On the Clarion board we often discuss markets. A couple guys have stories at Realms of Fantasy and have been waiting over six months with no response — one just got a form rejection after almost nine months.

I’ve only submitted a couple stories to Realms, the last one over eighteen months ago. They’re not really on my radar right now because of the long response times and rumors of frequently misplaced submissions. Clarion grads were also supposed to be plucked from the general slush, but not any more, allegedly. And on top of it all, they only publish six issues a year meaning they buy fewer stories annually than the other “big” markets.

So this got me thinking. How many stories do these markets publish annually?

In an entirely unscientific way, I did some searching on the Internet and put together the below table. It’s not 100% accurate but I think it’s fairly close. Analog, Asimov’s and F&SF share the same format and, unsurprisingly, publish about the same amount of fiction per issue. I did a quick scan of the table of contents for about ten issues for each and since Analog and Asimov’s count their double issue as two, I did the same for F&SF. Strange Horizons and SCIFI.com publish a story a week for the year. I think it’s probably 51 stories a year as I think they take a week off, but what the heck, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Writers of the Future is a quarterly contest with three winners per quarter. The others are some other high-quality markets thrown in for comparison.

“Stories” include flash fiction, short stories, novelettes, novellas, and any part of a serialization.

I also threw in the average wait times for a manuscript based on the reports at Critter’s Black Hole which, in my experience, tend to be pretty accurate. I didn’t include pay but all of them are around 3-6 cents/word.

Again, this is only for a rough idea. For what it’s worth.

Joe Strummer has been dead for 2 years, 6 months, and 5 days.

I’m beginning to lose hope that he’s coming back.

Back among the living and the drudgery of work. Ironically, I’m currently between jobs. Not in the classic sense meaning unemployed, but rather the fact that I’m actually stuck between two jobs that collided. I’m trying to do both while only being paid for the lower one while my new hire paperwork tries to free itself from the glue of government red tape barring the way for smooth and easy transfer and employees between position. Blogging on the job seems to be the only rational solution.

The Apostle Islands trip rocked. I came back physically exhausted, sporting a patchwork sunburn and my equilibrium hasn’t adjusted to dry, non-moving land yet which means the monitor seems to be swaying on my desk as I type this. We paddled somewhere around twenty-five miles in the space of a couple days. Luckily, the weather cooperated as much as one could hope. Not as many pictures as I’d like, especially of the first afternoon of pure adventure where we paddled into the teeth of the howling wind with two foot swells crashing over the decking. I had the camera packed away and besides, every moment not used paddling forward meant being blown back towards shore.

Lake Superior’s temperature hovered around the mid-forties to mid-fifties all weekend. This is cold.

One more random comment. Forgive the pun but mosquitos suck. It’s terrible to have your sandaled feet bitten over the weekend followed by the maddening desire to scratch them as they’re constantly irritated by shoes and socks. Perhaps the mosquito bite represents a primal yearning and insatiable desire for the hardships and trials of the wild, and during the week the working man’s desire for freedom from the office must be placed beneath the yoke of shoe and sock–the desire stays hidden, yet itching still.

Or maybe not.

Apostle Islands pictures forthcoming.

Colorado pictures are now up.

If you choose to browse them, a few things you should know.

1. The lady in the pictures is Amy, my wife.
2. No, you can’t have her. She didn’t let her dad give her away at her wedding, so what makes you think I could give her away either?
3. The dog is Athena. She’s a full-blooded German Shepherd and about sixteen months old.
4. You can’t have her, either. Although she’d probably go without a fight if you offered her munster cheese.
5. Athena is often referred to as ‘Bean’ in the pictures. This is a derivation of ‘Theener-Beaner’ or ‘Athena-Bean’, both of which are syrupy nicknames for her. This should be self-evident.
6. I like my dog more than I like most people. My wife think it’s a bit obsessive. I disagree. I often like my dog more than wife, especially when she tells me this. The feeling is mutual.
7. The cat’s name is Heineken. He makes a brief cameo at the end.

Leaving tonight for the Apostle Islands on a kayaking trip, sans Bean. Winds from the SSE at 16 mph on Sunday. Let’s hope my next post isn’t from Silver Bay, MN.

Guess the Dictator and/or Television Sit-Com Character

Initially, the sheer absurdity overwhelms. The above website asks you to think of either a sit-com character or dictator and then proceeds to try to suss it by asking a series of questions. “Huh?” you might think.

But if you mull it over for a second, it’s really not that difficult to get. There are a finite number of sit-coms and characters out there and the average Joe will probably not remember a bit character from “McHale’s Navy.” So most folks with cycle through the Friends, Seinfeld cast, Will and Grace, etc. While the number of characters in the database probably aren’t small, it’s not an inconceivable number. And you do have to cut the database engine a little slack when it asks questions like, “Do I have an afro?” and the answer is ‘yes’ for both Jerry and Kramer.

Then take dictators. How many dictators can you name off the top of your head? Exactly. The dictator pool is substantially smaller.

What makes it curious is the tendency to think dictators and sit-com characters need to have something in common for this to work when they don’t. This could just have easily been comparing sit-com characters to sports stars, or U.S. presidents but those pools don’t have as many easily definable characteristics. The database separates possibilities using yes/no values. For presidents, questions like, “Did I own slaves?” or “Did I start a war with Mexico?” would leave most people stumped even though those would trim down the number of possibilities if answered correctly. For sports stars, there’s the problem of narrowing down the pool. There’s no charm in going sport by sport, decade by decade, team by team.

So when you think of it, sit-coms and dictators are relatively small pools. When you consider the database isn’t in on the joke (i.e. doesn’t know that it’s silly to compare goofball fictional characters with genocidal maniacs) the site loses some of it’s magic.

Only some though. It’s still fun.

What to read next? Isn’t that a common problem?

I’m almost done with Terry Bisson’s and John Kessel’s collections which I’ve enjoyed and learned a lot while reading. Both are masters of short fiction but Kessel edges Bisson for me. Man, Bisson writes with an unmistakeable voice though. Kessel’s stories are usually propped up by one philosophy or another (or I should say Philosophy with a big ‘P’ meaning an actual, reasoned world-view propounded by heavyweight philosophers to distinguish from something like the ‘philosophy’ of Deepak Chopra or Dr. Phil McGraw [not to be confused with the far more appealing Dr. Phil Kaldon from Clarion]) for me to ignore. But I read short fiction on top of novels anyway, so these don’t really count.

I’m trying to choose between Douglas Adams’ “Long, Dark, Tea-Time of the Soul” or “Titus Groan,” book one of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. I’m leaning towards the Adams because it’s a small, battered paperback that’s lightweight and packable as opposed to the dense, three-volume Gormenghast paperback I bought. (You know, I hate reading three novels bound together in one book. It’s a wonder I bought them this way.) Anyway, with the upcoming trips I don’t want to lug anything too heavy.

Speaking of upcoming trips, it’s paddling in the Apostle Islands this weekend. Accuweather’s 15-day forecast says fairly clear, sunny, and windy. I’ll take the first two but that last one’s a little creepy. Lake Superior is Big Water, y’all, and I don’t want to end up blown to Thunder Bay, Canada. Amy and I did the Apostles a few summers ago (photos here) and had a great time. This time we’re going with friends Jenny and Steven and we’re paddling a point-to-point, one-way trip rather than a loop. In fact, here’s where we going, campsites marked with red dots:

I’m really looking forward to it. I get increasingly irritable if I go too long without sleeping outside.

1) Pictures of the Colorado trip forthcoming. Athena stars in 98% of them. Literally.

2) I just sent out “The Life of Bogart Reilly,” a Clarion story, to Strange Horizons. This one split the room almost down the center. I don’t know if anyone actively disliked it but there were a lot of lukewarm reactions. It’s written in second-person and is about leprechauns. On that summary alone, I feel lukewarm towards it. But I do like the story and other Clarion folks did too, so maybe it’s an audience thing. We’ll see what Strange Horizons says, probably in about a month.

3) I finished the Kalevala yesterday at lunch and feel a little relieved. Plodding through the wedding lays (no pun intended) kind of sucked the life out of it for me. The end picked up and I appreciated the war with the residents of North Farm over the Sampo as well as the hiding of the Sun and Moon. In the end, I liked it but I didn’t love it. I’d recommend it but probably only portions. Unlike most pieces of epic poetry, the Kalevala only loosely fits into a narrative and it’s not linear at all so the reader can skip around between episodes and not miss too much.

4) The social calendar gets fast and furious coming up. This weekend is idle, but then it’s paddling the Apostle Islands, mom and dad in town for the brother’s anniversary party, a few weekends later it’s backpacking in the Porkies in the UP. Those three items mean about 30 hours of driving between them and the Colorado trip was about 50 hours spread over nine days last week. I don’t mind driving, but not that much.

5) I realized last night how to stop terrorism and that’s through art. Just like Peter Tosh’s plainly-stated No Nuclear War effectively ushered in the end of the nuclear arms race (revisionist historians credit Ronald Reagan f or this feat), what the world need now is an artist brave enough to make an album called No Terrorism and, as long as it bounced to a reggae beat, the problem would soon be over.

Still reeling from yesterday’s news. Received suggestions from Gordon van Gelder and they’re practically all line edits–typos, a few repetitions of phrase, etc. He did mention a wistful hope for one last SF twist to the story to give it more of a punch but liked it enough as is. Something to think about for next time. It sounds like the story should see the light of day in 2005 or early 2006 at the very, very latest.

Because I only found at out Clarion that I was writing speculative fiction, my stories often don’t have the sf element consistently throughout. I mean, there’s got to be a perfectly valid reason for having that element there in the first place and if it’s important enough to include, it should be intrinsic to the story.

At least for F&SF. Strange Horizons, SCIFI.com, and Asimov’s stories often have a much slighter spec fic element to them, or at least that’s the way it seems to me. In contrast, F&SF stories always prominently feature the speculative element. These are the subtle differences people mean when they say “know your markets.” It’s not that F&SF and Asimov’s publish spec fic, but rather what kind of spec fic they gravitate towards. At a certain level it’s a crap shoot because you can never know with absolute certainty which editors might be attracted to certain stories, and certainly they’re all interested in an outstanding story regardless of personal preference, but it’s far better than proverbially chucking it against the wall and seeing what sticks.

Ironically, just last week on vacation lovely wife Amy beseeched me to get more stuff out floating around because I’m too hard on my own stories. I argued (defensively of course) that may be so but I didn’t want to send out crap and most of pending stories had dire problems that needed fixing, thank you very much. And really, what more could I do? I still send stories that I’m unsatisfied with to big markets like F&SF, placing them in a folder titled “Hell, Not a Shot In.”

Luckily I am mentally strong enough to live with someone who is right virtually all the time.

Shakespeare once wrote “Hindsight is 20/20″ and boy, was the bard was right. I toiled over both “Change of Seasons” and “From the Mouths of Babes” for weeks with much gnashing of teeth and hair pulling, only sending them out when I could no longer stand the sight of them. Like sending Jason after the Golden Fleece, or Thingol telling Beren to go get a Silmaril, I thought I sent them to their inevitable doom–yet they returned triumphant and made me look the fool.[/overwrought analogy]

So my next plan of action is to pump out a number of stories I think work pretty well already. I wrote five stories at Clarion and I think two of them need very little work. I always envision massive, agonizing rewrites and painstaking editing followed by the conclusion that, “This story sucks.” Maybe I can replace that process with a little more sane, little more rational style of just taking things for what they’re worth and getting them out the door. Not because I think they’re sure fire sales, but more specifically because I think they’re very close to being as good as I can get them right now. Eternally tinkering with words and sentences doesn’t improve the story.

This, of course, is all about my never-ending struggle against the dual forces of hope and expectation. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” Dante said. “Keep your expectations low,” Gavin Grant said.

Will do, fellas, will do.

Well, it’s exactly three months since I received my first acceptance letter for a story at Cicada, a pro market, I just found out yesterday that the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is buying “From the Mouths of Babes,” a story I wrote pre-Clarion but significantly revised after I got home. To be perfectly honest, I’m beside myself with yippee-ness.

In case you don’t remember, I identified the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as one of my “dream” markets, meaning it would be absolutely dreamy if I ever got published there because it’s the Big Time. Seriously. Both of these magazines get literally hundreds of stories each month and with narrow profit margins they can’t afford to shepherd new writers along by publishing so-so stories.

Again, like I wrote when I got my first story published, this sale doesn’t get me in the door anywhere else. My submissions will still have to rise from the slush pile like everyone else’s. There’s the added benefit of being able to mention these two publications in my cover letter which may give me a little more sympathetic of a read, or it may not. Putting them on my cover letter shouts out “I am not a hack,” but it in no way guarantees anything else. It does not grant me the benefit of the doubt. Simply put, I need to continue writing stories good enough for the pro markets if I expect to keep getting published.

All humility aside, this is a tremendous confidence boost. It happens once and there’s a slight chance it’s a fluke (although that’s highly unlikely given the tremendous amount of competition.) It happens twice and it’s pretty much confirmed you have the ability to write a saleable story. It happens three times and you’re deemed good enough to join SFWA, the professional writer’s membership organization for speculative fiction. In January, becoming a qualified author seemed a remote possibility. Now I’m just a single sale away. Best of all, I’ve only sent out five stories since coming home from Clarion; two of them have now sold to major markets.

Humility reinstalled, even three stories is nowhere near enough exposure to make a name for yourself especially considering Cicada is outside the genre. I would say it would take four, five or six stories in the major sci-fi/fantasy markets before your name has any kind of weight whatsoever. Given the publishing schedules of most markets, that’s still years away in the best-case scenario. In addition, the combined word count for both of my stories is about 6K words. It’ll be a bigger achievement to sell a 6-10K story to a big market–the longer the story, the better it has to be.

Still, this puts a lot of gas in my tank. I’m still motivated from the first sale so this just adds to it. Selling a third story before the end of the year seems like an aggressive but realistic goal now, but I’m not going to be bummed out if I can’t achieve it. I have no doubt whatsoever that this isn’t my last pro sale; however, I fully realize I might have to wait awhile for the magic number three and that’s fine. I haven’t been writing seriously for that long, and I’ve been writing decent stories for even less time so enjoying the success I have in the eleven months since Clarion is remarkable, especially considering how little I’ve put out there.

In conclusion, I’ll enjoy the big yippee for today and then it’s back to pounding keys in search of number three.

Ahoy hoy,

Been on vacation in Colorado for the past week. Pictures forthcoming, nearly all of which feature Athena in her first hiking gig west of the Mississippi. She did extremely well for a sixteen-month old puppy, especially in the stupifyingly boring, sixteen-hour drive from Madison to Denver.

In case you didn’t know, Motel 6 has a “one pet per room” policy that worked out great for us. Athena is a very well-mannered dog although does get a bit barky at times, especially when confronted with new and unusual situations. She’s gentle and Amy thinks she would never hurt a fly, but I think if provoked or if she thought we were in danger she would happily rip a roll of carpet off your arm, preferably with the arm still in it. The first night in the hotel she kept nosing under the curtain to get a better look at the rif-raff making noise in the nearby parking lot and didn’t sleep very well. But the thought of her chewing on furniture or relieving herself in the room is as abhorrent to her as it is to us. Two steps outside the room is another matter completely and she has, tragically, let fly in the foyer of my brother’s Chicago condo. Nobody’s perfect. There’s also the small matter of having all the Motel 6’s in Des Moines being fully booked at midnight and being stuck without another hotel that accepts dogs and thereby being forced to drive on late into the night feeling so tired that the car seems to float during lane changes and having to constantly rake your tongue against your teeth and pinch your face to stay awake, but that only happened one night out of ten.

Audio books enjoyed on the trip included, in the order of listening pleasure:

• To Conquer the Air is about the Wilbur Wright and Orville Redenbacher’s discovery of human flight. I found the experiments’ progressions and the bros’ adherence to the scientific process fascinating but Amy found it dull, dull, dull. You never much hear about the guys who were close to making the discover but, for whatever reason, got beaten to the punch by folks who become household names. I had no idea the race to be the first man in flight was so competitive and ruthlessly cutthroat. My favorite audio book of the trip.
• Endurance is the story of Ernest Shakleton and his aborted trip to travel across the Antarctic continent. The glow of this fascinating tale was diminished somewhat as we saw an extraordinary photographic exhibit from the Endurance’s (that’s the ship’s name) chief picture snapper. In many cases, a picture is worth a thousand words and there’s no substitute for actually seeing an enormous, ocean-worthy craft seized and eventually pulverized by an ocean of ice. The story is incredible though especially considering the crew was stranded on ice floes eating seal meat for sixteen months before [spoiler warning] Ernie et al beat all the odds sailing a thousand miles in a bathtub to find a rescue ship, and recover all the crew members without a single fatality.[/spoiler]
• Finally, Arcanum was the last and least of the bunch. It already had a strike against it as it’s a book on tape instead of CD. It’s about European porcelain. I would love to write a spoiler but there isn’t one. Here’s the plot. A goofball guy lands himself in hot water by faking he can turn lead into gold using a sleight-of-hand trick. The king thinks that’s pretty neat and captures the guy, saying “turn lots of lead into gold or die for being a charlatan.” The guy ends up making a pretty good replication of Oriental porcelain instead. Who knew the 18th-century Europeans were so bonzo over porcelain? Not me. But I do know now. Boy, do I know now. When I popped in the last tape (six hours of the history of European porcelain, by the way) the infinitely-bored Amy asked me if I was studying for my porcelain boards. ‘Nuff said.

In other, sadder news, my wife’s Aunt Judy unexpectedly passed away last week. We all loved Aunt Judy dearly and we will miss her tremendously. She was only 56 years old. Her obituary can be found here.