Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction

Earlier this month I got to attend the Viable Paradise writing workshop on Martha’s Vineyard. It was an amazing experience, and I will write a much more detailed post about it soon — but it was so formulative and overwhelming that I couldn’t bring myself to blog intelligently about it right away.  It is on my (very long) to do list for November.

Although I’ve only written one new story this month, I’ve had a number of very exciting sales and publications in October.

Publications:

“The tell-tale ear” was published by The Journal of Nature. This is a 21st-century retelling of “The tell-tale heart” told entirely through e-mails. I wrote the story for a Shock Totem contest and was thrilled to have it sell to Nature mere days after I submitted it there, by far my fastest pro-level acceptance.  You can read this story here.

Smoke & Mirrors, an outstanding podcast by Dennis R. Miller, produced my 100-word humorous fantasy story Chill, which originally appeared in The Drabbler a year ago.  Dennis was also kind enough to plug Unidentified Funny Objects. Listen to this week’s episode here.

Combined with my Bards & Sages story mentioned in the previous post this has been quite a month for my humor stories. And, to top it off, yet another humor story will appear on ufopub.com — but I will make a separate post about it when it goes live.

Sales:

Stupefying Stories will publish “Number Station” in their November issue, edited by M. David Blake. The story was accepted by Stupefying Stories back in January and has been waiting for the right issue ever since. So technically this isn’t a new sale, but I’m pleased to share this story with the world.

Weird Tales accepted “A Gnomish Gift” for their Fairy Tales themed issue, which is likely to appear around December.

Daily Science Fiction accepted “Things We Leave Behind” — this is my fourth sale to my favorite SF ‘zine, and the first longer Friday story (at 2500 words).

So what’s on tap for November? It’s novel time! Beginning November 1st I will tackle a novel. I’ve been busy outlining and planning and generally thinking about the themes and motifs I would like to feature in the book. Although I expected my first novel to be a Conrad Brent story, I decided to start with something else instead. This will be a space opera tentatively titled “World Burner” and based on the short story “The Dragon Ships of Tycho” which I wrote last year and which was published in the Galactic Creatures anthology in Spring of 2012. I wrote the sequel story to “Dragon Ships” titled “The Sgovari Stratagem” while at Viable Paradise and the world and characters just can’t get out of my head. So I’m going to expand on these two stories and try to produce the first draft of a novel in a few months’ time.

I don’t want to abandon short stories though. I still intend to write at least one new short story per month to meet my Write1Sub1 goals. Speaking of Write1Sub1, the fine folks behind this motivational program are gearing up for its third year and they recruited several new moderators to help usher it along. I’m one of those new moderators. Which means I will be in charge of posting the weekly content on the Write1Sub1 web site for at least one month next summer, among other things. Because, you know, there wasn’t enough on my plate already. But I love the W1S1 initiative and how it helps lazy writers like myself to produce more words and helps the more timid writers among us to kick their stories out the door and into submission queues, so when they asked, it was an easy “yes” for me.

I’m looking forward to November. I will attend Phil Con and send ARCs (Advance Review Copies) of Unidentified Funny Objects to reviewers. And, with any luck, have more exciting story sales to report.