The year just gone hasn’t been as productive, in terms of word count, as the previous year. This is because in 2016 I was laid off at work in May, and didn’t start a new job until October, giving me six months to effectively write full-time. I discovered I can write a lot in six months.

I also haven’t written, or submitted, nearly as much short fiction this year, because I’ve been spending what writing time I had on novels. This is largely because my deal with Canadian-based small press Digital Fiction to take over publication of the Gryphon Clerks series has made my novels more profitable, and hence more attractive to work on; but it’s partly been a mood thing, too. I write what I’m motivated to write, which is sometimes novels and sometimes short stories. This was a novels year.

Consequently, my short story submission figures for this year are way down, because I wasn’t writing new stuff. I also pulled a number of my stories out of submission to work on them some more, and then ended up not doing so. I joined Codex, a forum for “neo-pro” writers, last year, and while the critiques I’ve received there have been all kinds of useful, by the same token they’ve clarified to me some of the issues with the stories I haven’t sold yet, and I haven’t quite puzzled out how to fix them.

I did sell a few stories, though, mostly reprints of ones I’d already sold somewhere else, and I reached the milestone of 200 total submissions (spread over 6 years). Here are my figures for the year, compared with previous years:

I did get some writing done. My fifth Gryphon Clerks novel, Mister Bucket for Assembly, which I was originally going to self-publish in late 2016, ended up coming out as the first all-new publication I had with Digital Fiction, appearing in May 2017. That wasn’t Digital Fiction’s fault, or even, really, because I published it with them rather than doing it myself; it needed a lot of structural work, including tearing out a whole storyline that wasn’t well integrated with the main plot. I do plan to publish those “deleted scenes”, probably in 2018 sometime, as part of a (slightly? much?) larger book that follows the human characters from the Hope books and wraps up parts of their stories. It will take place over the timeframe of Mister Bucket and probably a bit beyond.

That’s how the Gryphon Clerks books tend to work: it’s a big world, even the small part of it that I’ve explored so far, and three of the novels already take place at overlapping times, with different groups of characters that occasionally intersect. (That’s Realmgolds, Hope and the Clever Man, and Beastheads, all of which take place in part during the brief Unification War.)

Here’s a timeline, in case you’re confused:

You’ll notice on there a book called Illustrated Gnome News. If you’ve read Mister Bucket, you’ll probably recognise that as the name of the gnomes’ newspaper, founded to support Bucket in his campaign for election. That’s the book I’m working on at the moment. The third draft has gone off to my development editor; it’s a monster, currently at 115,000 words, which is my longest book yet (Bucket is second, at around 90,000). It seems to grow by 5000 words each time I revise it. But I feel like I’m finally getting a handle on writing a long, multi-threaded, multiple-viewpoint novel with a unified theme explored from different perspectives.

Illustrated Gnome News follows some of the younger gnomes from Mister Bucket for Assembly, a couple of years later, as they struggle to figure out how to live in a world where gnomes are now free and not subject to the old constraints imposed by the dwarves – but where a lot of gnomes, particularly older ones, go on living by those rules, because that’s what they’ve always done, and they’re outraged at the idea that younger gnomes might depart from them. It’s a confusing and challenging time for everyone, and the newspaper has to balance between being a voice to move gnomish society forward, and a business that can afford to keep operating. To make matters worse, some of the debt that Mister Hammer, the paper’s owner, has had to take on has fallen into unfriendly hands, which could result in ruin not only for him but for other gnome businessmen. It’s never been more important for gnomes to pull together, and yet they’re more openly at odds than they’ve ever been.

And into the middle of all this I drop a romance that is very much not in the approved gnomish manner, and that’s threatened by social expectations and economic realities alike.

I’m not willing to give a more precise estimate than “first half of 2018” for publication, but I think it’ll be worth waiting for. Stay tuned.

I’ve also started a new Gryphon Clerks project. I’m not sure how long it will end up being; it’s a set of three linked stories featuring a pair of gnomes, a Realm Agent and a woman engineer, who solve technological crimes together. Working title is The Piston and Precision Mysteries. It’s set a few years later than Illustrated Gnome News, and Piston is a minor character in that novel.

I’m very pleased to announce not one, but two short story sales to professional publications.

A science fiction story yet to receive its final title (working title: “One-Eyed Man”) will be published in Futuristica Volume 2 in November 2016. I’ve known about this one for a while, but had to delay the announcement while the editors sorted out which stories would go in which volume. It’s the story of what happens when scientists who have developed a treatment that makes people more prosocial first take it themselves, and then seek to convince a politician to be one of the first high-profile people to take it. I think I’ve managed to pull off an ending which feels either dystopian or utopian, depending on the reader.

My fantasy short story “Gatekeeper, What Toll?” will also be published in the new magazine Cosmic Roots and Elvish Shores. I don’t have a publication date yet, so stay tuned. This one is told from the viewpoint of the keeper of an interdimensional portal, who sees a fated conqueror-king pass back and forth through the Gate at key times in his life. It’s a six-volume, two-and-a-half-million-word epic fantasy implied in two and a half thousand words.

I’m proud of my achievement in going from no sales to pro sales in approximately two and a half years. I started to get serious about submitting short stories almost exactly two years ago, and these two professional sales (and another seven semipro sales, plus an acceptance from a charity anthology) are the fruit of nearly a hundred submissions over that two-year period.

Judging by the contents of the Campbellian Anthology, which contains work by people who have had their first pro sale in the past three years, approximately one person a week achieves this milestone worldwide. This appears to be my week.

I’m continuing to work hard on other stories, and I hope to sell several more to professional publications this year.

Sir Julius Vogel Eligibility

Sir Julius Vogel Awards trophy

Looking back to last year, I published several works which are eligible for the Sir Julius Vogel awards, New Zealand’s awards for science fiction, fantasy and horror. Finalists are determined by the number of nominations for each work, and nominations have to be received by 28 February this year.

If you’ve read (or listened to) one of my works listed below and think it’s award-worthy, please email your nomination to: sjv_awards@sffanz.org.nz. Anyone in the world can nominate, but the final vote is by members of the annual NZ science fiction conference.

Note: I originally had links and other information below for both the text and podcast versions of “Something Rich and Strange”. They’re not identical–there are two or three sentences that are different–so to prevent issues I’ve changed it to just the text version, which is (I think) the better one.

I’ve added a new sub-site to my website specifically for short stories, since that’s become a significant part of my fiction output. I’ve sold eight stories so far this year (one of which I’m still not allowed to talk about, so watch this space).

Since my last update, two more have been published. The first is “There’s a Tattoo, but the Robes Hide It,” a comic sword-and-sorcery tale in which the Dread Lord’s consort, desperate to leave him, reluctantly enlists the aid of the trickster god. It’s published in the charity anthology In Memory: A Tribute to Sir Terry Pratchett, which is burning up the Amazon charts. (As I write, it’s number 28 in the Kindle store for fantasy anthologies.) All proceeds go to Alzheimer’s research, so I encourage you to pick up a copy. Not only does it honour Terry Pratchett by its charitable purpose, but the stories are a fitting tribute to his legacy of humane, moving, funny fantasy.

The other story just out is “Something Rich and Strange“. A Victorian miss in an alternate version of our world finds her true self at the Change Storm, the bizarre natural phenomenon on which her professor father is a leading expert. Her father and his mansplaining assistant expect her to fall into the role of audience/love interest/impediment/rescuee that is the lot of professors’ daughters in so many pulp adventure stories, but she has ideas of her own. This one is published in podcast form at The Overcast, so you can enjoy someone reading it to you.

I’ve also recently sold a couple of stories to Stupefying Stories, and I’ll let you know about those when they come out. And then there’s that secret one.

If you’re not already subscribed to my mailing list, and you don’t want to miss these announcements, hop on. We’re coming close to the next milestone at which I’ll release another piece of free short fiction to the list, as well, so encourage your short-story-loving friends to join.

It’s launch day for The Well-Presented Manuscript: Just What You Need to Know to Make Your Fiction Look Professional, my new non-fiction book for my fellow writers. Currently, it’s exclusive to Amazon, but if you use other outlets, I’ll soon have it available in the B&N, Kobo and Apple stores and via Oyster and Scribd.

I’ve just finished reading Damon Knight’s excellent book Creating Short Fiction. I was pleased to note that his section on “How to Be Publishable” included the point that you need a command of language, including some knowledge of how to assemble words into phrases and sentences, and a good active vocabulary. That’s exactly what The Well-Presented Manuscript is about: developing the basic competence with the tools and materials of language that will get your fiction read by editors, reviewers and the general public.

Nowhere is this more important than in your blurb or pitch, which is one of the first things your prospective reader will see. Just this morning, I read a blurb in which “Scottish” was spelled with three consecutive Ts. As it happens, I’ve read part of the book concerned, and the editing is terrible (which is why I stopped reading). The blurb does tip you off to what the book is going to be like.

So here’s the blurb for The Well-Presented Manuscript:

Do you want to be taken seriously by editors, readers or reviewers?
Do you make errors in your fiction writing?
This book is for you.

Mike Reeves-McMillan is a fiction author, reviewer, and former copy editor and technical writer. He’s analysed the errors he’s found in almost 250 books, both indie and traditionally published, and written a simple, clear guide to avoiding the most common issues.

Learn:
– Why editors reject 90% of what’s submitted to them—and how to increase your chances.
– How to get punctuation right every time.
– The special conventions of dialog.
– The most common word confusions, typos, and research errors—and how to check for and eliminate them.

If that interests you, please go to Amazon and pick up a copy of The Well-Presented Manuscript. (That’s an affiliate link–it costs you the same, but pays me more.) I promise you’ll learn at least two useful things you didn’t know before.

More News

I recently reviewed my short story submission stats for the first half of this year, and compared them with the full-year stats for last year.

I’m submitting at about the same rate (23 for the half-year, versus 44 for the full year last year). My proportion of personal rejections to form rejections has improved slightly (8:9 instead of 14:20). But the big jump is in acceptances: four so far this year, versus one for the whole of last year.

I’ll announce the publications as they come out, but I’ve made two sales to online magazine The Sockdolager (one of them already published); placed a story with In Memory, a charity anthology honouring Terry Pratchett and benefiting Alzheimer’s research; and sold another story to The Overcast, a fiction podcast.

I’m continuing to write new stories, and keeping them in circulation. There are over 100 professional and semi-professional science fiction and fantasy publications soliciting stories at the moment, so it’s a wonderful time to be writing short fiction.

On the novel side, I have three or four more edit passes to go on Auckland Allies, the first in a new urban fantasy series. It’s set in Auckland, New Zealand, where I live. It’s a lot of fun, and I hope to bring it out in the next few months.

My short story “Wearing the Hat” appears this month, in the first issue of online adventure fiction magazine The Sockdolager. You can read the whole story, and in fact the whole issue, online, but if you enjoy it I urge you to buy it (using the links from the issue’s main page) and support this new venture.

I had an excellent experience submitting the story. The editors got back to me within 24 hours of my submission, they loved it, they sent me a contract the same day, the contract was clear and straightforward and fair, and they paid me – earlier than the contract said they had to – in advance of publication. All of these (apart, perhaps, from loving my story) are things that you’d think would be standard industry practice, but they’re very much not.

The story itself is typical of my short pieces. It takes place in the Gryphon Clerks setting, but a long way away from the big events of the novels. It isn’t about movers and shakers, but about the people who are moved and shaken, and deal with it as best they can. The hero isn’t young, isn’t a warrior, isn’t changing the world; she’s a middle-aged shopkeeper placed in an invidious position, who does what she has to do.

In keeping with The Sockdolager’s premise (“short genre stories in which Things Happen”), though, it’s more action-oriented than most of my stories. At the same time – and this, I think, is why they bought it – the action isn’t in isolation, or there for its own sake; it arises naturally out of the situation, and means something to the participants. At heart, it’s a Western.

If you enjoy it, there are another dozen like it in my solo collection Good Neighbours and Other Stories from HDWP Books. And don’t forget the current Kickstarter for the Hysterical Realms anthology, in which I also have a piece.

I have a story in this anthology, now on Kickstarter. It’s the third anthology in the Alternate Hilarities series, and you can get all three at the $10 backer level, or just this one for $5.

As I write, it’s about halfway to its goal with 11 days to go, so pile in and add your contribution if funny fantasy is of interest to you. I haven’t read the other stories, but some of them sound like they have a lot of potential.

My story (“Axe Stone, Svart Detective”) is a mashup of Fritz Leiber-style sword-and-sorcery, the narrative style of Damon Runyon, and classic detective noir. I think I’ve combined those three elements effectively, into a story that would work even if it wasn’t funny (but it is). Go ahead and back the Kickstarter, and you can see if you agree with me.

I’ve been working on this one for a little while now, but I decided it’s time to announce it on my blog.

Makers of Magic will be a single-author themed anthology, thirteen stories in twelve settings (two Gryphon Clerks ones), each with a different kind of magic-user as a character. Mostly, the magic-using character will be the protagonist, but sometimes the antagonist, or maybe even a secondary character.

A single-author anthology unified by theme rather than setting is unusual. I’m sure someone else has done it, but I’m not aware of any. The reason I’m doing it is simple: I like stories about magic-users, and I noticed I’d written several and decided to go for a collection.

I’m submitting these stories out to magazines and anthologies, in the hope of getting as many as possible published before I do the collection. It’s a kind of social proof thing. The downside of that is that I’ll have to wait for the rights to revert, and that sometimes takes a year from the date of publication, so the book is unlikely to be published before late 2015 (more likely early 2016).

Given that I’m planning 13 stories, and my stories average about 3000 words, it’s probably going to have a total wordcount around 40,000, unless I find a story that needs to be longer.

seanmcgrath / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

So far I’ve written four stories which are out on submission, and which cover Necromancer (“Axe Stone: Svart Detective”), Sorcerer (“Family Curse”), Wizard (“Alix and the Dragon”, though I may write another wizard story and substitute it), and Alchemist (“Lock and Key”). I have another one in beta (“Mail-Order Witch”), and a sixth story partially written (no title as yet; it’s about a thaumaturge). The settings include a mashup of a sword-and-sorcery city with Damon Runyon’s noirish 1930s New York; a city that could possibly be Edwardian London; a secondary-world dukedom; a sword-and-sorceryish place with similarities to the Crusader kingdom of Outremer; and more-or-less contemporary Alaska.

The rest of the stories will cover Mage, Shaman, Adept, Illusionist, Warlock, Theurgist and Enchantress, unless I have better ideas, which is always likely.

The tone of the stories I’ve written so far generally includes some humour, though that’s not always the case (the sorcerer story is pretty serious, and more like an old-style Weird Tale of the 1930s). That’s not to say that they don’t also include drama involving love and/or death.

I’ll be sure to post about any of the stories that get accepted for publication elsewhere, so you can pick them up if you want to get in early, and it’s likely that one or more of them will end up as bonus content for members of my mailing list.