Yesterday I got some terribly exciting news: AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review accepted one of my stories.
Right, the same new magazine that pays professional rates. Getting published in prozines is, for people in my position, the ongoing quest: they pay a lot. Because they pay a lot, they get a lot of great stories. Because they get a lot of great stories, they get a lot of readers. And, once they’ve been around for a year, placing a story with them makes you eligible for the Science Fiction Writers of America. As an Associate member, yeah. But who doesn’t want to associate? Nobody, that’s who.
Oh, and it makes for a pretty great credit, too.
AE just started up a couple months ago, but they’ve already run some pretty great stories. I’m flattered to join them. They’re the level of market I’ve focused the last year trying to crack.
By strange coincidence, not two hours after I got the great news, I got the bad news too: Reflection’s Edge has shut down for the indeterminate future. Maybe forever. Apparently they posted notice last Halloween. I’ve been so busy dragging this house into the 21st century I only learned this now.
RE was the first place to publish me. In all, they published three of my stories. Editor Sharon Dodge always took an active editorial presence and I learned a lot working with her. For writers, they had an incredibly fast turnaround time (usually 0-3 days!) and, if you could snag the $50 bonus for their favorite story of the issue, paid respectably. For readers, they published just about everything under the sun–bigger genres like SF, fantasy, and horror right alongside erotica, westerns, whatever. There weren’t a lot of magazines like it.
For me, there are none. Because they published me first. They proved to me people would pay for my fiction. It’s hard to say where I’d be without them or where I’ll be five or ten years from now, but the reason I just made a pro sale is I kept writing and I kept submitting. I’m pretty certain I’d have kept writing whether or not I made that first sale to RE. But in terms of the confidence and experience it takes to keep sending your work out when all anyone ever says is “No,” that sale made a huge difference to me.
I had hoped, one day when I was famous, to send Sharon another story.
Leave a Reply