My News

Letting you know my news.

Dagan Books Fish Acceptance

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Dagan Books Fish CoverSome time ago, I wrote a piece of whimsical absurdism. I was soon to discover it’s hard to sell absurdism. And by hard, I mean some of the rejections I got implied the slush reader wanted to take my keyboard, burn it, stomp on the pieces, then burn it again, so I wouldn’t write another just like it.

Then as I was browsing market listings, I came across an anthology for fish stories. My first thought being: “I have a story about fish!”*

I read the submission call and it sounded like they just might appreciate absurdism. So off went my fishy absurdism story, and I braced for a keyboard-burning rejection. It wasn’t that fast though, because it hadn’t reached the cut-off date and the publisher put out a few blog posts in the meantime. I didn’t make any of the most common cover letter mistakes, and my fish were real fish, but I quailed somewhat when goldfish were listed as one of the most common submissions. I should have guessed they would be, but I was in originality denial. I continued the denial by convincing myself that my goldfish were different.

But they didn’t want to burn my keyboard. “Thwarting the Fiends” will appear in Dagan Books ‘Fish’ anthology, coming out early in 2012. Yay for absurd fish!

It turns out I know or speak to a number of the authors on the list, and if I try to list them, I’ll probably forget someone (or end up listing half the list). So instead, here’s a link to Dagan’s post:

Fish Table of Contents

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* This isn’t really a surprise. Probably more surprising is I only had one story about fish.

# The cover art is by Galen Dara.

Roses Story in Nature (Nature Futures)

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My hard science fiction piece “War of the Roses” is in the current issue of Nature (Volume 467 (7316), 7 October 2010). At least, that’s what their website says and I’m going to believe them.

It looks like the story is available online at the moment, but I don’t know how long that’ll last as they’re not primarily an online market: War of the Roses

Back when I was studying for my ecology degree, Nature was one of those places trainee scientists wanted to get published in. Perhaps a paper about some amazing research into the sort of things ecologists research*. I probably wouldn’t have believed time-travelling future me if I said I’d get a piece of fiction published there.

At least fiction doesn’t need citations**.

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* Usually stuff like measuring lichens and wading out into swamps to take insect samples. Ecologists are the hardy branch of biologists.

** Blake, Polenth, A Bunch of Random Stuff about Roses, Polenth’s Brain, 2010

Steampunk in Bards and Sages Quarterly

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I have a piece of flash fiction out in Bards and Sages Quarterly (October 2010). ‘Clockwork Fly’ has a steampunk vibe, which probably isn’t a surprise from the name.

It’s not a free-to-read publication, but if you’re a subscriber (or want to check it out), here are the details:

Main Website – The e-versions are probably best price-wise for most people (Kindle or PDF), though it is also available as a physical book.

In random tangent notes, one of the other authors in this issue is a Blake. You’d think this’d come up more often, as Blake is a pretty common surname, but it seems there aren’t very many writing fantasy and science fiction. Either that are they’re all using pen names.