Samuel Johnston

The Read Report — February 2024

March has begun with an unseasonably warm weekend. Here in Minnesota, where we’re used to rough winters, it barely feels like we had any winter at all. Let’s jump back to February for my monthly report on what I’ve been reading.

To stay on theme, I’m trying to read more short stories this year. I end up reading quite a few while researching markets, but I’ve also got a stack of anthologies on my bookshelf that I’ll be reading as the year goes on.

I’m getting close to wrapping up the read-through of Harry Potter with my kids, and I finally returned to The Witcher series after an unplanned hiatus.

Where possible, I’ve included Bookshop.org affiliate links instead of Amazon. If any of these book pique your interest, please use those links. I’ll get a small commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of gig economy worker abuse.

Time Shift: Tales of Time

Edited by Eric Fomley

*(Unfortunately, may only be available on Kindle Unlimited now)*

For my February short stories, I picked Time Shift, an anthology of time travel flash fiction I picked up as a backer reward from The Martian Magazine.

Anthologies like this are awesome when you only have five or ten minutes to read. This one is even nicely pocket-sized. However, I’m reminded why I don’t like narrow themes like this. While any of these stories, individually, is good, thirty-eight stories about time travel, all in a row, started to feel repetitive.

If you like time travel and flash fiction, this is certainly the anthology for you. But if you’re like me, you might want to only consume them a few at a time.

The Witcher: The Time of Contempt

By Andrzej Sapkowski

I never intended to take a break from The Witcher series, but I got distracted by this and that, and suddenly a few months had gone by. The Witcher books consist of a five-book series, along with three anthologies of short stories that interconnect with the larger story. Time of Contempt is the fourth Witcher book, and the second book in the main series.

The setting for the story is the Northern Kingdoms, about a dozen countries of various sizes in a vaguely Nordic, medieval, semi-feudal fantasy world. A few years have passed since the attempted invasion of the huge southern Nilfgaardian Empire was barely stopped by an alliance of kingdoms and sorcerers in a decisive battle.

The Witcher, Geralt, had had his run-ins with royals in the past, but he’s made a point of staying out of politics. Now, however, he finds himself entangled by his ties to his adopted daughter, Cintran princess Ciri, and his sorceress partner Yennifer. War is brewing again between the Northern Kingdoms and Nilfgaard, but back-stabbing politics between kingdoms and factions of sorcerers make it look increasingly unlikely that the North will be able to unify again against their stronger adversary.

Ciri, despite her kingdom lying in ruins, is sought by royals and spies on both sides for her ability to legitimize claims over disputed lands near the center of the conflict. Some would kill her, while others would use her as a figurehead for political marriage. Even worse, she is believed by sorcerers and others to be the prophesied Child of Elder Blood, who may be destined to set off and/or finish a conflict of apocalyptic proportions.

Sapkowski does a great job combining the often humble difficulties of these powerful—but ultimately fallible and mortal—main characters, with the politics and machinations of classic high fantasy. All of the big movements of the world are revealed through small interactions. The widespread preparations for war are shown by following a royal messenger as he delivers secret messages, or the changes in market prices noted by a banker who sees the rich hedging their bets and fleeing in droves.

Geralt is the reluctant hero who could theoretically just walk away from all of this, but the people he loves cannot, so he gets drawn in through his efforts to protect them. He’s a likable character because he’s smart and moral, but he’s perpetually fighting a defensive fight to shield his family from forces he doesn’t entirely understand. The surface-level causes and effects of the war make sense, but it’s clear that there are deeper drivers of world events that haven’t yet been revealed: the Emperor of Nilfgaard and the Sorcerer Vigelfortz are both after Ciri because of something to do with the prophecy, but we don’t know why.

The languages and cultures of the world are, for my money, on par with the greats of the fantasy genre. The world is more gritty and grounded than the squeaky-clean high fantasy of Lord of the Rings, and the Polish influences make it feel distinct from the glut of generic Western European D&D knock-offs. The Elder Speech used by non-humans and sorcerers feels like a real language, and though few words are directly translated, it is consistent enough that phrases and patterns become familiar and recognizable.

Having recently read Palaniuk’s book on writing, I noticed some similarities in Sapkowski’s style. Palaniuk advocates writing each chapter of a book as a short story that can effectively stand alone. The early Witcher books are short stories that contribute to a larger narrative. The series books are more focused, but most sections are still nicely self-contained, and there are many smaller pieces within the narrative that could stand alone, without the context of the series.

The Time of Contempt ends with the three main characters separated, each of them in a bad place. However, they are survivors, and the question is how they will be able to get back together and solve the problems that plague them.

If it isn’t obvious, I’m delighted to be back in this series. It’s a joy to read, and I plan to plow through the rest of the books in the near future.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

By J. K. Rowling

Half-Blood Prince might be the most interesting Harry Potter book. In a series that relies on patterns that repeat in each book, this is the book where most of the patterns get broken.

The Harry Potter books usually slavishly follow Harry’s perspective. Half-Blood Prince, however, opens with two chapters where the namesake character is conspicuously absent. The first is a meeting between the newly elected wizard Minister of Magic and the “muggle” Prime Minister, showing just how much the war between wizards is bleeding out from their usually secret world. The second is a meeting between the bad guys where a promise is made that will be fulfilled at the end of the book.

This collapse of familiar structures mirrors the plot: the order of the wizard world, and the world as Harry Potter understands it, is falling apart. Despite this, it might be the most well-plotted book in the series.

The language in this book is also different. This is partly a continuation of the trend away from the childishness of the first few books, as the language grew alongside the audience. It’s also clear that some of this came with Rowling gaining experience. I’m sure she had a stellar editing team at this point as well. However, I suspect that the language is more cinematic, more vividly descriptive, partly because Rowling had the opportunity to see the first couple books adapted as movies by the time the series was wrapping up.

The ending of this book is, of course, the big twist that has become something of a meme by now. But that’s because it’s a pretty good twist. It’s hard to imagine a bigger, more unexpected plot point for the series, short of one of the three main characters dying. This ending really is the ultimate way to signal that the story is now off the map. The final book will do without the patterns and conventions of the previous six, and will tread into the darkest territory of the series.

Die

By Kieron Gillen, Illustrated by Stephanie Hans

I fell backward into this series, reading the TTRPG rulebook based on the comic before I got the book itself. My understanding is that they were created in tandem though, so it seems appropriate.

The book itself is a beautiful, monstrously thick hardback with an understated black cover. The slightly oversized comics form factor feels oddly tall and skinny for a book with this much heft. The art is full color, and the style is dreamlike. Almost every panel is either crowded with shadows or blown-out with background light.

The first two chapters describe the backstory: a group of misfit teens play a magical RPG that sucks them into the fantasy world of the game. They don’t return until two years later, missing one person and one arm, and considerably worse for wear. They never tell anyone what happened to them.

Twenty years pass, and they meet up again, brought together by the mysterious return of the magical dice that transported them, and memories of the player they left behind. Most of their lives aren’t going well. They still carry the traumas of their past. Once again, they’re sucked into the fantasy world of Die.

Like so many of the stories I’m drawn to, Die is a metafiction, obsessed with the structures and dynamics of stories. Where Sandman is a contemplation of dreams and myths, and The Unwritten is a study in fantasy tropes, Die is an analysis of story and conflict in tabletop RPGs, and the interplay between players, player-characters, and the game. In fact, the back of the book is taken up with a number of essays on TTRPGs written concurrently with the story itself.

Unfortunately, I feel like Die is a little too eager to define itself in shorthand references to greater works. It bludgeons the reader with big nods to Tolkein, Wells and Lovecraft, but they are shallow references, and not enough new and interesting is built on top of them. Die is constantly saying things like

The Fair are…”What if William Gibson designed elves.”

…or…

Glass Town is Rivendell meets Casablanca, Oz in No Man’s Land.

Eventually, I found myself desperate for something in the world that wasn’t described in terms of something else. Unfortunately, the gods of Die and the Fallen half-zombies are the most unique aspects of the setting, but they’re only rarely touched upon. I couldn’t help feeling that Die is a little too clever, and a little too eager to show you how clever it is. There is a certain cynicism to a story that hides behind its influences. By not exposing its heart, the story and the author don’t leave themselves open to praise or criticism in their own right.

Die is driven by a simple idea: the characters are trapped in this fictional world, and the only way they can go home is if they all agree to it. The challenge is that they do not get along, so getting everyone to agree is no simple task. It can’t be done through force, only through negotiation.

While that’s a fun concept, I felt like the motivations of the characters were too mercurial. Their disagreements and fights felt too arbitrary, too inorganic. It’s the soap opera problem, where the characters whims shift in service to every twist and turn in the plot.

In retrospect, I see that a lot of my review here is negative, and that is probably unfair. Die ultimately didn’t quite land for me, but it does do a lot of things well. The art is beautiful, and it presents a huge number of interesting ideas. And while many of them work on a granular level, they don’t quite mesh into a satisfying whole.

I’m not the most die-hard fan of TTRPGs, but I’ve played a decent amount. Over the years, I’ve come to realize and accept that the story in a TTRPG campaign will never conform to the shape of a well-crafted novel or movie. As a GM, trying to make that kind of story is a mistake. It can’t work when there are four or more people all driving it together. There will be tangents. It will meander. And that’s okay. It’s a different sort of experience than a novel or movie. Despite the incredible popularity of TTRPG “actual play” podcasts and videos in recent years, I firmly believe these stories are more enjoyable as a contributor than they are as an external viewer.

Strangely, I feel the same way about Die. I can feel a great story in there for someone, I just wasn’t able to experience it myself.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1

By Alan Moore, Illustrated by Kevin O’Neill

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was originally published in 1999. Ironically perhaps, for a series that cribs from the earliest science fiction, it feels older than that. I suspect that feeling is due to the outsized influence that League has had on indie comics. We see echoes of it in many things that came after, so when we return to the original, it seems a little less unique and strange than it did at first. But it still holds up pretty well.

If Die is a story that rubs me the wrong way with its blatant references to other stories, League is the polar opposite. Practically every single page is jammed to the gills with references to turn of the 20th century proto-science-fiction. However, there are no winks and no nods. The story doesn’t feel the need to draw attention to the references.

In the first few pages, our scarf-clad main character, Mina Harker (né Murray) meets with her employer, Campion Bond, who works for a mysterious M. Then she’s off to retrieve a second main character, the opium-addled Alan Quatermain, taking the taciturn Mr. Nemo’s submersible. The League is rounded out with the help of Mssr. Dupin in acquiring the two-faced Dr. Jekyl, and they locate a certain invisible man at the estate of Rosa Cootes.

The story is so stuffed with familiar names that it’s easy to latch on to Jekyl or Nemo or the invisible man and not worry about the rest. But an avid reader can search out every name and turn up another interesting lost corner of old pulp literature. League draws upon an absurd number of stories and mashes them together with reckless abandon. The result is something pulpy and silly and occasionally self-serious in much the same ways as the stories that it cribs from.

The story fully embraces the casual racism, sexism, self-righteous colonialism, and all the other -isms endemic to the British Empire as it approached the 20th century. This could easily come across as crass, but it manages to feel accurate to that world and time period. And as the main characters tend to be on the receiving end more often than not, it doesn’t feel as though these ideas or behaviors are condoned.

That’s not to say that the protagonists are good people all of the time. Or even most of the time. They don’t get along with each other, let alone the rest of the world around them.

The art is a style that I’m not sure I’ve seen elsewhere. It’s detailed and scribbly in equal measure, with impossible, caricature proportions that combine realistic and cartoon aesthetics.

At the end of the six issue series is a lightly-illustrated bonus story called “Allan and the Sundered Devil.” This adds a little more color to Quatermain’s character and acts as a mini-prequel to the main story. It leans into the pulp fiction premise of League even more than the comic, and the prose is so purple that I found it a little much to read.

This is the only volume that I’ve read previously, but the pile of comics I received at Christmas included three more volumes of League. I’ll be reading those in the coming months and seeing how they hold up compared to the first. This one, at least, I would consider a must-read for any fan of non-superhero comics.

What I’m Reading In March

The final book of Harry Potter, the continuation of The Witcher and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. For short stories, I’ve got some light reading lined up in The Complete Works of Ernest Hemingway.

Year of Short Stories — Week #7

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 1
Submissions This Week – 1
Submissions Currently Out – 3
Rejections This Year – 2

Thanks to a failure of scheduled posts, this is going out on a Wednesday night, not a Monday morning. Oops…

Torpedo Away

As I mentioned last week, I was waiting for final notes from my wife on the revised version of “The Incident at Pleasant Hills.” She gave me that feedback, and I ended up spending another few days editing again.

However, I finally decided that enough was enough, and sent it out. I’m sure I could go through it another five times and change another word here or there, but eventually you just have to admit it’s about as good as it’s going to get and move on to something new.

Something New

Hopefully, now that I’m really, truly done with Pleasant Hills, I can spend more time this week figuring out what to work on next. Oddly, because I had a few stories ready to send out and one in progress, this is the first time this year that I’ve had to sit down and begin something new.

I poked and prodded at “Portrait of the Artist in Wartime,” which is still theoretically the next story on the docket. I still like the idea, but I realized this week that I don’t yet have everything I need to make it into a proper story. The central conflict is conspicuously absent. I’m going to need to solve that problem, or else find a different story to work on.

To that end, I sifted through my old writing files, looking for other half-baked ideas and drafts that might inspire me. There are a few that I would like to revisit, but I didn’t have any epiphanies.

Goals for Next Week

Just one: decide on the next project and put together an outline.

Submission Fees for Short Fiction

There is a truism among authors that has been passed down for many years: “Money should always flow toward the writer.” In a world where many writers are desperate for recognition and the opportunity to be published and read, and where many unscrupulous people are happy to prey upon them, this is a good default attitude to have.

However, the publishing landscape has changed drastically in the decades since this truism was popularized. Traditional publishing, with its gauntlets of gatekeepers, is no longer the only path to success. Many choose to self-publish, and in self-publishing, sometimes it takes money to make money. Readers, editors, cover-artists and myriad other paid contractors are often used by successful self-published authors to polish their work and attract a wider audience.

I’ll admit that I’ve always been more focused on the traditional routes to publishing, so I was even more surprised to discover that fees paid by writers have crept into the world of short fiction as well. And this isn’t even self-publishing. It is now widely considered normal for literary magazines to charge several dollars in reading fees to authors who submit short stories for consideration, even when those journals pay little or nothing upon publication.

How Did This Happen?

In reading about this topic, I’ve come across a few explanations (or excuses) for this sea change. The audience for short fiction has been shrinking for years, stolen by games and movies and social media, so it’s harder to sell magazines. Publishing has always been a hard business, and it’s getting harder. Editors need fair compensation. Too many writers are submitting, and the slush pile is unmanageable.

There is no shortage of voices, both writers and editors, who claim that submission fees are “worth it.” Fees allow more literary journals to survive, which means more short fiction is published. These journals provide a valuable service: a place for up-and-coming writers to show off their work and grow their audience.

Publishing is not a business that moves quickly or embraces technology easily. That’s why Amazon was able to take over the ecosystem from publishers that dominated for decades. However, most of these journals have finally moved online in recent years. In fact, many no longer have any print presence whatsoever.

Many of the costs of running a journal are fixed: editors and readers are needed to trawl through the never-ending slush pile of submissions. Websites have maintenance costs. But there are also costs of printing that scale with the number of issues printed. Moving online should result in some sort of savings. So why are submission fees still becoming more popular?

There’s another reason for these fees, whispered wherever authors and editors gather: Submittable.

Fees as a Service

Submittable, according to its marketing, “streamlines workflows for publications of every kind, so you can get your content to more audiences, faster.”

Submittable is a private, VC-funded startup that provides software-as-a-service. I don’t think there are public numbers, but it’s likely that literary magazines are only a small part of their overall business.

For these journals, Submittable provides a means to accept, track, and respond to electronic submissions. No more piles of mail. No more paper manuscripts. Organize the slush pile, and send responses with a few clicks.

Sounds like a great thing. Except that Submittable makes its money by charging a fee for each submission it processes. This means that more submissions cost the journal more to process. Thanks to the pressure of these fees, Submittable’s business model often becomes the journal’s business model.

Cause and Effect

I don’t find the pleas for understanding from editors particularly sympathetic. They suggest that editors consider their own difficulties more important than any hardship their writers might face. I’ve seen more than one editor suggest that it’s unreasonable for writers to be mad. After all, don’t their staff deserve to be paid a living wage? Never mind that even full-time writers often don’t make enough to get over the poverty line.

Are these editors publishing as a side-job? It’s not uncommon. But it’s still uneven treatment to suggest that their side-gig deserves pay more than the authors that actually fill their publication.

I’m even less sympathetic toward submission fees when the journal doesn’t pay upon acceptance. What other profession requires the people producing the work to pay? This only makes sense under the assumption that art doesn’t hold any real economic value.

Is it really a valuable service to show off the work of upcoming writers while costing them money? If the publication isn’t being read enough to actually make money, how effectively is it promoting these writers? There are tons of ways authors could put their own work out into the world effectively for free, so the value of a journal must be prestige a or gatekeeper that ensures quality.

Nowhere else in publishing is this considered acceptable. Authors with a book in hand are warned never to work with an agent who requires up-front fees. Agents take a cut of the actual profit as motivation to get their clients a good deal. Book publishers who charge authors up-front fees are condescendingly referred to as “vanity presses.” So what makes short fiction (and especially short literary fiction) different?

Misaligned Incentives

Publishing works best when all the incentives align with the goal of creating a good product. A publication that relies on purchases and subscriptions from readers is incentivized to provide the most satisfying product to those readers. When less of the overall budget comes from readers, the incentives change. A hypothetical magazine that makes all its money from submission fees is incentivized to maximize the number of submissions, not the number and satisfaction of readers. It wouldn’t matter if the magazine had no readers, if they could convince authors to keep submitting.

Reading fees also skew publishing even more toward the privileged, and add yet another obstacle for struggling writers. A $2-3 fee isn’t a lot, but it is an emotional, mental, and sometimes very real financial barrier that a writer must overcome to submit. Determined writers aren’t submitting a couple times. They’re submitting dozens of times, sometimes for a single story. Fees add up.

Some publications have fee-free periods, or reduced and waived fees for specific underprivileged groups. This is a good thing, because it tries to address the problem, but it only goes so far. It’s a half measure that admits there is an issue, while only offering a partial solution.

But What Are The Alternatives?

It’s not easy to run a small publication. But that doesn’t make it ethical or justified to charge writers. Writers may seem like an infinite resource, and they are often abused because it is easy to do so.

For many writers, making a living (or something closer to a living) involves diversifying their income streams. They take writing contracts or work as journalists, copy-editors and proofreaders. To survive in challenging times, publications need to also diversify and be clever about their income streams. Luckily, we live in a time where there are a lot of ways to diversify.

Patreon, Kickstarter, and other crowd-funding platforms make it possible to build a community where the people who care about what you do can contribute directly to it. Many publications crowd-fund their regular issues and kickstart anthologies or other special editions. This requires good community engagement and providing a product that people like.

I’ve seen a few publications with optional submission fees. This is another form of patronage where authors who are well-off can offset the costs for those who aren’t. This can also take the form of payment for feedback, which is sometimes a nice option for those who are looking to improve their craft and struggling to understand why they aren’t landing more stories.

Merch, ads and sponsorships are other possible avenues for funding, all with their own upsides and downsides. With all these options, it’s easy to forget the original and simplest business model for literary journals: readers paying for stories. This can take the form of subscriptions, per-issue pricing, freemium models, and a million other variations.

Dumping Submittable

When it comes to Submittable, with its problematic fees, I think there’s a straightforward way to make things better. Just stop using it.

The speculative fiction (sci-fi/fantasy/horror) community is lucky to have an unusually high percentage of tech-savvy people working in it. There’s a reason why we have sites like Critters. Unlike other communities, spec-fic has pretty much completely eschewed Submittable. Instead, they’ve worked together and pooled resources to build tools like Moksha, or the Clarkesworld submission system. And none of them charge submission fees.

Don’t Settle

I come at this topic with a biased perspective. I’m a writer, and I don’t like paying fees to submit my work. But I don’t think it’s biased to say that submission fees for short fiction have a negative effect on readers, writers, and publishers. They might be the easiest solution to a hard problem, but that doesn’t make them the correct solution.

Writers shouldn’t excuse submission fees as a necessary evil. We should expect more from literary journals, even if that means these publications need to explore a creative mix of funding solutions to remain viable. Rather than accepting overpriced tools like Submittable, publications should work together on community tools that serve the community’s needs.

Writers and editors should be pursuing the same goals: a vibrant, healthy fiction ecosystem that not only produces great art, but also values that art and the writers producing it.

Reblog: Finding Confidence — John August

This week’s reblog comes from screenwriter John August, of the popular Script Notes podcast. If you’re a fan of Script Notes, his SubStack Inneresting is really just more of the same in text form. I’d highly recommend it.

As usual, August comes at his topics from a screenwriter’s perspective, but the discussion pertains to any kind of writer. This one is a mailbag post addressing questions of confidence in writing.

First, there’s the question of insecurity vs. arrogance. I think most of us struggle with this in some form or another, even if we don’t have full-on imposter syndrome. When I was young, I read some advice that suggested cultivating both feelings simultaneously: be your own biggest critic, while also remembering all the ways that you’re fantastic. It’s a bit of a mental magic trick, but it’s a good goal to strive for.

Other questions include whether it benefits a writer to be unpopular or self-obsessed, and what to do when you’ve lost your confidence.

Read the rest over at John August’s blog, Inneresting…

Year of Short Stories — Week #6

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 1
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 2
Rejections This Year – 2

It’s Quiet. Too Quiet…

I received no responses this week. Based on the average response times for the two places I’ve submitted, I expect to get at least one next week. Of course, as I get more stories into the rotation, this will pick up, and I’ll have fewer “quiet” weeks.

Revisions for Pleasant Hills

This was my big goal for the past few weeks: finish revisions on “The Incident at Pleasant Hills.” It only took about three times as long as I planned, but I’m happy with how the story turned out.

I finished with all of my revision notes, and it’s going to get one last read-through from my wife. Once she’s done and I’ve addressed her final feedback, it’ll be ready to send out.

Another One

One of the many nice things about writing short stories is that each one requires considerably less up-front thought than a novel. Now that I’m done with Pleasant Hills, I can jump right into the next.

I mentioned in previous weeks that I was thinking about “Portrait of the Artist in Wartime,” a story about a performance artist who uses time travel to make his point. I briefly thought about writing the story from the artist’s perspective, but I eventually decided that it would work better if it was told by his former assistant in the form of a magazine interview. Because the article is written with the expectation that the reader will already be familiar with some of the events of the story, I can leave out certain information at first, and create some twists and turns as it is revealed.

I reviewed my notes for this story, and discovered that I had actually written a few tentative pages at some point. I have a pretty clear idea of the ending, so I just need to plan out the rough beats that lead to that ending.

Other Bits and Bobs

Before I get too deep into “Portrait,” I’m going to think about some other projects as well.

I’d like to spend some time thinking about interactive fiction, to see if I can come up with an idea for Plotopolis. However, since interactive fiction is so niche, I don’t want to spend too much time on it. If I submit something and get rejected, there really isn’t anywhere else to send it, so it’s a dead story.

I’m also still occasionally stirring the stew of ideas for themed submissions. I might spend another few hours this week more actively working on that.

Goals for Next Week

Think about interactive fiction and themed submissions
Submit “Pleasant Hills”
Work on “Portrait”

Year of Short Stories —Week #5

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 1
Submissions This Week – 1
Submissions Currently Out – 2
Total Rejections – 2

(I doubt anyone is setting their watch to my blog posts, but I wanted to note that I’ll be shifting these updates to Mondays, which fits better with my writing schedule.)

Second Rejection

This week marked my second rejection of the year, a response for Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug, which had been out for about three weeks. I’ve now had one rejection for each story I’m submitting, which feels like a small milestone.

I’m learning to batch the effort of finding publications for a story by jotting down several options, so that when the story comes back to me, I can send it off again with less downtime.

Revisions for Pleasant Hills

After a couple weeks where I felt I wasn’t getting much done on this story, I tried to buckle down and get these revisions done. I even took a day off my day job to sneak in some extra writing time.

Revision is hard to quantify, especially with short stories. There are no word count quotas or chapters to measure progress against. I definitely get more done when I can set specific, measurable goals.

To that end, I made a checklist of problems to resolve and went through them one by one. Most of these items involved adding words, so the final step will be to trim, trim, trim.

So, as I suspected last week, I didn’t manage to finish. However, I’m close, and I should be done before the next update.

Goals For Next Week

Finish and submit Pleasant Hills
Start a new short story

Year of Short Stories —Week #4

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 1
Submissions This Week – 1
Submissions Currently Out – 2
Rejections – 1

The First Rejection of the Year

“Tom, Dick, and Derek” garnered my first rejection of the year. This was a turnaround of only a few days, but it’s not too surprising since it’s a drabble and the magazine was only accepting flash fiction. I’m still not entirely sure of the viability of 100-word stories, but I’ll continue submitting to flash fiction publications and see how it goes.

Revisions for Pleasant Hills

This week, I re-read all the feedback I had received for “The Incident at Pleasant Hills” and condensed it into a page of bullet points of things to address, and several more pages of small line edits and suggestions for wording improvements. Most of these are straightforward fixes. A few are things that the story needs, and I just need to figure out where to put them. But there are a couple problems that I don’t have a solution for yet.

One of the things I need to improve about my writing process is handling revisions. I was hoping to be done or close to done with this story last week, but now that I’m in the middle of it, I’ll be happy if I can get it all done in the next week. I’m quickly realizing that writing short stories is a juggling act between keeping finished stories out on submission, and writing and editing new stories.

Themed Submissions

I mentioned last time that I was thinking about trying some themed submissions.

This week, I trolled the Duotrope listings, looking for themed submissions in speculative fiction genres that pay pro and semi-pro rates. I started with the basic search, and was annoyed to find no good search options to filter down to these. So I searched the listings and read the submissions pages. It was only after I had gone through twenty or thirty publications that I discovered Duotrope’s entirely separate page, the Theme and Deadline Calendar, which is designed for exactly this.

Having gone on my own search before discovering these listings, I know it’s not showing everything that’s out there. For example, Apex Magazine’s monthly flash fiction contest doesn’t show up. This probably comes down to how the listings are categorized.

If you’ve got the time and the inclination to write for these themed submissions, it might be worth doing your own research to track them down. However, the Duotrope listing is pretty good, and won’t suck up a whole afternoon.

With a few options in hand, I spent time brainstorming for the Parsec short story contest’s “AI Mythology” theme. I filled a couple pages with Story Engine ideas, but nothing that particularly excited me. I find Story Engine useful because it creates interesting constraints, but in this case, where the theme is already a significant constraint, I think it might be too much.

I plan to come back to these themed submissions every week or two and try other methods of brainstorming. It’s a good exercise to stay productive when I don’t feel like working on the stories in progress.

Fun Find – Plotopolis

Plotopolis is a new site for interactive fiction. It’s launching this winter, but open for submissions and proposals now. If you’re not familiar with interactive fiction, I wrote a post about it. It can be as simple as Choose Your Own Adventure-style branching narrative, or as complex and gamified as Fallen London, with character attributes and an inventory of items.

Interactive fiction has gained some acceptance as gaming in general has entered the cultural mainstream, but it remains a fairly small niche, so it’s nice to see something like this popping up. Hopefully they find their feet and are able to stick around.

Goals for Next Week

Only one goal this week: revise Pleasant Hills! I want to get this one done and out for submission.

The Read Report — January 2024

It’s a new year. I’m working on the pile of books and comics I got for Christmas, and mostly ignoring the books I had planned to read. Someday I’ll get back to The Witcher. Someday.

If any of these sound interesting, please use my bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon. I’ll get a small commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of phallic rockets for billionaires.

Signal to Noise

By Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

I thought I had read nearly all of the Gaiman/McKean comics collaborations, but this one somehow slipped under my radar. Published in 1989, Signal to Noise is almost a prototype of their future work. It’s a little less subtle with its themes than later works, but it still shows that expertise at crafting a story that can be observed from a dozen different angles to reveal some new through-line or idea.

The “noise” cutting through the signal of the story is nonsensical text, hinting at meaning without ever finding it. At the end of the book, it’s explained that this text was produced by a text sampler program, a 1989 prototype of the LLMs that have recently become so prevalent.

McKean’s illustrations are a fever-dream. The filmmaker inhabits a foggy ghost world. The movie in his head is unfocused and clogged with snow. Pops of color cut through: the yellow of a wheel clamp on an illegally-parked car, a red traffic light, a rare splash of green from a potted plant. The story is drowning in monochrome blue-white-gray, and the splashes of color are quick breaths before going under again. The panels shift between purposely similar 4×4 squares (evoking strips of film) and luscious full-page spreads, especially potent in this oversized form-factor.

The main character is a filmmaker, who is dying. He’s composing a movie in his head: people in the year 999, waiting for the new year, when they expect the world to end. A dying man composing a story of the apocalypse. But the apocalypse never came for those people.

For me, the resonating theme of the book is creator’s remorse. The work, when done, is never as good as it was in your head. But there is always hope that the next piece will be the one that works. Still, there is joy in it. A finished piece of art evokes “the feeling that one has clawed back something from eternity, that one has put something over on a nodding god, that one has beaten the system.”

Death: The High Cost of Living

By Neil Gaiman and Chris Bachalo

Continuing the theme of old Gaiman comics, we have short spin-off in the Sandman universe, starring the effervescent goth girl Death, possibly the most popular of the Endless, apart from Dream.

Once each century, Death must spend a day as a mortal, and this just happens to be that day. She meets a boy named Sexton, who happens to have written a suicide note he has yet to act on. He is utterly disillusioned with the world, as only an inexperienced teenager can be.

Death, going by Didi today, explains who she is and invites Sexton to spend the day with her. He does , complaining all the way, and only slowly coming to believe Didi really is the personification of Death.

The magic of the Sandman version of Death is that she knows everyone, and she loves everyone, regardless of how the average human might judge them. She embodies the Christian ideal of kindness that many people aspire to, and none really achieve. So, of course, she goes on a little adventure with Sexton, and it changes him. He gains a new outlook on life. I won’t spoil who ends up dying at the end.

If you like the Sandman universe, this is a fun little jaunt along the edges of it, with a few familiar faces, and a good story in its own right.

Persepolis

By Marjane Satrapi

Persepolis is autobiographical history in the comic tradition of Maus. The author grew up in Iran, living in a well-off family of intellectuals.

The first part of the book is largely about Satrapi’s childhood, and the many revolutionary elements that led to the overthrow of the Shah, followed by the disappointment of groups like the communist revolutionaries when the movement was hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists.

In the second half, Satrapi moves overseas, attends college in Germany. She gets into drugs, spends time homeless, and manages to rebuild her life. After her time abroad, she returns to Iran and finds herself chafing against the rules of the regime.

She finds a boyfriend and marries, but they are almost immediately unhappy. The end of the book is abrupt. She gets a divorce and moves overseas again, this time to France.

Although it’s sometimes disjointed, the book is a great ground-level introduction to the recent history of Iran and a culture that I certainly didn’t learn much about, growing up in America.

There seems to be an inherent dissonance in Iranian culture between public and private life. Despite Islamic theocracy, many Iranians hold on to Persian culture, seeing themselves as independent from the rest of the Middle East. The fundamentalist regime makes the consumption of alcohol and mixed-gender parties illegal, but they still secretly happen with regularity. Head coverings are mandatory and makeup is frowned-upon, but many women flout these rules, even in public when they think they can get away with it. Punishments for breaking these cultural rules can be avoided by paying a fine, which results in the wealthy having much more leeway than the poor.

While it might be cliche, the obvious takeaway is that Western countries have more in common with Iran than the uneducated (like me) might think. There is a thread of fierce personal independence and self-determination in these stories that will feel familiar to anyone who has grown up in America, as will the rifts between social classes and the mismatch between public perception and private reality.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

By J.K. Rowling

The Potter read-through with my kids continues. It’s the fifth book in the seven-book Potter series, and everything’s falling apart. Wizard Hitler is back in town, consolidating power in secret. Meanwhile, the government refuses to believe the only evidence: the eyewitness testimony of our 15-year-old protagonist.

As a series of kids’ books, I’m willing to overlook some of the simplicity of world-building that a lot of folks like to harp on, but this book really makes it clear how dysfunctional the “wizarding world” is. There are a great many institutions that are unique in the wizarding world, and that makes it awfully easy to gain and abuse power.

There’s effectively only one wizard newspaper. The government apparently exerts tremendous control over it, and can just squash articles they don’t like. Harry only gets his story published in a homemade conspiracy zine.

There’s a very simple wizard government, with a single head of state that seems to have total control over the unicameral legislature. In fact, it’s not even clear if anyone except the wizard president even needs to sign off on new laws.

There’s a single, hellish maximum-security wizard prison, which seems to be the default punishment for any non-trivial offense. There’s a single wizard bank, just in case the all-powerful government wants to exert economic controls as well. Finally, there’s only one wizard school in the country, so it’s nice and easy to lock down that educational system.

The wizarding world is a model autocracy. No wonder a new wizard Hitler crops up every couple decades.

Anyway, this book marks Harry at his most persecuted. The all-powerful government hates him because he keeps saying that Voldemort is back, and exerts all its power to convince everyone he’s a crazy person. His friends are mostly children, so they can do very little about this. The few adults on his side have created a secret society to try to fight back, because they’d be targets for the all-powerful government if they were open about it.

The theme of being unable to depend on adults really reaches its peak here. The school is taken over by a sadistic pawn of the government, the adults who Harry trusts are picked off one-by-one, and even Dumbledore, who has always been a bit like Old Testament God (distant, but loving authority figure), purposely abandons Harry.

As usual, Harry leads the kids by ignoring all adult advice and doing what he thinks is best. On the one hand, this is a pretty bad idea because he knows full well that all the adults have been hiding a lot of information from him. He doesn’t really know what’s going on. As usual, he’s ignored their warnings. On the other hand, this has worked out well for him in every single book up to this point. Maybe if the adults wanted him to behave, they should have tried a little harder to parent the headstrong super-wizard orphan boy.

Where previous books like Prisoner of Azkaban toyed with the idea that Harry’s poorly thought-out actions might cause real problems, everything always turned out prefectly when he followed his gut. Even the first death of the series in Goblet of Fire was not really his fault. He got played by an adult he trusted. But in Order of the Phoenix, Harry lets his intuition guide him, against the advice of literally everyone, and the result is terrible.

Sure, they get incontrovertible evidence that Voldemort’s back. So that’s nice. It just costs the life of the only person Harry considers family.

There is also a problem of Harry’s personality in this book. He’s constantly angry, and generally mean to all of his friends. In the end, it turns out that he’s being psychically manipulated, but there really aren’t enough hints about what’s going on, so he just comes across as an unpleasant character for most of the book.

Consider This

By Chuck Palahniuk

I won’t harp on this one, since I’ve already written a separate post about it. Suffice to say it’s the best book on writing that I’ve read in a few years.

What I’m Reading in February

Harry Potter continues. I’m halfway through a beautiful hardcover complete edition of the comic Die. I may dig into a stack of anthologies, to stay on-brand for my year of short stories. And there is always the eternal promise of jumping back into The Witcher. It could happen.

See you in February.

Year of Short Stories —Week #3

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 1
Submissions this Week – 1
Submissions Currently Out – 2

Submitting a Drabble

I reviewed quite a few options this week, and ended up submitting my drabble, “Tom, Dick, and Derek,” to a magazine taking flash fiction submissions. I’ve never sent out a drabble before, and I have no idea whether the incredibly short format will be a disadvantage or not.

As a general rule, it’s a little easier to sell short stories than long ones. In the old days, when everything was on paper, this was a simple matter of limited pages. Magazines cost money to print, and there’s a limit to the number of words that will fit. In a world where many publications are entirely online or have a web component, the limiting factor might be attention, rather than space.

However, I suspect the general rule breaks down when a story gets below about 500 words. While there are plenty of places to sell flash fiction, when the story gets short enough, the format becomes a distinguishing feature. There are a handful of publications that specialize in drabbles, but they’re few and far between.

Critique Revisions

My short story, “The Incident at Pleasant Hills,” is a more traditional short story at roughly 2000 words. I ran it through Critters a while ago, and got a lot of useful feedback. This week, I reacquainted myself with the story and began to re-read all that feedback, distilling it into broader issues and line edits. Hopefully I can finish those revisions this week.

Themed Submissions

While I was scanning publications in Duotrope this week, a few calls for themed submissions caught my eye. These are usually for one-off themed issues of magazines, but they can also pop up for anthologies or writing contests.

This is one of those things that I was aware of, but never really took seriously. Maybe it’s the difficulty of coming up with an interesting story for a specific prompt. Maybe it’s the concern that a story crafted to fit a theme will be harder to sell somewhere else if it’s rejected. However, if I’m going to be spending a year on short stories, it seems like a great time to get my feet wet.

I may spend some time brainstorming ideas for themed submissions this week, but if I don’t get around to it now, I’ll definitely try to dedicate some time later.

Goals for Next Week

Finish revising “Pleasant Hills”
Begin writing “Portrait of the Artist in Wartime”
Brainstorm ideas for themed submissions

(Don’t) Write Every Day

Last week, in the second post of my series on writing short stories, I had already missed my weekly goals. Hardly the end of the world, but I was still a little disappointed in myself.

I have a notebook from NaNoWriMo that says “Write Every Day” on the cover. It’s exactly the thing that NaNoWriMo advocates. It might be the most commonly given writing advice. After all, if you want to be prolific, you’re going to need to write a lot. Right?

Well, yes and no.

The reason we have this mantra is because it’s hard. Most of us don’t write every day, even if we aspire to. However, simple aphorisms usually obscure a more complicated truth. Writing every day doesn’t guarantee success, and success doesn’t require writing every day.

The Self-Designed Job

Most of us who write fiction on spec are writing entirely on our own. There is no job description, no education or work history requirements. Nobody evaluated our resumes. We woke up one day and decided to write. Even those of us who have more formal writing jobs are often freelancers or contractors.

It can be powerful to choose your own goals and working hours. It can also be difficult. It’s not as simple as going into the office 9–5. It’s not as easy as having work handed down from a boss. Being self-directed means there are no defined boundaries to the job. You can work too little, or far too much.

I realized a few years ago that I was always setting goals for myself, and almost never satisfied with my own achievement. My performance reviews for my self-defined job were consistently bad. But this is really just my own personality issue. It doesn’t actually reflect my performance. Understanding that, I can more easily recognize that feeling and let it go.

Writing is More Than Writing

It’s not surprising how many writers hate talking about their own work, or trying to sell it. We write because we love writing, not because we want to do writing-adjacent business stuff. Unfortunately, that’s not the real world. If you want people to read what you’re writing, there’s probably some amount of business and self-promotion that needs to be done.

Beyond that, writing is more than putting words on the page. There’s work to be done before the first draft, coming up with ideas and refining them. There’s work to be done after, revising and editing. There are classes, books, and blogs about craft.

There is even the undefinable work of being out in the world, observing people and things, having the experiences that will inform the work. Fiction can only be as interesting as the inner world of the author. That stew of ideas requires ingredients and time.

I’ve even found blogging or journaling to be incredibly useful for my writing. Sometimes experience isn’t enough; it takes reflection to unlock that understanding. I can’t count the number of times that writing about my process resulted in exciting new ideas.

Moving Toward the Mountain

If you’re like me, and you have that voice in the back of your head that complains when you’re not writing “enough,” there are a few things you can do to address it. Make a list of all the things that contribute to the writing. Include things like ideation, editing, and critique. Include that fun business stuff, whether it be sending work to traditional publishers, working on self-publishing, or something as mundane as accounting for taxes. Include reflection, like blogging or journaling.

Ask yourself honestly if you’re allocating enough time to rest, recharge, and feed that stew of ideas that will, in turn, feed your stories. Don’t be afraid of taking a break, or even a vacation. If you want writing to be a “real” job, it should come with sick days and vacation time.

When pursuing goals, there are a lot of different ways to move toward the mountain. Sometimes the path isn’t straight. We have to put words to paper if we’re going to be writers. But not necessarily every day.