What classes are coming up? There's Writing F&SF Stories, the First Pages workshop, Podcasting Basics, Literary Techniques for Genre Fiction...and more.I’ve been teaching online classes for a few years now. They have been awesome and one of the coolest things has been the number of talented writers I’ve had the privilege to work with. However, I’m scheduling a break from teaching during the latter half of 2014, and it’s for a few reasons.
The first and most important is that I can feel a little burnout creeping up around the edges. I’ll be talking in a class and think to myself, “I know I’ve said this before,” and it will be because I have said it before, repeatedly even — but not to that class. I can tell that if I don’t take a break, that feeling is going to drown me.
The second is to focus even more on the writing, because there’s at least two books I’d like to finish up this year, along with the usual roster of short stories. (I’m at ten completed so far this year, which is unusually productive but highly pleasing.)
The third is because I don’t want to get in a rut. I want to go think about some new things and then come back ready to talk about them to students.
So – if you want a class with me in 2014 — check out the list now. I’ll probably list a couple more conversation classes in June, but that’s it. But I’ll be back in 2015!
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Response Times and Professional Magazines
Yesterday I withdrew a story from a market because we were starting to near the one year mark, and the couple of queries I’d made all got the usual “It’s in the queue, we’re swamped, just a little longer” reply. I don’t mind waiting a little longer, but I do mind when it gets used to keep you going for months.
So that’s cool, and no hard feelings over them having sat on it a while. I end up withdrawing a story for similar reasons once every couple of years. But here’s the reply I got regarding the withdrawal:
Thanks for the note. Your story is officially withdrawn from our reading queue. One thing you might want to consider in the future is that pro markets take a lot of time. So I’d tailor a story for a certain market and then move on while you wait. That’s what Bradbury and Matheson and all those guys do. Some pro markets such as Cemetery Dance take up to two years. So that’s why I say. But the credit one receives when they break pro is worth everything. I hope this helps you future endeavors. You can send along something else in the future when we reopen for subs in [identifying information redacted]. Just make sure it’s a different story as I don’t accept stories that have previously been withdrawn.
Some pro markets do take up to two years, but it’s darn few of them. Most of the professional magazines are professional; they get stuff back to you fast. Even without e-submissions, Gordon Van Gelder manages to wade through swamps of rejections and still return them in a timely manner. Sure, Tor.com is slow, but given that they pay five times as much as most, I’m willing to give them five times as much time in which to reply. Asimov’s, Analog, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Strange Horizons all pay professional rates and yet manage what is apparently a highly unprofessional rapid reply rate.
We got 550-600 subs a month towards the end of my tenure with Fantasy, and I would have felt terrible making people wait over a month, let alone more. And I’m going to say, this particular rejection is a great argument for form rejections, because the patronizing tone here really put me off, plus this is TERRIBLE advice for a new writer. Write what you want to write, not what you think a magazine wants to see.
I dunno. Maybe the editor is working off a different definition of professional than I use.
An exiled soldier tries to wait out a winter in a fort beleaguered by fox-spirits and winter demons.Happy New Year, one and all! I thought I’d start the New Year talking about what I’m working on at the moment, putting individual stories up on Amazon and Smashwords. Between publications and backlog, I’ve got about 200 to play with, so it’s a pretty big task, given that I’d like to have almost all of them up by the end of the month. But if I consider that some are flash, which I’ll put up individually on QuarterReads and release in a compendium, it becomes less daunting.
I’m getting faster at the process as I go, and I’m also refining it, which unfortunately means I need to go back over some of the earlier releases, just to make them all look the same as far as prettiness and completeness goes.
Would it be better to space releasing the stories out over the course of a year? Probably. But I’d like to get this all set up and done so I can move onto other things. I have enough stories that will be added over the course of the year as I write them or their rights become available that there will be plenty of additions as is.
What I’ve done with the stories is split them up into series. This is an easy enough task because I’ve got plenty of clusters of stories where characters or locations repeat, as with Twicefar Station, which is the backdrop for “Amid the Words of War,” “Kallakak’s Cousins,” and “On TwiceFar Station, As the Ships Come and Go.” It’s also the same world as “TimeSnip,” whose main character appears in “On TwiceFar Station, As the Ships Come and Go.”
Why I’m doing this:
This allows me to provide readers who like a particular story with a way to find similar ones. If they read “Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart,” for instance, and want to find other steampunk stories by me, they can look at the others in the Altered America series.
This lets me play with KDP in a meaningful way. If I make the first book Kindle only for at least the first year, I can use the Kindle Select promotional tools and get readers to sample a story by giving it to them free.
Here’s what I’ve got sorted of the series so far, with a description of each.
Altered America (steampunk)
Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart
Rappacini’s Crow
Closer Than You Think (near future SF)
All the Pretty Little Mermaids
Tortoiseshell Cats Are Not Refundable
Zeppelin Follies
English Muffin, Devotion on the Side
Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars
Therapy Buddha
Farther Than Tomorrow (slipstream & space opera)
Bus Ride to Mars
Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain
Grandmother
Elsewhen, Within, Elsewhen
Superlives (superheroes)
Ms. Liberty Gets a Haircut
Acquainted with the Night
Tales of Tabat (secondary world fantasy)
Narrative of a Beast’s Life
How Dogs Came to the New Continent
Events at Fort Plentitude
Sugar
Love, Resurrected
In the Lesser Southern Isles
Twicefar Station (far future SF)
Kallakak’s Cousins
On TwiceFar Station, As the Ships Come and Go
Amid the Words of War
I Come From the Dark Universe
Villa Encantada (urban fantasy/horror)
Eagle-haunted Lake Sammammish
Villa Encantada
Crowned with Antlers Comes the King
Women of Zalanthas (secondary world fantasy)
Aquila’s Ring
Mirabai the Twice-lived
Karaluvian Fale
The World Beside Us (urban fantasy/horror)
Jaco Tours
Magnificent Pigs
Heart in a Box
Can You Hear the Moon?
Of Selkies, Disco Balls, and Anna Plane
So far, after approximately a month of getting stuff up there, I’m seeing some small sales, but also a tiny uptick in my collections that could be due to something else entirely. (Self-publishing is such a mysterious process!) So over the course of the year, I’ll be tracking the results.
