Recent News: Mid-October 2014

I've had two stories published in the past month:

• "Searching for a Dishonest Man" - This science fiction story was published at Every Day Fiction.
• "Too Smart" - Another science fiction story, this one published at Read Short Fiction.

I've also recently had two stories accepted for publication, both of which should be coming out in November. "Final Mission" will be appearing at T. Gene Davis's Speculative Blog and "Uplifting" will be in the November issue of Musa Publishing's short fiction magazine Penumbra. Both of these are also science fiction stories.

Finally, I have a fantasy short story in the forthcoming Alliteration Ink anthology "Not Our Kind: Tales of (Not) Belonging." That anthology is currently Kickstarting; I'll be writing more about the anthology and my story in a blog post before long.

Publication Updates: Two Stories Released & Two Editing Projects

I've been remiss in my blogging lately, so I'm going to hit you all with a bunch of updates over the next few days. Tonight I'm going to cover various short fiction releases and related news.

First off, I've had two stories come out recently. My horror story "Welcome to Blackrock" is in the current issue of Black Treacle, a Canadian online publication. This is also the first time I've mentioned this particular story sale on my blog. I was pleased with the turnaround time from submission to publication with this new site.

Next, I've got a crime story "Three Times a Killer" in the first Plan B anthology. If you have read my self-published story "Levels of Trust", you might want to check out this one since it features the same main character, much earlier in his criminal career.

Short Story Sale: "Live from Arcona" to Azure Keep Quarterly

Earlier today I received word that my fantasy short story "Live from Arcona" has been accepted for publication by a new publication, Azure Keep Quarterly. It's slated to be in their first issue, release date not yet specified.

Two Short Story Sales & Two Anthology Releases

I got a double shot of good news a couple of days ago with short story sales to both Nature ("An Alien Named Tim") and InterGalactic Medicine Show ("Small Creatures and Large"). I'm looking forward to the release of both of these stories later this year.

Also, this month, two anthologies in which I have stories have been released.

First was the Sidekicks! anthology, edited by Sarah Hans and featuring, among others, Alex Bledsoe. My fantasy con-artist story "Learning the Game" appears in this anthology. There's also a print edition of this book and if you'd like a copy signed by me, hit me up on my contact form and we'll get it worked out.

Second is The California Cantata anthology, released by Kazka Press. My fantasy story "Counting it Up" was accepted for this anthology before I came on as editor of the monthly flash fiction contests for Kazka. So this may well end up being my last story released by the press, and I'm glad it's available for purchase now alongside stories by other writers such as Beth Cato.

Short Story Sale: "Private Memories" to Daily Science Fiction

I received word a couple of days ago that my short story "Private Memories" has sold to Daily Science Fiction. I am very pleased by this sale; it will be my second story to run with Daily Science Fiction and it represents my first pro-rate sale for 2013. I don't know yet when it will run, but most likely sometime in the May-June timeframe. I'll post the link here, as always, when the story is available.

First Sale of 2013: "Three Times a Killer" to Plan B Magazine

I got word today that my short story "Three Times a Killer" has been accepted for publication by Plan B Magazine. Plan B is a new crime/mystery semi-pro ezine. As I've discussed before, there's a real dearth of good markets for mystery short fiction and I hope to see Plan B have a long and healthy lifetime. I'm very pleased to have had a story selected for publication by them.

This story relates to another story of mine. The protagonist of both this and "Levels of Trust" is Lawrence Thomas; the two stories are set at very different points of the man's life. "Three Times a Killer" is from when Lawrence was just barely an adult while "Levels of Trust" is set when he is a widower with a young child. I like the character and suspect I'll write a few more stories about him over time.

I've been a bit less-than-industrious about having stories circulating the past few months which has led to a slowdown in sales. I've been trying to be better about that this month and I'm quite happy that it paid off with the sale of "Three Times a Killer."

I'll be sure to let everyone know as soon as it's available to read.

Two Story Sales and More Goal Updates

I ended 2012 with two more short story sales. My story "Act of Penance" was accepted for the December 2012 Kazka Press Flash Fiction contest. I'm very pleased to have had one more story accepted there before I take over the editorial reins for the monthly contests. This story should go live today or in the very near future.

Also, "Back to School", my zombie teacher story, has been accepted for publication by Plasma Frequency. It will be in the fourth issue of that publication, due in early February.

Now to close out December's goals and declare goals for January.

For December...

Story Sale: "Learning the Game" to Sidekicks!

A real quick note during my holiday hiatus. I'm pleased to announce that my short story "Learning the Game" has been accepted for Sidekicks!, an anthology of sidekick-themed stories edited by Sarah Hans for publisher Alliteration Ink. This book will be coming out in print and eBook in early 2013. I'll post more details as they become available.

Story Sale: "The Barber and the Count" to Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Some very good news in my inbox today. Beneath Ceaseless Skies has accepted my short story "The Barber and the Count" for future publication.

This is good news for a whole host of reasons. First off, Beneath Ceaseless Skies! This is a very exciting market to be appearing in. Second of all, I really like this story. (Okay, I know... I like almost all of my stories. But this would be among my favorites if someone forced me to rank my stories.) Third, there's a little backstory to this story. My wife occasionally cuts my hair and one night this summer she was doing just that. As I was sitting there, relaxing, the idea for this story came to me. As soon as the haircut was complete I hurried to the computer and wrote up its first draft. Fourth, this sale is my third qualifying sale for full Active membership into SFWA. Which means that not only will I be able to nominate for the Nebulas, but I'll be able to vote on them as well.

I feel very fortunate to have had such a phenomenal year with writing. I've had about 25 short story sales including the three SFWA-qualifying sales and several others at professional rates. I'm getting to do something I love and having some measure of success at it. What could be better?

Finally, thanks to Brenda Stokes Barron and Alex Shvartsman for critiquing "The Barber and the Count" and helping me make it better!

Story Sale: "In the Paint" to Arcane II

My flash horror story "In the Paint" has been accepted by the Arcane II anthology. I'm always fond of being able to tell a little interesting "story-behind-the-story" and this is one of mine which was inspired, in a way, by one of my children.

Our living room, before it was recently repainted, had a pattern of markings on one wall which looked like a scary face to one of our sons. His repeated insistence that it was a monster led me to dream up this story.

Arcane II will have both an electronic edition and a print edition. I'm pleased that my little collection of physical books and magazines with my stories in them will have a new addition early next year.

Two Recent Sales: Deep Cuts and Kwik Krimes

With contracts signed and such, I have two new sales to report, both to anthologies.

My horror story "Awaiting the Captain's Ghost" will be appearing in the Deep Cuts anthology. I'm excited about this for any number of reasons. First off, I really like how this story turned out and I'm glad others will have the chance to read it. Secondly, this is a print (and ebook) anthology, so I'll be able to add to my little shelf of print publications. Third, without getting into anything that might be vaguely spoilerish, this story is part of a thematically-linked set of stories I've been working on in the past year. It's the first of those to have sold. Finally, it's a pro-rate sale, which is always really cool.

The other sale is a reprint sale. "Present Company", which ran earlier this year at Every Day Fiction, will be appearing in an anthology of flash fiction mysteries. The collection, titled Kwik Krimes, is being edited by noted mystery editor Otto Penzler. Again, this was exciting for me for a whole bunch of reasons. I've read many a Penzler-edited or published book and having him choose one of my stories for selection in this anthology was a major thrill. I've also always been a real fan of collections of short-short/flash stories like Microcosmic Tales and 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories (to name two which are sitting right here on my bookshelf). Appearing in a similar volume will be really neat. I say "similar volume", but I believe this will be eBook only. Still, having the chance to be part of this anthology really made me happy.

October hasn't been the most productive month for me in terms of word-count, but it's been a good month overall between what I have gotten done writing-wise, these two sales, and the great reaction I received to the stories of mine which were published early in the month. If every writing month was as good as this one, I would have no complaints at all.

Three Short Story Sales: Space & Time + Kazka Press California Cantata anthology + Interstellar Fiction

The blog hiatus doesn't preclude me from stopping by for a quick announcement...

I received word late last night of not one but two short story sales. Venerable semi-pro zine Space & Time has accepted my science fiction short story "State of the Union" and Kazka Press has accepted my fantasy short "Counting It Up" for their California Cantata anthology.

(edited to add: Make that three short story sales! Interstellar Fiction will be running my science fiction baseball story "Out With the Crowd" in their October issue. Perfect timing, with the World Series coming up!)

No specific publication date yet for the Space & Time story. The California Cantata anthology is projected to come out sometime around the first of the year. Links will be provided when they are available.

Speaking of Kazka Press... This would be a good time to remind everyone that I'm guest-editing their flash fiction contest this month. Submissions are open now through the 20th of September on the theme of "Love Beyond Death." When asked to describe what I was looking for, I said:

"The best thing I can say is: surprise me! There are some obvious directions this theme could take: ghosts, other paranormal beasties, personality-on-a-microchip/uploaded-brain type stories, etc. I’m not saying I won’t take those if they’re great, because we want to provide great stories for the contest’s readers. But if I’ve got the choice between a great ghost story and a great story that took the theme in a direction I couldn’t have anticipated and that made me say ‘Wow!’ I know which one I’ll pick every time."

Short Story Sale: "Other Kinds" to Nine: A Journal of Imaginative Fiction

I received word earlier today that my dark fantasy/crime short story "Other Kinds" has been accepted for publication in the upcoming issue #3 of Nine: A Journal of Imaginative Fiction. I had sent the story in about a month ago and received a quick reply back indicating that they were intrigued by the story but wanted some revisions. I turned the revisions around in short order and then sat in to wait while the staff went through the process of building the Table of Contents for this issue. I was very pleased to get the news today that my story was accepted. The first two issues have both had some good stories in them and I'm looking forward to reading the stories which I'll be published alongside.

Short Story Sale: "Present Company" to Every Day Fiction

I just received word that my mystery flash fiction "Present Company" will be published by Every Day Fiction. This will be my first story for EDF and I'm very much looking forward to this story being published there.

"Present Company" arose from a stray comment a coworker made during a lunch conversation one day. It began as a slightly-longer story, about 1600 words. Over time I trimmed a bit here and a bit there and the last set of cuts made it just short enough for EDF.

I'll update everyone when it's live and ready to read on their site.

Short Story Sales to IGMS, Book of Pulp Heroes, Kzine

I mentioned a few days ago being on a kind of amazing run of short fiction acceptances. That's continued since then. Yesterday and today, I received a total of three more story acceptances. I'm thrilled beyond belief -- particularly the "beyond belief" part!

The three sales are:

• "The Flower of Memory" to Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show - This sale was especially exciting since IGMS is a particularly tough market to crack. It's a SFWA-qualifying market but since this is a very short story (about 650 words) I don't expect this to be my third sale to qualify for Active membership in SFWA.
• "No Way But the Hard Way" to The Alchemy Book of Pulp Heroes - This is one of the earliest stories I wrote when I returned to writing last summer and I'm very pleased that it will be appearing in print (literally) in this publication. One of the highlights of my year is a convention named Pulpfest so the aesthetic they're going for in this publication is one that appeals to me. And the "appearing in print" really appeals to me. There's a good chance this will be the first of my recent stories to actually show up on paper in my hands, depending on publication timelines.
• "Taking Chances" to Kzine. - I've finally sold a mystery story! This is one I wrote in 2007, the first time I tried to develop a daily writing chain. I went through and revised it last year and sent it out several places. I'm glad that it's found a home and tickled to say that I've sold a mystery now, as well as my speculative fiction sales.

I'll be sure to post information when these stories become available in their respective publications.

Short Story Sale: "ReFormed" to Buzzy Mag

My science fiction short story "ReFormed" has sold to Buzzy Mag. This is the longest story I've sold to date, coming in at about 4200 words. It also represents my fourth pro-rate sale. For the moment, it won't add to my list of SFWA-qualifying sales since markets have to publish regularly for a year before they can be added to the SFWA list. From what I've seen of this market, I'd say they have a better than average chance of making it to that point, but only time will tell.

Either way, I'm very pleased to have this story coming to "print" and I'm looking forward to when it's available for others to read.

I have to give lots of thanks to Brenda Stokes Barron for her input on this story as I took it through several iterations. She urged me to keep going back and deepening the emotional aspects of the story. It ended up a much better story for the effort.

Short Story Sale: "Scraps" to Daily Science Fiction

I received word earlier today that Daily Science Fiction has accepted my story "Scraps" for publication. I'm very excited about this for a number of reasons.

One is that I feel like "Scraps" is among the best of my stories so far and I'm thrilled that it will be seeing publication. This is a story which literally kept me up at night. I wrote about half of it late one evening and was so tired that I thought I'd have to finish it in the morning. But after 45 minutes or so of tossing and turning (and occasionally sending myself an email from my phone so I wouldn't forget some detail I wanted to add to the story "in the morning") I finally conceded to the story's pull. I got back out of bed and wrote the rest of it. The muse satisfied, I then slept well (if for a briefer time than I might have liked).

Also, the venue is one that I'm really excited to be published by. DSF is among the first places I started submitting stories to when I returned to writing last year and it's nice to "crack" the market in that sense. Plus, the story will get broad exposure when it's released. (If you're not familiar with DSF, they are a SFWA-qualifying professional short fiction market which publishes a story every day Monday through Friday. The stories go out by email and then are posted on their website a week later.)

Finally, there is the previously-mentioned SFWA-qualifying aspect. This makes two of the three sales I will need to be able to become an Active member of SFWA. Since that's something I literally first contemplated wanting to achieve over 20 years ago, reaching that point will be quite a life achievement.

The acceptance was easily one of the most exciting writing-related emails I've received. I look forward to sharing the story with you when it's released. (No dates available yet, but I expect Fall 2012 based on what I understand their usual lead times to be.)

Lastly, I want to thank all of the people who helped critique this story: Leah Cypess, Alex Shvartsman, Brenda Stokes Barron, Robert Lowell Russell, Kelly Stiles, Greg Wachausen, and Ronald Ferguson. Each of your input was valued.

Monday May 21st #writemotivation Check-In

Like I said in my Sunday Links post, the month has flown by for me. There's been a ton of great writing news, which is awesome, though I feel like I've been running short of time to do a lot of new writing work in the last several days. I did do critiques on about 20,000 words of fiction not too long ago and both of the people that I sent notes back to seemed to find them useful. So, that's been good. But since finishing a new story last Monday I've only made a small amount of progress on one of my ongoing fiction projects. I've still been writing every day, one way or the other, but I'm beginning to get a slightly "itchy" feeling about not having made much headway on fiction for almost a week.

And, on the whole, I feel like that's a good thing. It certainly could be a bad thing if I was letting it turn into negative self-talk or otherwise letting it get me down. But I think of it the same way that I hear some people talk about feeling antsy if they haven't exercised recently. It means that my brain is expecting me to be doing this thing and is reminding me that I really should spend some time on it soon! And since this "thing" is something that I really, really want to continue to make progress on, I'm not going to complain about that.

I'm going to do one thing, though, to give myself a bit of an extra nudge. I've already well surpassed my monthly fiction writing goal (as I'll discuss further below) but I want to take the last 1/3rd of May and aim to add an additional 1/3rd to my goal word count. So another 2500 words of fiction for May for me. There's no reason this should be hard, but it will be another little carrot out there to keep striving towards.

With this being Monday, it's time to update my goal status for the month for #writemotivation. Next Monday (or thereabouts) I'll have a final wrap-up for the month and also define my June goals.

1) Except for a Memorial Day Weekend blogging hiatus, keep all my writing routines -- Daily Writing Chain (aka Seinfeld Chain), blogging schedule, etc. - This has been going just fine. There've been some days recently when I've done close to the minimum 500 words for my Daily Writing Chain, but that's why I keep the number at that (relatively) easy target. The days I need to be able to have lots of time for other things, I do.

2) Write and submit one or more short stories for the first time. - I've completed two new stories this month, though neither has been submitted yet. There's a slim chance, I suppose, that I'll miss the "submit" portion of this goal as both the two I've completed are off with beta readers. If that happens, it happens, though I'll certainly keep the goal in mind as I plan the rest of my work for the month.

3) Make revisions to my non-fiction project based on feedback and my own editing of it. - I received feedback on this but haven't started on revisions yet.

4) Write 7,500 words of new fiction. - Even with several days recently with little or no fiction writing I'm at 8,563 for the month. If I meet my "bonus" goal above of another 2,500 words I'll be over 11,000 for the month.

5) On 5/31, have two non-time-sensitive blog posts written and ready for future use on a day when I'm not able to post something "new." - This one should be fine, unless I have to use one of my two reserved items for 5/31 itself.

6) Launch at least one new eBook - Earlier this week, I thought it was a bit less likely that I'd do one this month. However, there's a short story that's a reasonable length for a standalone $0.99 short which might be a good candidate for ePublication. It's a mystery/crime story which, on the one hand, means that it doesn't "fit" with my first ePub in terms of being a natural followup in the same genre. On the other hand, that means there's a dearth of good short fiction markets for it. I like this story quite a bit but couldn't find anywhere that I'd want to send it. I'm going to sleep on it for a day or two more, but I might go ahead and... if you'll pardon the saying... pull the trigger on making this one my May eBook.

Finally, an additional piece of news. As you may have seen, I've had an absolutely phenomenal run of sales recently to various publications. This news isn't a "sale" per se since no money is involved, but the one and only micro-fiction (Twitter-length story) in my inventory has been accepted by trapeze magazine and will be run on their site in the near future. I generally don't submit to non-paying venues but there are only a handful of paying venues for micro-fiction. Trapeze is run by Stephen Ramey, and I'm glad that he wanted to publish it on the site. As always, I'll let everyone know when it's available to read.

#writemotivation folks and others, have a fantastic week and be sure to be safe if you're traveling over Memorial Day weekend!

Short Story Sale: "Pherusa Among the Stars" to Fantastic Frontiers Magazine

I've received word that my flash fiction "Pherusa Among the Stars" has been accepted by Fantastic Frontiers Magazine. It will most likely appear in their August issue, which should be the second for this new publication.

One interesting thing about this is that they request some form of multimedia "bonus" relating to the story/author. (This could be as simple as -- and I'm paraphrasing slightly here -- a photo of me in my "natural habitat." So it seems like it's one of those things that's as much, or as little, work as you want it to be.) My plan is to record a short (1-2 minute) video of myself talking about the origin of the story. I think that will be a fun thing to have out there for readers to watch.

Short Story Sale: "Sequence" to Grand Science Fiction

Grand Science Fiction, a new pro-paying venue for flash fiction stories (of either exactly 100 or 1000 words, in particular), has accepted my 1000-word story "Sequence" for publication. This is my second pro-rate sale though as a new market, this sale won't count for SFWA credentialing until such time as the market met the criteria to be considered a qualifying market by SFWA. And I believe that requires at least a year of consistent publication, so the earliest that would happen would be mid-2013.

May has been a somewhat bogglingly-good month for acceptances for me so far. I'm not complaining in the slightest, but I know better than to consider this some sort of "new normal."