Story Online Now!

SQ Mag #28 is now online and stories are free to read on the website. Above is the cover of the edition and I’m delighted to see my name on the authors’ lineup!

You can read my story “Lo, These Many Gods” at the link above. If you enjoy it, do consider dropping the mag a few bob at the donate button, to help keep science fiction alive and kicking!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Reacting Quickly

You need to stay on your toes or entropy will erode your assault on the marketplace. Sometimes it’s just rejections racking up quicker than you can deal with, or that marketplace you felt was ideal having closed for submissions before you could connect the right piece with it. Or working late at night and not having the brain cells left to fathom what’s happening, so things get left for later…

For the first time, however, I’ve had a magazine die when I had a submission with them. Plasma Frequency was one of the promising, active markets able to look at dynamic shorts, and when Daily passed on a new piece, I redirected it to PF. I received an email receipt and settled into wait – sixty days, they said, maybe as much as ninety. Well, at a hundred I thought it was time to query, and lo and behold, the magazine has closed. No wonder there were no emails generated through Submittable informing me of the status of my story – the market was gone.

It may have been good manners to directly inform those writers offering them material, but if the magazine folded under any but the best of circumstances such niceties may have gone by the wayside.

The website is still there, the link above still works, if you fancy a look, but this one has joined the honour roll of departed titles, and, as always, the fiction market is the poorer for the loss.

I redirected my story immediately, and that’s the focus here – whatever happens, there is always an alternative, and work should not be resting fallow, but out there under consideration with someone, somewhere. You never know, this particular submission might be the one to bear fruit!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Trusting Inspiration

The old saying is that success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, and every conscientious writer – or artist of any description – takes this onboard as a truism. We learn to work hard, to channel inspiration into the mechanism as a fuelling agent. Is that the only role for inspiration? How does it function?

This is perhaps a unique matter for every artist. The interaction of the faculty (that glimpses a finished product) with the means (by which it is reached) – when coming to think about it I find myself hard put to say how it works. There is obviously some professional component, but my impression is the facility is probably far more intrinsic than it is mechanical.

In an interview many, many years ago, Freddie Mercury was asked how he came up with the idea for Bohemian Rhapsody. He replied it was in fact three different songs, none of which was working on its own; when combined they became three sparkling components of a new whole – and the rest is history, as they say. Surely that was both an inspired move and a thoroughly professional one – the ability to understand when the material was not working and to make a leap of faith to find a form in which it did.

As a painter in my earlier years, I was either blessed or cursed with the ability to see in my mind’s eye what my finished artwork should look like, and then left with the task of trying to match that vision with a brush – it never really worked. As a writer the same faculty is in play, and it is still just as visual. I will glimpse a scene and wonder what it means, perceive some vista that characters will move among or witness, and be left to overcome a problem – the visualisation is complete in itself if one is a painter, but in terms of fiction constitutes a setting, contributing to a scenario, and merely describing it is not telling a story. It contributes to the texture and world building elements, and is inspirational because of its completeness, but other elements need to come together for it to mean something coherent.

Some writers glimpse plotlines, the interaction of characters and the forces driving them, but are surprisingly light on setting and detail.  That would seem the opposite of sensing the lush detailing of a scene and then fitting the story dynamics to it.

Whichever tack one comes in on, it is the end product that matters – are the elements balanced? If the characters are both believable and set against an engaging backdrop, it should make no difference to the reader which element came first in the creative process. How does the story read? Proof of the pudding, and all that.

Can we write without inspiration? Of course; ignoble hack work for low wages – the sports reporter, the jaded critic, the micro-managed coursework composer, the pulp-fiction ghost writer – would likely be devoid of inspiration, and many a writer has probably found him or herself in such a trap, making ends meet but not enjoying it. To the creative soul can there be anything worse than the shine going off what used to be a joy? The real trick is preserving the pleasure in the process, keeping the art alongside the technical competence and, yes, the spark of inspiration alive. After all, it is that inner visualisation the artist tries to capture and record, and, surely for many, it’s where the pleasure really lies.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

First Exposures – Update

I’m delighted to say I have a fourth shortlisting, this time with the new anthology Humans Wanted. This is an exciting volume, and the editor, Vivian Caethe, is looking to counterbalance the widespread despondency about the relationship between the human species and the universe by providing a volume which demonstrates the positive side of human nature. I should know in the New Year if my story, “The Dreaming Giants,” has made the final cut.

The backing phase of this project is now complete but you can pre-order the volume directly off the Kickstarter page -- just click the link above.

As of the date of uploading, I have 35 submissions in play and more than 10% have received expressions of interest – I couldn’t be happier!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Writing for your Audience

I was once accused of talking like a textbook. At the time I couldn’t see it, but it was true, and it was not appropriate.

I was in the lull between Masters and PhD at the time, and over a dozen years through off-and-on tertiary studies, so perhaps there was no mystery to it. One trains oneself to express in a particular way for a particular audience, and when that audience is your professional peers and elders you tend to go out of your way to live up to their expectations. When the field is science or social science, the “principle of pedantry” applies and precision is everything.

When I’m teaching beginners the rudiments of tertiary study I tell them in the first class that “the English language is a precision instrument, as exact as a scalpel, and you must learn how to use it properly, so you can say what you mean and mean what you say.” It’s remarkable how many don’t know what I mean at that point, and who think they can waltz through a university education without ever learning how to string words together. The bar has been lowered in terms of required skills in order to stuff commercial universities with candidates paid for by government schemes – this is probably true in many places around the world – and a large cadre amongst those who secure places will not leave First Year due to disillusionment over their own skill levels.

As you might imagine, it’s a thankless task for the teacher who is trying to point this out to those considering senior level study but whose literary bad habits are ingrained over a lifetime. These students are poles apart from the condition I found myself in, so locked into academic expression that every word I said was measured, considered and formulated. I must have seriously annoyed those around me at the time, just as those who are trying to run before they can walk are the bane of those who must either find some way to teach them what they need to know, or break it to them that higher education is not their wisest choice.

Bringing it down a level, this really comes under the heading of speaking to your audience in the terms they can accept. A world of difference lies between academic and creative writing. Spare a thought for the creative writing student at tertiary level, who must alternate between styles – dry, pedantic analysis when writing essays about the craft of writing, interspersed with lush prose, experimental narratives and giving rein to enthusiasm and inspiration when creative expression is the object. This applies to creative writing in general at a finer grain.

For whom are we writing? What is our target marketplace? What is the style a piece demands or invites? If we are writing in first person, who is the character who provides the POV? Is the narrative obliged to be couched in a regional, dialectic form? If so, one must be intimately familiar with it to carry it off or native speakers will spot the errors. Is the character well educated or poorly? From a high or low socioeconomic background? These factors, along with age, gender and others will govern the speech patterns and thus how the narrative should be expressed. Likewise, if structuring a narrative line in third person, are we following a singular POV or the “omnipotent narrator” model? The latter seems to have fallen from favour these days, and perhaps with good reason – the term “head hopping” applies. Whatever our artistic choices, we end up with a package of information we are presenting to a reader in the hopes of providing entertainment on one or more levels. The reader’s receptivity is another matter…

It has been said, when submitting a story, you are not selling that one but the next. Even if we don’t score a placement with a particular piece, being welcome to submit again is a win in itself, we are doing something right if an editor is looking forward to our next submission. The first-readers know their editor’s brief, and the editor knows the marketplace he or she is publishing to. We are endeavouring to please that final marketplace and the submission meatgrinder is how it happens. It’s unfortunate our work is the meat, but that’s the price the writer pays for offering up his or her brainchild for public scrutiny. Perhaps the best way to soften the process is to write consciously – conscientiously – for that final market.

That said, guidelines vary enormously between marketplaces. Some have a brief so narrow you would be hard-pressed to send a rejection anywhere else, while others are open to every subject and style. This is the gordian knot the writer must endlessly attempt to unpick – far worse than the riddle of the sphinx – for what one marketplace craves, another cannot abide, and vice versa. Variety is the spice of life, as they say, but many a writer has had to rewrite a story created for a particular marketplace when a sale was not forthcoming but the alternate marketplaces required some sort of change – take out a supernatural element, or shift a scenario from, say, fantasy to historical.

At this level, the fine-tuning to the audience’s requirements is technical and complicated, and tests a writer’s skill and patience. Sometimes a rewrite is glaringly obvious, and the good writer knows it – puts a story aside until mentally ready to unravel at least some of the tapestry and start again. Sometimes a rewrite is not necessary at all because, as some markets point out in their form response, all feedback is subjective – and thus open to dispute. First readers must generally make the right call for their magazine, that doesn’t mean the next one won’t snap your hand off for the same story exactly as it stands.

Perhaps, in the end, you can’t second guess the marketplace; this has probably been true of all artists in all media from the very beginning. You can only commit to doing the best job you know how, and then let the audience decide. It’s a helpless feeling for any writer, and established professionals know the sting of rejection as surely as the newest beginner. The trick is not to let it beat you, but come back with a new submission, every single time.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Research – Fun as well as Important!

The importance of research becomes clear when writing outside the stream of pure invention. In a way the fantasy specialist has it easiest because he or she can, in essence, invent everything. So long as those inventions are internally consistent, the story’s background detailing will work perfectly well. But what about other streams of fiction?

Research is most certainly important. Perhaps it is stretching a point to say that getting the details accurate can actively make or break or a piece but it doesn’t help your credibility if your reader comes across inaccuracies. Sometimes they can be quite trivial but still stick in folks’ craws, or at worst provide fodder for criticism perhaps out of all proportion to the scale of the error. At other times, the mistake is clearly the result of the writer not knowing the fine points of the field in which they are working.

An example comes to mind, the “Soldiers of Barabbas” pulp military adventure novels by Jack Hild (Gold Eagle, 1983 – 1989). There were 33 titles in the series and it was very obvious that Jack Hild himself wrote the first half of them, about sixteen if memory serves (he returned for a few other instalments which stood out among the ghost-written hack-jobs like a rose among weeds). The 18^th title, Sakhalin Breakout, was very obviously ghost written, and the new hand on the pen was not just lacking Jack Hild’s literary flare and enthusiasm for subject, he lacked the technical knowledge of the general militaria of the times. At one point he had a short-duration high-speed interceptor deployed in the ground attack role and flying a long, long standing patrol over an area – exactly the opposite of what the aircraft type concerned was capable of. Maybe this only jumped off the page to someone who knew their aeroplanes, but the militaria fans of the day no doubt picked up the error. It’s worth noting, some of the ghost writers were so bad their English sounded like it was being written as a second language – one of the later novels I closed after reading the first two pages.

Fast forward thirty years… A recent research case of my own concerned the history of Japan. I had an idea for a rather exotic short and found myself delving into some bite-sized volumes of good repute, two Osprey titles by Stephen Turnbull. One was a concise history of the Samurai sword, placed in its broader context, while the other was a biography of Toyotomi Hideoshi, the great general of the 16^th century who united Japan in an era of conquest likened to that of Napoleon in Europe. Having already read Willian de Lange’s excellent treatise, Famous Japanese Swordsmen of the Two Courts Period, and access to Jonathan Clements’ A Brief History of The Samurai, a New History of the Warrior Elite, I found I had a general grounding in the tide of Japanese medieval history, certainly good enough for me to select the era I felt best suited my material, and enough detail for me to depict the elements which should be encountered. Online searches further refined things when it came to the honourifics of the language and some featured elements of the Shinto religion. The story itself was swift to write and went off on submission to a forthcoming anthology – fingers are still crossed as I write this.

The research process was a great pleasure, and therein lies perhaps the greatest strength: if the subject matter is genuinely interesting to the writer then research is not a chore, there is no aspect of “wading through it,” but of discovering information which is not just useful in the sense of its utility to the project in hand but of intrinsic value in its own right. If all research could be this way, the writer’s task in firming up the background details, whether historical, technical or otherwise, would be no burden at all!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

With a Deep Breath…

I have often been asked why I don’t have a writing blog, and the answer has always been a simple one: I may write rather a lot but I have never previously felt comfortable – qualified – to comment on the field. What’s changed? I have always felt professional acknowledgement is the tipping point, the one extra step beyond the non-paying credits, which, while they are certainly nice, are not quite the same. Having been paid for one’s work is a lynchpin of today’s society, and while there are certainly grades of payment and grades of “standing” that go with them, a transaction is a transaction.

I have been writing most of my life. I recall being in early primary school, age around 7, and being asked to draw a picture and provide a caption – I drew a small picture at the bottom of each of two pages and filled the rest of both with writing, something about an expedition to the moon, if I recall, using rather Thunderbirds-like hardware. My teachers commented rather a lot. After that I always enjoyed “composition” in school.

Writing for fun has been a lifetime hobby, and as an academic I learned to use English at the level of the 99^th percentile, with 218, 000 words of theses collectively, and academia is a hard habit to break. Converting textbook English to popular prose can be a mental gymnastic and it’s harder than some might think to be able to see one’s own style and know it may be inappropriate in a given context. Having a first rate beta reader is almost a prerequisite, as we cannot “see ourselves as others see us” and only a perspective separated by a few or more degrees provides objectivity.

What is it that makes a storyteller? That question has probably been asked since the first bards, when wandering recitations were the stock in trade of the ancient world. There may be no definitive answer, no matter how long philosophers debate the point. The born storyteller knows they need to tell stories – there is an inspiration that burns within and cannot be denied. I remember as a kid being inspired by sci-fi cover art and, without necessarily understanding much of what was going on, feeling an impulse I could only describe as – literally – a burning excitement and a needing to give form to events and places. The same feeling remains, if at only a ghost of its former intensity, and inspirational creativity is still a valuable tool.

I have long wanted to try my hand at the traditional short story market, and I recently decided to give it a go, so this blog is a companion to that process. I’ll discuss what I’m reading or writing, perhaps review things, talk about the craft of writing, and certainly report successes as they occur, with links to outlets I’ll be only too happy to promote (see the previous post for the first of these!).

So, I’ll be posting from time to time with my thoughts and ramblings, and I hope my ravings will be of use or interest to fellow writers and aspiring bards. This will be an occasional blog which I hope will develop over time with general literary mill-grist. I hope you’ll come along for the ride!

Cheers, Mike

PS: Apologies for the stock images so far, I’ll get creative with a camera, I promise!

First Exposures

You can catch my short story “Lo, These Many Gods” on September 1^st with the release of SQ Mag #28.

This was a piece I wrote from a purely inspirational seed and it developed as I hoped it might. I was delighted for it to find a home! I originally submitted it for a themed collection, but while it was not a good fit for that volume it was accepted for the ongoing magazine. Many thanks SQ!

Also in play at this time are short-listings with Phobos (#4, themed issue “Deep Black Sea”), Andromeda Spaceways (note the recent slight title change)and Aurealis. I’m on tenterhooks to see which (all??) of these second-round readings may turn up trumps, and rest assured I’ll keep you up to date.

Cheers, Mike

In at the Deep End

Is there anything as sweet as an acceptance letter?

Every aspiring writer – aspiring to becoming a known name, a professional, whatever definition you want to put on one’s serious participation in the field of popular or commercial writing today – must deal with the bare facts and they are intimidating. To throw your hat into the literary ring calls for more than a little fortitude, as the odds are overwhelmingly loaded against the writer.

Statistics are available, derived from a cross section of the writing and publishing public – take a wander through the stats at The(Submission) Grinder and you may be appalled. Unless I was reading the data incorrectly, something like 96.5% of all submissions are rejected, another per cent or two are lost, and one-point-something per cent are acceptances.

On the face of it there seems to be a wider marketplace than ever before, but the apparent richness is deceptive. Yes, there are scores and scores of media outlets now, a great many catering to the contemporary taste for “speculative” fiction – science fiction, fantasy, horror and every admixture and permutation of those categories. But marketplaces are far from equal and when sorted by their particular requirements the amazing variety goes down like a stone in terms of their applicability to any particular piece you may have written.

Length is an obvious limiting factor – writing to length is all part of the art, but the various latitudes of different marketplaces mean you develop a selection of available material which simply cannot be universally submittable for this reason alone. Then there is tenor – what is a particular marketplace looking for? Gritty realism or PG-13 fun? The same story cannot be both unless you have the flexibility to write multiple versions of the same piece, editing and reworking to tune it to different outlets. There is nothing impossible in this but it is a very commercial and mercenary pursuit – ruthless, in fact, to one’s own natural style which is inevitably drowned in the requirements of others. That’s a topic to come back to.

What about “voice?” There are outlets which favour “experimental narratives” – prose so oblique and filled with peculiar metaphor that it jangles in the ear like a sack of scrap metal, and that’s fine, those marketplaces know what their readers want and are giving it to them. There are other outlets which have had quite enough of those experiments and want lush prose into which the reader can sink like a scented bath. Each to their own, but where does the writer fall in this?

Research is an ongoing pursuit, one comes across new outlets on an almost daily basis – sadly many are now-closed anthologies, or magazines which went defunct five years ago and have not been weeded from databases. And what about the question of who is reading and who isn’t? A wise move is to keep a check on this, note when markets are re-opening for submission and be ready with appropriate material.

This is all very intimidating to the newbie, but nothing that can’t be squared away with practice and forethought. Standard manuscript format is another such industry hoop to jump through – you only need to fix those details once, then adjust as necessary for the specifics of individual outlets.

Jumping in at the deep end seems to be the only way, and, with at least some trepidation, I did just that. I have my acceptance letter and it’s a wonderful feeling, coming on top of a string of semi-pro credits in the last few years; there are also the near-misses resulting in an encouraging, personalised rejection. It whispers keep going, one day you’ll send the right story to the right outlet where it’ll be seen by the right readers on the right day, and you’ll have another pro credit. And of course, in addition, there are the short-listings, passing the first-readers and being held for second-round consideration, and they are very sweet indeed!

That’s the dream – to call oneself a published writer, taking part in the machine of popular fiction as we know it in the electronic age. Nothing has really changed in the last century at the fundamental level of aspiring to write, the internal impulse to be a storyteller no matter what, but the industry changes over time and the writer must endeavour to keep pace, to change with it.

Oh, by the way, that dream office in the header pic is not mine (surprised, right?), I found it on a free image search on the web. But it’s where I wish I was sitting to compose this. Well, maybe one day!

Cheers, Mike Adamson.