“Every Song Is a Love Song” at OG’s Speculative Fiction.

I was pretty happy to sell to this place back during my spring hot streak. This issue’s just me and some dude who’s won the Writers of the Future contest; nice company. I like the publication and its editor, Seth Crossman–the first piece I tried him with, he gave me some smart, useful feedback that ended up significantly improving a hole in that story’s narrative. It still hasn’t sold, but if it does, I can basically just chalk that up to his credit.

The rusty lining to this silver cloud is I’ve got just one piece upcoming now (slated for January, hopefully–it’s a small market and it looks like it may be in a bit of trouble). I’m getting antsy to make some more sales. I’m keeping the work in circulation, so I expect I’ll be able to move a few of these to my “SOLD!!!” file sooner or later; in the meantime, it’s a bit tiresome.

Haven’t done a progress post in a while, so here goes.

Finished a new story a couple weeks ago, “Even the Guppies.” It’s not a show-stopping piece of breathless speculation, but it does what I was trying to do with it, and I think it’ll find a home somewhere. It’s also, as far as I can remember, the first story I’ve written first-person with a female protagonist; was trying to stretch myself a little. My first priority was not going overboard with the XX perspective, and I know I pulled that off if nothing else.

Revised two stories, changing one from horror to sci-fi (that may deserve its own post) and just polishing something else some editors were split on.

While doing that, I stumbled on something I’d mothballed as not worthy of sending around, but which read pretty well nearly a year later. Made a couple minor changes and returned it to circulation.

Hauled in a few rejections: about 2/3 “No, but this is good and you should send us more later,” about 1/3 form.

I spent the early part of this week catching up with submissions. Checking my list, there are a couple stories I’ve had hanging for three months now, a couple in the 3-6 weeks stage, and five that were waiting to be sent out, again or for the first time. Did some market research and I’ve now got all nine unpublished stories on desks or hard drives somewhere.

My plan for the remainder of the year is to finish five more stories, bringing my total to 20, while threshing out the ground work for a novel. If I make enough progress on that, I’ll get started as soon as I feel able; otherwise, I’ll start it on the not-at-all cliched date of January 2. (January 1 is reserved for hangover recovery.)

I’d really like to have at least one pro publication before that novel’s completed and submitted, but that’s not entirely within my control, and at that point I’ll have spent the majority of the last two years of my fiction writing time on short stories, which feels like enough for the time being. Last time I sent a novel out, I had zero fiction writing credits. This time, I’ll have a minimum of six. We’ll see if the combination of credits and fresh experience makes a difference once I resume the agent search.

Jim Baen’s Universe, one of the top markets of the SFF genre, is closing. Unfortunate for two reasons: it was a big, very well-paying market, and it was a big important experiment in actually charging money for its web-based content.

Given how many online magazines put all their stories out there for free, I’m not sure how successful a subscription-based model can ever be. I don’t mean I don’t think they’ll work: I simply mean I have no idea whether they can compete and thrive. The death of one big subscription-based magazine doesn’t mean anything, really. It was just one place, and it seems to have been founded on a top-down model of profitability: start off with a known brand, invest a lot up front, pay big money for big names, then use all that to try to drum up enough readership to match or exceed costs before the initial capital dries up.

It could be that model for a short fiction market just doesn’t shake out well in the online environment, or it could be that it just didn’t work well in this specific case. I hope someone else gives it a shot soon so we can find out.

The other main subscription startup model, like M-Brane SF, is to start off with very little capital and very little expenses–it is a paying market (which when I’m looking for places to submit to is the difference between considering it and ruling it out immediately), but it’s run off Blogger (and still looks better than most online SFF mags), is distributed by PDF, and can’t have much of the way in overhead costs other than what it pays its authors.

The thinking here’s both identical to and opposite of the JBU plan: start off small, then once you stop running in the red, that’s when you can start plugging real money back into attracting talent, getting your name out there, and proving to a wide audience you’ve got something worth plunking down a couple bucks for, something it’s difficult or impossible to find for free.

Because there is simply no way to eliminate the free content model. I’ve seen some talk about getting other mags to change their way of thinking, for everyone to band together and charge readers for what they’re putting out there, but given the internet environment–all but total anarchy, huge populations of people whose self-confidence outstrips their ability, the unending energy of people to provide their thoughts and content not in order to make a living off it but just because they need to be heard–free content is never going away.

In an awful lot of ways, the ease of setting up a website is actually a bad thing. Anyone who wants to start up a webzine can do so with minimal investment, which means hobbyists, incompetents, and lunatics are all out there on the same playing field with the pros and the people who take it seriously.

We’ve got way too many writers, too, way too many kinda-good authors to fit in the limited space of the big magazines; once they get rejected there, they shoot their stories off to the next level down, or the one below that, or to some dork’s flashing Geocities unicorn zine. A lot of fine fiction ends up placed with markets that don’t really deserve it–but if a bad market ends up running a lot of good fiction, is it really a bad market after all?

There’s a huge supply of writers who expect little or nothing for their labor. On the other side, the entry fee to the publishing game is basically zero. How do you expect to stop editors from giving it away for free? Unionize the Internets? Beat up everyone who posts a story without a price tag on it?

Pouring energy into reversing established web culture is useless when every part of the environment opposes those efforts by its very nature. Free fiction will always be out there. Shit-tons of it. Some of that shit will even be pretty good.

I think JBU realized that. I think that’s why they paid for real talent, stuff you can’t find anywhere else online. Hell if I know why they went under, whether it was bad luck or bad decisions or if paid subscription models simply can’t support a pro market in this medium. But they were trying to work with the environment rather than against it. That’s the one thing anyone hoping to charge for web-based content needs to keep in mind.

Got plans to revise two stories and finish another over the weekend. Revising short stories is something I’ve cut back on lately; I still give them a brush-up, but in general I find they’re compact enough to where I don’t need to go back and spend a lot of time refining characters and sharpening incomplete themes and all that mess that shows up in the course of a 300-page novel. I don’t think there’s a direct cause and effect relationship here, but since I’ve stopped the heavy revision of short stories, I’ve started selling a lot more.

The first exception is the first SFF short story I wrote two years ago. The problem is one of the main SFF elements was based around something out of a dream I’d had, and while this dream had an unusually strong narrative–normally any involvement of a dream in storytelling should be met with violence–there’s always been an undeniable dream logic to part of the resulting short story that I’ve never been satisfied with.

So it’s earned a few rejections, the most recent of which came yesterday. I gave no more thought to it than “Damn, I think there’s some really good stuff in this story, why doesn’t someone pick it up,” and as I was wandering around a parking lot, the solution came to me fully-formed. It involves aliens, but I don’t think that has anything to do with the fact it was 103 degrees out at the time.

The second exception is for a market that asks, oddly, to see just the first part of your submissions, and then if they like that they’ll ask to see the complete thing. I got a “Let’s see the rest” from them, which is cool, but now I of course feel compelled to fix the hell out of the part they haven’t seen yet. If I’d sent the whole story somewhere and they’d simply rejected it, I’d have no such instinct whatsoever.

It’s an unusual set of work for me, but these days I try to switch up my process all the time just to learn new things and build some new muscles. I imagine it will meet with as much success as when I started lifting weights, and strained my back for six weeks by sneezing.

Finished “The Mayor of Mars” a few days ago. I swear two-thirds of the stories I write are between 6500-7000 words. Working to mix it up a little.

In my mind it’s a decent story, but it may be better than I think. Got it out the door already.

No other real news. Back to work.

At The Future Fire. It’s one of my favorites; I have a bad habit of overexplaining things, so in this one I tried to take it the opposite route. I’m pleased with the way that turned out.

The illustrations are pretty fucking cool, too. For me, they somehow make its publication feel more real.

Finished what turned out to be titled “The Blackout.” Most of the narrative to this piece is of the psychological variety–things happen, but there isn’t a strong block-by-block plot structure–so I really have no idea how it’s going to strike editors.

Took me three weeks to finish this one, which is better than I used to do but still 50% slower than the plan. Damn it. Once I jumped in to the actual composition it only took two weeks to pull off, but there was a blank week there while I was thinking about the story and not doing any real writing (the kind where words are produced), which slowed me up.

Reflection’s Edge is back up and running and they’ve restored their April ’08 issue, meaning both my stories there are available for reading. In many ways this is a useless announcement, as I am the only one who reads this and I already have both those stories on my hard drive, but sometimes the internet takes people strange places. If you’ve somehow stumbled here, go take a look.

M-Brane SF #5, home of “Steve Kendrick’s Disease,” released yesterday. I was looking forward to both this and “10%” in The Future Fire releasing on the same day, as scheduled, but then again having things in print is fucking awesome and nigh-on addictive, so if this sounds like a complaint, that’s because you’re terribly wrong.

Third story in print, but only my second market, so it’s kind of special. I wouldn’t be surprised if M-Brane is commanding a lot of attention in a year or three; Christopher Fletcher, its editor, is very personable and low-key, but he gives off a vibe like he can make this happen. I wish him luck and thanks. If he’ll have me, I wouldn’t be surprised if I show up there again.