A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to #AmQuerying

Turn left at the widening gyre…

You’d like to think that things could be easy, right? Or even straightforward? But, no, often it doesn’t work out that way, at least in my experience.

Yesterday I sent out the first wave (of five? the only? of seventeen?) of queries to agents for the novel, and so I’m officially #AmQuerying. At this point I’ve jokingly referred to it as UNTITLED FUTURE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND PULITZER PRIZE WINNER so many times, that should have been the dang title! Alas, however, it’s something more conventional.

This book started life a little over three years ago, with similarities to what went out in the mail yesterday, but it was a different book. It’s a short novel, about 70,000 words, and various drafts have been shorter, longer, and/or somewhat different in format. At one point I lost faith and shelved it, but after letting it marinate for months, I got perspective and solved some problems.

Is this my first novel? Not by a long shot. I’ve finished—as in completed and tied a bow on—two novels previously, one of which I thought good enough to seek representation. I also have some almost-novels that ranged from “abandoned at 20,000 words and an outline” to “wound up a novella, not a novel.” If UNTITLED FUTURE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND PULITZER PRIZE WINNER finds a home, I’ll be thrilled for it to be my debut novel, and I’ll also be able to say comfortably that it wasn’t my first novel. For all that I wanted Novel # 1 to be The Book, I’ve always admired authors who persist, and here’s hoping I’ll wind up in that rank.

Most of my readers know me for my short fiction, or sometimes the essays, scholarly or otherwise. Believe it or not, my long-term goal and general preference as a reader is novels! The spring of 2020 meant many things, but when this book started, it seemed as good a time as any to focus on writing what I really wanted to write. Did we wind up barricaded in our houses for five years? Thankfully not, but the time to focus did seem to move me in a good direction, though I didn’t really write about the pandemic in this book. The next novel, however, is another story…

The Future of Speculative Fiction

Do you read fantasy, science fiction, horror, or related genres? Do you know where you’ll be on the evening of July 28, 2021? Come check out an online panel discussion put on by James River Writers about The Future of Speculative Fiction. Hear from speakers M.K. England, Stephanie Toliver, and Nghi Vo about what’s in store for fiction that shows us alternate worlds. I’ll be moderating this exploration of what’s new, what’s back, and what’s next.

For more information and registration:
https://jamesriverwriters.org/event/july-2021-online-writing-show-the-future-of-speculative-fiction/

Adieu, Weird Fiction Publishers List

Photo by Pia on Pexels.com

Starting in 2015 I maintained a list of publishers of weird fiction, literary horror, or mainstream fiction that occasionally handled either. That list stayed current for a few years, but updates gradually became less frequent, and it became ever more out of date. Many people have used it over the years, but my interest in refreshing it has gone. If you’d like to save the links I had posted for your own purposes, there’s a copy over on the Wayback Machine.

These days, seems like more people get their market info from social, or from those folks who do regular submission roundups, like Eric J. Guignard or Gwendolyn Kiste. Likewise, check out Ralan.com, lists from writer’s organizations (SFWA, AWP, etc.), The Grinder, etc. Cheers!

The Sample Copies of Yesteryear

Let me tell you of the days of print magazines!

For those of you who don’t publish or aspire to publish your writing, part of the process often involves familiarizing yourself with magazines. Back in the print-only days, that meant ordering sample copies from a publisher, or subscribing, or (increasingly rarely as newsstands waned) going somewhere to purchase a copy in person. These days even print-only magazines often have samples of their fiction online, partly to lure would-be readers, partly to give writers an idea of what (not) to submit. This summer I was doing some cleaning and was reminded that over the years, I’ve amassed a small horde of sample copies. What you see here is a tiny fraction of it, as I have piles elsewhere of magazines I subscribed to or bought an issue or two of, including Cemetery Dance, F&SF, Grue, Deathrealm, Weird Tales, etc..

A pleasant surprise was seeing names that are familiar to me today from tables of contents, social media, conventions, and other parts of the publishing world: Allen, Cisco, Kilpatrick, Pugmire, Schwader, Schweitzer, Thomas, and many more. Some of those authors are still publishing in magazines, big and small. Some write full time, some part time. Some have had a lasting impact on readers and writers who came after them and, in some cases, followed their models.

A squamous menagerie…

I’d like to think the continued presence of these authors in the field says something about continuity, and about what makes a writer a writer (writing, yes, but publication, too). Once upon a time I bought into the idea of a standard template for authors’ literary lives, and up until a few years ago I was still thinking in those terms. The disruptions caused by publisher consolidation, e-books, etc., has changed that for me, but also taking a long, hard look at the market, and realizing that the Big 5 currently have only a sliver of a sliver of a niche for dark fiction, and it’s parceled out across the bookstores. (I’m skipping over YA and graphic novels, which are different kettles of fish, and neither of which I really write.) Instead, there are—as there were hundreds of years ago—various means for making your work public. The familiar names that I see belong to people who learned that lesson and published consistently wherever there was room, or who found a way to make room for themselves.

Less happily, the names I didn’t recognize in these magazines are as disproportionately female as those I do recognize are male. What happened to them? Hard to say, given how many writers publish a story or two and then vanish, and I don’t know every corner of the field, but many of the TOCs I saw do clearly uphold the idea of horror as a boys’ club (awareness of which has led to various attempts at correction), and there is a host of reasons why women historically have published less often than men. Personally I love the broadening of the field in recent years. Long ago I was reading Brite, Jackson, Rice, etc., and in the last decade authors like Carter, Kiernan, Link, Llewellyn, etc. The writer just starting out today who looks back in twenty years will have a new group of authors  to consider foundational, and I think it probably goes without saying, but that group will look different in more ways than one.

About that List of Weird Fiction Publishers

A little over a month ago, I assembled and posted a list of weird fiction publishers. I shared it widely at the time, and in turn it’s been shared and reposted in a number of places, including Reddit. It’s gotten traffic most every day since then, and the overall number of visits here has risen to (for now) a steadily higher level than in past:

 

 

My process for assembling the list was fairly straightforward. I reeled off a list by memory, took a quick-but-not-exhaustive look at my bookshelves, looked at websites of high-profile writers of weird fiction and link lists from high-profile publishers of weird fiction, and trawled social media. As such things inevitably do, all of that took longer than I’d planned. Originally I’d intended simply to do a list of names & links, but the speed with which the list grew, along with comments from a bunch of people, led me to organize it a little bit. Maybe not surprising for a librarian.

The list serves my original, stated purpose: a list for me and the world to use in order to find publishers of weird fiction. That said, lately I’ve been reading about the history of publishing, as well as literary sociology, and because I tend to overthink things, and because I’m having an especially ruminative year, I started pondering where this fits into the list of literary activities that are not creative writing: readings, social media, agenting, editing, reviewing, criticism, publishing, awards, conventions, conferences, affinity groups, etc. I don’t have any grand conclusions to articulate here, other than that I feel like the list is an attempt on my part to engage a little more fully with and contribute to the Weird-o-sphere.

And on the off chance you’re reading this and don’t know what weird fiction is? Here’s Stephen Graham Jones‘ Flowchart of the Weird [BoingBoing; Weird Fiction Review; flickr]:

Stephen Graham Jones’ Flowchart of the Weird