Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction

I'm vacationing in Barbados with my family at the moment, so this is going to be a very brief update:

* Issue 1 of KZine, containing my story "A Tear in the Web," is out at Amazon.com and can be purchased here:
http://www.amazon.com/Kzine-Issue-1-ebook/dp/B005OM0RHA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317517600&sr=8-1

"A Tear in the Web" features a sarcastic-to-the-point-of-being-almost-bitter protagonist who runs an Internet Cafe. Just like yours truly. Hope you like it!

* FISH Anthology from Dagan Books will publish my magical realism story "Life at the Lake's Shore." This anthology's Table of Contents was just announced today and it features a number of heavyweights like Cat Rambo and Ken Liu, so I'm very excited and gratified to have made the cut alongside those authors.

This anthology is scheduled to be released in February of 2012.

* Finally, a shout out to Sam Mae whose new e-zine "Comets and Criminals" is launching its inaugural issue. Check it out here:
http://www.cometsandcriminals.com/?page_id=288

Today I hit a little bit of a milestone – I've sent out my 100th short fiction submission in 2011.

I keep a spreadsheet to help me track which stories have been submitted to which magazines, and how they are doing. When you have a dozen or more short stories in circulation it would be easy (and embarassing) to submit one to a market that has previously rejected it. The spreadsheet helps me keep a careful tab on what's happening with all those submissions, and it also provides an opportunity for some data crunching, to satisfy my inner statistics geek.

So, here's a snapshot of my 2011 submissions, out of 100 total:

* Currently out on submission: 11
* Sales: 9
* Lost/never responded: 1
* Rejections: 79

It sounds like a whole lot of rejection, but I'm actually quite happy with these stats. An average SF/F magazine rejects hundreds of stories for every one they buy. My track record this year has been better than one in ten. I have already accomplished my goal of ten fiction sales in 2011 (although I sold only 9 stories submitted in 2011, I also made three sales from my late 2010 submissions).

My plan is to continue working on short fiction sales and build up a better resume of Pro market sales, at least for the next few months. I would like to begin work on a novel in early 2012, but I feel intimidated by trying to put something together with such a high word count. That is something I hope to overcome with lots of preparation and by creating a very detailed outline.

Various stuff has been going on (nothing majorly bad) that caused me to fall a bit behind on updating the blog. So let's catch up then:

My big news for the month of August was that I had a second professional rate sale. Buzzy Mag, a new publication that is launching in early 2012, picked up "A Shard Glows in Brooklyn" for their inaugural issue.

I love that story for so many reasons. At 4600 words, it's one of the longest stories I've written so far (I do best with brevity) and unlike many of my other stories it is a light, fun urban fantasy adventure set in my hometown of Brooklyn, New York. Even it's title is a pun, which I didn't really know if I could get away with. The story's characters and setting sort of took on a life of their own and, while it is a complete story in itself, in many ways it reads like the first chapter of a novel. There are lots of threads to create future storylines and I will definitely be revisiting the world of Conrad Brent soon. In fact, I have the second story outlined and two more in an idea stage. However, I don't know exactly when I will get around to putting them down on paper. Soon, I hope. Their titles will be puns based on famous books and movies set in Brooklyn as well.

Another sale in August was for a story called "A Tear in the Web" to a new Kindle magazine launching out of the U.K. "A Tear in the Web" is a story about a sarcastic, snarky man (like me) who runs an Internet Cafe (like I do in real life). While this story is by no means autobiographical, I certainly had a good time with ye olde "write what you know" adage on this one.

KZine is launching exclusively on the Kindle and issue 1 (with my story in it) should be out on September 30th, for about $3. I'll be sure to link to its Amazon page once it's up.

My final August sale was of "Hunger," an action-packed story of the last yeti being hunted down by the humans. I submitted it to Misanthrope Press' "The Rustle of Dark Leaves" anthology. Since much of the action takes place in the forest, I felt it suited their theme. The editor enjoyed the story, but didn't think it synced closely enough with their theme, so she offered to publish it in the magazine she edits, "Title Goes Here" instead. Of course, I was happy to oblige. It is slated for the Spring 2012 issue.

In other news, the Drabble issue with my 100-word story "Chill" in it has hit the proverbial newsstands.  You can buy it here.

There’s an old Russian joke that goes something like this:

A young student is applying to a prestigious Creative Writing program at a university, and the admission board is
quizzing him about the scope of his literary education.

"Don’t you get it? I’m not a reader. I’m a WRITER!"

It’s safe to assume that, unlike the student in our joke, most folks who care enough to write fiction are already avid readers anyway. To become any good at all, one needs to be familiar with the classics – whether it’s Shakespeare and Joyce for a literary author, or Asimov and Tolkien for a spec fic scribe.

For me, at least, familiarity with the genre wasn’t the hard part. The concern was more along the lines of "Holy crap, this writing thing takes up a lot of my free time. You know, that time I used to spend reading books." I used to devour books, sometimes going through as many as 2-3 novels per week. And now … I just don’t. There’s never enough time. I’ve fallen so far behind on my reading that I haven’t even gotten to some of the books released by my favorite authors in late 2010.

Recently though, I discovered something wondrous. Whenever I find a little extra time to read, I also tend to write more. Reading fiction appears to help clear out my writer’s block better than any other activity. This past week I’ve been on a real reading binge, working my way through a terrific "Void" trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton.

Hamilton is a master of writing sweeping, intelligent space operas. His books burst with interesting ideas, are engaging, and nearly impossible to put down once the story really gets going. They are also, on average, the size of a phone book. Seriously, you can kill someone with those things. If I hadn’t been reading the Void trilogy on the Kindle, carrying the books around could be legitimately considered a rigorous physical activity. So as you can imagine, finishing the entire Book 2 and making significant inroads into Book 3 all in one week took a giant bite out of what little free time I can scrounge up these days.

And yet, I’m making better progress with my writing than I have in a long time. I finished a science fiction story and tackled a magical realism tale I’ve been pretending to work on for weeks; it’s almost done now. A fantasy short I submitted to the Shock Totem contest is back with readers’ feedback and I’m now finalizing edits on that one, too. It is entirely possible I will submit not one, not two, but three brand new stories to different magazines next week. And look – I’m even updating the blog today with this rather lengthy post.

This correlation between reading and writing is welcome news indeed. It gives me an excuse to try and carve out just a little more time each week to spend doing both, and that can’t be a bad thing.

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.

The July issue of Golden Visions Magazine is now live and it includes "Pel’s Crusade" – a very short humorous flash fiction piece of mine. You can read it by clicking over here.

In other news, The Drabbler will be publishing my 100-word super-short "Chill" in their change-themed issue due out in August.

The July issue of BSQ is out. It contains my flash fantasy story "Superior Firepower." This is the first published story of mine that can’t be read for free on the web – you have to actually buy the issue, which you can do over here on Amazon.com, or get a much less expensive eBook version over here at Smashwords. And while I’m sure you will gladly fork over a few bucks to read "Superior Firepower" there are plenty of other cool stories to make this issue worth buying, including fiction by my fellow W1S1 writers James Milo Fowler and Samuel "Izz" Mae.

Speaking of Sam Mae, he recently launched his own speculative fiction magazine called Comets and Criminals. The first issue isn’t due out till January 2012, but Sam is now reading submissions and I encourage fellow spec fic authors to send him your work.

In a few days another short story of mine called "Pel’s Crusade" will be published in the July issue of Golden Visions magazine. I’ll post a link when that happens.

Dagan Books unveiled the cover for its "In Situ" anthology today, and it looks amazing:

Visit daganbooks.com to check out a hi-res image. This anthology should be released in the next month or two.