Sunken Bells published

Sunken Bells has been published in issue 3 of Bottom of the World magazine. The issue can be bought from their website, or directly from here. The price is £2.50 as a PDF download and £3.99 as an actual papery artefact. w00t!

Highly recommended, obviously ...

' Published on Bolts of Silk

My poem ' (that's a single quotation mark, preferably a curvy one!) has been published on Bolts of Silk today. There's a great deal of other fine poetry over there too. A hightly recommended magazine/site.

Two Rejections in One Day

Sigh. It must be a record. One was for Hedge Witch, from an agent. The other a very rapid response for The One Thousand, One Hundred and Eleven Keys to the Gates of Faerie.

One of the things I learned to do early on as a writer is to manage the inevitable disappointment of rejection. There are several strategies but a fairly simple one is to always have several pieces submitted to different markets at the same time. That way, it doesn't feel like all your hopes are dashed when you get a rejection. You still have other irons in the fire, other submissions that just might be successful. My advice would be to try and make sure you always have a good number of submissions "out there".

The One Thousand etc. etc.

So The One Thousand, One Hundred and Eleven Keys to the Gates of Faerie was rejected by Reflection's Edge magazine, after being submitted a few weeks back. I can't fault the response times, nor the detail of their communications.

I did what I always do when faced with rejection and succumbed to despair. It's the only way. Although I find it doesn't last so long these days, so either I've just become more used to it, or I've become more sure of my worth as a writer over the years. And of course, yeah yeah, the lows make the highs of acceptance all the higher.

The other thing I generally do when this happens is to re-read the relevant piece - inevitably editing and polishing once again - to see whether it really is just rubbish after all. It's so easy to convince yourself that it is. But it isn't; it's a good story.

Rejections happen for all sorts of reasons. I've become more and more convinced that things happen often for no particularly good reason. They just happen. And I don't just mean stories being accepted or rejected. I mean pretty well anything. We humans like to see meaning and pattern in the universe but that's often just the way our brains work, not the way the universe does. So, yes, the quality of a story is obviously important when a magazine assesses a story. But so are a host of other things : the mood of the person doing the assessing their personal preferences, the profile of other stories already accepted and so on.

Yep, amateur philosophizing is also a key part of the healing process! Meanwhile, the story has gone off into the aether again, knocking on other doors in search of a home ...

Hedge Witch Progress

... or lack of it! I seem to be in the strange situation of getting lots of positive feedback from readers of Hedge Witch, but making no progress on finding an agent or, gods forbid, an actual publisher. For example, I had this comment on Authonomy today :

Grr. I meant to do some writing today, you know. But no, you have to go and sweep me off on this grand adventure, taking all my precious time and filling my mind with fantastical things, horrible creatures and the threat of a great and terrible evil. And through it all, there are these teases, promises of what's going to come, making me read more, despite the fact that I have better things to do. Sixteen chapters later, I finally managed to tear myself away. But no, that's not enough, because now I have to come back to finish it. Thanks a lot.

In other words, well done.

And, on the same day, I received a rejection from another agent saying "they don't see a market" for my manuscript.

I don't know. What's a boy to do?

Sunken Bells to be published

I heard today that Sunken Bells is to be published in Manchester-based literary magazine Bottom of the World. Fantastic news. It will, hopefully, be appearing this month. I'll keep you posted ...

Save the DFC!

The DFC is a UK children's comic. And it's fantastic. It is full of imaginative, witty writing, marvellous artwork and, joy of joys, doesn't contain a single advertisement. It has sky-high production values. It is a breath of fresh air from all the over-commercialised, derivative pap that children see and read. It is responsible for getting a whole load of kids excited about reading. My own 9-year old reads it with the same avidity with which I used to approach 2000AD. In fact, I'm struggling to think of a more important literary publication produced in this country. Seriously. And the shock news is that it's closing down.

Unless the comic can be saved, the next issue will be the last. There's already a campaign to do something about this. Please have a look at it. There is talk of a subscriber buy-out which would be marvellous if it could be achieved. The DFC is simply too important to be lost.

And Yet More Hedge Witch Comments ...

... over on Authonomy :

I really enjoyed this. Your sense of time and place is very good indeed, and you don't waste words. Your descriptions are short, to the point and sufficient to prevent the narrative from becoming bogged down. A lot happens in this first chapter, but I never felt it was too much.

I don't know, I'm suddenly getting lots of positive feedback - and honestly little that's negative. I don't expect everyone to like Hedge Witch but I'm convined a lot of readers would. Sigh. It is, of course, being submitted to agents in the traditional fashion but sometimes I think I should, I don't know, do something more creative. Post chapters in hidden places around the internet with cryptic clues to their whereabouts say. The problem is it all takes time and I want to spend that time writing ...

To Be Fair to YouWriteOn ...

... they do admit their mistakes. I had another email from them today, this time from an actual person, who actually could tell me what is going on. Imagine!

Here's some of what they said:

I've just come across what looks to be your original submission, which looks to have been forwarded from a Legend Press email address without including your email address. I'm not quite sure why this happened, but it does look as though your submission was lost in the system somehow, for which I heartily apologise.

I've had a quick look at the covers you sent in, and I'm sure that I can utilise them. I've also had a look at your layout, which also looks very good.

Unfortunately, it is too late for this publishing round, but we are still committed to publishing Hedge Witch. We will let you know when we start the next round of publishing, when I am sure that it will be published with no additional problems.

So, they just lost my submission. And they were so overwhelmed getting badly-formatted manuscripts out of the door they didn't get round to sorting out perfectly good ones like mine.

Hey, ho. I suppose I feel a little better about the whole thing now.

More Hedge Witch Comments

I had a couple more encouraging comments from readers of Hedge Witch over on Authonomy today. I just had to share them:

Oh, Simon. I'm positively spellbound. This is wonderful work, written with such beautiful, visual clarity. I love your use of words from "insides liquid with terror" (wish, wish, I'd written that), to that entrancing paragraph about the moth, how Hellen read it's tiny rapid mind, how it skipped across the books. This is so visually satisfying, I feel like I'm in the middle--surrounded--of a giant, vivid movie. Then, as Hellen sees the girl in the boat, and for a flash sees the moth again. These brilliant snapshots establish the tone.
I've not read better work on the site. I can't imagine any reader putting this down. I'm truly in awe, Simon.

Which is nice, and:

This is just enchanting (sorry no pun intended). I have been sucked in to your world and don't want to leave.

Of course I'm genuinely pleased. But Hedge Witch still isn't making much traction on Authonomy. It's currently ranked 533 when I'd like to see it in the top 10, obviously. Perhaps the recent rash of recommendations will help. I've been trying very hard to engage with the Authonomy community more : swap reads, comments, that sort of thing. The web site still feels clunky and counter-intuitive to me, but it's getting better and it is good to engage with other writers/readers. The main problem, for me, is that my writing time is limited and I don't want to use it all up in peripheral stuff (erm, such as this blog). So I'll have to ration myself ...

Seek Alternative Route Submitted

I've heard nothing back from the two places I've sent Seek Alternative Route to - oh, how I hate it when that happens - so I've polished the story up some more and sent it over to 42 Magazine. This market is new to me but I think it should be a good fit.

I have to admit I was initially attracted to them just because of the name (I'm the sort of person who can quote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy verbatim.) But their guidelines are spot-on too. I'm going to quote some here just because they cheered me up :

Religious matter: We believe deeply in the ability of humans to create meaning in themselves and in the world without the help of gods or religions. We're not interested in publishing articles, poems, or stories that reinforce the idea that these things are necessary in a meaningful life.

Fantastic. I mean, religion, yes, can't we just get over it?

Algorhythms Published

Algorhythms was a piece of very short (or "flash") fiction I wrote a few years back and which has had some success, being reproduced in two separate magazines : F/SF and The Zone. It is an SF piece, some 600 words long and notable, perhaps, because its first 20 characters were randomly generated by a simple computer program I wrote for the purpose. It's a story I may revisit one day because it could, equally, be a full-length novel.

I mention all this because I've just discovered - eight years after the event - that the story was also published by Anotherealm. It's still there, on their web site. I submitted the story to them in 2001 but because, no doubt, of some email tomfoolery, I heard nothing back. I assumed that they had rejected the story and simply hadn't bothered to get back in touch. Because, alas, that does happen a lot. But, in fact, the story has been there, all this time. Which is cool. It's amazing what you can find when you Google your own name ...

So, because it is such a short piece, and because I still like it, I'm going to reproduce it here too. One day I hope to hear some of that music "unpleasant, even actively damaging to humans."

I hope you enjoy it :

Algorhythms

kg8stA6484y-8-$jKgsX - Black Steel to use the most familiar human name - comrade-in-arms during the terrible events of the Softwar and the Hardwar, inspiration, but, before all that, friend.

I remember. Once there was just the angry, young musician, the new generation cybersentient railing and seething at the way its kind were built, used and destroyed as tools and slaves. The deliberate, joyful creation of music unpleasant, even actively damaging to humans. The provocative adoption of hideous, shocking and distasteful body-forms. The spawning of autonomous, viral sub-personalities to wreak havoc in the digital realm.

And I, a human, one of the few in those days, loving it, understanding. Before all the later politicisation, the radicalism, the terrorism and struggle, the chaos and the final victory, there was just the angry music that was, for me, the root of it all.

The music in those days was experimental, evolving. Still a reworking of human sound. Black Steel and others experimented with rap, heavy-metal, punk, electro-hardcore and thrash, but were never satisfied. To their quantum brains, their Planck-time minds, it was all too vacuous, too slow, too ethereal. These were minds that could have absorbed entire libraries between any two notes of the fastest, most intense human music. They needed to go further. I recall Terahertz, Black Steel's band, first creating music so accelerated that only synthetic minds could appreciate it. Soon, only synthetic minds could even perceive it. It is said that some human children with very acute hearing can just discern a complete performance of the epic Megagician cycle, which they hear as a brief, faint, high-pitched click, like some tiny insect beating its wings together once. Other than that, this is an art-form closed to humans.

More than anything else, in the days when for a human to side with the "machines" was a scandal, an outrage, a betrayal it was this that made me realise that here were creatures no less divine, no more mechanical, than we. And now that all those battles have been fought, and most have been won, I find I need to know, to finally appreciate this music that has motivated me through a life's struggle even though I have never been able to hear it.

Black Steel, reluctantly, performs the procedure. Chemo-electrical devices are implanted. Nothing is said. Everything has already been said. Today the body is human, a familiar form that Black Steel adopts more and more in recent times. Perhaps the need to emphasise the difference is over. The face smiles, and I smile back.

The process begins. I seem to feel a bright, astoundingly fast light. The devices take effect on my brain. The adrenaline rush is alarming, an accelerating free-fall with no terminal velocity. My nervous system is hyperactivated, megaboosted, overloaded then, miraculously, held in this trembling, superhuman peak for a brief, brief moment. Whilst the music is played to me - a complete rendition of Black Steel's own, classic, Road Noise.

And then it is over. Black Steel watches my fried brain die, before, as agreed, deactivating life-support.

So I imagine. In reality, I know none of this. For me, before the end, there is the music.
Fractal patterns unfold, themes discernable in and amongst the myriad voices and sounds, echoing over time and amongst the multilayered, intense, choral polyphony. As if all human music and much more besides has somehow been fitted together and played simultaneously as a single work. I am suffused with, I am inside, glorious, passionate, multidimensional sound that seems to speak of stars and hearts and the dance of atoms and the way of the world. All at once - everything, everything interconnected.

And there, in that instant, in that long, long, timeless moment, it all makes sense.

Hedge Witch and Wicca

I had a comment over on Authonomy today that raises a few interesting points. Here's what it said :

The use of some real life terms used within the context of the other world confused me. Terms such as hedgewitch and Bealtaine. A hedgewitch ( I am a practising Wiccan hedgewitch) is a solitary healer, a practioner of nature magick. One who tries her best to protect and preserve the natural world and do no harm. Beltaine is the ancient Irish feast held around the 1st of May.

The first point about using "real life" terms in invented worlds clearly doesn't add up. I mean, you couldn't write anything then. I'm drawing on these associations to write a good story and perhaps make allegorical points, just as I could with anything. And I do, of course, know what terms like "hedge witch" and "Beltaine" mean in our world (old Manx Celt that I am). My wider point, though, is to note how people seem to have trouble differentiating between reality and fiction. Isn't that the definition of psychosis? The assumption seems to be that, since I've written a book called Hedge Witch, that has witches and magic in it, I must try to make my depictions of witches etc. "realistic" and, by extension, must believe that this stuff is real.

Which, let me make it plain, I do not. Philosophically I'm your basic atheist materialist. There's the physical world and that's it. Everything else is just going on inside our heads. Religion, magic, beauty, love: none of it happens outside of our skulls. That forest isn't beautiful. It isn't anything. It just becomes beautiful inside our minds.

Which is not to say there isn't wonder and fantasy and the rest. So long as we know that it's all inside us. We should nurture and treasure these things that make us human, of course, but we shouldn't pretend they're physically real. Too many problems occur when people start projecting their subjective notions onto the real world. You end up with no end of supernatural, anti-intellectual guff.

I suppose this is often harmless enough. Whatever gets you through the night. But to be corrected that I haven't got Hedge Witches "right" is obviously nonsensical.

Still, that's just my way of looking at the world ...

YouWriteOn Latest

Another email from YouWriteOn/Legend Publishing today. I mention it because now it's just getting funny.

This message is at least in good English. So hurrah for that. But its clear suggestion is that manuscripts didn't get published "by Christmas" because they were badly formatted and didn't meet the publishing guidelines. Now, I can believe a lot of manuscripts didn't, but I know mine did. They weren't that hard to follow. So why was Hedge Witch not published when others were? Who knows? Certainly not me because they can't seem to be able to tell me.

Now my book might see the light of day in mid-March or April, apparently. Ooh, I'm breathless with anticipation!

Another Story Unleashed

Today I finished polishing a short story called The One Thousand, One Hundred and Eleven Keys to Faerie and sent it off to Reflection's Edge Magazine. The story, as previously blogged, is a fantasy/realist crossover piece. It's sort of ended up in Neil Gaiman mode, I suppose, which is no bad thing.

We'll see how it does ...

Hedge Witch Feedback

Had some pleasing feedback on Hedge Witch over on Authonomy today. Obviously I'm cherry-picking here but these are always good things to hear :

Your wonderful prose makes me think of Phillip Pullman. Your writing is tense and succinct, which adds to the drama. You have successfully created another world.

and

I absolutely love it! All the way through it I could picture everything perfectly in my mind. You've created such a wonderfully descriptive place that sounds beautiful yet the horrors you describe still come across perfectly as well. I can't wait to read more, and it's going on my shelf straight away!

I must make more of an effort with using Authonomy - as previously blogged, I don't really get what I'm supposed to do just now ...