Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction

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.

Dagan Books has been posting bios and interviews with all the authors included in the forthcoming "In Situ" anthology. This week it’s my turn. You can read the interview (and a very short excerpt from The Field Trip) here.

Also, Every Day Fiction announced their table of contents for April, and "On The Last Afternoon" is slated for an April 13 release. Mark your calendars!

Huzzah – Every Day Fiction picked up another one of my stories. They will be publishing "On The Last Afternoon" sometime in the coming months (date to be determined).

I’ve also been playing around with a shiny new toy that is Google Sites. I used it to create a comprehensive list of all of my published (and soon to be published) fiction. Everything that’s out so far is available to read for free, though you will have to shell out some cash if you want to read The Field Trip (buy the anthology) or Superior Firepower (buy the magazine issue). Totally worth it, of course.

Two bits of news today. Pel’s Crusade, a fantasy flash story was picked up by Golden Visions magazine and will appear in their summer issue. GVM publishes both online and in-print, with different content appearing in both. This story will be available online (which is my preference
anyway, so that more people get to read it).

Also, Part II of “The Candidate” was posted at ascensiongame.com today. Read it here.