Things have been a little slower lately, the pace of
acceptances has been down since February, with a total of nineteen on the
scorecard to date. I have an important announcement for next month, so will
hopefully be posting news in two or three weeks. (Apologies for being so quiet
lately, but I’ve been writing intensively too.)
Coming available at the end of April will be the
Walpurgisnacht edition of Lovecraftiana, featuring my short story Fall of the
Dark God, and I seem to have struck up a good working relationship with
this publishing house. I have a story in their stand-alone anthology Sword and Planet (By the Moons of Grolph) and
in the last week placed another piece with the magazine. My Cthulhu Mythos
piece With Strange Aeons is slated
for the following issue of Lovecraftiana,
due for release July 31st. This is my first repeat publisher. Sales links as they come available!
The new magazine Storyhack is
dedicated to action and adventure in all their forms, and I pitched a “pure”
adventure, i.e., taking place in a real world/historical context as opposed to
a genre setting, and the piece was solicited. I penned a World War II adventure
about a British fighter pilot shot down on the coast of France endeavouring to
escape back to England, and formulated it as if it were a memoires written in
the late 1970s. This is easily the most intensively researched piece I have
ever written. The editor was unable to fit the story into his inaugural volume
but would like to consider it for the second, so I’m very hopeful this will
firm up into a placement in due course.
I have a short-listing with Andromeda Spaceways, which is great news, but apparently they buy only 5% of stories on the
shortlist anyway, so the odds remain around the level of random chance even
after passing two rounds of reading – nobody said it was easy! On the same
note, two more short-listings have come in in quick succession. The young
readers’ magazine Cast of Wonders like
my piece Salazar’s Flying Emporium,
while the Aussie SF mag Aurealis, just
coming up on their milestone 100th issue, fancy my deep-sea horror
piece Fear of the Dark. My fingers
are crossed for both!
My new record for total number of stories on submission at
any one time stands at 73, and I expect it to go higher in the near future. I
have made 429 submissions to date, and completed 24 stories so far this year.
I’ll hopefully have some new essays soon, and am always
eager to report new sales!
Cheers, Mike Adamson
