Apex

Lull

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Tonight’s a moment of respite, I think, amid the pell-mell rush of the last few weeks. And for all that it’s been a good kind of rush, full of new jobs and new words and ticking things off the metaphorical to-do list, I’m kind of glad to be easing off the accelerator a little. I’m currently sitting my study with a snifter of port, my belly full of well-roasted vegetables, and my head full of stories that I’d really like to write in the near future.

It’s a pleasant kind of feeling, one that’s been all too scarce over the last eight months, and it’s rather nice to be looking at things I could do instead of panicking about the things I haven’t yet done.

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So, yes, an update. Where shall we begin.

As I mentioned in my last post, I disappeared down the Rabbit Hole over the weekend just gone. It was a deranged and foolhardy exercise, conceived by my new boss, where a group of writers gathered together for three days and tried to write 30,000 words each. I wrote no-where near that many, nor did I expect to, but I still emerged from the weekend with 16,000 words under my belt and a substantial head-start on the next few installments of Flotsam.  I’ll be off to continue work on the draft once this blog post is done, forging ahead into this brave new world where I do not have to live in fear of deadlines.

I’ve discovered magical things happen when you do not fear your deadlines. That Douglas Adams quote about deadlines making pleasant noises as they whisk past isn’t all its cracked up to be, largely because missing deadlines just makes you stupid and slightly worthless, regardless of how nice the editor is about things. And writing isn’t one of those activities that gets better with misery and late-night cram sessions. Getting things done ahead of a deadline means the story you turn is much more likely to resemble the story you thought you were writing, for example, and you’re actually permitted to email your editor without starting using the phrase look, I’m really sorry about this, but…

There are other things being written too, quietly and in the short cracks of  free time created by the new job. Catching the train to work means I can scribble down a page or two before work, and getting a lunch break is good for another couple of hundred words. I started a new short story today, something that may be a strange kind of love story, and I suspect it may be the first love story I’ve written that actually has a happy ending. My plan is to write the entire thing on my morning commute, in one of the moleskins I was given for Christmas and never really got around to using because they were too nice for scribbled notes, and there shall be trains and people who think they know better than they do and murdered donuts who suffer excruciating deaths.

(Of course, someone at worked asked about the third Miriam Aster novella today, to which the only answer is look, I’m really sorry about this, but…)

Which brings us, I suppose, to the new job.

I’ve been somewhat coy about mentioning this online, largely because the sensation of having a regular day job that I like and enjoy is a remarkably foreign experience. The short version goes something like this: three days a week I work as a project manager for a community arts project run by the Queensland Writer’s Centre, which is this very odd cross between working a meaningful, engaging, rewarding job that I really enjoy and getting to catch up with a bunch of writer-type people I usually only encounter at writers festivals, workshops, and conventions. That I get to work in offices located at the State Library, above a cafe with decent coffee and a non-mallspawn bookstore is icing on the cake.

I’m three weeks into the contract, and I’ll admit to being slightly nervous about going in this morning. I love the job dearly thus far, but i’d just spent three days in the QWC offices belting out words for the rabbit hole. Surely, I thought, this will be the day I resent the fact that I can’t just stay home and write. 

Turns out, no, it wasn’t. Not even a little. And man, I tell you, that realisation was very unsettling.

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Okay, some random things.

Kathleen Jennings draws strange and curious things with surprising regularity, and if you’re not following her blog then you’re really missing out. The Dalek Game, in particular, has been one of the highlights of my year. Last week Alan Baxter and I used the medium of twitter to produce this startling rendition of Flash Gordon, Dale Arden, and the Fourteen Ducks who can Save the Earth. Go and check it out – odds are, if you’re reading this blog, you’re going to enjoy the experience. Personally, I think the image answers any questions I ever had about why twitter was a worthwhile place to spend time.

Stephen Dedman’s The Art of Arrowcutting is a remarkable novel, one that’s done a remarkable disservice by it’s cover-blurb given the way the urban-fantasy/noir genre has shifted since the book was first released. I suspect it’s not a book I’d recommend to everyone, but also suspect that those I would recommended it to would come to love it with a kind of fierce and unholy joy. It is, however, almost certainly a book for writers to read – it was recommended to me as a book with phenomenal, Wuxia-influenced action sequences in prose form and it utterly delivered on that recommendation. It also makes me wonder why in hell it’s been five years since someone last published a Stephen Dedman novel, because there really should be more of them floating around in the world.

And: Apex Publications, a company I have a great deal of affection for, have recently had interest Diamond Distributors about carry the Apex range of books and short story anthologies in stores across the USA and the UK. Taking advantage of the opportunity means Apex needs to shift their business model away from short print runs, so they’re currently crowd-sourcing the funds they need on peer-backer.

Blatant Self Promotion: February

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Okay, since February is deveoted to the Gauntlet, I’m just going to cram a whole months worth of blatant self promotion into the one post. Strap yourselves in, ’cause it looks like February is a busy one:

– Descended from Darkness volume II is out, collecting another twelve months of short fiction originally published in Apex Magazine (including my story To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer’s Lament). For a limited time you can pick this up with the first Descended from Darkness collection (which included my story Clockwork, Patchwork, and Ravens) for only $25US.

– My story Briar Day is live over at the Moonlight Tuber site, as part of the line-up of the “Moonlight Tuber #2 – Captain Homonculous Dines with ‘That Irascible Mizzen Mast’ – Part Three” issue of the zine that’s available for online reading or as a downloadable PDF. I think this officially marks editor Ben Payne as the man whose acquired more of my short fiction than any other editor.

– The teaser page for Electric Velocipede 21/22 is live, complete with the opening teaser for my story Memories of Chalice in addition to the works of such fine writers as LL Hannett.  The issue is just $12 US and features a small horde of writers I’m excited to be sharing a table of contents with.

– There are also reports that we’re about a week away from one of my short stories making an appearance in Daily Science Fiction, a magazine that delivers short stories to your inbox every workday. This stuff keeps me sane at the day-job, giving me something to read over my mid-morning coffee, and it’s FREE TO SUBSCRIBE. There should be a web-version of the story eventaully, should you prefer to keep your inbox free of fiction, but that usually comes after the email version is out. If you’re on the fence, I recommend taking a look at the February line-up which includes folks such as Cat Rambo and Nina Kiriki Hoffman.

– The February issue of Locus is out with its recommended reading list for 2011, which named a whole host of Australian SF work including TPP’s Sprawl anthology in the best original anthologies section and stories by me, Angela Slatter (twice!), and Cat Sparks in the short-stories list.

– Bleed scored itself an 8 out of 10 stars in a review over on Scary Minds. To quote: Bleed rocks along at a fair pace, Ball doesn’t allow the narrative to lag at any stage, and you will be dragged into the shenanigans unfolding. There’s a mystery to be solved, plenty of plot twists, and the sort of conclusion that no doubt bodes well for another book in the series. Be careful here Ball’s series is habit forming and I’m already looking at getting my grubby mits on Horn sooner rather than later. And let’s keep our minds out of the gutter here okay!

Which, lets face it, is more or less what I was aiming for. The full text is available over on the Scary Minds review site, and I recommend checking out their review of Eeek! (which features work by my comrade in gauntleting, Jason Fischer) as well. Bonus sidenote: The Bleed review does mention some confusion with finding the book over at the Twelfth Planet site, which is mostly because they’re an older link (Twelthplanet.wordpress.com) that connects to an earlier edition of the site. Twelfthplanetpress.com should make your life easier, should you be, you know, inclined to go order yourself a copy.

– Back in December I did an interview with Dan Abnett for the Auscon podcast. Actually, I did two interviews, largely because the first one didn’t record properly and Dan Abnett was nice enough to come back and re-record things. Not really February pimpery, I know, but since it happened during the blog haitus of December it’d largely forgotten to mention it before now.

L’esprit de L’escalier live at Apex Magazine

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So the latest issue of Apex Magazine is now online and features my story L’esprit de L’escalier about a guy, and endless staircase, and the things you think about during the descent. There’s already some discussion about the story taking place over at I09 which has left me thinking, among other things, “wow, I really do need to read House of Leaves.”

And since we’re talking Apex, I’m going to take the opportunity to re-post something that the Apex Chief Alien Jason Sizemore put up on their blog recently. It interests me for two reasons: firstly, because Apex has been pretty good to me as a writer. This is the third of my stories they’ve published, and the first two have managed to sneak onto the occasional recommended reading list and awards shortlist, but I was a fan of the magazine long before I was published there. I subscribed, back when they were a semi-pro hardcopy magazine, and I’ve signed up to be a minion now that they’re a pro-level online market.

But the second reason this interests me is simple: the internet is changing the way people read and consume, and all too often it’s easy to forget this. The internet increasingly makes us passive in our consumption – these days I rarely even go looking for specific websites, since the combination of Twitter, Facebook, and my RSS feed pushes more information at me on a daily basis than I can process. And as a reader of short fiction, I’m acutely aware that passive consumption without thinking about the means of production will inevitably lead to less short fiction for me to enjoy. When I first read Jason’s post it immediately make me think about the relationship I have to many of the short fiction venues I enjoy, and hopefully it’ll give you a moment to pause and reflect as well.

And if you choose to drift over to the website and click on the big alien headed “become a minion” on the bottom of the page , well, that’d just be icing on the cake.

Becoming an Apex Magazine Minion
(Originally posted on the Apex Blog by Jason Sizemore)

One of the most common questions I receive has to do with Apex Magazine and where do I find the money to keep it operating. They see that we pay five cents a word. They see that we buy great art each issue. They see that the published products are polished and edited. You’ll find few typos in our stories (and if you do, feel free to call us out on it, I’d prefer fixing it than leaving it for the world to see like some ugly cold sore). They want to know how do I fund Apex Magazine.

The answer is simple. Straight from my pocket.

How much is this exactly?

It doesn’t take a math wizard to get a close estimate of how much money is spent running Apex Magazine. Copy and pasting Nick’s story into Word gives us a value of approximately 2100 words. Doing the same for Theodora’s story and you’ll get around 7200 words. That alone is $465 in author expenses. The poem was $5 and we paid $25 for the VanderMeer reprint. All told, $495 in author expenses.

I’m not going to divulge what we paid the artist, but I can give an honest estimate of $50 per issue for the art.

Each issue costs on average $500-$600 to produce.

Even with my prior post asking our readers to consider becoming a minion, the magazine has earned $122.36 this month through donations, minion memberships, and digital copy sales. And this is an exceptional month. Most months the amount is $40-$60.

I love financing and producing Apex Magazine. But I sure could use an assist. Even if the amount earned was just half the cost to produce it would be a great help.

I don’t ever foresee me ending Apex Magazine. I love working with writers, artists, and editors too much for that to happen. Yet, painful concessions would have to be made eventually. Our word limit would decrease. Pay would drop below the professional rate. No more beautiful art to adorn each issue. Fewer reprints. No poetry.

This isn’t one of those patented Internet ultimatums: ya unappreciative bastards pony up or I close the show. This is me asking for some financial aid to help Apex Magazine remain a top-notch pro publication. I know it can be done because I know our site visit numbers. Since June, 2009, they have doubled. Over a 30 day span, a single story on Apex Magazine receives an average of 2000 unique visitors (and draws about 10 a day as long as it’s available).

Being a minion grants you benefits and rewards. You will receive each issue (in seven different eBook formats) a week before the content is posted online. You get a discount code for the Apex Store. There are a number of other benefits, as well. Check them out here.

If you’ve made it this far, well, thank you for your kind attention. But shouldn’t you be clicking the link above to become a minion? Get to it, already!