Feedback on Seek Alternative Route

Had a couple of good early reviews of Seek Alternative Route on YouWriteOn. Here's an exercpt from one of them, which I just had to relay :

I only read this five minutes ago and all ready it is one of my favourites. Bare bones essentials, only three characters. This is one story I wish was a novel. I wanted it to go on.

I really don’t think there is anything to add. The characters go through a change of life and deep inside you know they have the strength to cope with what is coming their way. This is not only one of the best short stories on YWO, it is also one of the most heart warming.

Characters: Slaughtered Pig is one of the best characters on the site. And Buckley, as he deflates and the mask slips, shows there is more to him than his merc.
Plot: Fabulous. Nothing fancy, it doesn’t need it. 5.
Pace and Structure: I didn’t want the story to end. 5.
Use of Language: Just the name Slaughtered Pig is worth 5 stars. 5.
Narrative Voice: Really good. 5.
Dialogue: 5 star dialogue.
Settings: Best traffic jam on YWO. 5.
Themes and Ideas: 5.

So, all in all, pretty good!

YouWriteOn to publish Hedge Witch ...

... OK, along with 4,999 other books. They emailed me a couple of days ago saying they planned to publish 5,000 books from YouWriteOn before Christmas. The terms seem pretty good :

Books will be available to order through the YouWriteOn website, and members will be able to get in touch with readers and reviewers who have enjoyed their book excerpts on site. YouWriteOn authors will receive 60% royalties for each copy sold to the public, compared to 12 to15% royalties that authors usually receive through mainstream publishing. Your book will be of the same quality as a bookstore paperback. You retain all rights to your book at all times. Open to UK and US residents only.

So, Hedge Witch has been signed up! Which is fantastic and will solve all your Christmas present problems at a stroke. Possibly. The only thing is, this has prompted me to go back through the book and edit the text one more time. Always worth doing, I guess, but suddenly I have a deadline as manuscripts must be sent to YouWriteOn prior to October 31st. So now that's become a top priority ...

Seek Alternative Route Completed

The "literary" short story I started last week, Seek Alternative Route, is now complete and edited and ready to see the light of day. I've enjoyed writing it very much : it was one of those stories that just seemed to flow onto the page, without much in the way of effort. So we'll see how it does. I've uploaded it to YouWriteOn for some feedback. It's a bit Raymond Carver so may not be to everyone's taste! Next it's back to the SF.

Also sent Hedge Witch off to another agent (Aaron, Goldberg & Rothschild). One of these fine days, an agent will pick it up ...

A Warlock's Perspective

Another pleasing review of Hedge Witch on YouWriteOn today, from someone who doesn't normally read fantasy :

Thank you - I enjoyed reading this extract. Normally these 'fantasy' stories don't usually interest me nor give me the sense of 'reality' that encourages me to read on - Hedge Witch is very different.

Your ability to paint a picture works for me; your vocabulary is wide and there were few grating phrases. I enjoyed your flow of words and events and the descriptions of a different world. Repetition was infrequent and the few 'mediaeval' words grated initially but then either you stopped using them or I stopped noticing them. Either way it not overdone and I thought it lent itself to creating that atmosphere.

Which is good to see. Too often on sites like YouWriteOn people who don't like a certain genre (or lack of genre) can't assess a piece on its own merits.

Serendipity

Flotsam has been published by Serendipity today - a mere two weeks since I sent it off to them. Ah, if only it was always like that!

The story can be read here. Enjoy.

Seek Alternative Route

A, T, C and G is progressing well but I've also gone off at a complete tangent and started writing another new short story - this one tentatively entitled Seek Alternative Route.

Strange the way the mind works. Writing (for me anyway) starts out with some rush of ideas, scraps of conversation, a central conceit, whatever it may be, which have to be madly jotted down before they are lost. This is the "free" bit - free in that it comes without effort and free in that I don't make any effort to censor, edit or organize what I write (or, more often, type). Then comes the actual work of shaping all the notes into a working story. There has to be a beginning, a middle and an end. There have to be characters that ring true. And so on.

This was the stage I was at with A, T, C and G and I'd hit a few snags over the order in which certain events should appear in the narrative. There comes a point sometimes where you start to feel you are "forcing" a story onto the page when you still haven't got it quite right in your mind. At such times, it's often best to set it aside and work on something else. And so I found myself writing this new story without really even thinking about it. It just started out as a sort of doodle that has grown into a more complete picture. And the interesting thing is that it's the complete opposite of the story I was supposed to be working on. Seek Alternative Route is mainstream, "realist" fiction, largely about character and with no aliens or dragons anywhere in sight. And not a whole lot happens. Which is cool.

So, I'll work on both at the same time and if I get stuck on one I'll just work on the other ...

The Wind Singing in the Wires

Today I sent off a short story of this name to Ideomancer magazine. The story is slipstream (I suppose) in that it is written like a piece of realist fiction but has a distinct speculative/metaphorical edge to it. You could probably call it magic realism too if you wanted.

I've sent this magazine four stories in the past (Museum Beetles, Perfect Circles, Flotsam and Body of Work), all of which they rejected (but all of which were subsequently published elsewhere.) One thing that impressed me with each rejection was the detail of their response. They don't just send back a standard reply : they explain what they did and didn't like about a piece. On one they even suggested books related to my story that I might be interested in reading. Which is unusual and deeply impressive : it must take some considerable effort on their part.

A New Story

I started work on a new short story today. Actually, it's one that's been rattling around in my brain for, ooh, years and I already have various scraps of ideas, conversations and plot points jotted down. Now I "just" need to pull it all together and make something coherent from it. It's SF and it's called A, T, C and G. And it's going to be completely fab.

I also had another comment on Hedge Witch over at YouWriteOn. I was very pleased with it. It says for example :

This was a very polished piece of work, with well-developed characters and lovely descriptions (e.g. "The torches ... hissed and crackled, giving off a faint smell of honey", and later, "a transparent moon ... little more than tatters of lace). It also had a great beginning, which captured the magical atmosphere immediately, continued at a good pace, and then with the unexpected arrival of Merdoc and Fer, and with Hellen's words, "There is something very wrong here," set up the tension right on cue.

I suppose I have mixed feelings about YouWriteOn. Some of the reviews are considered, constructive and very helpful. Others have clearly been dashed off without much effort, in order to earn the reading credit. I've had reviews where the reader has clearly skimmed the text and then complained that they couldn't understand what was going on. Hedge Witch is hardly Finnegans Wake ferchristsake! I've had reviews that have concentrated on making bogus grammatical "corrections" rather than talking about, you know, characters and plot and all that. And so on.

The problem is that your rating and thus chart position are at the mercy of everyone. I suppose that's fair enough : not every reader will be interested in every book out in the real world. The ability to delete one review out of every eight is some help. Still, getting a stupid review is galling.

Hedge Witch has been up to #11 in the YouWriteOn chart, which is great - but obviously I'd like to get it higher. Top ten would be ideal.

Two Submissions

I sent Hedge Witch off to another agent today. As is well known, the chances of it being accepted are slim - it is almost as impossible to get an agent these days as it is to get a publisher. Stories of successful authors who were rejected umpteen times are legion. Of course, there are many more unsuccessful authors who have also been rejected umpteen times - the quality of the writing is obviously important. But it seems that a significant part of being an author is having the sheer bloody-mindedness to continue. And I'm convinced that luck plays a part too - happening to catch the right reader on the right day, for example. The odd thing is that, although so few books appear to get picked up, you only have to go into a bookshop to see just how many books are being published. Thousands and thousands of them. And someone has had to write each one of them ...

I also sent off a short story called Sunken Bells to The Pedestal Magazine. I'm not completely convinced it's a good fit, but we'll see. Sunken Bells is pretty much straightforward realist, "literary" fiction - and the sad fact is that there are vanishingly few markets for short, realist fiction, especially here in the UK. Which is bizarre, really, given the number of realist novels that are bought each year. And the fact that the short story seems ideally suited in many ways to modern life. You can read one during a daily commute, for example. There seems to be some disconnect between the potential number of short stories that could be read and the number that actually are. Perhaps it's just the convenience of the novel form. Perhaps once we all have eBook readers, downloading short stories will become more common. I don't know. But I can't help thinking someone somewhere could do great things with short stories that isn't currently being done.

Two Triumphs

Had an email from Wendy S. Delmater, Managing Editor of Abyss & Apex, asking to purchase the reprint rights for Museum Beetles (a story they have previously published) for their Best of Abyss & Apex Volume 1, to be published in November of this year. The volume is to be launched at the World Fantasy Convention, Calgary, Alberta. This is great news and I'm more than happy for them to reprint the story. They already have the cover art and it's looking good, as you can see.

I also had a reply from Serendipity, just four days after I submitted to them, accepting my magic-realist short story, Flotsam, for their next issue. Can't criticise their response time - or their taste in literature!

So, good news all round today.

Email from Serendipity

Serendipity magazine emailed to acknowledge the receipt of my submission. This, I think, indicates a market that is at least well-organized and polite. It's good to see. This is a fairly common practice but is by no means universal. It's also very easy to do, at least with emailed submissions - it's probably just an automated response. But it makes a big difference.

All too often you send off a submission to a magazine and aren't sure that they ever received it in the first place when you don't hear anything back after several months. Quite often, it seemes, the submission "never reached them" and you have to start again. I'm sure running a magazine is a hard, thankless task, but treating writers with such disdain like this is surely unacceptable.

Perhaps my favourite such experience was with a magazine called "Roadworks : Tales from the Hard Road". In April 1999 I submitted a short story called Small Differences of Detail to them and in June of that year they emailed back to say they had accepted it and would tell me when it was going to appear. All well and good. But the story didn't appear and didn't appear. Occasionally I sent off a polite enquiry but heard little or nothing back. The story would be appearing "soon" etc. Then, in October 2003, over four years later, the magazine folded just as, they said, my story was really, finally about to appear. They had held on to it for four years and then did this. Of course, it's sad when a magazine folds and I'm sure there were lots of good reason. Still, this is not acceptable behaviour and is certainly no way to treat authors. If they were still active I certainly would not submit to them again.

Poetry

Submitted five poems written over the past year or so to iota magazine. I've never managed to have anything published by this market, despite several attempts, although I have come close, with poems on their shortlist for particular editions. So fingers crossed for this time ...

The five poems in question are :

Walking the Himalaya
'
Red Kite
Ephemeroptera
Extinction Events

Poetry isn't something I write a great deal of - but every now and then one arrives that just has to be written down. This is how it was for each of these five.

Hedge Witch

Hedge Witch will feature a lot in this blog for a bit. It's my first novel, which I'm currently in the process of trying to find a publisher and/or an agent for. Aren't we all?


Here's the blurb I'm currently using for the book, which gives an idea of what it is about:

For a thousand years the lands of Andar and Angere have been kept apart by the river An. But the peace is now coming to an end as the An starts to freeze over. All of Andar is threatened by the undead horrors of Angere.

A witch of Andar, Hellen Meggenwar, sets in motion her long plans. A book of necromancy holds the key to the power of Angere, half of which she has obtained and hidden in our own world. It is time for the book to be retrieved and either used or, if necessary, destroyed. But the creatures of Angere are already in our world, searching desperately for the book.

Meanwhile, in Manchester, a schoolgirl called Cait goes to visit her gran, unaware of the role that she is about to play in the unfolding events ...

I suppose if you had to categorize the book - and it seems you do have to categorize it - it would be called a fantasy novel. It has magic in it, and other worlds, and even the odd dragon (one very odd dragon in fact). On the other hand, it could also be called SF, as it certainly has SF elements. But it also has strong elements of realist fiction, and even social/political analysis. When one of the central characters, Cait, goes to see her gran, who works at Manchester Central Library, she finds her sorting out the books situated "somewhere between Social Realism and Fantasy". I suppose that's about what I'm aiming at with Hedge Witch too. Mainly, I don't worry about what pigeon-holes it is put into. I've merely tried to make it a good read.

Personally, I take great delight in trying to subvert genre boundaries. The notion that a book can't be "literary" if it isn't set in the mundane world is less widely-held these days, but still pretty common. As if every work of ficition ever written isn't a fantasy. When I had to categorize the book on YouWriteOn for example, I had to decide whether it was "Science Fiction", "Fantasy" or "Literary Fiction", as if these things were mutually exclusive! Pah. I chose all three.

Hedge Witch is 100, 000 words long and conceived as the first part of a trilogy. The second and third parts are tentatively titled Fetch Light and Lich King. But these two volumes are still at the planning stage. Hedge Witch, on the other hand, is finished, polished, redrafted, polished again, edited, polished yet again and is now definitely all ready to make its way in the world. Although I am currently working on yet another draft as a result of feedback I've had from various places, including You Write On and Authonomy. A work of art is never completed; it is merely left ...

Flotsam

Today I've been mainly decanting all the notes, story ideas, scraps of conversation and other flotsam I've had over the past few weeks onto computer. I carry a notebook around for making these stray jottings, as many writers do, but then I have to transpose them onto computer to use them.

I'm not one of those writers who uses paper much. I don't begin to understand how you can write anything of any length without using a word processor. Obviously many great books have been written without the help of a computer but using paper for a large work just seems so clumsy. Some writers say they find the words flow more freely with a pencil than with a keyboard but, for me, the keyboard feels far more comfortable. Perhaps it's my twenty-plus years at the code face, working as a software developer. Anyway, the task of decanting notes onto the screen is just something that has to be done. And it is useful : I always edit and revise as I go.

I also submitted a previously-completed short story called Flotsam to a magazine called Serendipity. This short story is fairly impressionistic and perhaps rather experimental, but it has some imagery in it I do like. It's the sort of thing that reads like it was made up whilst half-awake in the middle of the night - which indeed it was. Serendipity are a magic realism magazine so it should be a good fit. We shall see ...