The Tale of One Author’s First Short Story Sale

Many of you might have seen the posts here announcing my latest book, and many of you might wonder how the hell I ever got to have so much stuff published. Well… it wasn’t always like that, and I was once an unpublished writer sending stories into the void in hopes of making a sale. And here is the story of that very first one.

It had been the week from hell.

It was a cold Thursday in the middle of May (May is mid-autumn in Argentina), and I sincerely felt that my professional career had reached the lowest point I could remember.  Like most aspiring writers, I have a day job, one that was quickly driving me insane.  The problem was that I had recently left my job at Johnson & Johnson to take a much higher-profile job offered by a local company.  From both an economic and career standpoint, this was a step forward.  But there was a problem.

I couldn’t stand my boss.

I had had difficult bosses before, and, in general, had been able to deal with the situation in a professional way and thereby smooth out the possible differences. But this guy was different.  Obsessive and detail oriented, he was the person that they (whoever “they” are) were thinking of when they coined the word “micromanagement”.  And to make things worse, it wasn’t enough to do things right.  You also had to do things his way.

But that wasn’t even the worst of it.  The worst of it was that he was so convinced that his way was the right way of doing things that he would be sarcastic and scathing to the point of aggression whenever things weren’t exactly to his liking.  Which they never were.

And on this particular week, the rest of his direct reports had been away on business in Brazil, which left me alone to face the full force of his personality.  This invariably caused me to stay late at work and get up early to work some more.  By Thursday, I was ready to resign, but couldn’t because I needed the job.

It was nearly nine when I left work that evening, and tried to use the commute to calm down.  The only good thing about the situation is that the rush hour had been over for an hour, and my commute was therefore much quicker.  I was exhausted and feeling very, very down.

I arrived at my apartment and was handed a small manila envelope addressed to me, handwritten in blue ink.  I opened it and inside was a copy of Jupiter SF, a small press British magazine devoted to Science Fiction printed in black and white.

At first, I was unsure what to make of this.  I knew that I had sent them a story, and I thought that this was a market strategy to try to get me to subscribe.  But then it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, they had decided to print my story.  I leafed through it quickly, and there it was.  It wasn’t a Marketing ploy, it was a contributor’s copy.

Honesty forces me to stop here and admit that while in the process of changing jobs and failing to adapt to my new boss, I had let my writing slide.  I hadn’t written anything at all since January, and hadn’t even bothered to send my rejected stories out again to different markets.  I can see now that I was quickly becoming a failed former writer, as opposed to an aspiring one.

Nevertheless, at the moment I realized that I was now a published author; all my other worries went out the window.  The satisfaction that I got from it was not monetary, since it was a small magazine and I wasn’t paid for the story (although, having submitted by email and received a magazine worth four dollars, I had, unusually, come out ahead), but at the thought that someone out there had thought that my story was good enough that people would have to hand over their hard-earned cash in order to read it.  And, that, somewhere out there, people were doing precisely that.

I assume that this is a feeling that all published writers have had during their careers, but the effect on me was rather strong.  It instantly rekindled my desire to write and publish. 

And, much more importantly, it gave me something to be proud of. And that was something I had really needed.

Gustavo Bondoni has recently completed the Emily Plair Trilogy with the final novel, Amalgam. Find out what happens to each of the characters in the satisfying conclusion, which you can purchase here.

When the Anthologist Gets it Wrong

Before Martin H. Greenburg died in 2011, Gardner Dozois had a tradition of dismissing his anthologies (usually filled with major genre writers) as “pleasant but minor”.  In general terms, I disagree with Mr. Dozois because I found Greenbergs antho’s to be both entertaining and solid.  Whenever I gought one, I knew that great writers were going to take me on a fun ride.

However, I’ve got to give the nod to Dozois if he happened to make any snide remarks about the book Olympus, edited by Greenberg and Bruce D. Arthurs.

This one is pleasant enough, and a reasonably entertaining read, too, but it truly is minor in the most Dozoisian use of the word, and it isn’t 100% the fault of the anthologists.  Greenberg and Arthurs got together a stronglineup of writers–Friesner, Watt-Evans, De Lint, Huff, Michelle West–and asked for tales based on Greek mythology.

The writers, I feel, fell on their faces.  Sitting here looking over the stories, I think what may have gone wrong is that the book was published in 1998, when the fantasy genre was in the midst of the urban-fantasy doldrums.  Stoies about Greek gods set in 1980s-style cities with late 90s morality are just unmemorable.  Comptently written by a raft of professional writers, but not very noteworthy.

The best, in my opinion was “To Hades and Back” by Karen Haber, mainly because it goes the full 80s rockstar route.

Anyway, there are better Greenberg anthos out there.  Perhaps finding one of those is the best bet.

 

About the blogger: Gustavo Bondoni, apart from reading everything he can get his hands on, is also a novelist.  His latest book, The Malakiad, is a hugely entertaining take on the Greek heroic era.  He doesn’t want to say it’s better than the book reviewed above, but…  Paperback here, Kindle edition here.

Learning to Love Romance: Crafting a Romance Anthology for Everyone

Here at Classically Educated, we enjoy discussing nearly all aspects of cultural life, but attentive readers will have noticed that we have a particular soft spot for literature.  For that reason, we are delighted to present today’s guest post, Written by  Elizabeth Hirst.  Elizabeth is a writer, editor and 3D animator from Hamilton, Ontario Canada. She is a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop, Class of ’06, and a student of life.

The latest book she has published, Love, Time, Space, Magic, can be found here (print book) and here (ebook).  We hope you enjoy Elizabeth’s insight into the creation of the book as much as we did.

It was probably around May or June of last year when I first started tossing around the idea of doing an anthology with love as the central theme. My company, Pop Seagull Publishing, does a lot of conventions, street fairs and other community events, and a large share of our sales comes from hand selling and building relationships in the community. So, when my regulars tell me something that they want, I listen. And what I had been hearing, largely from my younger and middle-aged female customers was: “Do you have any Romance?” Clearly, a large portion of my target market was looking for love stories with sci-fi and fantasy elements.

It’s no surprise that my readers would be primed for these kinds of stories, considering the success of Twilight and other paranormal romance heavy-hitters in recent years. However, Pop Seagull, while being a company devoted to its readers, is still my company, and to be honest I’ve always been a bit of a tomboy. My longer work is mostly action and adventure, and I grew up with movies like Indiana Jones, Mulan, and Star Wars as my favourites. I’m much more interested in a trip through ghoul infested woods with only a shotgun, a dog, and an unreliable reporter than I am in the mushy stuff, most of the time.

Another potential roadblock on the way to Romance success is my other key demographic: young men in technology fields. The company has seen a lot of sales and support from these guys, who tend to love action, and sci fi, and humor. There’s a lot of overlap interest-wise between my male and female customers, especially when it comes to strong female characters and emphasis on strong character development and relationships. However, when I was envisioning a traditional Romance title, complete with buff naked people cuddling on the cover and formulaic plots featuring soft-core sex scenes, I just didn’t really see my typical male customers getting on board. Also, to be honest, I just didn’t think that releasing that kind of title accurately reflected me, or my mission for Pop Seagull.

Still, based on the amount of demand I was hearing from readers, if I wanted to take Pop Seagull to the next level with a really great anthology, I knew Romance might be the way to go. But, if I wanted a book to appeal to our reader base, it couldn’t be a typical Romance book. After some thought, I decided to open up the idea of romance a bit. I asked for stories based on the theme of love, with no prescription for the ending (it didn’t have to be happy) or the type of romance (it didn’t have to be consummated, or at least not ‘on screen’). As befits our company philosophy, the characters could also be of any sexual orientation. With these guidelines solidified, I stepped out on a limb, and opened up submissions.

With all of my anthologies thus far, I have left some wiggle room in the secondary themes and general feel of the work, to leave space for the ideas coming in. As I read through the first round of submissions and picked out those that I enjoyed, I noticed that many of them were high-emotion pieces where love was a powerful force involved in shaping the characters’ lives. Often, in the stories I chose, love ended up pitting itself against other titanic forces. Once I had assembled the first three or four stories, I had a secondary theme, and a title: Love, Time, Space, Magic.

More submissions poured in, and despite my initial reservations about Romance, I couldn’t have been more pleased with the volume, quality and variety of the work sent to me. So many of the stories brought a tear to my eye. So many more impressed me by being truly romantic and sentimental while still upholding other themes in a very small amount of space. In the end, after having reservations about the quantity and quality of work I would attract, I found that I was forced to turn away work I would otherwise have bought, because we had reached the end of our budget and space. We closed three months early, and I began the most time-consuming phase of production: layout and design.

Most editors do not do their own book design, but I, like many Canadians of my generation, have far too many degrees and far too few places to use them. And so, as I entered production, I found myself grappling with the question of how to make the cover and interior design signal ‘Romance’ without telling male readers that the book was not meant for them. For better or for worse, men in our culture have been socialized to feel that if they see a Romance cover, the book will only appeal to women and dwell on themes that often don’t interest men as much. Since I’d taken great pains to buy stories that anyone can enjoy, with plenty of action, science, alternate history and great world building, it would have been a terrible waste to design a cover that warded half of my customers away right off the bat. I thought about ways to blend the heralds of romance stories with the scientific, the historical and the strange.

My first inspiration came from my day job. I work for a medical non-profit, and often see pictures of cells, anatomical drawings and other such work. I think that these images contain great beauty, and seeing them led me to the idea of using an anatomically correct heart on the cover as a way of conveying both beauty and the complication of traditional romance tropes. I also love the use of flowing script and old manuscripts, and thought that using the texture of an old parchment manuscript would also convey the fantasy and historical elements of the stories I’d chosen. Naturally, when I put these two trains of thought together, I was led to Da Vinci’s anatomical drawings. In my font, image, and texture choices, I tried to get as close to a Da Vinci manuscript as possible, while still keeping a modern flair.

The result was this:

I don’t think anyone would call this cover un-romantic, but there are still no airbrushed cuddling models or Fabio-esque guys with hair flowing in the wind. It appeals to both the emotional and the historical/scientific in its influences, and just generally catches the eye.

I first started on this anthology looking to better serve my core customer base, but through the challenges that ensued, and the wonderful work that I found to publish, I ended up with something that I really enjoyed working on. I think that Love, Time, Space, Magic is truly a Romance anthology for any gender, and diverse sexual orientations, and that makes it a thing of beauty. Through working on this book, I feel that I, and the contributing authors, have shown that Romance doesn’t have to fit a narrow conception of the genre, or a gendered concept of love, and I couldn’t be prouder to bring that message to the world.