Silence, Is It Golden?

Like so many others, I leave for World Fantasy (WFC) in a few days. Unlike so many others, I am going to a library conference in Pittsburgh the Tuesday I get back from WFC. I will be away from home for 9 days.

I will most likely have access to computery stuff along the way (particularly in Pitt) so I may be able to update.

I mean, I have to keep up with Google Reader or I'll have 5,000 unread posts waiting for me.

The new issue will get sent out some time in November. It's a busy month for me, so I will make no promises now.

World Fantasy and the Laptop

Will anyone be bringing a laptop to World Fantasy who would be willing to donate its services to a late-night get together on which to play music? I won't be bringing mine as I share its services with my wife, and she'll need it while I'm away.

Issue #13 Covers the World

No really.

I was struck the other day with the realization that the contributors to this issue are from all over the globe. Locally, there are contributors from both coasts (CA and NY; truth be told, the CA author is going to school in IA right now...just down the road from me!) the Midwest (IN) the South (GA, TX, and FL) the Rockies (NV) and Canada. Outside of my continent, there are people from Ireland, the United Kingdom, Greece, and Thailand.

That's pretty damn cool. I need to get some writers from South America and Africa to have published someone from every continent (OK, I'd need Antarctica, too). I don't see a lot of submissions from Africa, but that would be way cool if I did. I see a lot of subs from the East Coast, but I published the zine out there for six years, so that makes sense.

I should make some sort of spreadsheet and charts about where I get submissions from.

Anyone interested in doing some data entry?

Submissions

I'm catching up on submissions to my first reading period (Apr - June) of this year. I'm currently open to submissions (new reading period opened Oct 1). I have less than 50 submissions to read before WFC next week Thursday. I can get them done. I will get them done. If you sent something between April and June of this year, you will hear from me shortly.

The response time for new submissions should be much faster. I've got a new submission process in place. I have a nice set of readers in place who are helping get submissions responded to in a more timely manner.

I just read a submission that made me really uncomfortable. I had two different readers recommend it to me. They were right. It's good. But it makes me uncomfortable. In a good way. I don't publish 'creepy' very often, but when it's this good, I make an exception.

Over the River and Through the Streets to the Printer's House We Go!

Actually, it was all done electronically, but I do use a printer across the river (the Mississippi River to be precise). Nonetheless, the new issue (as well as a 2nd printing of the previous issue) has (have?) been sent to the printer. That means I'll have copies for people at World Fantasy next week. I'll also have a bunch of other goodies with me, so look for photos after I get back.

I also note, with this post, I have now posted more items this year than last year. I'm not a prolific writer (compared to some) but I think it's good that I'm writing more and being more informative.

To celebrate this achievement, this guy:

Thanks to David Malki and Wondermark for this guy!

WFC Fires That Need Putting Out

UPDATE: Man am I making progress on this mother!

As I've done before, here is my to-do list of what I needwant to get done before the World Fantasy Convention November 1. I'll continue to update this as I complete things (and add more things).

Create ad for Asimov's (Thanks Darin!)
Edit issue #13
Send out issue #13 edits
Key in issue #13 edits
Get nonfiction piece for issue #13
Make sure all contributor bios are in
Make sure all contributors answered aspic questions
Update EV website
Create promotional materials
Finalize party plans with caterer
Create invitations/flyers for catered event
Figure out what to wear (in case you're wondering: sequins)
**Sekrit mission about which Mark Teppo knows** (which, as Mark notes in the comments does not involve my wardrobe)
Proofread issue #13
Figure out how to get from Albany airport to convention
Figure out how to get from convention to Albany airport
Create packing list so I don't forget anything
Print issue #13
Re-print issue #12 (100 copies)
Work on 'happy just to be nominated' face for awards ceremony
Figure out where closest grocery stores to the hotel are (and how to get to them) (Thanks Allison!)
Figure out where closest liquor stores to the hotel are (and how to get to them) (Thanks Allison!)
Get a haircut?
Devise meal plans with people (contact me!)
Create submission guidelines flyer?
Create subscription flyer?
**write up plans for a totally different sekrit mission**
**contact people about totally different sekrit mission** (probably do this at convention)

Anything else people think I should do? Leave me commands in the comments.

Issue #13

The next issue of Electric Velocipede is going to the printer later this week. In honor of this momentous occasion (being no different than the previous 12 times I made an issue) I've updated the website to reflect issue #13 as the dominant issue.

Merlin Mann = boy genius

OK, so perhaps I shouldn't refer to someone older than me as a boy genius, but Merlin Mann is pretty damn awesome in a wunderkind type way. So there.

Recently, Mann wrote up a quick little defense of paper on his blog at 43 Folders. As a guy who gets called in by Google (no link, you know how to get to Google...if you're not sure how, just 'google' it) to give a talk on how they can increase their productivity.

What he's talking up is best summed up in his own words:

But as an intermediary medium between thinking and a final draft, I still just love what you can do with a stack of index cards and a little spare time.

No content types. No taxonomy. No typefaces. Just you and your ideas — in a bunch of little piles that make sense to you.

I have to agree completely. There are some things that I do that just work best on paper. Like this for example:

or this:

Yes. At least a portion of those documents were created on a computer. But sometimes working on the printout is the best option. I should really scan a few pages of an edit to show since I work off a rough PDF layout of the issue. You'd really see how you can use paper in ways that would be impossible on a computer.

And there's nothing faster for creating to-do lists or action items than paper. Often I'll transfer these paper lists to my electronic task list, but paper can be the best. I actually have a notebook where I brainstorm and put down ideas I'm not ready to share with anyone.

Oh yeah, I love paper. Like Mann, I love it for the things it does better than anything else. Or in his words:

Paper’s not perfect, but it’s perfect for what it does.

Small Beer Press Lives Up to Name

NORTHAMPTON, Massachusetts (EV) - After causing almost a decade of confusion with their name, stalwart independent publisher Small Beer Press lives up to its name with the first of a series of articles about, what else, beer.

OMG, theresalushstoreopeninginmayfairmall!

I feel slightly dizzy. My favorite store in the whole world, Lush, is going to be opening a store in the Milwaukee area.

I know most of you don't care, but this is very exciting for me. While there are a number of stores in the Chicago area, I don't make my way to Chicago very often. However, my family lives in the Milwaukee area, so I'm there a couple times a year.

Oh happy day!

Michael Cisco, auteur étonnant

Via Jeff:

Michael Cisco's The Traitor is out now from Prime Books. I read this in manuscript a while ago, and much of its imagery still is with me. Cisco is one of those authors that makes me want to publish books. I want to publish his books. I want to put out these amazing, fierce and terrifying novels.

While I've enjoyed everything of Cisco's that I've read, The Traitor is easily the best thing he's written. If you've never read Cisco before, this is an excellent place to start. I can't sum it up any more succinctly that Paul Tremblay does in his Amazon review:

One of my favorite reads of the year. Surrealistic setup; the narrator is a soul burner, employ of the Empire, and must hunt down Wite, a soul burner turned spirit eater. Cisco turns the strange and exotic into something so personal. The key here, is the narrative voice. So many writers don’t know how to use first person to their advantage (and I love me a good first person) and Cisco nails it in this book. The narrator’s voice/rhythm was hypnotic, mesmerizing, the repeated bits like incantations. It builds suspense and release at the right times, and the last line of the novel, after the narrator has flogged and implicated the reader, then made the reader want to be a part of humanity’s destruction, that last line is just pitch perfect.

Issue #13 Pre-order Now!

I've just sent off issue #13 to my proofreaders. Here is the table of contents for that issue:

Cover
Stephen Wilson (My Elves Are Different)

Fiction

Novelettes
Corey Brown - Obituary for a Living Man
Claude Lalumière - Hochelaga and Sons

Short Stories
Jennifer Rachel Baumer - Until the Wind Changes
Marie Brennan - Selection
Richard Howard - The Dogrog Phenomenon
Philip J. Lees - Sand
Rachel Swirsky - How the World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation Myth
Damien G. Walter - Momentum

Poetry
KJ Bishop - The Crone Meets Her Son
Jon Hansen - Under the Garden in Dreams
Mikal Trimm - The Paper Trail
Marly Youmans - When Demons Ruled,
Marly Youmans - Why the People Disliked Art, Circa 2005

Nonfiction
Blindfold Taste Test with Kage Baker
Sampling the Aspic

I don't have any content for the issue online yet, but I have added it to the shopping page for pre-ordering. It's all coming together now!

Honorable Mentions for 2006

Here is the complete list of what's made Honorable Mention (and in one case, was reprinted in a year's best) from what I published last year:

Issue Ten

• "A Walking of Crows" by Tim Akers (Year's Best Fantasy & Horror 20)
• "The Way He Does It" by Jeffrey Ford (Year's Best Fantasy & Horror 20, Locus 2006, Year's Best Science Fiction 24, nominated for the World Fantasy Award)
• "The Navel of the Universe" by Andra Oosterman (Year's Best Fantasy & Horror 20)
• "Il Duca di Cesena" by Alistair Rennie (Year's Best Fantasy & Horror 20)

Issue Eleven

• "Bar Golem" by Sonya Taaffe (Year's Best Fantasy & Horror 20)
• "Milk and Apples" by Catherynne M. Valente (Year's Best Fantasy & Horror 20)
• "Moon Does Run" by Edd Vick (reprinted in Year's Best SF 12)
• "Tiger, Tiger" by Liz Williams (Year's Best Fantasy & Horror 20)

The Taaffe and Williams stories were indicated as being from Electric Velocipede #9, which is incorrect.

Congratulations to everyone!

All World Fantasy All the Time

So people are starting to post their World Fantasy convention schedules online. I'm not part of programming; I decided to opt out this year. Nonetheless, there are still things going on in which I'm taking part. Without further ado, here is my WFC schedule:

Thursday:
Arrive noonish at the convention through the good graces of Mssr. Wheeler and Herr Minz
9PM Party with the Aussies

Friday:
4PM High Tea with Electric Velocipede
(I might peek in the autograph session, and I'm splitting my room with Shimmer who's having a post-autograph party which I'll likely go to)

Saturday:
Midnight or so: sekirt mission
(I'll likely swing by the artist's reception at some point)

Sunday:
1PM Awards Banquet
(I'll be drowning my sorrows in beer post-banquet after I congratulate the winner)

Monday:
Heading home (right now my flight is at 6AM, but I might change that)

The rest of the time at the convention I'll be either in the dealer's room or at the bar.

So You Want to Start A Zine Pt. 6

Submissions Redux

We're going to go more in-depth here with submissions. I'll be talking about writing submission guidelines, reading submissions, responding to submissions, accepting submissions, and soliciting submissions. This is the crux of your business. You need to understand how much time this is going to take and how important it is that you are clear about what you're looking for.

Guidelines

The submission guidelines for Electric Velocipede are vaguely specific:

I want to see something different. I want to see something unusual. I want to see stories that are . . . a little weird. If you've read the zine, you know what that means. If you recognize the names of the people in the zine, you'll probably have an idea of what I want. Science fiction is fine; I just don't care for hardcore nuts and bolts. Fantasy is fine; I'm just not all that comfortable with elves, dwarves, unicorns, etc. Cross-genre is more than fine, and weird is just about perfect. I am not actively looking for horror.

Note that it's just as important to say what you aren't looking for (e.g., elves, unicorns, nuts-and-bolts science fiction). You'll be much happier if you're up front about the types of things you don't want. People will still send you what you don't want, either through believing that their piece is THE ONE that will make you change your mind or through not reading the submission guidelines. I believe it's the latter. Nonetheless, clear guidelines will cut down on time-wasting submissions.

In my opinion, my guidelines are a little long. None of the sections are that long, and the reader can skip a section if it's not pertinent, but I think that whole page can feel/look a little intimidating at first. Nonetheless, I'm not taking anything out. A good rule of thumb is to only include enough information to cover one side of one sheet of paper. Pretend that you'll be handing out guidelines at a convention. If your guidelines won't fit on one side of one sheet of paper (like mind wouldn't) then they're too long.

Something I added recently was a quick list of what I want to see in a cover letter. Unless I know you personally, I really don't want to see more than the things on this list:

1. Novel sales (please note, these are sales that you get an advance for)
2. Professional short fiction sales (i.e., Asimov's, Analog, Realms of Fantasy, F&SF, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, etc.)
3. Semi-pro short fiction sales (i.e., LCRW, Talebones, Electric Velocipede, Shimmer Magazine, etc.)
4. Year's Best reprints of your stories (i.e., Year's Best Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois or David Hartwell, Year's Best Fantasy & Horror edited by Ellen Datlow, Gavin Grant, and Kelly Link, etc.)
5. Anthology sales (professional rate sales are better)
6. Writing workshops you belong to/attended (i.e., Clarion, Viable Paradise, Odyssey, OWW, etc.)
7. Where you heard about Electric Velocipede
8. Any other fiction sales you have

Any one of these things will aid in moving you out of the slush pile. For me. Not for any other editor. You can create your own list of criteria. Perhaps it's important that people like a certain television show, or a genre of writing, or a type of food, etc. I'll confess, for the longest time I avoided reading cover letters since they often tilted my opinion of the story one way or another before I even started it. Usually for worse. I would cover letters that went on and on about their stories that I felt I could reject the story based on the cover letter.

Note that I don't ask for a description of the story. Here's why: it's a short story. I'll know what it's about soon enough. If it was a novel, a little summary would be nice, but for a short story? Just let me get on to it. A good example: 'Here is my science fiction story of 3,000 words for consideration for publication in Electric Velocipede.' Great. I'll start reading it.

Reading/Rejecting/Accepting Submissions

Do all of these things as quickly as possible. When you start reading, rejecting, and accepting submissions at a furious rate, be confident in one thing: you are not doing it fast enough.

I am a slow slush reader. I have been, until a few months ago, a one-man show. It's tough to do all this and maintain a regular life. I recently moved halfway across the country, started a new job, and bought a house. It doesn't matter. To the writers who submitted to me, they could give a fig what I'm doing. I need to be reading their stories. If I had thought about it, I could have closed to submissions for the year, or half a year. I didn't since I didn't want to give the impression that the magazine was folding.

At the beginning of the year, I had issues 12, 13, and most of 14 set. That meant I had all the issues for 2007 and one of the 2008 issues set. I didn't need to stay open to submissions. I've had a lot of withdraws recently. I'm not happy about it, but not happy in that I should have treated my submissions with more respect.

So, read and respond quickly. Get help reading. Don't make it so that you get overwhelmed with submissions. I learned lazy slush reading at Tor. Let's be clear, no one taught it to me, that's just how it was. I was an assistant to three people, working about 100 books a year (not 100 unique books, often there'd be a hardcover, trade paperback, and mass-market of the same that you worked on in the same year). So there were at least some of those to read. Plus there were agented submissions to read. Unsolicited slush just took the back burner.

Don't do it. Don't be lazy. Set up reading periods if you think you're getting overwhelmed, or suspect you might. You could be like Flytrap or Sybil's Garage and only read until you have the next issue filled and then close until you're ready for another issue. That works well and lets you stay on top of your submission pile.

So here are the steps to follow:

1. Read story
2. Respond to it (reject/accept)
3. Repeat

Yes, I know. It's hypocritical of me to give this type of advice when I don't follow it myself. This is what I aspire to. I haven't done so yet. You should aspire to this, too.


Soliciting Submissions

This is tricky, particularly when you're new. But this is what you have to do when you start a zine, whether you're new or established. This is where, in my experience, going to conventions is beneficial. Getting the chance to sit with an author or two, buy them some drinks (or some snacks), and just sit and chat is the greatest way to market yourself and your zine to new people. Get their e-mail addresses so you can remind them about your zine; or wait until the e-mail to bring it up. Writers want to find a home for their fiction.

Of course, for some the thought of going up to even a semi-established writer (much less a pro) is just terrifying. In these cases, you want to have your one-sided, one-sheet submission guidelines there with you in sufficient quantity to leave out on every surface. People will pick them up and take them.

If you're new, meaning you have no publishing/editing/writing credits of your own, your have two options for soliciting submissions: send your guidelines to places that list writer's markets, and go to places where writers congregate and talk to them.

Do not: post on a message board that you are starting a new publishing venture (you will be met with ridicule, and it will not be kind), take an ad out in another magazine (this is a waste of your money), or buy advertising on popular (or not-so-popular) websites. In essence, if you are unknown, don't shoot yourself in the foot before you begin. While it may be tempting to post about your new magazine on a message board, don't do it. You will likely be so thoroughly traumatized by people's comments that you won't start your magazine. If you feel the need to post about it on a message board, do so as a query about starting a magazine, not as a call for submissions.

Unless you know pro writers, it's likely that it will take you at least a few issue before you publish anything more than new writers. That's ok. I still publish new writers. The next issue (#13 at the writing of this post) contains someone's first publication (Richard Howard's "The Dogrog Phenomenon"). And that's pretty cool in my opinion.

I still solicit submissions. When there's an author I'd like to work with, I contact them. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Sometimes we keep talking and discussing. If nothing else, it's a relationship you're building with someone. For me, I don't push. I want people to bring something to me when they're ready. So far it's worked out pretty good.

National Book Awards

From LIS News via Paper Cuts:

It's not that I care that the National Book Award nominees were announced recently. The chances of me ever being connected to a National Book Award nominee (let alone a winner) are about the same as me spontaneously giving birth: Ain't gonna happen. I just found the fiction list...let's call it interesting:

FICTION
Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown & Company)
Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Jim Shepard, Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Alfred A. Knopf)

I don't know about you, but I find it highly suspicious that so many of the fiction nominees are from the same publisher. Don't get me wrong, FSG does some great stuff.

But still...

READING: The Shotgun Rule by Charlie Huston

WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND

I just finished Charlie Huston's The Shotgun Rule last night; ok, technically I finished it this morning, but you know what I mean. First, I like Huston's writing. It's tight, fast, kickass, and rough in all the right ways. It reminds me of early Lansdale or Norm Partridge. In fact, the whole time I was reading this book, I had to keep checking the cover to make sure it didn't say 'Lansdale' on the outside. This isn't meant as a slight. It's not a rip-off of Joe Lansdale. It's just that good.

Second, there were a few small things that kept bugging me. The book starts out telling the story in a non-linear fashion. About half-way through, this falls apart and we move to straightforward linear story telling. The first half had all this great jumping back and forth in time that was really disconcerting. The whole book made you feel uncomfortable, and this not knowing 'where' you were in the story's timeline made that even worse; in a good way. Now, I don't know if it could be maintained for an entire novel, but I wish Huston had tried.

**START SPOILER ZONE**

As these novels tend to do, there was a lot of hidden history about the players on the stage. (BTW, I love stuff like this) Most of it was revealed well. Every time you thought you knew where the story was going, Huston revealed a little more about the characters and you had to rethink your position. But I didn't care for how the dad's (George and Andy's dad, that is) history was handled. It reminded me of Cronenberg's A History of Violence. And that's not a good thing.

This whole, aw-shucks-I'm-just-trying-to-work-hard-and-make-a-living act (a la Viggo Mortenson in the movie) that the dad puts on is hard to buy. It seems disenginuous at best, and an outright lie at worst. That might have worked, the dad struggling--even years later--with his decision to become a more upright citizen. That could work. The two lives he lead were diametrically opposed and one could expect him to have difficulty sorting them out. Yeah, that could work. It doesn't quite work here, but that's only becuase of...

...the ease in which he steps back into his old life. It just didn't ring true to me. Viggo's character did the same thing in that awful movie I refuse to mention again by name. If this new life was so godawful important, why risk it by stepping back into the life you abandoned? In both cases, it was to protect/save family. Having my own little family, I totally get the 'do whatever you need to do' concept for protecting family.

But in this book and the movie, it's more than a little extreme. In the movie I saw no way for Viggo to get back out of hi sold life. He was screwed. His efforts were wasted. He would spend the rest of his life on the run and most likely would get run down and ground into paste. In the book, he wrapped up his loose ends a little better, but not entirely. I think for me it took so long to get a true sense of who the father had been that I hadn't assimilated that into my head before he was out taking care of business.

Still, that's far from the biggest problem I had with the book. One of George and Andy's friends, Paul, had a secret world that was revealed very poorly. I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to understand was going on between Paul and his father. It seems very squicky, but I can't be sure. And it, too, was revealed in an awful rush towards the end so the reader had no time to think about it. There was a lot going on with this character, and most of the time Paul was presented as a cardboard cutout of an angry teen with parental issues.

**END SPOILER ZONE**

You have to read this book, if for nothing else, for the interactions between the main characters (yes, I just used between in reference to more than two things; yes I hate it when someone says between the four of them...you can be among the four of them, but you can only be between two things; deal with it): George, Paul, Hector, and Andy. These are four teens in California with nothing better to do with their time and they get into a truckload of trouble.

You've also go to, even with the stuff mentioned in the spoiler section, read this for how Huston weaves a tight little story by unraveling the secret history of the town the boys live in. It's very cool to see how Huston simultaneously tightens and ratchets up his story while having the characters and their world fall apart.

I love Huston's Joe Pitt books. I don't think this is as strong as those books, but I had a lot of fun reading it. Normally when I complain this much about something, it's because I liked it so much that I wanted it to be perfect.

Survival Meme

Looks like all the hunting and fishing paid off...

Your chance of survival: Preparedness: 72%, City Skills: 57%, Survival Skills: 58%, Nature Skills: 38%

“There are things that we never want to let go of, people we never want to leave behind. But keep in mind that letting go isn’t the end of the world, it’s the beginning of a new life.”

“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”

“Even the end of the world is described as if it were only an exceptionally hot afternoon.”

“The heart of a man to the heart of a maid - Light of my tents, be fleet - Morning awaits at the end of the world, And the world is all at our feet.”

"If I left you alone in the woods with a hatchet, how long before you could send me an e-mail?"

Link: The Apocalypse Survival Test written by mike_ix on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Honorable Mentions

Hey, since I'm kind of lazybusy, could someone who has a copy of the Year's Best Fantasy & Horror 20th Annual Edition tell me if Electric Velocipede had any stories in the honorable mentions in the back?

Thanks!