Aim for the top

Over the Christmas break I spent several hours updating my list of paying magazines that accept science fiction stories.  It was tedious hard work, but the outcome was a pleasant one.

The first thing I noticed was that there were a lot more magazines to submit to than last time I did a list.  The big difference is that a lot of them are purely digital, or digital first with an anthology or possible paperback publication later.  This makes their overheads smaller, and gives the magazine a better chance of surviving in tough times.

The next thing that struck me was that the big magazines were still there, even after the toughest recession for a generation.  Asimov's, Analog, Fantasy and Ścience Fiction, all the magazines I'd grown up reading, were still there.  And these unchanging bedrocks of the SF short story market still welcome new writers, a reassuring business as usual. 

What has changed is my attitude towards submitting my stories to these magazines. When I first started magazines like Asimov's and Analog were worshipped as gods.  There was a feeling that you could only send stuff to them if you'd been published elsewhere.  They were "big" magazines, too good for the beginner writer.  I no longer believe that advice.  Take at look at their submission guidelines, and both magazines explicitly state that they're always on the lookout for new talent. This is an invitation a writer rarely gets.  It's more usually 'we don't know you, so you're not welcome here'.  So I've changed my way of thinking about these bastions of the SF scene.

I now know my writing is as good as any published author's.  The thing which will bring a sale or not will be content of the story.  Looking back through some old ones, I see how I fudged the science in them.  I didn't try and explain how something worked.  Now I've realised I can't dodge the challenge.  But equally, researching is so much easier now with an iPad and ready access to the vast resources of the Ihe internet.  I can put in the science, because I can easily research it.

I have set a goal for 2015 to submit five short stories each month to magazines. I've done January's submissions, and yes, two of the stories went to Asimov's and Analog.  My mindset is different.  Instead of thinking "why would they be interested in me?" I now think "why shouldn't they be interested in me?"  2015 is going to be my short story publication year.

You say crime, I say SF

The issue of genre 'pigeonholes' raised its head again for me this week.  With fellow Pentangle Press writers Carol Westron and Christine Hammacott, we were interviewed by a reporter from the Portsmouth News for an article on Pentangle Press's second birthday,

As part of our development we are about to set up a panel to speak at writing events, to market ourselves as writers.  Carol wants to call me a future crime writer for the purposes of this.  It makes sense, as we cover past, present, and future crime then, but it isn't really who I am.  

I spent a year going to crime conferences and reading in that genre, and it didn't take me long to realise that I don't belong there.  I hated the idea of my books being marketed by covers dripping with blood, and I just wasn't engaged by many of the stories.  Some of them even depressed me.  And one thriller writer (a massive best-seller) appalled me with the casual and totally unnecessary violence he put in his work.

And yet, at their heart, many of my books do contain crimes.  Eyemind has my main character Keri Starseer being hired to investigate dodgy interactive artworks.  She's an artist, not a law enforcer, but she's subjected to attempts to brainwash her and is kidnapped and beaten.  In my novel Jade the proposed crime is the rape of a sentient planet.  In my novel Snowbird, the crimes are fraud and illegal exploitation of a sentient species. In the second book of that series, Darius, it is the sabotage of the orbital shipyard, the murder of a starship, and attempted rape.

The crimes that occur in my books are many and varied, and yet, I'm still not a crime writer.  I don't feel comfortable with that label.  My heart belongs in the ideas around the crimes I write about, not in the investigation of the crimes themselves.  And I want starships and beautiful starfields on my covers, not blood.

This is one of the downsides of being pigeonholed into a genre.  I am sure there are a great many crime writers whose stories I would enjoy, if they were not packaged as crime.  And there are probably many crime readers who would enjoy my novels.  But the chances are that we won't discover each other's work.  This is the downside of being forced into a genre.  We can only be one thing there, when In fact we might be several.  We might be SF and crime, like me, or romance and crime, like several of Carol Westron's books, or SF and romance.  Life is richer than strict genre boundaries, and our stories should reflect this.

A lighter shade of darkness

I recently did a sort-out of some of my bookshelves, and found myself giving away a few young adult  series.  The common factor in every case was that I'd only half-read the book, or had managed to struggle through to the end of it but knew I would never read it again.

One series of books was hailed by commentators as a brilliant portrayal of the fear and darkness of ancient times, an accurate representation of how humans lived then.  This was a book aimed at twelve year olds, and that claim of accurate darkness worried me.  Yes, it may well have been like that in those times, but we are writing for people in 2015.  Most of us don't live in fear of supernatural monsters, and most of us don't live short, nasty, brutish lives.  And part of what civilised us is stories.

You might well argue, as many gamers do, that this is pretend violence, and that people can tell the difference between make-believe killing and the real thing.  I'm not convinced by that argument.  I do think that constant exposure to make-believe violence shapes  our life scripts as much as exposure to real violence,

I believe I have a moral responsibility inherent in everything I write, a responsibility to show a better way of being in the universe.  My stories aim to teach respect for the natural world and its creatures, and I don't intend to do that with a thrill-ride side-order of violence.  My writer friend Carol Westron once described me as the most moral writer she'd ever met.  She said she always felt confident that my stories wouldn't be filled with unnecessary evil.

For me that lighter shade or darkness means that I don't give my characters the biggest guns they can find, and let them blast everything around them in glorious technicolor.  Our current TV news channels do that every day, and I don't watch that violence.  My lighter shade of darkness means I put the violence off the page.  People do get killed in my books, but not on-stage.  My story is about the consequences of those deaths, showing the loss and devastation that others feel when a person or wild animal dies an untimely death.

I see it as my responsibility not to add to the evil in the world, so If you're looking for a tale that revels in gratuitous violence, move along there.  I'm not for you.

A change of voice

Over the Christmas period I've been editing two different novels.  It struck me when reading them how different the two voices were, at opposite ends of the spectrum of storytelling.

My novel Jade is a science-heavy exploration of a planet.  It is told from a single viewpoint, that of Kaath N'kosi, a xenoformer.  Her speciality is in xenoforming ruined worlds, bringing them back to life after humans have explored them and ruined them.  She is out of her comfort zone on Jade, having been pressured into taking the mission by a life-long friend.  The story is about the survey team's gradual unravelling of the planet's sentience.  I have tried to make the explanation work in terms of known hard science.  The chapters are between 1,500 and 2,500 words long, and involve many scientific investigations and discussions between the characters.  It is a gradual reveal of the truth about this sentient planet.

The other story I was editing is Panthera : Death Plain, the third in the Panthera series.  It is a multi-viewpoint book, told from the viewpoints of four characters.  As in the first two books, there is a main narrative thread and two minor ones running alongside it.  The narrative swings frequently between the viewpoints, each character acting like a runner in a relay race, picking up the baton of story for a while, then handing it on to another character in the next chapter.

Because of the frequent viewpoint changes the chapters are much shorter, somewhere between 400  and 2,000 words.  And because I am continually changing viewpoint, I have a lot of opportunities to construct cliffhangers.

The two books have totally different voices. Jade is a serious scientific exploration of a planet, and while there are action scenes and fights in it, the focus of the book is on the gradual reveal of the extent of the planet's sentience.  Death Plain's voice is lighter.  I do discuss wildlife poaching and habitat destruction, and people are shot at and nearly kidnapped, but the voice is less heavyweight, more focused on producing a pacy read.

The voice a novel ends up with is not usually consciously chosen by me.  It's something that arises from the subconscious as I sit down to plan the book.  It's an instinctive choice,  and over the years I've learned to trust my instinct.  My first choice of tense, past, or present viewpoint, is usually the right one.  Finding my voice as a writer has become an unconscious competence, and I've learned to trust its choice.

2014 - the science fictional year

2014 was the year when I finally came home.  After dabbling with the idea of being a crime writer for a year, I finally realised that I could be nothing other than an SF writer.

January found me doing a lot of soul-searching about this issue.  I couldn't deny my true calling any longer.  Despite the best efforts of my crime writer friends to get me to join them, I just didn't feel like I belonged in crime.  Yes. There is often a crime at the heart of my stories, but my heart sings when I'm exploring something in an SF setting.  So armed with my new resolve i bought a membership to the World Science Fiction Convention Loncon 3.

Next I completed the manuscript of my second indie-pubbed book Panthera : Death Song.  The books went live on the Amazon site the week before Loncon 3.  Then I left for Loncon 3, five days of brilliance in London in August.  I attended an SF writers' workshop, heard some of the major editors in the genre speak, and spoke on a panel myself. There was also the satisfaction of sitting in the Hugo awards ceremony and seeing Best Novel go to a woman, Anne Leckie.  And Aidan Moher, one of the bloggers I appeared on my panel with, also won a Hugo.

I went home and wrote two 20,000 word novellas in two months, a phenomenal output of words.  Then I decided to re-write Jade, my 15 year old novel about the discovery of a sentient planet.  Half way through that re-write the Conville and Walsh Word of  Mouth Prize was announced, and I found myself scrambling to do the edit of the first 30,000 words to submit to the competition.

As the year closes I've finished the final edit of Jade, and have just completed reading the book aloud. I've moved on to the final edit of Panthera : Death Plain, which will be my third indie-pubbed book, which I want out before Easter.

Looking back on this year, I see how hard I have worked, and how hard I played at Loncon 3.  I have a sense of having come home, and have recovered my passion for writing in the genre.  But writing is only the first step in the journey.  My goal for this year is to be able to come back at the end of next year having persuaded somebody to pay for my writing.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of science fiction Eco-crime novels Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song,