Category Archives: magazines

Why Yes, I WOULD Cut Off My Nose to Spite My Face, Why Do You Ask?

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 Anyone can be a published writer if all you want to do is make ebook versions of your stories/novels and put them up on Kindle/Nook/iBook/Whatever. I’m not slagging on the idea. I’ll grant you, there’s a time I would have, but times change and it’s adapt or die. Now I do it myself when doing so makes sense to me. However, if you still want to sell stories to professional  science fiction and fantasy (SF/F) markets in the traditional way, deciding between Garamond vs Bookman Old Style is no longer your concern. It’s also no longer about whether your stories please you. Before you see print/online publication, you’ve got to please someone else–the editor.

The traditional SF/F short fiction market is a buyer’s market. Always has been and probably always will be. Even with the explosion of online venues, there are more good stories than there are decent homes for them, for varying values of “decent” and, let’s be honest, varying values of “good.” Fortunately there are enough variances in editorial taste that eventually things usually work out. “Eventually” meaning just that–it can take years to place some stories. “Usually” meaning, sigh, not always. But I’m not here to lament this sad fact, merely to state it, to place what follows in context–The Sh*tlist  Continue reading →

Signing at the Quisenberry Library

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My Stuff

Saturday,  February 4th, a gang of local and near-local authors held a signing in the new Quisenberry Library in Clinton, Mississippi. I wish I’d been able to get some exterior shots of the building itself, because it’s rather attractive as buildings go, set in a wooded area with a nature/walking trail on the grounds. The problem was that the cold front that should have been here weeks ago finally arrived and dumped buckets of water everywhere and it was pouring rain for most of the afternoon. Not the best of conditions when you want people out and about and coming to such local events, but it wasn’t a bad afternoon despite that.

Glen and Melanie Being Casual

J. Mulvihill Setting Up

As one would expect from a general signing, there was quite a range of subject matter on display, from cookbooks to thrillers to the science fiction and fantasy end of the spectrum. Authors in attendance other than me were Cynthia Leavelle, Melanie Atkins, Glen Stripling, Luther Knight, J. Moffett Walker, and Jennifer Mulvihill. Jennifer was the organizer, coordinating with Karen Sims, the President of the Clinton Friends of the Library. Aside from the authors, there was the Editor/Publisher of a new magazine, Real Girl Magazine, aimed at Teen Girls. I confess when I learned the editor’s name was Elizabeth Bennett my first reaction was “Seriously?” Yes, syrsly. It’s her married name

Elizabeth Bennett

and yes, she takes some ribbing for it. You can check it out at Real Girl Magazine.

As part of the event, an all-volunteer musical group, The Clintones, put on a set of jazz and bluesy numbers and I have to say they were pretty good, and any glitches in the set order or occasional mic problems were met with patience and good humor.

All right, that’s for that. So how did it all go? About as well as could be expected. The ad that was supposed to run in the local paper before the event, didn’t, so hardly anyone knew about it. That and the weather kept a lot of library patrons away. Even so, I’d do it again. I sold a fair number of books, including all the extra copies I had of THE HEAVENLY FOX, I met the President of the Friends of the Library and may be doing a presentation to the group at some point down the road. I also slipped away from the signing to visit the library book sale which happened to be going on at the same time and scored a copy of WAY STATION by Clifford Simak, which has been on my to-read list for a while. I sold more books than I brought home new ones, so I consider that a win.

The Sky is Falling – Not

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Or: “Rumors of the short story’s death are greatly exaggerated.” 

It’s obvious to even the casual observer that the print sf/f magazines are holding on by the skin of their metaphorical teeth, but as I’ve pointed out before, that’s been true for a long time. When I was starting out as a wannabee, the Ted White Fantastic Stories was my holy grail, and it probably never had a circulation greater than 20,000. It’s fair to say that the situation is not getting any better. Are the current print magazines tenable long term? Probably not, and I’m not happy about that, but people who should know better constantly confuse the decline of the traditional magazines with the death of short science fiction and fantasy. Which is equating a particular delivery system with the product, to use the cold capitalist designation. Or to put it another way, a lot like saying the death of the stagecoach meant people could no longer travel.

Magazine circulations are declining in general. This is not confined to the fiction magazines. This is across the board. There are a lot of reasons for this: time, competition, distribution…. I’m sure you can think of your own. If you love a magazine that still appears in physical paper form, subscribe. Heck, if there’s an online magazine that deserves support, do your bit there, too; it’s all good. Regardless, the short story form will be around. Maybe book publishers will sponsor them to draw attention to their book lines, as Prime did once and Tor is sort of doing. Maybe they’ll go to NPR fundraising models like Strange Horizons. The point is that venues will remain, and people will write short stories to fill them. For that matter, people will write stories solely to collect them in books, and self-publish if they have to. There may or may not be any money in it, but other than Howard Waldrop, almost no one has made any kind of living off short fiction for half a century or better. Hasn’t slowed things down in the least.

The reason is simple. People tell stories. That’s what we do. And until someone invents a true full-immersion VR (don’t hold your breath) there’s simply no other medium that can do what narrative fiction does: puts you in another time and place. Makes you see through another’s eyes. Lets you see through another’s eyes. Lets you feel, taste, smell the world of the story, experience it in every sense of the word, not simply observe. Reminds you of things you didn’t realize you knew. Tells you things you never knew. We’re a species of storytellers, and story listeners. That’s not going to change. The short story form itself will be around simply because not every story is an epic, but every good story is important in its own way. They’re part of what we are.

Does that sound a little self-satisfied? Arrogant? So be it. I think it’s true. While I may now mourn Realms of Fantasy just as I still mourn Fantastic, Galaxy, SF Age, et too many ceteras, I know the short story will go on. I’m not the least bit worried.

A little more problematic is the notion that only short story writers actually read short stories these days, that there are no actual readers any more. Kinda like poetry. Which to me rings false immediately because I read poetry. Not in any organized or systematic way, but I do it. And I am not now and never will be a poet. Yes, of course short story writers read short stories. It’s part of the job to study a form you’re trying to master, and the writer who did not start out as a reader is a rare bird indeed. Yet even a cursory examination of the premise that there are no readers proves it simply isn’t true. Even a quick informal poll in an online f/sf discussion board showed that writers were at most about %25 of the readership. Granted, that was a self-selected sample, but telling for all that. The readership is and will remain fragmented, simply because there are so many competing mediums, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. It many not be enough to sustain short story writers commercially, but this is nothing new.

As someone who loves the short story form I suppose I should get all worked up about its so-called death. I would if I believed it for even a moment, but it just ain’t so. All the rest of it, as the zen Master Yogi Berra once said, is just déjà vu all over again.

The Final Tally

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I got an email this morning from the owners of Realms of Fantasy officially releasing the last two stories of mine that had been contracted for the magazine. If those two had been published I’d have had 27 stories there, total. As it was, the final count was 25. it’s possilble that someone may have published more stories there than I did, but off the top of my head I can’t think who it might be. As Theodora Goss pointed out elsewhere, with the loss of ROF and the combining of Fantasy Magazine and LightSpeed, there are no more “generalist” fantasy-only fiction magazines, and that’s a shame. There’s Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Black Gate but both are a bit more specialized in adventure and S&S-type fantasy. Realms of Fantasy under Shawna McCarthy was far more ecumenical, and ran the gamut, which is something I like to do in my work as well. We were a good fit.

For the record, here’s the list of every story I published in Realms of Fantasy over 16 years:

  1. “The Last Waltz,” February 1995
  2. “The Right Sort of Flea,” April 1997
  3. “Lord Madoc and the Red Knight,” December 1997
  4. “Take a Long Step,” April 1999
  5. “How Konti Scrounged the World,” February 2000
  6. “The Fourth Law of Power,” August 2000
  7. “Judgment Day,” October 2000
  8. “The Trickster’s Wife,” February 2001
  9. “The First Law of Power,” June 2001
  10. “A Respectful Silence,” December 2001
  11. “Kallisti,” April 2002
  12. “Worshipping Small Gods,” August 2003
  13. “Yamabushi,” December 2003
  14. “The Right God,” August 2004
  15. “Death, the Devil, and the Lady in White,” April 2005
  16. “Fox Tails,” June 2005 (The first Lord Yamada story)
  17. “The Penultimate Riddle,” August 2005
  18. “Empty Places,” December 2005
  19. “Moon Viewing at Shiji Bridge,” April 2006
  20. “A Touch of Hell,” April 2007
  21. “Hot Water,” December 2007
  22. “On the Banks of the River of Heaven,” April 2008
  23. “The River of Three Crossings,” February 2009
  24. “A Road Once Traveled,” December 2009
  25. “The Swan Troika,” February 2011

Not a bad list. I only wish it could have been longer.