“In Open Air” to be published in Leadership Gone Right

Some publishing news: my short story “In Open Air” will be published in the upcoming anthology Leadership Gone Right.

Leadership Gone Right, edited by D. A. D’Amico and published by Farthest Star Publishing, aims to tell stories that “envision a world where leadership takes a different path, where heroes and anti-heroes emerge in unexpected ways,” according to the initial announcement.

I was happy to find a home for “In Open Air,” which originally appeared in Accessing the Future, in this anthology. Part of the story hinges on the rotating leadership structure of a generation ship that has finally made it to its destination planet — but an unexpected arrival forces a crisis and the right course of action is anything but clear.

The full lineup of authors and stories for the anthology can be found here. The book is set for release in April 2024. I’ll be sure to announce it here when it’s available!

Writing goals for 2024

Well, January may almost be over, but it’s not too late to post some writing goals for 2024. I hope!

I’ve been focusing on getting some novel manuscripts written, revised, and/or polished in recent years, and I let short fiction submissions fall by the wayside. Which is too bad, considering there are a number that I never found homes for.

So, in the interests of getting short stories out there, I decided to do a few things. One: write new stories. Two: revise old stories that were never published. Three: send out previously published stories to markets that take reprints. In other words: submit, submit, submit!

Werewolf figure from American Werewolf in London prowls over two short stories by David Jón Fuller
A werewolf figure from An American Werewolf in London prowls over two new short stories.

It was fun to log back in the Submission Grinder for the first time in ages, and start logging new submissions. Having written a couple of new stories at the tail end of 2023, and another at the beginning of 2024, I decided to aim high. My goal for 2024? Twelve new publication credits, either first publication or reprint. I’m not fussy! There are a lot of great magazines and anthologies out there, and I want my work in as many of them as I can manage.

I had kind of forgotten how much work it can be to find just the right market or submissions call for a particular story, and then making sure your submission package matches all the requirements. And then: the obsessive checking of email, Moksha, or Submission Grinder to see if there are any new responses. Spoiler alert: having a lot of stories out on sub does not mean an avalanche of writing correspondence.

However, I have a number of secondary markets lined up for each story I sent out, so the inevitable rejections aren’t so terrible — I can just send the story out to the next possible home. And new submission calls, special issues, and anthologies crop up all the time. I figured that to get to a dozen new publication credits this year, I would need to keep at least that many stories out on submission at all times. Right now I’ve got 14. I also have a few more unpublished stories I still like that could use an overhaul. So with a few more drafts apiece, I’ll get those ready to send out as well.

Of course, the goal is to get to zero submissions, meaning every story has found a home somewhere. Maybe I’ll get there! Then again, I plan to keep writing new stories. We’ll see where we are by December 31…

Live, from Winnipeg… it’s Manitoba Book Jam

Thanks to COVID-19, there are new protocols for just about everything, and that includes book readings and other author events. In the before-times, I had a great time attending the launch for Parallel Prairies: Stories of Manitoba Speculative Fiction. Now, however, if we want to do a public event, doing it by video is the safer way to go. Fortunately, that’s exactly what Anita Daher has organized through Manitoba Book Jam. The event will be held this week, on Thursday, Jan. 21 at 7 p.m. CT.

Parallel Prairies
Parallel Prairies

I’m one of six authors for the evening. I’ll be reading from my short story in the anthology, “The Comments Gaze Also Into You.” (It’s an urban fantasy story about holding online trolls accountable. Can’t imagine how that might be relevant these days.) The other authors taking part are Jonathan Ball, S.M. Beiko, Adam Petrash, Darren Ridgley, and Craig Russell. Live music will be provided at the intermission by Alana Levandoski. The anthology was edited by Darren Ridgley and Adam Petrash, and published by Great Plains Books / Enfield and Wizenty. Each author will have about five minutes during the hour-long event.

If you want to watch and listen via Zoom, you can register for the event here. Registration is free, but please consider picking up a copy of the book, or one of the other books by the participating authors! (I should add that Zoom attendees to the event are eligible for a $25 McNally Robinson Booksellers gift certificate draw.) There is more information on the event’s Facebook page, where people can also watch the video of the event.

So: if you’re looking for some book-related diversion this week, tune in on Thursday and listen to a half-dozen prairie authors read from their weird, wonderful work. Hope to see you there!

What a long, strange year it’s been

I’ve been meaning to write a writing-related post for, oh…. since the Before Times. But part of what has made even that so difficult is the same thing that has made it hard to do anything creative as the COVID-19 pandemic hits different parts of the world: worry.

I don’t find I have been worrying all the time about the coronavirus, but living in a state of taking precautions, shifting all kinds of routines and daily life, and not being able to make long-term plans (and cancelling many plans already on the books), makes it hard to, say, write a novel.

So… I picked necessary but not-exhausting tasks.

Proofing and line editing A Taste of Home in the spring — I always catch more when I a) read it out loud and b) mark up a print copy.

In the spring, I read aloud the MS for my Icelandic-folkore-collides-with-Canadian-real-estate-practices novel, A Taste of Home, marking line edits and corrections. That took a few weeks. Then I went through the MS and made all the changes. Another few days. In May, I dusted off the Excel spreadsheet of people I planned to query on it, and started working up query letters.

Also, since finishing the latest round of submissions for my 1980s heavy metal werewolf novel Bark at the Moon, I was fortunate enough to get feedback from awesome critique partners Angélique Jamail and Sarah Warburton. Taking their suggestions to heart, I turned my attention to tweaking and making a few big shifts to that MS.

And, since #PitMad was coming up in June, I worked on some new Twitter pitches… for both novels! Why not? Seriously, why not. It was more complete-able than jumping back into my current WIP, the haunted-threatre novel Venue 13, which had stalled months ago when I put all my attention into substantive rewrites for A Taste of Home.

Over the summer, thanks to the Twitter recommendation of Delilah Dawson, I picked up Lisa Cron’s Story Genius. As someone who likes to write big ideas, and work out plot, but often falls down in the (many) early drafts on characterization, I really, really want to try her approach as I overhauled Venue 13. I ended up abandoning the 90-odd pages I’d already written, and started over from scratch.

Following the approach recommended in Story Genius, it’s taken me much longer than usual to get to a point where I’m writing the draft of the novel. But I don’t know whether that’s owing to trying a new method, or the background stress of the whole year. I’ll probably blog about what it’s like for me to take an approach that sees you figuring out major character motivations and conflicts before you start drafting, rather than my usual method of starting to figure that out after three or four drafts.

Also during the summer, I worked on a cover for Bark at the Moon so I could submit it to an online reading platform. It was a lot of fun to bust out my pen and ink for the first time in years and dust off some old Photoshop skills! But alas, getting things just right on the cover took me longer than I thought, and I missed the submission window. Maybe I’ll blog about that later, too, and show off the cover. I’m happy with the way it turned out.

Bark at the Moon book cover
A section of what I came up with for a cover for Bark at the Moon.

Currently I’m still querying and submitting A Taste of Home, and writing the first draft of Venue 13. I wish I’d gotten more writing done this year — but I’m not complaining. The pandemic has messed up everyone’s plans, and tragically so for far too many.

I suspect all of the above (writing-wise) is a consequence of having just enough energy and attention-span bandwidth to work on small, concrete tasks, but not necessarily enough for huge, open-ended tasks like writing the first draft of a novel.

I will not get into all the other (good, useful, non-writing) projects I got into over the past year — those were mostly for my mental health in being able to keep “busy” without dwelling on the pandemic 24/7. But hey, now I can make and can jam, build raised garden beds, and er, clean the basement (just kidding, the basement never stays clean — that’s more a Sysiphean task that borders on open-ended).

Home made composter
One of the projects keeping me occupied in 2020 was building this composter.

In Manitoba, it we had a relatively mild first wave of COVID-19, but a much more serious second wave. And even in our province, which initially saw fewer cases and fewer deaths from the coronavirus than other jurisdictions, there have been many job losses and a lot of economic hardship. In that context, I found it very hard to focus and start working on a new novel.

So who knows? I count myself lucky to have escaped some of the worst effects of the pandemic, and I salute all those writers out there who were able to get anything done. With any luck, the next year will be better for all of us.

Farewell to 2019

For anyone out there interested in what I’ve been up to, writing-wise, I wish I had more publishing news! But that’s the problem with working on novels. They take a long time in development, and a long time to find a publisher.

For a lot of 2019, I continued to send out Bark at the Moon, my 1980s metal/werewolf novel. I also sought feedback on it from beta readers for some aspects I hadn’t given deep enough consideration to, and made revisions to it.

Most of the revising work I was doing, though, was on my other novel-in-progress, A Taste of Home. I often describe it as a Douglas Adams-esque take on Icelandic folklore transplanted to Canada, and if that’s not niche enough for you, it also explores the reasons Icelanders cannot agree on the correct recipe for vínarterta and why family recipes (or at least, one) are guarded jealously.  I was also getting feedback on the MS and some of the history it grapples with from fellow writers and experts, and incorporating their feedback into a massive revision of the entire manuscript.

What else? I also started working on a novel about a haunted theatre, which I will probably blog more about once I can devote more time to both the novel and blogging. I decided to write the first draft of the novel by hand, to see if it had any effect on  the creative process.

Parallel Prairies
Parallel Prairies

One other thing I never did blog about was the publication of Parallel Prairies by Great Plains Publications, an anthology of the weird and bizarre, in which my story, “The Comments Gaze Also Into You,” was included.

So that’s all my writing news for now. I’m not sure much else will happen, publishing wise, before the end of the year, so I’ll just call this my writing-year-in-review post. I’ll blog again! But likely not a lot of news until one of these various projects finds a home.

I’ll ask though — what are y’all up to?  Drop me a line in the comments with any news, writing projects, or things you’re excited about being involved in!

Submitting your writing, explained in Princess Bride GIFs

Film poster for The Princess Bride - Copyright...
Film poster for The Princess Bride – Copyright 1987, 20th Century Fox (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s easy to become disheartened when submitting your writing. We’ve all been there. Even after all the heavy lifting of writing a story or novel, revising it, getting feedback, even working with an editor, you send it out into the world with high hopes. Sadly, there is no guarantee of success, exception maybe perseverance, but even then you know not every story will find a home.

Take heart! Even great stories can take a while to find traction. Take The Princess Bride, now cherished as a classic film. Upon its theatrical release in 1987, it barely made a ripple, and was considered a flop. (For the inside story on what it was like to work on the movie, I highly recommend Cary Elwes’ book, As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales From the Making of The Princess Bride.) But thanks to home video and word of mouth, eventually the movie found its audience, and then some, becoming a cult classic.

I happen to think that in submitting your writing, as in many aspects of life, The Princess Bride has much to teach us.