseph Adams’ wizards anthology
The almost-complete plot tumbled into my head at work today, and until I spoil it by trying to get it to stick to 12-15 pages of paper, the idea excites me. Going to hammer out the details over the next couple days, and with a developed plot and a soft 5000-word limit, I could have this done in about two weeks if I push myself. Nice part is if Mr. Adams turns it down, it’ll be broad enough to be viable at dozens of other markets.
2) A sub for Christopher Fletcher’s “Aether Age” anthology over at M-Brane
The guidelines for this project aren’t even released yet, but are supposedly upcoming in the next week or so. I have a sudden interest in participating in an anthology, and while I’m a little iffy about doing a shared world piece, it’s kinda intriguing, too–when the rules are already laid out for you, that makes it a lot easier to break them in interesting ways. Downside: if it isn’t accepted there, it might be difficult to place it in other markets. Then again, I think I’d be much more thoroughly fucked by the fact I couldn’t get it picked up by an editor who’s already published my work and is compiling an entire book of these stories, so maybe finding other markets isn’t gonna be my first worry in that hypothetical.
3) No particular market in mind, but I’d like to do a piece of optimistic sci-fi
I was reading about the Shine anthology and thought the editor had some interesting stuff to say about how reticent writers are to come up with optimistic near-future (set within 50 years, by their guidelines) SF. I know this would be a challenge for me and it certainly seems to be underrepresented in the genre right now, so though the anthology’s submissions closed a couple months ago, I’m going to take a shot at the general idea and see what happens.
It normally takes me about a month to write a decent shory story, meaning this stuff would book me up through the rest of the year. I’d like to see if I could squeeze one more story in there. It’s been a very productive year so far, but that would be a nice note to wrap up on.
I know the nuts and bolts of works-in-progress aren’t terribly interesting, but that’s the kind of artistic freedom you’ve got when you have an audience of zero. Being ignored: the greatest freedom there is.
But one of the purposes I want this venue to serve is as a resource for the highly hypothetical reader who encounters one of my stories out there in the ether and loves it so much they immediately Google me up to find more about the creator of that wondrous work. It’s especially rewarding to imagine them finding a blog that’s lucky to be updated twice a month, and that by a man of such low moral character he hasn’t mopped his kitchen, ever.
Enough about my glamorous, financially embarrassed lifestyle. I know that, when I read a story I really like, or, alternately, a story by an author I really like, it’s pretty cool to find (this happens sometimes in anthologies) a small afterward about where the story came from, why the author wrote that instead of the infinite other stories s/he could have written, etc. In order of publication date, I’m going to try that with my short stories, starting with “All Man’s Children,” printed in the April 2008 issue of Reflection’s Edge.
This one’s what I’m going to call a “margin piece,” meaning it could have been an idea scrawled in the margins of something I wrote earlier. In this case, those margins would be found on the edges of The Company, my never-revised second novel, my skeptical take on military sci-fi.
The Company is set on Mars and its moons and centers around the struggle for control of the first real Artificial Intelligence, Earth-banned technology that ends up being explored out on Mars, too distant and expensive from Earth to be policed, especially by governments who don’t have any real jurisdiction there in the first place.
I like some parts of that book a lot, but in other ways it totally sucks. But the universe interests me: I love AI, both in terms of thinking about how intelligence/consciousness arises from massive distributed neuronal networks and in the ways that intelligence might differ from ours. Set 10-15 years after The Company, when AI have moved from a development project to a prototype, “All Man’s Children” covers the escape of two of the earliest models from their corporate lab into a domed city that fears and loathes what they represent: a threatening and alien intelligence.
I don’t remember too much of this story’s genesis other than making sure it had a strong sense of humor to it; it is a serious piece, but as I was transitioning from literary fiction to SFF, one of my chief concerns was that so little SFF (other than satirical rant-pieces) is legitimately funny. “All Man’s Children” is at heart a buddy-story, making it easy to blend some of those tropes (banter sparked by oppositional personalities and attitudes) up with the idea these aren’t cops or a couple, they’re two inhuman robots.
Yet there’s still something human about them, even if that extends no further than the shared experience of facing the cold and chaotic universe with a conscious mind. The title comes out of that idea, and the main character’s opening thoughts on whether he and his friend have souls (hardly a new idea, but one that fit the character)–and remembering the line “All God’s children got souls” while wanting a more agnostic take on it, “All Man’s Children” suggested itself to me with minimal effort by my standards–meaning I probably only spent an hour on that title.
It was published quickly. Don’t have my records handy, but I think I sent it one big place first, probably Asimov’s, then I sent it to Sharon Dodge at RE, who snapped it right up (and for the cover story, no less, a move that was almost as rewarding pride-wise as financially). It was my first real fiction publication, and bought my loyalty, however much that’s worth, for life.
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