Bits and Bobs

Just about completed the first draft of A, T, C & G - which, as expected, is around 10,000 words. So not really a short story. Hopefully this will reduce down nicely to around 7,500. My plan is to get it ready for submission by Christmas and then send it to a few choice SF magazines. The first one to try will be Interzone, a market I've submitted to four times with no success. Most recently I sent them Live from the Continuing Explosion about which they said :

Everyone liked it, but in the end we decided we should pass, sorry. Please don't feel too bad, it's a good story and was a near miss

Which cheered me up a little at the time. This story, incidentally, eventually found a happy home in Albedo 1.

I also Sent Seek Alternative Route off to Short FICTION. We shall see. Realist short stories though : apparently no-one reads them.

I also found a review of one of my stories that I hadn't harvested from the net before. The story in question is Good Vibrations, another SF story and one that I am very fond of. It was published in 1999 by Kimota, a magazine that is now sadly no more than a quantum echo drifting through deep space. The review said :

Good Vibrations by Simon Kewin is a wonderfully, almost surreal choice nibble which explores the pursuit of music through the universe and takes the music hunter to realms not thought possible. A great issue of Kimota I think. Very cool.

Good Vibrations is another story, like A, T, C & G as it happens, that mixes future SF and present-day pop music. Not sure why this is such an appealing theme, but it is one I seem to return to quite often. If you fancy reading Good Vibrations, it's in the archive section of my main web site.

Authonomy Domine?

Authonomy emailed me recently to extol the virtues of their latest update. This is a fairly minor update : you can now leave messages for people, you can adjust font sizes via a control on the page (which you could do anyway via the Browser's own controls) and that sort of thing.

So I spent a bit of time nosing around. The entire manuscript of Hedge Witch is up there and, as previously reported, it has had a few good comments. But I have never really "got" Authonomy in the past. I find myself confused as to what I am actually supposed to do. YouWriteOn has its mechanistic system of trading reviews, which works pretty well. With Authonomy, it's all very organic. Books rise to the top of the charts by some mysterious process of osmosis so far as I can see. There is no rating system. It's just, I don't know, word of mouth and recommendations. Which mirrors how books get sold in real life, maybe, but doesn't feel very satisfactory. Am I supposed to review other books at random in the hope that mine will get noticed? Should I be reciprocating with those people who have commented on my book? I don't know - and this new version doesn't seem any clearer to me. After a few minutes of clicking around I gave up. It still isn't clear quite what I'm supposed to do.

So, I guess I'll leave Hedge Witch up there. Who knows, something may come of it. But I don't see much to be gained in "participating" in Authonomy. It seems time-consuming and unproductive. A great way to waste those valuable writing hours ...

No news from Pulp.Net about Seek Alternative Route. I guess they didn't take it, although it's not completely clear as they have this approach of not replying for rejected manuscripts. Which means you always have this nagging worry that they did reply and that the email just didn't get through. Still, time to submit elsewhere.

Working on A, T, C & G ...

I've been hacking away at A, T, C and G almost exclusively of late. It's looking like it's going to hit around 10, 000 words on first draft so should boil down to a nice 8K or so when it's polished. I'm hoping to get it ready for submission this year.

As happens quite often, my starting point was the central idea/conceit, and latterly I've been developing the characters that bring the world to life. I pretty much have the story worked out now so it's just a matter of getting it all down.

As I've been writing I've occasionally had the sense that the characters and the events were demanding more space for their story to be told more fully - i.e. to expand the piece up to novel length. So far, I'm resisting the temptation as I want to work on a completely different novel next. But it might be an option ...

Moving On

So, after a week's break it's time to move on. I've had a lot of ideas for the next novel jostling for attention in my mind. Should it be realist so that, you know, it gets taken seriously by all those agents and publishers who get sniffy and say "no fantasy" (whereas of course, as we know, all fiction is fantasy, as is a great deal of non-fiction come to that). Should it be a genre-bending magic realist piece? Or what?

The current favourite is an SF novel, drawing together various ideas I've had for short stories over the years. The working title is Godstar. Has anyone used that already? I'll mull it over further but I think it's most likely the next one. And, in the meantime, I've got A, T, C and G to work on. And, my mind being what it is, what I've actually started writing is none of the above but another fantasy/realist crossover short story codenamed The One Thousand, One Hundred and Eleven Keys to Fairyland.

Had a couple of rejections whilst I was away. Firstly, The Wind Singing in the Wires got bounced by Ideomancer, making it five strikes in a row from them now. Can you have five strikes in a row? Hey ho. It was, as ever, a polite and useful rejection, saying :

This story was well-written, but I thought perhaps it didn't have enough plot.

Which is, quite possibly, fair enough. Once the wounds have healed I'll rework it and resubmit. I also got a form rejection from The Pedestal Magazine for Sunken Bells. Now there's a story that really doesn't have much plot! But I do like it. It's one of those minimalist, lots-unspoken-going-on kind of things. As ever, it's a matter of finding the right home for each work ...

Meanwhile I had another comment for Hedge Witch on Authonomy :

Good intriguing start. Instantly caught my attention and the world is nicely realised. Very good.

Which was more encouraging. I realised that the copy of the novel on Authonomy was way out of date so I then spent a tedious half and hour updating it when I should have been writing ...