"Phoenix Dreams" Is Now Available as an E-Book

Starship Cat Press is proud to reprint "Phoenix Dreams," which was originally published in Lazarus Risen, an anthology of transhumanist speculative fiction.



Phoenix Dreams by Leigh Kimmel

In Greek myth, the phoenix is a bird that rises from its own ashes. Growing up in the city named for it, Toni knew the story well, and her experience with computer games made her comfortable with the idea of death being negotiable. So when she found a cache of old space memorabilia in her grandfather's attic, she never guessed that her eagerness to right a historic wrong would meet with such ferocious opposition.

But it only made her more determined to give this man his spaceflight, even a century late. She would learn the skills, develop the code, and do whatever it took

Books for Fall

In the United States, Labor Day is considered the beginning of autumn for social purposes. Traditionally, white shoes and hats were put away until Memorial Day, outdoor public swimming pools were closed, and school reopened for the fall semester after summer break.

Today the rules aren't nearly so strict. People wear whatever colors they want throughout the year. Heated pools stay open well into fall, and a lot of schools open near the beginning of August, shortening summer vacation in hopes of increasing retention of skills learned the previous year.

But it's still a good time for some fun books.



I Am a Wondrous Thing by Rob Howell

War looms in the west as sword, axe, and flame sweep the Kreisens and threaten to drag all of the neighboring realms, including Periaslavl, into the maelstrom.

Irina Ivanovna, ruler of Periaslavl, knows that war would destroy much of her land. Even though magic has kept her body young, she is tired and sees that she is not the one to lead her land through the upcoming storm.

She steps down in favor of her heir, as tradition dictates, and disappears from sight. She heads to the Kreisens to see if her magic can halt the bloodshed and pain.

But the storm was orchestrated by foes she does not know she has. They stalk her, knowing her magic is the key.

She must elude the hunters so she can discover what is truly threatening not just Periaslavl, but all of Shijuren.

Where will the lightning strike?

(This is the third and latest volume in the World of Shijuren.)



The Death of a Bandit: The Lady Was a Bandit volume 1 by Joseph T. Major

You can easily find the tale of the Diverse Band of Ordinary But Special People questing for the Magic Knickknack of Querty to help them win the Ultimate Battle Between Good and Evil which will mark the End of the Faerie Folk in Our World. This isn't one of those stories.
A bandit queen finds herself forced to choose between domesticity and execution. A scholar goes to extraordinary ends to find a wife. Together, they seek to solve the problems presented them in a world where magic and faerie are, well, just there.

WARNING: Contains violence, sex, and family.

(Humorous fantasy -- avoid choking, don't read while eating or drinking)



Whispered Magics by Sherwood Smith

As a child, Sherwood Smith was always on the watch for magic: no fog bank went unexplored, no wooden closet unchecked for a false back, no possible magical token left on the ground or in the gutter. In these nine stories, the impossible becomes possible, magic is real, aliens come visiting. How would our lives change?

(Although Sherwood Smith's muse usually runs to novels, even whole sequences of novels, every now and then it serves her up a perfect little gem of a short story. These are stories from the heart, that have stuck with me ever since I read them in the now-vanished magazines and kids' anthologies in which they first appeared).



Salt of the Air by Vera Nazarian

You are familiar with the salt of the earth. But did you know there is an even finer, more delicate essence?

Take wisdom and imagination, responsibility and beauty, and mix them together in arcane proportions to form a rich and peculiar brine. The resulting water of life is an emotional muddy liquid, filled with existential sediment swirling in the light of secret reality and reflecting prismatic colors of hope and wonder. If allowed to evaporate -- escape, flee, ascend into the ether and join the music of the spheres -- what remains is the quintessence; a precious concentrate that is elusive and volatile, neither fully solid nor so illusory as to be devoid of pithy substance. It is the Salt of the Air.

In this debut collection from the critically acclaimed author of Dreams of the Compass Rose and Lords of Rainbow, the nineteen stories are distillations of myth and philosophy, eroticism and ascetic purity. Dipping into an ancient multi-ethnic well, they are the stuff of fantasy—of maidens and deities and senior retirees, of emperors and artists and con artists, of warriors and librarians, of beings without a name and things very fey indeed....

Don't be afraid of ingesting ethereal salt.

Open your mind and inhale.

"Cautionary, sensual stories of love, reversal and revenge upend fairy tale conventions in Nazarian's lush collection... Sumptuous detail, twisty plots and surprising endings lift these extravagant tales."
-- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"These are beautiful, haunting confections, reminiscent of Tanith Lee's erotically charged tales... Fine shades of emotion, mythic grandeur, crystalline prose, sharp revisionist intelligence: these are Vera Nazarian's hallmarks..."
-- Nick Gevers, LOCUS

Vera Nazarian immigrated to the USA from the former USSR as a kid, sold her first story at the age of 17, and since then has published numerous works in anthologies and magazines, and has seen her fiction translated into eight languages.

She made her novelist debut with the critically acclaimed novel DREAMS OF THE COMPASS ROSE, followed by epic fantasy about a world without color, LORDS OF RAINBOW. Her novella "The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass" with an introduction by Charles de Lint made the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2005. This first collection Salt of the Air, with an introduction by Gene Wolfe, contains the 2007 Nebula Award-nominated "The Story of Love." Recent work includes the 2008 Nebula Award-nominated, baroque novella "The Duke in His Castle."

Ancient myth, moral fables, eclectic philosophy, and her Armenian and Russian ethnic heritage play a strong part in all her work, combining the essences of things and places long gone into a rich evocation of wonder.

In addition to being a writer and award-winning artist, she is also the publisher of Norilana Books.

Official website: www.veranazarian.com

(A collection of Vera Nazarian's fantasy short stories that don't belong to the Compass Rose universe.)



Mortis Operandi by Kfir Luzzatto and Dru Pagliassotti

Although not every criminal is a monster, nor every monster a criminal, you might be forgiven for mistaking the two as you investigate the gritty underworld of supernatural crime. Join officers of the law, private eyes, firefighters, bodyguards, crime-scene cleaners, security specialists, and other not-so-everyday citizens as they struggle against the macabre machinations of MORTIS OPERANDI.

MORTIS OPERANDI features stories that revolve around the investigation of a crime and in which the supernatural plays a central role.

(This anthology includes my short story "Once a Chekist," which belongs in the Gus on the Moon timeline but is set in Russia).



The Shadow over Leningrad by Leigh Kimmel

In Stalin's Soviet Union, Tikhon Grigoriev lives a precarious life. He knows too much. He's seen too much. A single misstep could destroy him, and if he stumbles, he will take his family down with him. With Leningrad besieged by Nazi armies, the danger has only increased.

He's not a man who wants to come to the notice of those in high places. But when he solved a murder that seemed supernatural, impossible, he attracted the attention of Leningrad's First Party Secretary.

So when a plot of land grows vegetables of unusual size and vigor, and anyone who eats them goes mad, who should be called upon to solve the mystery but Tikhon Grigoriev. However, these secrets could get him far worse than a bullet in the head. For during the White Nights the boundaries between worlds grow thin, and in some of those worlds humanity can have no place.

(The sequel to "Gnawing the Bones of the City," which appeared in Fiction Vortex in 2015.)

And over at Sarah Hoyt's blog, there's the annual Indie Author Labor Day Sale.

Crossposted at The Starship Cat blog and The Billion Light-Year Bookshelf.

When It All Looks Like Crap

Right now I'm at the worst part of the revision process with The Steel Breeds True -- the point where everything looks like crap, and I'm starting to wonder if the story itself can even be salvaged, or if it would be better to just toss the whole thing and try something else. That dreadful moment when I fear that if I do offer it for sale, everyone will laugh and point.

It's a longstanding problem for authors. I remember several of my favorite authors telling about coming to a point in the writing of a novel when they felt as if it was the biggest pile of crap ever gathered in a single place, and were seriously considering giving up on it. Yet they all persevered and often the novel in question turned out far better than they feared -- in some cases, even won awards (back when awards still meant something, and hadn't been politicized into worthlessness).

But all of those writers had one thing going for them -- the knowledge that their work would receive editorial oversight. If it really was as bad as they feared, if it were so stupid and badly written that everyone would laugh and point, it would never reach the shelves. The editor would either reject it outright or require substantial revisions to bring the work up to a presentable standard.

However, with the rise of indie publishing, authors who are going that route don't have the safety net of editorial oversight. They can hire an editor, but that requires money, and when you're first starting out, the availability of the necessary funds isn't a given. And of course you have to be sure that the freelance editor you've hired is familiar with the genre you're publishing in, and is willing to understand your vision of the work you're trying to write rather than imposing their tastes and views of what it ought to be. You do have the option of firing them if it doesn't work out, but there's always the risk that you won't realize it isn't working out, especially if they're pleasant to work with -- after all, this person is an expert, so there's a tendency to defer to their opinions even when your gut is telling you that their advice is taking the novel in the wrong direction.

If hiring a freelance professional editor simply isn't in your budget, there's also the option of getting it looked over on a volunteer basis by a trusted beta reader. You want someone you can rely upon to have a good eye for problems, but not to try to take the story over and force it into their mold. This person doesn't have to be a writer -- sometimes a person who is just a very avid reader can make the best beta reader, for the simple reason that they don't try to rewrite the story for you, but instead will be able to identify the places where they lost interest or became confused.

The worst situation is when you can't afford to hire a professional and can't seem to drum up any interest in being a beta reader among the people you feel comfortable in approaching about it. Because then you really have only two options -- muddle through as best as you can and trust your gut as to when it's ready to put up, or put it away. And there are arguments in favor of both. The argument for the first route is that at least you put up something, and if it gets a bad reception on the market, you always have the option of either rewriting it and republishing it (something which is particularly easy with e-books). The argument for the second is that putting up a bad book has a very real potential to damage your brand in a way that can be very hard to overcome with future books.

Do the Anti-Amazon Voices Have a Point

Over at Mad Genius Club, Peter Grant has an essay on whether there is some truth in the complaints against Amazon by various publishers and authors' groups.

We’ve seen the fun and games between Amazon and the Big 5 publishers, most notably Hachette.  The ‘old guard’ of the publishing world derides Amazon as a ‘monopolistic’ enterprise (which is clearly not true, as anyone with a dictionary can tell you after looking up the definition of the word ‘monopoly’).  The pro-Amazon lobby (of which I count myself a member) derides the Big 5 and their hangers-on (agents, ancillary businesses and all those who are on the ‘other side’) as dinosaurs opposed to progress.

Unfortunately, it’s not that  simple.  There really are serious concerns over where our current technological revolution is taking us, particularly as regards entertainment.  Books are only one part – and a relatively small part – of the entertainment spectrum.  Movies, games, music, theater, etc. also fall under the ‘entertainment’ umbrella.  We have to accept that in this day and age, where digital access to any and all of these elements is a mouse click away, we’re competing for the same audience and the same dollar.

 One of  his most salient points is that Amazon views authors as essentially interchangeable widgets, all effectively replaceable. There's no need to support authors or build their success. Just sign them up, let them upload their books, and collect the fees as the sales roll in. If an author doesn't see any success and decides to pack it in, no problem. There's plenty more where that one came from.

While this is technically true, it overlooks the fact that the support a publisher gave an author comes at a price. Most obviously, the publisher tied up your rights to that book, and depending on how options clauses were drafted, any number of future books you might write. You were under the authority of the editor and expected to treat that editor as right by definition, even when wrong. And while some editors might have excellent insights into your book and help you make it better, you could get stuck with a dud who didn't understand what you were trying to achieve with your book, or worse, someone trying to make you conform to a political agenda. Worst of all, your editor might leave or be fired, leaving your book and your career orphaned. And all that for a royalty that's a few percentage points of the book's sales price.

By contrast, Amazon's handling of rights is far more generous to writers, and editorial oversight is pretty much non-existent. There are a few topics that are prohibited, but most of them are pretty squicky stuff such as certain kinds of taboo sexual activities in the erotica areas. Even then, writers have often been able to get their books relisted by making relatively minor changes so the stories become edge-play rather than the actual taboos (near-incest with a step-relative rather than actual incest with a biological relative, for instance).

Of course the lack of editorial oversight means that authors are on their own to make sure that they are producing good copy, which may feel like having no safety net for some writers. However, being on your own doesn't mean you have to do it all yourself. You can pay a freelance editor for any level of editing -- continuity editing (does the story make sense? are there plot holes big enough to fly the ISS through? does characterization remain consistent throughout the story? etc), copy editing (spelling errors, grammar errors, etc), proofreading (ferreting out typos and other errors in the final copy to be presented to readers) -- or you can find a beta reader to do it on a volunteer basis, usually through a writers' group.

The most important thing is that Amazon is effectively acting more like a distributor than a publisher. In fact, many small presses and micropresses are using Amazon's CreateSpace system to produce paper copies of their books, and the Kindle program for e-books. As a result, a number of people have taken to advising that you should create your own imprint name when publishing your books, rather than having them listed as Kindle Direct Publishing in the publisher line, because it will help make your books look that much more professional.

Talking to an Empty Room

Earlier I wrote about how obscurity and indifference are the writer's greatest enemies, especially at the beginning of one's career. Obviously, if people can't find you, you're going to have a hard time growing your audience -- and there's only so much self-promotion can do before it becomes off-putting and counter-productive. But obscurity and indifference can also be detrimental to a writer's career in a more subtle way.

Imagine that you've been asked to give a speech. When you arrive, you discover a rather unusual arrangement: the podium is brightly lit, but the rest of the room is in darkness. You're having to speak to an audience you cannot see.

Or at least you assume you have an audience you cannot see. As you proceed with your speech, you become uncomfortably aware of how quiet everyone is. No whispered comments, no little rustlings of papers as someone fidgets with their program, just silence. Maybe the rumble of the building's HVAC or other mechanical sounds, but nothing human.

And then you finish and the lights come on to reveal row after row of empty seats. And you wonder: did the announcement not go out that I was giving a speech? Did nobody consider it interesting enough to be worth their time? Or worse, were some people out there in the beginning, but found it so terrible that they tiptoed out without a sound and left me standing there talking to an empty room?

Most of us who've tried the traditional publishing route know how disheartening it is to get one after another say-nothing form rejection. But we could always comfort ourselves by noting how many stories that did get published were nothing we wanted to read. Maybe they just weren't to our tastes, or maybe they struck us as overly lit'ry or just plain badly written. But their presence in the markets we were trying to crack let us comfort ourselves with the idea that the gatekeepers really didn't have a clue about what they were doing and were picking stories by guess and by golly, and if we could just get our writing on the right editor's desk, things would start happening. And that thought enabled us to keep pushing on past rejection after rejection.

But for those of us who've decided to go indie, putting something up and seeing no evidence anybody is even interested can be particularly disheartening. We're not dealing with gatekeepers who may be flaky or beholden to clueless suits in the corner office. We're dealing directly with the reading public, and none of them are coming. It gets to the point we'd almost welcome a harsh critique for the simple reason that it means that someone actually cares. And so it becomes harder and harder to scrape together the enthusiasm to write the next story, the next chapter, the next novel. That little voice in the back of your mind starts asking whether it's time to give it up, if nobody wants to read what you're writing.

Which means that it may not take that much to rekindle one's enthusiasm -- just evidence that someone out there is reading and likes it can be enough to get the words flowing again. On JukePop Serials,  just getting a few +votes here and there have been enough for me to be able to get the words flowing on that next chapter and have something new to put up again.

Say What?

Every now and then somebody says something outrageous that you just blink in astonishment. Did they really say what you just heard coming out of their mouth?

Just recently The Guardian, which used to be one of the respectable British newspapers, published Self-publishing is not revolutionary -- it's reactionary , which tries to claim that the rising trend of independent publishing is in fact a step backward which helps neither writers nor readers.

When I first started getting serious about writing, you had basically two choices -- traditional publishing, or vanity publishing. And the latter term pretty much speaks for itself -- if you were to turn to one of these presses, paying them for the privilege of seeing your book in print, you were obviously doing it solely to tickle your vanity. You thought so highly of yourself that either you couldn't bear to lower yourself to submitting it to a publisher and accepting their judgment of your work, or that you couldn't accept their determination that you weren't as good as you thought you were. In either case, your book and you as author would bear the ugly stigma of Loser, and quite possibly of Poseur.

Truth be told, by the latter decades of the twentieth century, there was a very good reason to place a heavy stigma on subsidy publishing, and not just on the grounds that it represented a failure of proper humility on the part of the author. Although there had been a time when it was perfectly respectable for an author to pay to have a book published, and many gentleman hobbyist writers of the Victorian Era and Gilded Age got their works in print in this way, during the twentieth century a large number of unscrupulous actors entered the industry, preying on the hopes and dreams of unsuspecting writers. These predators would acquire large numbers of books with little or no editorial oversight and do the minimum legally required to be able to fulfill their contracts. Often the quality of the books were grossly inferior to industry standard. Sometimes the wouldn't even bind all the books the author paid for unless additional fees were paid. There was no effort on the part of the publisher to actually market the book, and the author generally ended up with a basement full of books and had to hand-sell them -- which generally meant bugging friends and families or haunting flea markets with a pile of unwanted books.

There was a sort of third path of genuine self-publishing, in which the author did all the layout and design and contracted the production of the actual books with a print shop. However, that required skills that most authors didn't possess, and it still required the author to do all his or her own marketing. So it was really only a viable option for a book that had a clear niche market, such as how-to books or histories of very small organizations (frex, veterans writing up the history of their unit). For fiction your only real choice was still to struggle through the endless rounds of rejections and probably end up with a huge pile of trunk stories that had worn out their welcome everywhere. After a few rounds of that it becomes harder and harder to convince your family that your writing is anything but a hobby for your spare time, as opposed to something that should be taken seriously and given time. Lots of promising writers became discouraged and wrote only for their own amusement or gave up on writing altogether.

By the turn of the millennium, the growth of the World Wide Web made it possible for ordinary people to create webpages that could be accessed by anyone, anywhere that had Internet connectivity. The old barriers that made it almost impossible to market your work without a publisher's access to distribution channels began to crumble. But the old stigma remained -- if you were sticking your writing up on a website, you were obviously doing it because it wasn't good enough to make the big time, and therefore you were a loser. Aspiring writers were warned not to kill their careers before they began by marking themselves out in this way.

And then something happened. A lot of the midlist writers who'd once been publishing houses' small-but-solid sellers but were squeezed out as the industry moved to a "bestsellers only" model discovered that used copies of their books were selling quite briskly on Amazon and ABEbooks. Obviously there was still a market for their writing, if they could just re-tap it, but the big publishers didn't want to reprint anything that wouldn't sell millions. So these authors began bringing their books out on their own, either through various small presses and co-operatives or entirely independently.  Some made electronic editions, and others used xerographic-based print-on-demand systems such as LightningSource to create hardcopy editions. And since these were books that had already gone through the editorial vetting process but had just fallen out of print, a crack appeared in the wall of stigma against self-publishing.

That crack widened when established authors began releasing new books through these channels. Some of these authors had been squeezed out altogether by the publishers because their sales numbers, while decent, just weren't growing fast enough to keep the bean-counters happy. However, some were authors that were still enjoying success in traditional publishing, but couldn't get this particular book to sell. Editors would tell them that the book was wonderful, but nobody in marketing knew how to sell it, because it didn't fit neatly in any of the established genre slots.

And guess what -- the books didn't sink like a stone on the marketplace. In fact, some of them quickly rose on Amazon's best-seller lists and became rousing successes. It became obvious that no, self-publishing a work of fiction was no longer the kiss of death, the admission that you were a Loser who simply couldn't hack it in the real world of publishing and had to pay someone to publish your lousy, boring tripe.

At the same time, I can sort of understand the sour-grapes sentiments that underlie these attacks on the new dawning of independent publishing. I've spent the last several decades struggling and straining to get my novels and stories accepted through the traditional publishing system, and now, just as I'm beginning to see a glimmering of success, the brass ring for which I've spent so much time and energy striving seems to have been rendered worthless.

And then I remind myself of the days when I wished there were some way to use the Internet to reach readers directly instead of having to jump through the gatekeeper hoops of getting published, and being told that it might be possible Someday, but that would be a long time down the road and right now I needed to buckle down and focus on doing the things that were necessary to make my works acceptable to the gatekeepers, even when it hurt.

And now Someday is here, and quite honestly, the crumbling of the stigma and the growing success of self-published writers took me by surprise because I was still operating in circles that assumed you had to have that imprimatur of a publisher's acceptance to be any good. So it's frustrating to have so much catching up to do, to shift gears from shopping stuff around in hopes of finding someone, somewhere who'd like it to getting stuff out there in front of readers in this brand new marketplace and trying to get it on their radar so they'll Find It, Like It and Buy It.

It's a whole different ballgame, and I've just barely begun to get into it with A Separate War and Holovideo. There's a whole lot more I still need to do -- and I'm feeling like I'm torn a dozen ways with all the projects that I've had lying around in various states of completion while chasing the ever-shifting editorial whims of publishers.

Perseverance Rewarded At Last

My short story Royal Steel went up today at Swords and Sorcery Magazine.
   
This is a story with a long history. I originally wrote it back in 2002 for the first Sword and Sorceress volume published after Marion Zimmer Bradley's death. It get held a long time and I actually thought I had a chance (especially after I had a story held right down to the final cut for the last three volumes, which were published out of her "hold" pile at the time of her death in 1999). However, at the very last minute it came back with a "liked it but couldn't find a place for it" response.
   
After that, it bounced around from one market to another for several years. I went through some rough times in which I pretty much quit marketing stuff because I barely had seconds to jot down story ideas because I was so busy in frantic efforts to make money to pay the ever-mounting pile of bills. So when that situation finally eased up, I decided to put it through a major revision -- but by that point so many markets had already seen it that I didn't have many places left to send it. So it's really great to have it finally see print, right as I was ready to give up on it.

Oh, Rocketman!

It's now official. My short story "Tell Me a Story" will be appearing in Rocket Science, an anthology of hard science fiction.

This story has a rather interesting genesis. I originally wrote it for the September 2001 On the Premises contest prompt. However, I apparently screwed up the submission process, because a completely different story showed up in the listing at Submishmash. Don't ask me how I managed to goof it up that bad. The other story sort of fit the prompt for that contest, but not as well. So I now had a story that needed to find a home.

Meanwhile, I had tried several different story ideas for Rocket Science, and none of them were working out. Worse, all of them seemed to fall into thematic zones that were already well covered by the existing submissions, so I wasn't sure if I wanted to spend a lot of time wrestling a story into shape only to have it rejected because it was too similar to stories already accepted.

In writing "Tell Me a Story" I drew upon my background as both a librarian and a historian, not to mention my own personal experience of being a small child and having my parents read to me. Telling the story through the eyes of successive generations of children gave me an opportunity to take a new look at humanity's future in space, not to mention showing how the historical memory can become confused as events recede into the past.

Rocket Science is scheduled to be released in April, with a big party at the UK convention Eastercon. It will be coinciding fairly closely with ConGlomeration, a convention in Louisville, Kentucky, which I'll be attending, so I may try to do some promotional activity for it there.

My Story Is Now Live

I've spent the last week wondering whether I had a sale or not, and just as I am about to query, I get a message that yes, they're ready to publish my story. Maybe I should've queried right after the message that looked like a server burp.

But the story is up now. It's The End of Her Line and it's at Every Day Fiction, which publishes a short-short of 1000 words or less every day of the year.

Do I Have a Sale?

Last night I got a really weird e-mail from an online market to which I'd submitted a story. A single line of text rather like code, which looked more like a server burp than a rejection.

Today I get onto their website, and they're definitely having problems. A bunch of pages return me messages that look more like SQL database errors. But I was able to get onto their submission tracking page, and it looks like they may have accepted the story.

So now I wait to see whether it's true or it was an error. I so hope it's for real, and doesn't evaporate on me like so many other sales in the past.