Women's History Month

March is National Women's History Month if you didn't know. And on the last day of March, here again is the table of contents for the next issue of Electric Velocipede:

Issue #14
Cover
Lisa Snellings-Clark

Fiction
Novelette
Leslie Claire Walker - Your Blood

Short Stories
Elissa Malcohn - Hermit Crabs
Lisa Mantchev - Perfect Tense
Tracie McBride - The Last Tiger
Sandra McDonald - Recipe for Survival
Melissa Mead - Stepsister
Jennifer Pelland - Sashenka Redux
Sara Saab - No Bubblewrap for Little Guys
Michelle Scott - Them
D. E. Wasden - The Artificial Sunlight of Memory
Leslie What - #1
Sharon E. Woods - Bull
Erzebet YellowBoy - Waiting at the Window

Poetry
Lida Broadhurst - Asylum
Erin Hoffman - Hyldegarde Speaks to Jacqueline
Sonya Taaffe - Evighed

Nonfiction
Penelope O'Shea - Sampling the Aspic
Blindfold Taste Test (contributor to come)

It may not be apparent, but the contributor list is made up of all female authors. I'll post my reasons for doing this in a follow-up post, but for now I want to hear people's thoughts without them being adulterated by my intentions.

I've had pro and con comments about this over the past year while I've been plannig the issue. What are your thoughts about the all-female contributor list?

Hitting a Targeted Audience

I was lucky enough a week ago or so to get an enthusiastic review from Bill Barnes, the gentleman who draws the Unshelved webcomic. I had a great response from the review as seen below:

The spike in hits and page views is . . . well obvious . . . to say the least. The magnitude of the spike is even more impressive when you look at month view:

One interesting difference (at least to me) between getting mentioned on BoingBoing (which is also totally awesome) and getting mentioned on Unshelved, is that people coming from Unshelved spent a lot more time looking around.

The people from BoingBoing looked at the linked page, and went on to something else or straight back to BoingBoing. The Unshelved people went to all sorts of pages and looked at all sorts of things. I wasn't surprised by this. The people who read Unshelved tend to be librarians, and they were sent to my site with a huge thumb's up, so I'm sure they wanted to check around and see what was there. And a nice chunk of them bought copies of the issue (yay!) or subscriptions (WOO HOO!), so that was totally awesome.

The people who tend to read BoingBoing are . . . well . . . everyone. Or at least a wider cross section of people than those who read Unshelved. Certainly the readers of Unshelved are more devoting to the pursuit of reading while the readers of BoingBoing could be interested in technology or ephemera or copyright or lots of things. When I was mentioned last year on BoingBoing it was for very specific things. They served different purposes in coming to the site than those who came from Unshelved. In both cases, I had great response and I really appreciated it.

I wish I could plan an Unshelved-like surge every month, but the fact that you can't plan it is part of why it worked: it was genuine and uncontrived. To find a place that has the reach and influence that Unshelved has every month would be a monumental task. But you could do it. The trick is finding people with a reading audience, and Unshelved is a great combination of creators who like books (and more specifically science fiction) and an audience that LOVES reading. In that vein, a lot of webcomics might not work.

Do the people that read Penny Arcade or Ctrl-Alt-Del read books/magazines, or do they primarily play video games? I don't know. It might be both, but I suspect they lean towards gaming and a print zine wouldn't necessarily appeal to them. People who read Seth's Blog or 43folders are probably readers, but would Seth Godin or Merlin Mann like Electric Velocipede? There's been little mention of science fiction on their sites. What about io9? Well, their focus is on media stuff . . .

The big hurdle, as I've pointed out above, is getting the person to be enthusiastic about your product. And that's a crapshoot. It could happen, it could not happen. You try for the widest coverage you can, and then you cross your fingers and hope you've researched well enough. Obviously when Bill Barnes gets printed material in the mail, he knows (even if it's not explicitly stated) that the person sending it is hoping for a mention or a review or--god's be praised--a comic.

On the rare occasions that I get stuff in the mail (and it could happen more, hint hint) I know that the person is hoping that I'll make mention of it. My stats would not impress anyone, but I can think of at least one example where I was enthusiastic about something and it lead to a purchase. Sometimes your aim is good, and sometimes it's not.

Hal Duncan Ain't Gonna Put Up With Your Crap

Hal Duncan received a piece of hateful e-mail recently. Many people would bristle about its content, some people would feel hurt and withdraw, others might even respond back with vehemence. Not Hal. He posts it on his blog along with his vitriol-laced response. Here's the intro:

"Thank you for your charming email of bigoted homophobia. It amused me no end, I must say, with its witty mimicry of the quiz show question format (I can only presume you are an avid viewer of commercial television in preference to, for example, reading books), its air-tight syllogistic logic (compelling, I say, compelling) and its prurient interest as to what I do with my cock (though I must say I'm confused as to how this is any concern of yours)."

And it just gets better from there. I'm always a little surprised and saddened when I see examples of such outright homophobia. I shouldn't be. This country is full of puritanical christians who think (read: know) they know what's right for everyone. That attitude is something I see even more since moving back to the Midwest where the homosexual community is smaller to well-hidden to nonexistent.

I'd love to think there'd be a day where we existed in tolerance of each other, but I suspect humans are too selfish to let other people be different. It's too bad since, in my opinion, it's our uniqueness that makes being human special (as opposed to being a monkey or a dog). I guess we'll just keep trying and move slowly towards a more enlightened life.

Like they say, "Even small steps will get you to the top of the mountain."

Sybil's Many Personalities and Where She Kept Them

That's right, a new issue of Sybil's Garage is upon the world. Sybil's is one of my favorite newish speculative zines out there. It's always a great mix of writing, and the design is top notch. In fact, the covers always make me a little jealous. :) Here's what you'll find inside:

Poetry:
Elizabeth Barrette - "With Every Fine and Subtle Sense Perceive"
Amal El-Mohtar - "Orpheus"
Miranda Gaw - "Last Supper"
Aaron Leis - "Glass"
Pam McNew - "No Word for Goodbye"
Adrienne J. Odasso - "River Girl"
David M. Rheingold - "Macduff’s Lament"
Eilyahoo Talgam - "Look Away"

Fiction:
Samantha Henderson - "The Ballad of Delphinium Blue"
Vylar Kaftan - "The Girl Next Door"
Barbara Krasnoff - "All His Worldly Goods"
Caspian Gray - "Waiting for Spring"
Jason Erik Lundberg - "Wombat Fishbone"
Alex Dally MacFarlane - "Tattoos of the Sky, Tattoos of the Days"
Gary Moshimer - "Salesman"
Hazel Marcus Ong - "Roses"
Daniel A. Rabuzzi - "Last and First"
Veronica Schanoes - "Lost in the Supermarket"

Non-Fiction:
Dinner with Lauren McLaughlin, an Interview by Devin Poore
The Best-Dressed Man on the Court, a memoir by Mercurio D. Rivera

If you enjoy exceptional speculative fiction, poetry, and art, Sybil's Garage is the magazine for you. Order your copy today!

Final 2008 Hugo Ballot

The final Hugo ballot is now available. To no one's surprise, Electric Velocipede did not make the ballot. However, I am very proud to see this portion of the ballot:

Best Novelette

• "The Cambist and Lord Iron: a Fairytale of Economics" by Daniel Abraham (Logorrhea ed. John Klima, BantamSpectra)
• "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang (Subterranean Press; F&SF Sept. 2007)
• "Dark Integers" by Greg Egan (Asimov's Oct./Nov. 2007)
• "Glory" by Greg Egan (The New Space Opera, ed. Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan, HarperCollins/Eos)
• "Finisterra" by David Moles (F&SF Dec. 2007)

The emphasis is mine, but it's there to show that Daniel Abraham's fantastic story from Logorrhea is nominated for Best Novelette. While I would love to see the final ballot consist of only stories that I edited, I understand that this is not possible. I am very happy for Dan. This is a fantastic category. Congratulations Dan!

Unshelved Webcomic

Unshelved is one of my favorite web comics. It's about the staff of the Mallville library and the daily shenanigans that they got into with their patrons. For the uninitiated, I would call it Dilbert for libraries, but it's so much more than that.

I had the great pleasure of meeting Unshelved artist Bill Barnes at the American Library Association Midwinter meeting this last January. I contacted him later via e-mail about Logorrhea, since the strip does a Sunday strip that is a book review. Bill said that Logorrhea sounded interesting and that he would love to see a copy. I sent off a copy of the book and a few issues of the zine.

I'm at my parent's house for Easter right now, and I thought I would check my e-mail since it'd been a few days. There were a bunch of sales in there and my web stats were soaring higher and higher. When I invesigated a litte, I found this quote on the Unshelved website about issue 13 of Electric Velocipede:

So it's to my great surprise that I tell you that I enjoyed every single story, of which there were many, and even one or two of the poems. This is high quality writing indeed. I know my standards haven't gone down, just the opposite, so editor John Klima must just be that good. In any case, if you like sci-fi, or "speculative fiction" in their parlance, it's well worth your time and money.

Hot damn. I have to say, to get such a great, genuine review from Unshelved makes me happy beyond words.

Thanks Bill!

Thanks Unshelved readers!

I'm out of town through tomorrow, but I'll get stuff out in the mail in the next day or two.

Not Getting Enough Sleep

So I saw a story on the Today show this morning about sleep (I can't find a link to their story, but I have a few links below about sleep and dreams). It was about how adults should be getting at least seven hours of sleep every night; at best I get six, but I'd say I average about four. They also talked about how not getting enough sleep--essentially putting yourself into a state of sleep deprivation--causes all sorts of problems, including weight gain.

Now, I've felt for about a month now that I've gotten heavier...more accurately that my weight is becoming more fat and less muscle. I say that because my weight, i.e., the number of pounds, isn't changing, but my clothes aren't fitting the same. Everything seems more roly poly.

Somehow I need to assess what I think I need to be doing, and work on what I actually need to be doing. Part of it is getting back in the habit of checking my PDA so that I know what's due when. When I was in grad school, I was checking it every day to see what I needed to be working on. I've certainly falling out that habit.

Here's a link to an article on MSNBC about a possible link between not sleeping and obesity. And here's a link about how not sleeping, and therefore not dreaming, can adversely affect you.

Full Until 2010

Recently, I was finishing out the contents for Electric Velocipede #17 (which won't be published until 2009). I had a couple thousand words available, so I added a few stories to fill it out. Then I decided I should look at what I've accepted and rough out how many issues are already filled.

Whoah. I have a lot of material. I have material to fill through half of Electric Velocipede #20. (And #14 is still working its way through my production process) I'm upping my production model to work through it in a timely fashion. I'm publishing three issues this year (14, 15, and 16) and four next year (17, 18, 19, and 20), for a total of seven issues by the end of next year! In a lot of ways, that's very cool.

Now the bad news. With April 1 just around the corner, I've decided to leave subs closed until further notice so that I don't end up having work that won't be published for years.

And, yeah, it sucks, 'cause you all are writing smart stuff that I want to be buying. But the last thing we all need is for me to be a story hoarder.

Arthur C. Clarke Passes Away

I was genuinely sad to see that Arthur C. Clarke has passed away at the age of 90. I had the great fortune to work with him and Stephen Baxter on a novel when I was at Tor. The book had been acquired and edited by my boss Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and then it was up to me to shepherd the manuscript through to its final form. I never met the man, although we did exchange e-mail a few times. I'll have to reread some Clarke in honor of his passing.

Something Completely Unexpected

This is the theme song for Jamie Oliver's television show, "Jamie at Home." I absolutely love Jamie and his cooking, loved his restaurant when we were in London a few years ago, and love this toe-tapping song on which Jamie plays drums.

I'm virtually offline this week while I take some time away from work and enjoy my family.

Enjoy!

io9 on Short Fiction

Despite the title of the their post: "Unstoppable Rules," this article from io9 has some good advice. I wouldn't call them rules, as in: do this and you WILL NOT FAIL! But it is good advice/suggestions concerning short story writing.

Technological Problems

I've been trying for quite a while (months actually) to find an answer to the following issues that crop up on my laptop:

• sometimes www.flickr.com displays in my browser (in both FF and IE) as www.google.com; WTF? it usually clears up by clearing out the cache or at worst, rebooting, but sometimes it stays like that for DAYS
• when I do a scandisk (from the DOS prompt) or use a utility like JDisk Reporter, I'm told I have something like 138,000 files on my computer; however, when Norton runs its check, it goes through more than 500,000 files, again WTF?

Anyone have any ideas for either of these?

Are You Happy Now? You've Defeated Me

I created a dman LiveJournal account:

http://gumboeditor.livejournal.com/

It's for commenting on people's posts. I'm sick of tired of signing my name and hoping that people trust it's me. Or being blocked from commenting since people don't allow anonymous comments.

I do not plan on making any posts there.

I Usually Try to Avoid Speaking About Politics Here...

But: it's called masturbation, Mr. Spitzer. It can work fucking wonders.

Hugo Awards Fan vs. Semipro 2008

Recently (yesterday?) a writer (Jennifer Pelland for those too lazybusy to click) I know posted that because people she knew had received e-mails confirming their Hugo ballot status and that she had not received said e-mail, she had not made the ballot. Of course, after reading that, I realized that I had not received any such e-mail either, so I am not on the Hugo ballot.

I sent her an e-mail asking if she was trying to depress me. :)* After a few messages back and forth, she said that she had nominated me for Best Semiprozine. I had to break to her that I was not eligible for semiprozine. I was only eligible for fanzine. She had thought, and it's really a thought that makes sense, that since I pay my authors, I was not a fanzine. As someone who worked on fanzines, Jen thought she knew what one was and what one wasn't.

True in a definition sense. However, when taken in consideration of the Hugo rules for semiprozine eligibility:

(1) had an average press run of at least one thousand (1000) copies per issue,
(2) paid its contributors and/or staff in other than copies of the publication,
(3) provided at least half the income of any one person,
(4) had at least fifteen percent (15%) of its total space occupied by advertising,
(5) announced itself to be a semiprozine.

The only criteria I meet is #2. I am perilously close to meeting #4. And yes, I could do #5 and clear up the whole mess. But I've always felt that if I should actually get nominated for a Hugo, I had a better shot against four fanzine nominees than against Locus. Not to diminish the quality of work of fanzines, but since the semiprozine award was created in 1984 (in part as a reaction to Locus winning the fanzine too many times in a row) Locus has only lost the award three times. In that same stretch of time, 10 different publications have won the Best Fanzine Award.

I realize that 10 unique winners in 24 years of awards is not great either, but it's better than four unique winners in 24 years, with one of the four taking more than 20 of the awards. And it's strange because I really like Locus. I subscribe. I vote in the poll. They review my zine. I actually get really good coverage in Locus for how small I am. However, I suspect these types of posts (stop-giving-Locus-awards posts, for the less quick among us) are part of what keeps me from getting mentioned in the Locus Blinks.**

The argument is pedantic, however. It's unlikely I would ever get nominated for a Hugo, and once there, it's even less likely that I would win one.
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*The smiley is to let all of your folks know that I was kidding around. And the asterix is not meant to be thought of as some awful smiley goatee.

**That and the fact that I don't mail anything to Mark Kelly and I expect him to find stuff via magic.

Blake Lively and Me

I know I know I know. What the heck kind of post is this? Well, I've done memes before, and filled out quizzes in the past. I haven't done one in a while*, and when I saw "What's Your Ideal TV Girlfriend" I thought I would find out.

I forget where I saw this initially... I got Serena van der Woodsen played by Blake Lively. I don't watch the show my ideal TV girlfriend comes from, but, there you go.** I'm not unhappy with the result (not knowing what other choices I have), which is strange because I tend to not go for blondes.***

Who is Your Ideal TV Girlfriend?

For those looking for an ideal TV boyfriend, click here.
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*I filled out a quiz earlier to see what Winnie the Pooh character I was, and when I got Tigger instead of Pooh, I just shut down my browser and went back to work. Lousy liars, saying I'm Tigger...

**As a former teen librarian, I certainly know the Gossip Girl series of books. On that front, Blake Lively--the actress who plays my apparent ideal TV girlfriend--was also one of the leads in the SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS****, another YA staple.

***My wife and I joke with each other about her 'boyfriend' and my 'girlfriend.' Hers being Sting (or Johnny Depp) and mine was Nicole Kidman for a long long time. But she's started looking...strange...lately. So right now it's a toss up between Kate Winslet and Kate Beckinsale. Hmmm, something about that 'Kate' name I guess.

****Which also starred Rachel Bilson, another hottie... And anyway, isn't this whole conversation just a little disturbing?

The Power of the Editorial Brand

Recently, Jay Lake said:

One of the things you buy when you pick up Analog or an Ellen Datlow edited anthology is a group of stories selected by an editor you trust. A random anthology, or a novel from an unknown independent publisher, doesn't have that trusted branding. It has to work harder to win you over.

This is something I have direct experience with. And have continued experience with.

Starting the zine, very few people knew who I was. I could not expect to jump out there and get interest from any appreciable amount of people. I knew this going in, since I had experienced some of this while working full-time in publishing with new writers. So I started slowly, looking to build an audience over time.

This is something a lot of people starting a magazine don't think about. The reason why people buy Analog, or an anthology edited by Ellen Datlow or Gardner Dozois is that they know what they're getting. Analog's been around since the 1940s and Ellen and Gardner have been editing for decades. I don't have that experience yet. It was hard to keep this in mind when my anthology came out last year and I kept seeing reviews for books other than mine.

Even though I've been in the field since 1993, it's only been in the past two or three years that people have known my name. That means I spent more than 10 years working in genre publishing before people started to know what I was doing. That's a long time people.

And it only means that I need to work harder so that my name doesn't disappear from public view.

UPDATE: Strangely enough, this post by Nick Mamatas shows a real-life example of what I'm talking about.

And for people coming from Nick's blog, here's a link to the Zine Series: http://evzine.blogspot.com/search/label/Zine%20Series

A Refreshing Glass of Rhysling

I hear from KJ Bishop:

[M]y poem “The Crone Meets Her Son (on a battlefield)”, published in Electric Velocipede #13, has been nominated for a Rhysling Award (short poem). Which is very unexpected, and very nice.

Very nice, indeed. I was unable to find an official page for the nominees. I'll post an update when there's an official page from the Rhysling committee. Until then, congrats KJ!!!!

Books for Sale

Lavie Tidhar, EV contributor, and all-around talented author,* has decided to sell off some of his rare books. As a book lover myself, I know that these decisions are not made lightly.

Please go check out Lavie's auction and help him out. Particularly if you like authors such as Michael Marshall Smith, Terry Pratchett, Richard Morgan, and others.
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*I'll be publishing a chapbook from Mr. Tidhar called FORTEAN SIGNS OF RAIN towards the end of the year.

Black Gate Year's Best Round-Up

Dave Truesdale has a recommended reading list up at Black Gate. Dave says:

[The list] contains 214 stories from various 2007 print publications only: magazines, single author collections containing one or more original stories, and original anthologies. They come from some 35 publications originally published in 2007. This is by no means a complete list of the print publications featuring original fiction from 2007, but it does represent all of the major magazines, as well as quite a number of the smaller venues. Many of them were purchased, with an equal number received as review copies, for which I gratefully thank the publishers.

So, without further ado, here are the stories from the things I edited that Dave recommends.

Short Stories

• “Singing of Mount Abora” by Theodora Goss (Logorrhea/Bantam Spectra, May) F
• “Vivisepulture” by David Prill (Logorrhea/Bantam Spectra, May) H
• “Appoggiatura” by Jeff VanderMeer (Logorrhea/Bantam Spectra, May) F
• “The Smaragdine Knot” by Marly Youmans (Logorrhea/Bantam Spectra, May) F

Novelettes

• “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics” by Daniel Abraham (Logorrhea/Bantam Spectra, May) DF
• “Crossing the Seven” by Jay Lake (Logorrhea/Bantam Spectra, May) SF
• “From Around Here” by Tim Pratt (Logorrhea/Bantam Spectra, May) DF/H

Best of the Year
Short Stories

• “Vivisepulture” by David Prill (Logorrhea/Bantam Spectra, May) H
• “Appoggiatura” by Jeff VanderMeer (Logorrhea/Bantam Spectra, May) F
• “The Smaragdine Knot” by Marly Youmans (Logorrhea/Bantam Spectra, May) F

Alas, none of the novelettes made the final cut for best of the year.

To the Great D&D Module in the Sky

I learned today from SF Signal that Gary Gygax has passed away at the age of 69.* Gary's games and adventures certainly set the tone of my childhood and early adulthood years. I can say without a doubt that I would not be here (in publishing) if I had not been inspired by the works of Gary Gygax.

If you didn't know, Gary was co-creator for the Dungeons & Drgaons role-playing game, something I can say quite literally changed my life. Prior to D&D, my life had been all comic books and hmm, tether ball? Four square? But in second grade, my brother convinced me that I should ask for D&D for my birthday. So I did.

I've never been the same since. It was one of the few things my brother and I did together. I got all my friends into it. There were always new supplements, and particularly when you got to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D), more rule books, modules,** dice, etc. so every holiday there was something to ask for.

AD&D also led to joining the Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC) and the beginnings of a life-long love of science fiction and fantasy. I think it's fair to say that Gygax and AD&D had a huge impact on modern fantasy, as many of its writers were certainly players back in their formative years.

I played AD&D through college, but sadly sold all of my books when we moved out east. I still have a giant bag of dice, and some days still yearn for a couple hours to spend throwing six sided dice to generate characters.
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*I actually learned via IM from Scott Lais, former Asimov's/Analog/Alfred Hitchcock/Ellery Queen rights agent, but this was the first official notice I saw.

**with particular favorites being S1 Tomb of Horrors, S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, B2 The Keep on the Borderlands, D1 - 3 Descent Into the Depths of the Earth, The Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, Vault of the Drow, and G 1 - 3 Against the Giants. We had most of the modules that came out in the late 70s/early 80s, but shortly after then we started to make own adventures, which was the true power of the game.

Prices and Some Sold Out Information

I'm going to try and preclude some questions here. I've noted in the past that prices were going up. If you look at the shopping page, you'll see that prices have gone up for everything but the chapbooks. They were already on the 5/7/9 plan, so I felt there was no need to change them.

Issue #11 has now sold out. As I filling orders last night, I literally grabbed the very last copy I had and sent it out. I quick scrambled last night to update the page to reflect the sold out status before I got any more orders over night.

The website in general is getting a redesign. Things will be better organized. There'll be a combined shopping page, but there will also be separate shopping pages for chapbooks, single issues, and subscriptions. There'll also be a page for sales.