Comments on: Magazine Closings

By: the fiction of Scott H. Andrews » Blog Archive » More on the State of Short Fiction

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:44:38 +0000

[...] Michele Lee, who I don’t know, but whose frustrations I understand and in some part, [...]

By: Michele Lee

Michele Lee — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:35:27 +0000

Kaolin~ I love Murk Depths too. They’d don’t pay great, but I really love their look, their style and their product. I’d love to get into their pages.

S.F~ Good point, and also what is popular (like urban fantasy) is likewise ignored by the more prestigious members of the genre.

Magazines printing the same thing is why I love (and already miss) places like Apex and LSS which had their own style. LSS, for example was the only place I commonly found urban/modern fantasy shorts. I wrote a few of these and now I’m not sure how to market them because parts of the genre seem to want to remain unsullied by what is popular.

Bill~ I ask myself that too, then I answer that I write short stories because that’s the length it takes to tell the story. And I write [insert subgenre here] because that’s what the story also wants to be. I would rather have a beautiful, unsold story that I’m proud of and can sell later, than to have one that I’ve tried to shoehorn into a market or trend.

By: Bill Ward

Bill Ward — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:58:20 +0000

Too true SF Murphy — one of the reasons I really lament the passing of so many semi-pros is that they are the ones publishing the fiction I find interesting, stuff outside the established mold of the Big Tree, which I tend to find more ‘miss’ than ‘hit.’

By: Bill Ward

Bill Ward — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:55:23 +0000

I share your frustration Michelle, I’m often wondering why I bother writing short fiction at all with so many of the good markets either dead, frozen, or essentially unobtainable. Like you I have a bunch of unsold stuff making the rounds, and it seems like every few months my options get narrower — and I have several stories doing nothing, because I can’t even imagine what market to send them to. But, as Kaolin says, there are still some good ones out there; but for any aspiring writer that had hoped to see his work in Talebones, Paradox, or Apex it’s pretty depressing to see them vanish.

Kaolin, I think most writers understand that magazines need to close sometimes. I think the best policy by far is to have regular reading periods — writers can still plan to hit you with a sub, and it really beats the alternative of a magazine buying a year’s worth of stories and shutting down for nine months as a result.

And thanks for the link and good luck getting into Murky Depths — that’s a magazine I’m really proud to have my work in, as it’s just brimming over with graphical gorgeousity.

By: S. F. Murphy

S. F. Murphy — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:33:54 +0000

I think part of the problem is that we writers in SF spend all of our time writing stories designed to meet the approval of other SF writers. Readers, those with no literary aspirations at all, often come in second if at all in any consideration when a story is written. I think the result is often a story that, while it picks up awards and wins the approval of your writing peers, often bores the daylights out of your average reader.

The average reader, I might add, really only wants to be entertained. They don’t want to fight with a style monkey narrative (one of my pet peeves as a writer AND a reader). They don’t want to fight with some experimental nonsense and most important of all, most readers hate being preached at.

Lastly, I think the magazines all mainly put out the same thing. I can’t honestly tell the difference between a story published by Asimov’s and a story published by FSF or Strange Horizons.

Frankly, I find it depressing. There are all of these published stories yet I do not care for 90% of them. There are these markets, but I don’t care for what they publish.

What is one to do?

Respects,
S. F. Murphy