intergalactic medicine show

One of the questions that often comes up in the Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction class is: are there markets that should be eliminated due to factors outside of pay, reply time, exposure, and the other usual suspects?

This is something that one needs to think about, and my rule is simply this: would you feel pleased and proud to have your work appear there?

There are some markets that sometimes people might want to exclude. Let’s take a (very) recent example, the Weird Tales kerfuffle. To recap, Marvin Kaye announced that the magazine would be serializing a novel, SAVE THE PEARLS, and his announcement made it seem as though part of the reason for printing it was that the book has been unfairly ganged up on by “Amazon readers.” I put that phrase in quotation marks because it’s actually been pretty consistently slammed for its racism by numerous bloggers. Here’s one of the reactions that sums up a lot of the objections.

I have been noticing a lot of these over the last couple of months, and I was going to skip it, but then I was totting up the publications from last year, and I’m proud of the fact that I had 19 stories published.

They are all either short story or flash (Swallowing Ghosts, Futures, Lost in Drowsy Dreams, The Forbidden Stitch) and are eligible for various short story awards. There’s some favorites from last one (marked with *), but the one I’m hoping will get some notice is “Long Enough and Just So Long” which appeared in Lightspeed in February, 2011.

Here are links to the online stuff:

Long Enough and Just So Long – Lightspeed, SF

Love, Resurrected – Beneath Ceaseless Skies, fantasy
Pippa’s Smiles, Swallowing Ghosts – Daily Science Fiction, fantasy
Bots d’Amor – Abyss & Apex, SF
Karaluvian Fale – Giganotasaurus, fantasy
Whose Face This Is I Do Not Know – Clarkesworld, horror? sf? fantasy?
The Immortality Game – Fantasy Magazine, fantasy
TimeSnip – Basement Stories, sf
Lost in Drowsy Dreams and The Forbidden Stitch -10 Flash , fantasy
Futures – The Dream People, sf? fantasy?
Zeppelin Follies – last issue Crossed Genres, sf

I am happy to send the stories not available online to anyone reading for Hugos, Nebulas, Tiptree etc. They are:
Close Your Eyes – Apex Magazine, horror
A Frame of Mother-of-Pearl – Intergalactic Medicine Show, fantasy
A Querulous Flute of Bone – Tales From the Fathomless Abyss, sf
Flicka – Subversions, sf
The Coffeemaker’s Passion – Bull Spec, fantasy
Aquila – Shadows and Light II, sf

The art for Issue 21 of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show has appeared on the excellent blog Sideshow Freaks of its most excellent editor, Edmund R. Schubert. The story’s title was originally Starling’s Wing – for what reason I’m not sure other than it was a phrase that occurred to me and which I liked for its 19th century flavor. I managed to work the title into the story in a somewhat laborious and contrived fashion with this passage towards the end: