Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction

Far as the writing goes, yesterday was a very good day for me.

In the morning I heard back from Daily Science Fiction – they are buying a flash SF story  "Spidersong" which I wrote for a Shock Totem contest and submitted to them just under a month ago. A sale in itself is always a very exciting thing – but this sale even more so. First of all, this is my first professional market sale (as opposed to semi-pro and paying markets I’ve been able to get into in the past). But, more importantly, DSF is really special to me.

They launched on September 1, 2010 and I’ve been reading the stories they publish almost every day since then.  There is no other science fiction publication that I read with the same consistency. They also began accepting submissions at about the same time when I started sending them out – June of last year. It’s always been a goal of mine to be published with them, and in most cases they are the first market I try with my stories. Over the course of a year I submitted nine different times. A few times they held the story longer then average, or even let me know that it made it past the first round of reading – but this is the first time they bought one and I couldn’t be more proud.

Later that same day I heard back from Nanoism – a magazine that publishes Twitter-length fiction; complete stories told in 140 characters or less. I don’t quite understand the genre and the best solution to that is to try and write something in it. I did, and submitted my first ever 140-character story to Nanoism, which is the top market for such things. It’s been over four months since and I pretty much gave up on it, thinking they either lost the submission somehow or hated it so much that it didn’t deserve a rejection slip. Imagine my surprise when I heard back from the editor letting me know that he liked the story – and would be publishing it later that same day. It is up at Nanoism now and can be read over here.

I still don’t really know much about Twitter fiction, having written a grand total of 2 140-character stories (second one didn’t win or place in the contest it was written for) – but now I can at least pretend.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 7th, 2011 at 11:10 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.