A Nice Start to the Year

January 1^st, staring a whole new calendar year, and it’s seven days until I hit the two year milestone for this writing enterprise. What better way to kick off the New Year than a nice pro placement?

I’ve been angling for a slot with Daily SF, one of the well-respected professional markets, for a long time, and I’m delighted to say they’ve picked up a flash piece I wrote just recently, Revelations. Not sure when it’ll be scheduled, there are some formalities to square away as always, but I couldn’t be happier – here’s a market I’ve long had great respect for, and I’ll be featuring in their listings in the not too distant future.

Access info when it becomes available!

Cheers, Mike

Building a “Brag Shelf” (and Progress)

Nobody likes a braggart, but sometime you just can’t help it, and given the difficulty of finding your way into print a writer is forgiven a certain pride in the finished product. So when your placed stories see print and the contributor copies come in (or you buy them, depending on the contract) you find the collection expanding a book at a time.

And yes, there is a great deal of personal satisfaction to be had when you look at the shelf and know your work is in each title from there to there, and more to come. The photo shows my current print anthologies and magazines, and there are more on their way – three volumes of Lovecraftiana, Phantaxis #7, a second Flame Tree anthology due I think in April, Mind Candy Vol. 1, an annual-best-of from Misfit Stories, and doubtless others as time goes by. I’ll update the brag shelf here as it gets more impressive!

In latest news, my current submission to Andromeda Spaceways has passed first readers, so I’ll be watching in a few weeks in the hopes it passes second readers and joins the short-list pool.

And today I scored a placement with Kferrin for my fantasy flash piece The Cursed Throne, one of my “Avestium” stories, the third to place. This is full pro, on a very generous rate.

Season’s cheer to all, and here’s hoping for a great New Year!

Mike

What the Heck is a Pecamoid?

Language drifts over time, spellings alter, expressions change their meaning, but some words leave the vocabulary altogether and sometimes we come across words whose meaning is not at all clear.

I was recently researching for an historical – a straight adventure yarn set in Holmesian London, 1900, late in the Victorian age, full of peasoup fog, horse traction, pollution and gaslight, and was lucky enough to come across the holy grail of locational research tools, “georeferenced maps” in the collection of the National Library of Scotland. Researchers turned up a highly detailed survey of London produced in the middle years of the last decade of the 19^th century, and the charts were digitally cleaned up and stitched together to form a continuous scrolling map of unprecedented detail.

This is the Limehouse region of the East End, as it looked when Holmes and Watson were at large.

This amazing resource offers London as it was, surveyed between 1893 and 1896, at the enormous scale of five feet to the mile – fine enough to chart individual trees and the stair cases of large buildings. The real value is that it is a glimpse of the London that no longer exists, because when this period map is overlaid on a modern map to the same scale (which the online tool provides, with a slider bar to move between then and now as degrees of transparency) the redevelopments of the last hundred years, including rebuilding after the Blitz, are all too apparent. Whole streets and section are relaid – ancient street names still exist and main thoroughfares remain, but side streets, whole blocks, are gone, and names reappear on streets moved significantly from their historic location. The appalling terrace houses where labourers lived are gone utterly, as are the industries in which they worked, where lead smelters and iron foundries, rubber and other chemical works lay, literally, across the street from schools and homes. There was no notion of the effects of pollution, or, if there was, it was dismissed as the lot of the poor compelled to endure it.

            I selected the locality for my story in Limehouse – there had to be a Far East connection – and walked the area by scrolling the map. Amazing to see every street, house, shop, factory, church and pub, barely a stone of which still exists! But there, fronting the Regent Canal, one factory among many, close to the “Salvation Army Barracks,” is marked on the map: “Pecamoid Works.” The term is baldly given, as if an every day term everyone should know.

            Pardon?

            I have a pretty wide vocabulary, and at least one obscure term suggested itself to me, but I did it the usual way and Googled the word – no hits. The word seemed to be gone from the language, and it took a more detailed search to find even oblique reference in the texts of volumes. One reference was in fact back to the map, therefore of no use, but another was to an agricultural trade publication of 1921 – not the volume itself, but an online archiving of a crude and uncorrected optical character recognition pass of it. The word appeared in the context of “Naval pecamoid coats” in association with supplies for pig farmers, and that was the clue.

            “Pecarry” is an old word for some species of pig, and it would appear that “pecamoid” was a 19^th century term for pigskin treated to become waterproof. Therefore that factory was a specialist tannery. I’m pretty sure of the deductive pathway, but the paucity of information leaves room for doubt, and as the merest passing mention in the narrative it warrants no further attention. Maybe one day I’ll confirm or refute this curious bit of fluff.

            It’s interesting what old documents turn up; it certainly underlines the difference 120 years can make, even in a modern metropolis whose great landmarks have been unchanging for centuries. The small details are in constant flux, and over time whole regions shift in character. All the filthy industry of the old East End is gone as if it never was, the docklands have become trendy marinas for up-market types who work in towers in The City, and the character of London has evolved as surely as the language.

            For those seeking the hard facts of the topography of London in the era of Conan Doyle, HG Wells and their contemporaries, this map is a go-to source. I used it for a number of details in the current project, and fully expect to use it in future to chart the course of action on streets that once were, but are long gone to the march of progress.

Here are some period photos of the Limehouse dock region as it was around the turn of the last century, the sort of world I'm trying to evoke in prose. The picture at top is an aerial view taken around 1928 of the Regent Docks, with the Regent Canal heading off obliquely at upper left – that's where the action happens.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

In Print, December 2017 (and Progress)

Another post in quick succession, this is feeling like the old days in 2016!

My story Hostile Intent is now available as Compelling Science Fiction #10 goes live at Kindle for purchase, and here’s a direct read link for the site.

This is my second story with the magazine and my fourth pro placement. It’s wonderful to see material go out on the upper end of the market!

The situation with Alban Lake re Stalking Nemesis is under review, it may have been a simple admin glitch. Plus, they’re also looking at a novella from me, so fingers crossed there.

74 stories out at the moment, and over the last three days I have written a “flash triptych,” three short stories which, despite standing alone individually, describe an arc of events for their protagonist. I’m hopeful of selling them all of a piece at some point, maybe to Daily SF.

Updates as they happen,

Cheers, Mike Adamson

In Print, November 2017 (and Progress)

It seem a bit late in the month to be doing a what’s-in-print piece, but there are a couple of announcements to make.

First up, my “Middle Stars” short story The Eternals is now available in Phantaxis #7, this is my second placement with this excellent title from Canada. Click the link to go to their Amazon page for ebook or print editions.

Uprising Review published a third short from me, Naevus, which you can read online here.

A third piece was due out this month, my vampire story Stalking Nemesis in the Alban Lake title Bloodbond, but the edition (released just before the Thanksgiving break) does not seem to feature my piece – I have inquired with the publishers as to the situation and will pass on any news as it comes available.

Further, I just received the go-ahead to promote my second placement with Flame Tree Publishing in London, the anthology Endless Apocalypse features my hard SF story Flight of the Storm God. This is another of my “Post-Habitable Earth” group of stories, one of which appeared in the anthology Ecotastrophe II. Click the link for their blog entry announcing the contents. I’m totally thrilled with this, as the Flame Tree product is truly spectacular, and of course at full pro level.

I have a couple of short-listings in play, my story “Salazar’s Flying Emporium” is short-listed at Pulp Literature, a pro market, while “The Value of Meaningless Malaise” is short-listed with The Overcast, my fourth such hold/pending with that title.

Compelling Science Fiction (pro) have picked up a second story from me, Hostile Intent, which is due out in December – news as it breaks!

I currently have 39 placements. I have written seven stories in the month of November – who knows, I may write an extra flash today to round it up to eight!

Cheers,  Mike Adamson

Certified for the Third Time

Here’s my third Honourable Mention in the Writers of the Future Contest, it came in last week. Since then I’ve actually won a fourth HM, but that’s the last time I’ll be able to enter as I have now scored my third and fourth pro placements and am thus disqualified as a beginner – I’m now rated a pro!

I’ve held off my usual in-print post this month, as the item due out in November has not yet appeared. I also have some extra sales to report. For now, enjoy the certificate, and I’ll bring you up to date as soon as I have links.

Cheers,

Mike Adamson

In Print, September 2017 (and Progress)

August was the first month in 2017 when I didn’t have anything appearing in print or on the web, but it looks like September will make up for that with two. First out of the gate is Andromeda Spaceways #68, featuring my “Middle Stars” piece The Marachel Job. Click here to go direct to the purchase page -- $4.95 for a download, how can you go past that?

Coming soon should be Aurealis #104, featuring my deep-sea chiller Fear of the Dark – I’ll post the cover and purchase link as soon as they are available.

Progress on other fronts – Uprising Review have taken  second story from me, a dystopian short titled Street Pirates. Lovecraftiana have picked up my story Monarch of the Shadows for the Candlemas 2018 edition, while my “Ocean” story Gorgon’s Deep has been acquired for the new anthology Myths, Monsters, Mutations.

At this time I have thirty placements, and high hopes for many of the submissions currently in play. Some markets are not quick to reopen, I had hoped to have at least three more submissions over this past weekend, but am simply monitoring for markets to be reading.

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UPDATE

Aurealis #104 went out to subscribers on 23/9/17, featuring my story Fear of the Dark. Here's the cover -- purchase link as soon as it shows up in the Aurealis store!

And, a few days ago, the first issue of Storyhack went on release -- I have another cover credit! Purchase link as soon as possible.

Next month, the 2017 volume of The Martian Wave will be coming out -- watch for cover and links!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

In Print, August 2017 (and Progress)

For the first time since the beginning of the year, I don’t seem to have a release scheduled for the current month, but my last piece to hit the market was just one day short, so who am I to quibble?

Check out my Cthulhu Mythos piece With Strange Aeons in the Lammas edition of Lovecraftiana, which you can order right here. Very proud I got cover-billing, title and byline, just like in the old days!

I have picked up a sixth simultaneous short-listing, my SF piece With Scientific Detachment is currently short-listed with Aurealis. I should know something by the end of the month – it would be very cool to place a second story with Australia’s longest-running title!

Edits have been completed on Circus to Boulonge for Storyhack #1, and edits are currently underway on The Marachel Job for Andromeda Spaceways #67.

I was approached just today to do an interview with Uprising Review who recently published my “Middle Stars” short North of 25 – I’ll be making a start on that today.

I recently exceeded 550 submissions, have finished two older stories that have been hanging around a while, and wrote seven new pieces last month; I’m currently working up notes for a story that’s been at the back of my mind for twenty-three years, since the business with Jerry Pournelle’s Future Wars II anthology – but that’s a theme for a whole other post.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Progress Update

Quick update as July draws to a close -- Andromeda Spaceways has picked up my short The Marachel Job, and I have another shortlisting too, "How Like a God" is in the hold-group at The Overcast, a magazine out of the Cascadia region of the US Pacific Northwest.

Things continue to roll, with new stories putting in an appearance and new markets being plumbed.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Fragile Humans in a Changing Technoscape

As I’ve commented before, characters have begun to predominate over science fiction concepts in many a magazine’s writing brief – not all, to be sure, there are still those who specify that the concept, the science or the situation must be endemic to the storyline (Analog, for instance, and Compelling), but a majority want characters the reader can identify with – or loathe – readily and comfortably, first and foremost, and then depicted against a speculative background.

I have often wondered if this is symptomatic of the social development of the world – the “reality TV” era, which is devoutly and profoundly the opposite in a repellently glitzed-up package pretending to not be scripted. This preoccupation with “people” in an age which has, in real terms, devalued the individual human being in the most outrageous way, seems patently false and cynical. But there may be far a more functional explanation.

Take the tablet, for instance. When they first appeared in Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987, they were 24^th century hardware, but came true in less than 25 years and are now ubiquitous. The underwater camera was fictional when it appeared in the Bond flick Thunderball in 1968, but in the 1970s became a reality. Skype and similar systems have made visual communication a normality, when the dedicated “videophone” was an experiment following its introduction at the 1964 World’s Fair, but which attracted too few subscribers to prove viable. The point is that the gadgetry science fiction can conceive of, technology can – now – reproduce fairly quickly. Mobile phones are the academic example. Computer interfaces change so rapidly one can never be certain what is fictional and what isn’t, and it essentially no longer matters. Holographic displays such as we see in Iron Man and Avatar are tipped to be out there in the future for us, while projection systems, graphics the size of walls or table tops are with us already. One used to be aware that the systems depicted in the Bond films were often fictional, but the kind of graphics and system architectures depicted in later years no longer provoke that reaction, one simply accepts them. Compare the MI6 briefing room display in Quantum of Solace to the Memorex-drum memory, command environment and first-generation graphics seen in 1982’s For Your Eyes Only and the decades of development really do become apparent.

Technology, especially in the form of gadgetry, has become the axiom of the age. We almost all have a smartphone, even the most resistant of us, and who can operate in modern society without a computer? I’m writing on one and will use it to upload to the internet to be read on one, or a phone, or tablet… The line has blurred between lived reality and the fictional worlds science fiction used to depict, and in this is perhaps found the human need to connect with people in stories. Why? Because something of the fascination with the new and strange that SF used to embody has been lost, literally blown away, by the pace of change in the real world. Future shock? What’s that? A concept from half a century ago, when the pace of life was changing. Now the future holds out the promise of both wonders and terrors and we know there’s no avoiding them, no matter how uncomfortable any particular person might be with any particular promise.

As writers, this leaves us with the ironic proposition that, though we strive to be “prophets of the unknown,” we must place people first as surely as literary fiction ever did; there is no longer more than a curiosity role for people reduced to minor figures, hurrying to serve the mega-machines and implacable intelligences set in dehumanised landscape that the disturbed and wary conjectures of the Seventies warned about. The landscape more or less arrived, but it’s often softened with an enhanced knowledge of human needs, and, after all, we place people first now. At least we do if we’re hoping to entertain, if not inform or challenge.

So the only world in which machines dominate is an industrial one, an autocratic one, and the rest of the human race finds itself living into a gadget-rich tomorrow in which, ironically, those ever-fresh gadgets serve purposes that were invented merely because the technology existed to make gadgets to serve – a profitability cycle; while the problems which dogged humankind when science fiction sought so keenly for answers, are still dragging along with us as the 21^st century unfolds, and are generally worse than ever. Now there’s a scenario few could have predicted before the Eighties (I’m thinking Judge Dredd comics), and an interesting frame of reference in which to write of the tomorrows baring down on us.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Royalty-free header image.

Nice Cover!!!

For your pleasure, here’s the cover of Compelling Science Fiction #7, featuring my story Cogito, Ergo Sum. I didn’t post it when the issue went live at the beginning of last month – my bad!

Read the story for free on the site, or buy the issue as a download for your reader device.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Launching Now – Tales of the Sunrise Lands

This anthology from Guardbridge Books in Scotland is coming off the presses as I post this, and premiering at a UK literary convention this weekend. The international edition will be produced through Lightning Source and purchase links will be posted as soon as possible.

The editor sent the front cover graphic at once for dissemination, and it looks pretty good! Read my tale of late Medieval Japan, Ieyasu and the Shadow, in this volume. I hope to return to 1476 and the closing phase of the Ōnin War for further stories in future!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

In Print, July 2017 (and Progress)

A number of plusses have come along in the first week of July. My ‘Middle Stars” short story The Alien Way was picked up by the anthology Visions VII: Universe, and will be going to press this month – direct links as soon as they are available. This brings me to six “Middle Stars” stories placed, if I keep on like this one day I’ll be able to talk to a publisher about doing a collection in paperback.

Next up, the new pulp era-tribute magazine Storyhack Action and Adventure has picked up my WWII story Circus to Boulonge for issue #1 (it was held over from Issue #0). No release date yet, but the issue is moving through production and we went to contract today. Links when they come available, as always.

And AndromedaSpaceways have shortlisted my “Middle Stars” story “The Marachel Job,” another actioner on the high frontier, introducing a new character I’ll be returning to .

I just completed another “Middle Stars” piece, “The One that is All,” for submission to the anthology StrangeBeasties from Third Flatiron – it’s a little overlength but they cleared me to submit without doing a severe edit, so here’s hoping they like it!

Also appearing in print this month should be my short story Pelagus in the anthology Ecotastrophe II, from Nomadic Delirium Press (same publisher as The Martian Wave), due for release July 27^th, and my Cthulhu Mythos short With Strange Aeons will be in the edition of Lovecraftiana releasing on July 31^st.

Releasing the weekend os July 15-16 in the UK is the anthology Tales of the Sunrise Lands – more info in the next post!

In addition, as of the 15th, my short story "Unremembered Dreams" is shortlisted with the magazine New Myths, a turnaround within a few hours!

Circus to Boulonge was my 26^th placement. I recently passed the 500 submissions mark, I’m on 504 at this moment, with 66 stories out and more to come. I keep the plates spinning ever single day!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Promo with Flame Tree

As promotion for the new round of anthology releases, Flame Tree invited authors to respond to some questions with brief passages which could be compiled on the company blog. Two posts went up where you’ll find comments from me about my piece.

First: http://blog.flametreepublishing.com/fantasy-gothic/lost-worlds-author-qa-story-inspirations

Second: http://blog.flametreepublishing.com/fantasy-gothic/lost-worlds-author-qa-favourite-tales-and-writing-practices

There wasn’t room to do all three from each writer, so here’s the third of my passages (dealing with inspirational sources for my story An Echo of Gondwana):

What are your favourite stories from this genre? (can be films/artworks/other mediums too, or authors/film directors/artists)

“Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, of course; and King Kong must be listed; Burroughs’ The Eternal Savage and The Land That Time Forgot. The writings of Lovecraft, Howard, Smith, Carter and others have many evocative passages which bring the “lost worlds” concept into focus.”

I hope to place with Flame Tree in future as their list expands, and if I can then this anthology may be thought back on of as the start of an excellent partnership! The volume is at press at this time and should be available in the weeks ahead.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

* Royalty-free image from Pixabay.

In Print, June 2017 (and Progress)

Compelling ScienceFiction #7 went live today, you can read my story Cogito, Ergo Sum on the website!

I also placed a story today, one of my “Tales of the Middle Stars,” titled North of 25, with the magazine Uprising Review. This is an angry, mal-contented little piece, set in the aftermath of the Colonial War, short as it’s pithy, and is the fifth “Middle Stars” story to be accepted.

This takes me to 24 placements, with currently about 65 stories out, and 473 submissions to date.

Update:

The Alien Way was picked up by the anthology Visions VII: Universe on June 23rd for publication later in the year. This is the sixth "Middle Stars" story to be placed.

R*E*X went live with Syntax and Salt on June 24th -- read free on the site!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

* Royalty-free image from Pixabay.

The Influence of Art: Chris Foss

When considering the artists whose work influenced me the most in the early days of my creative development, Chris Foss shines bright. Named the “dean of science fiction illustration,” his work became one of the dominating styles of book jacket illustration in the 1970s and later, and remains one of the great franchises of the genre.

I can’t remember my first exposure to his work, but I knew the name and the style when Science Fiction Monthly began in 1974. It may have been his cover for E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s Galactic Patrol, which was the first golden-era SF novel I bought and read for its own sake – I remember the newsagent where I used to stare of those fabulous Panther editions, and the cover price was 95c – the year must have been around 1973. I still have it, indeed I’m looking at all the Panther/Grenada ‘Doc’ Smith volumes as I write this. I used to study the painting under a magnifying glass, puzzling endlessly over how Foss “managed to paint out of focus.” This was of course airbrush art, but I had only vaguely heard the term, and it would be six more years before I bought one.

Foss, born in Guernsey, the Channel Islands, in1946, brought to science fiction illustration more than imagination, he brought a grounding in architecture from Cambridge, naturally flowing into technical illustration – much as the American great Syd Mead brought sound technical knowledge to his concept work for US Steel and later movie applications. Foss’s work is characterised by a number of cardinal qualities – such as asymmetry, an artistic rebellion against the symmetrical design often necessitated by “form following function,” but sometimes by mere human preference: Foss’s work proposes that this need not always be so, either by choice, or by form-to-achieve function proceeding from laws of physics with which we are not yet conversant. This alone offers a wildly futuristic implication, so that when viewing a Foss painting one is imbued with a very convincing feeling of looking into another time and place.

It is also a future embodied in dynamism, brilliant colour and a minute attention to mechanical detail. It was said (by the venerable Brian Aldiss in his introduction to Science Fiction Art, Hart Davis MacGibbon, London, 1976) that the machine dominates in Foss’s art, and that any human being which may be glimpsed is invariably a tiny figure, hurried and occupied with his concerns, all of which are subservient to the technical grandeur of the machines of his creation. “When you catch sight of a human being in one of his paintings, he is a tiny, soft creature, generally in overalls, vulnerable, hurried, among the abrasive landscapes of a technological tomorrow.” (This may be ironically counterpointed with his black and white interior art for The Joy of Sex…)

During my younger days Foss represented the summit of the pyramid. I was well aware of the output of many other excellent artists, such as David Hardy, Eddie Jones, Kelly Freas (who also has been called the dean of SF art!) and others, but as a devotee of the machine in science fiction, Foss’s worlds captured my imagination like no other. His strange, almost organic machines, defying the laws of aerodynamics at every turn, implying as they do the unquestioned control of gravity, seemed to represent the ultimate ideal of the human triumph, embodied in the conquest of space. But his work also reflects the price at which these things come – his vessels belching pollution in the form of thick, black engine efflux, titanic explosions as things go very wrong, wrecked spacecraft marooned on exotic worlds, craft in collision, robots the size of mountains treading the natural world beneath their city-block sized feet – and humans minute as insects amongst it all, if they are glimpsed at all.

It was heady stuff for a kid, and I have to wonder to what extent these mega-machines helped shape my thinking. I have never forgotten the feelings those paintings inspired, the exotic and the alien made tangible, reachable, with the promise of technology overcoming the barriers of mundanity to free humans to explore the universe. And of course, the mechanical minutia, the intakes and exhausts, antennas and lights, every structural support and shock-absorber, represented with loving attention to detail and rendered with the brilliance of a very fine artist indeed.

When I think of the artists who have brought science fiction to visual life, Foss is invariably top of the list. I could rattle off dozens of names, each of whom has something special to bring to the table, a uniqueness of style or approach, visual tricks that stamp their work – but Foss is king. Perhaps it is the impact of his studied airbrush work, counterpointing traditional brushwork and the exquisite application of oils – a fineness of technique I have never yet been able to fathom. (How does one paint a perfectly straight, hair-thin line in oils?) Maybe it’s the outrageous vision, which marries artistic abstraction to hard machine technology; perhaps it’s the expansiveness of scope, the wide open spaces of the universe, made real. Whatever, “Foss-esque” has become a word in my vocabulary (yes, I tried his sort of fine detail, his strange not-quite-English lettering styles and plethora of antennae in watercolours as a kid), and there are times I’m more than tempted to visualise story material through the eyes of such imagination. After all, while one might never be able to afford to commission concept art from the maestro, one can always imagine it!

Now 71, Chris Foss is still working. After more than a thousand book covers, he has become his own industry, in a sense, not exactly cornering his own market but certainly preserving his own niche, distinct from the great many other brilliant artists in the field. There was a time when a Foss painting on the cover was almost guaranteed to sell an otherwise indifferent book, and art directors called for other artists to emulate him – which justifiably rankles the artist as it cost him work. The first major collection of his art, 21^st Century Foss from Dragon’s Dream (1978), is a hard-to-find classic now, and the binding was less than flash when new – beautifully printed but the pages disengaged quickly from the sort of perfect-binding adhesive in use. Hardware, from Titan Books is a 240-page all-colour opus dating from 2011, and well worth adding to any connoisseur’s library.

Find Chris’s official website here.

What can I say? Foss helped shape my outlook on the universe, and his imagery remains both an inspiration and a standard.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

In Print, May 2017 (and Progress)

Things have been happening in a variety of ways – domestic stuff, illness in the house, has certainly taken its toll, but the writing endeavour has kept on rolling.

A couple of pieces of important news take pride of place – on April 7^th Flame Tree Publishing in the UK picked up my story An Echo of Gondwana to feature in their forthcoming anthology Lost Worlds. They asked all contributors to keep it under their hats until the contents were formally announced on their blog – here’s the entry: http://blog.flametreepublishing.com/fantasy-gothic/gothic-fantasy-successful-submissions-lost-worlds-supernatural-horror

 It’s a very proud moment to be featured as one of the new contributors to a collection also featuring classic works by names like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert E Howard, Rudyard Kipling, H P Lovecraft, Jules Verne and H G Wells! Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would feature on the same contents list as luminaries like these!

You can order the volume here:  http://flametreepublishing.com/Lost-Worlds-Short-Stories.html

This was also my first sale for full professional rates, thus something of a turning point. It’s wonderful to be able to cite a pro credit!

And I can now also cite a second – on May 2^nd my short story Cogito, Ergo Sum was picked up by Compelling Science Fiction, another pro market, and will be going to press June 1^st in their seventh issue. Two pro sales a matter of weeks apart is very encouraging and I have done my best to maintain output, with new ideas going into my notes, new stories appearing, and older works being given tweaks and revisions.

The Overcast magazine has shortlisted my story “Cursed with Clarity,” while Storyhack is making great strides toward their next release, in which, I have every reason to hope, I will be appearing.

Lovecraftiana went to press April 30^th and the edition can be ordered as a POD paperback here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/rogue-planet-press/lovecraftiana-walpurgisnacht-edition-2017/paperback/product-23123522.html

I have entries in a number of writing competitions, with others on the way.

At this moment I have 21 placements from 453 submissions, less 68 stories currently on submission (my record is 73 or so), which equates to an average of 18.3 rejections per acceptance across the entire campaign from the beginning of last year. This is a somewhat skewed figure, as acceptances did not begin to roll until September 2016, after my very first actually appeared in print.

It’s a while since I’ve posted any new essays on the craft of writing – I’ve been busy actually writing stories! But I’ll see what I can come up with, all the same!

ADDENDUM – my SF short story Fear of the Dark was picked up on May 19th by Aurealis, one of Australia's flag-carrier SF magazines, in print since 1990. It should be appearing later in the year in issue 104. I'm delighted to have a short-listing convert to an acceptance! And also, my fantasy short Magus, one of my "Avestium" stories, was just picked up by 4 Star Stories, for publication next year.

Best wishes,

Mike Adamson

In Print, April 2017 (and Progress)

Things have been a little slower lately, the pace of acceptances has been down since February, with a total of nineteen on the scorecard to date. I have an important announcement for next month, so will hopefully be posting news in two or three weeks. (Apologies for being so quiet lately, but I’ve been writing intensively too.)

Coming available at the end of April will be the Walpurgisnacht edition of Lovecraftiana, featuring my short story Fall of the Dark God, and I seem to have struck up a good working relationship with this publishing house. I have a story in their stand-alone anthology Sword and Planet (By the Moons of Grolph) and in the last week placed another piece with the magazine. My Cthulhu Mythos piece With Strange Aeons is slated for the following issue of Lovecraftiana, due for release July 31^st. This is my first repeat publisher. Sales links as they come available!

The new magazine Storyhack is dedicated to action and adventure in all their forms, and I pitched a “pure” adventure, i.e., taking place in a real world/historical context as opposed to a genre setting, and the piece was solicited. I penned a World War II adventure about a British fighter pilot shot down on the coast of France endeavouring to escape back to England, and formulated it as if it were a memoires written in the late 1970s. This is easily the most intensively researched piece I have ever written. The editor was unable to fit the story into his inaugural volume but would like to consider it for the second, so I’m very hopeful this will firm up into a placement in due course.

I have a short-listing with Andromeda Spaceways, which is great news, but apparently they buy only 5% of stories on the shortlist anyway, so the odds remain around the level of random chance even after passing two rounds of reading – nobody said it was easy! On the same note, two more short-listings have come in in quick succession. The young readers’ magazine Cast of Wonders like my piece Salazar’s Flying Emporium, while the Aussie SF mag Aurealis, just coming up on their milestone 100^th issue, fancy my deep-sea horror piece Fear of the Dark. My fingers are crossed for both!

My new record for total number of stories on submission at any one time stands at 73, and I expect it to go higher in the near future. I have made 429 submissions to date, and completed 24 stories so far this year.

I’ll hopefully have some new essays soon, and am always eager to report new sales!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

In Print, March 2017 (and Progress)

The commissioned story Lux Aeterna has been published in Helios Quarterly Vol. 2, No. 1, and the sales links are now active:

http://heliosquarterly.com/index.php/product/helios-quarterly-magazine-volume-2-issue-1/

I think this one has gone live a little behind schedule, but that’s okay! Catch the interview with me in this volume also.

In progress, I have another short-listing, this time with Andromeda Spaceways, and should know in a couple of months if I make the cut. At least they’re up-front about it, if you pass two rounds of reading to reach the shortlist, you still have only a five percent chance of being selected.

The contracts came in for the two anthologies The Chronos Chronicles and First Contact, featuring my stories The Winds of Time and Dreamlogger, respectively. They should be appearing in a few months, and I’ll post links when they are available.

My tally of stories on submission recently hit a new record of 62, and I have been very busy so far during 2017, with seventeen new stories completed so far, most doing the rounds at this time, and many new markets having been identified.

UPDATE: As of March 22nd (this side of the dateline), my vampire short story Stalking Nemesis was picked up by the magazine Bloodbond (from Alban Lake) for their November 2017 issue. This is the third of my "Lucinda Crane,Vampire/Hunter" stories to be published, a fourth is on submission with Flame Tree in the UK for one of the new batch of anthologies, and I have one other, longer story on paper as well.

Also, today I received a solicitation to write an action/adventure story for the pilot issue of the new magazine Storyhack, and will be beginning work on the piece tomorrow. This will be my eighteenth story for 2017 -- averaging six a month this year!

More news as it breaks,

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Inspiration

Whence cometh the flame of inspiration? Who can say? We are inspired by what interests us, what excites us, or by what strikes a chord, whether anticipated or otherwise. Every writer has experienced block and burnout, going stale on a project and having to set it aside, and there are techniques for overcoming this – pacing, occupying the mind with other things when not working, writing something else – but nothing matches the pure light of inspiration.

“Success is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration,” is a hackneyed truism. Yes, we know this, and, having sweat gallons, every working writer knows all about the balance between wanting to do it and having to do it; but when inspiration strikes, the results can be amazing. My short story By the Moons of Grolph (picked up last month for the Sword and Planet anthology from Horrified Press) was written in one day. It was a reworking of an idea I first put on paper as a teenager and have long forgotten the inspirational sources, though I remember it being in the “New Age” era of weirdness-as-social-challenge. The story took on its own life, rooted in a distant memory (the original is longhand in an ancient notebook, long since packed away) and developed in a 4500-word rush to a wholly new conclusion. That was inspirational writing.

I have a novelette out on submission at the moment, “Annie Lustrum’s Psychedelic Shag Wagon,” a tongue-in-cheek adventure which makes no bones about being SF on the Western formula. This is a 26, 000-worder, I launched into it based on four lines of notes – and wrote over 8, 000 words on the first day. That’s the most inspired/driven I have been in a very log time, my previous record was 10, 000 (longhand) back in the mid-eighties.

So, what’s the tactic when inspiration dries up? I’ve found reading helps – read till your cup runneth over, and when it does so, catch the drops on paper. Lately I read a nonfiction work making a case for the Pharaoh Tutankhamen having been murdered –  a theory which has been substantially challenged in the twenty years since it appeared, but the book was a great read all the same. This was part of the research for my short story “With Scientific Detachment,” an archaeological piece about Ancient Egypt, currently on submission in the UK. Before that I read an illustrated volume about Victorian and Edwardian London, both as a personal interest and as research for possible steampunk tales and other outings featuring Victoriana and later. This was another very entertaining read and contributed to my fantasy piece “Silver Scales” which is doing the rounds. Before that? A massive illustrated volume, The Discovery of the Nile, tracing the history of exploration for the headwaters of Africa’s greatest river, from ancient times down to the dawn of the 20^th century. You can bet the sweep of history depicted in that one will be providing background to stories – I have one in notes already, something very much in the Lovecraft vein.

Currently I’m enjoying some stories by Clarke Ashton Smith I’ve not read before, having obtained one of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy anthologies edited by Lin Carter (vintage 1971); and continuing with The Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft. Some would say I’m pouring in all the wrong things, of course, two writers from eighty years ago can’t possibly prepare one for today’s market. Well, yes and no. Their imagery and concepts are inspirational, execution is what styles a work for a market.

I look through my files of notes and, typically, an idea from long ago will jump out at me and gel almost of its own accord – sometimes two ideas flow naturally together and become a more solid, effective whole. It’s important, I think, when this happens, to listen to your instinct, go with it, let it happen – and trust those instincts to know if it isn’t working at any point.

Imagery is inspirational, powerfully so. Three photographs turned into my vampire short “Dance of the Trees,” currently on submission; one was of an autumn wood, another was a gnarled, split but living tree, the third was a pool in a titanic cavern… They went together seamlessly and in two days another property was in the folder. If I feel myself needing to write but unable to focus I will look through photographs or artbooks and the chances are, some image will speak to me strongly enough my mind begins to construct the circumstances surrounding the image, and this leads to a new project.

I have three unfinished pieces from last year, a pure fantasy, a historical fantasy and an SF. I must get back to them, and I’m waiting for some particular spark of enthusiasm to rekindle. I’ve tried forcing it – it doesn’t work.

I should write again today – I wonder what it’ll be?

Oh – the image above has been doing the rounds on social media lately, no source or credit attached… I found it, yes, inspirational!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Certified Again!

The certificate for my second Honourable Mention in the Writers of the Future contest came in -- I pressed it for a while in a heavy book as the post had curled it a tad, but all's well now, it's suitably flat for photography.

I have two more pieces on submission to this contest, for the current and next quarters, and have high hopes of being a finalist one day -- it pays very nicely and is a respected industry credit.

This story, "Wake," one of my "Tales of the Middle Stars" opus, is currently on submission elsewhere, and four of the collection have now been placed. This awakens thoughts of an anthology at some point in the future, collecting them under one cover, or a decent selection of them, there are more coming along quite frequently!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

That First Time…

You never forget your first time in print!

For those thinking it’s a bit early for me to reminisce about that story accepted last April and published in September, I’m thinking farther back, and no, not that online acceptance in the late ‘90s. I’m thinking 1985.

The editor who gave me my first break is the late Neville Coleman, founder of Underwater Geographic, Australia’s premier diving and conservation quarterly. I read from the first issue, cover to cover, and learned to dive in late 1986, but the previous year I offered the mag a short story and Mr Coleman was impressed enough to take it, and serialise it over two parts.

I can’t photograph the spreads to publish here, those magazines are boxed and in storage along with so much of our older paperwork, but I can tell you I illustrated the story myself with two paintings. I considered myself a keen painter at the time and was more than happy to put brush to board.

The Island of the Sun God was an early adventure in my “Ocean” series, begun around 1982 and featuring a near future in which the code of the Cetacean languages had been broken, allowing direct interspecies communication to take place at a sophisticated, linguistic level. The title stems from a best guess at what cetaceans would call their world – we call it “Earth” after the stuff beneath our feet, what would be more natural than for dolphins to call it “Ocean?” This interpretation stems from the Italian underwater filmmaker Bruno Valarti (Not sure if this is accurate, I can find no reference to him online by this or other permutations of spelling, but the name has always stuck in my memory) who made documentaries on the theme in those days. I came up with the idea that humans and cetaceans would become partners in the exploration and protection of the ocean realm and this opened up a world-spanning possibility for adventure. I paired human scientist-explorers with orcas as “Ranger Patrol Teams,” and conceived of pairings as deeply bonded and inseparable friends.

In this story, one of the patrol teams was on downtime, and an orca told his human partner a story from the oral heritage of his people, of an eclipse which had challenged his ancestors’ sun-worship, and a great hero who had swum into the west to seek the place the sun rests in order to learn if the sun would ever leave its children again. Naïve, yes, and rooted in ancient stories and fears of humans, but it made for a good tale.

I had hoped very much more would come of this placing. It almost did. The story was fresh in the minds of folk attending the Oceans ’86 Congress, I remember the noted Scottish underwater photographer, the late Walt Deas was most interested in its potential, and there was some talk at the time of the late, great Carrie Fisher expressing interest in the concept. It went no further, sadly, and I was unable to place another story with Underwater Geographic, though I did become their Marine Mammal Correspondent for some years, publishing several articles in the late 1980s, during which period I worked for an all-too brief time with dolphins at an ill-fated oceanarium.

I wrote a great deal of “Ocean” material, dozens of stories, I had three anthologies prepared but an agent I had around 1990 was a non-starter (that was her description of the material after agreeing to work with it – my experience with agents has not been a sanguine one to date. This was about the time David Brinn’s Sundiver and Startide Rising were winning some of science fiction’s most coveted awards, so I can be forgiven for being bitter about it.) I planned a sprawling series of novels and short story collections spanning history from the immediate to far future, and the first four full length novels were completed, with inroads on others set many centuries hence. All in all it was an enormous body of work and I would still love to do something with it, rework it, bring it into line with the future we have lived into, and explore ideas afresh.

Some years ago a private project (Wild Dolphin Project, Jupiter, Florida) announced it was intending to use computers to try to generate linguistic pulses to allow some level of communication across the species barrier, and the project was covered in National Geographic as recently as April, 2015. I was most interested, as this was the sort of move that heralded the future world I conceived of (based originally, of course, on John Lilly’s pioneering Project Janus, now an artefact of history in its own right, while conceptually remaining the progenitor of what the WDP team are doing.) I recall I was majorly over-optimistic, expecting such research breakthroughs quite quickly, and in so doing placed the roots of the future close enough for that future to be swiftly overtaken by contrary events. Also, in those days, climate change and the bitter controversy over it had not yet taken hold of the public consciousness, another factor which would be a major shaping influence on such an opus. If I do go back and rework this concept, it will take on a very different character.

I hope I get the chance. If I can get a foothold in the wider market, I certainly have a great deal to offer at both short story and novel levels, and “Ocean” is a massive concept which remains quite unique. It’s sobering to discover how many of the industry professionals mentioned in this essay are gone now, Walt Deas in 2008, Neville Coleman – to whom I owe eternal gratitude for that first placement – in 2012, Carrie Fisher just a few months back. Time’s merciless passage waits for none, and I sincerely hope I have the chance to reawaken these concepts in some new and dynamic package in the years ahead.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

PS: The photo at top was found on a search for royalty free images.

In Print: February 2017 (and Progress)

Coming available, a little behind schedule, from Bards & Sages/ Society of Misfit Stories, my vampire short Red Sun Rising is now available to buy through Amazon for Kindle (at 99c, how can you resist?!) Here’s the direct link:

http://www.bardsandsages.com/speculative_fiction/society_of_misfit_stories

This is the second of my “Lucinda Crane, Vampire/Hunter” tales. The first, Crimson Blade, appeared in the anthology Spectral Visions, The Collection in 2014, and the fourth, “Stalking Nemesis” is still on the submission round. I’m hoping to find a berth for the third, a much heftier novella titled “Ouroboros,” in due course.

If you fancy at look at that first anthology, here’s the direct link ($2.87):

https://www.amazon.com/Spectral-Visions-Colin-Younger-ebook/dp/B00MSYA6AK/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1487134631&sr=1-1&keywords=Spectral+Visions

Also in the news, the second Honourable Mention certificate from Writers of the Future has arrived and I’ll post it after it’s had a chance to press for a while. And, more importantly, the edits came in on my fifteenth placement, “Lux Aeterna,” the commissioned story for Helios Quarterly. The issue is due to go live on March 5^th and I’ll provide buy links in the “In Print: March 2017” post.

Better get back to writing!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

The Little-Known “Classics” of Science Fiction

When we think of classics we think of the famous, but there is in any era a huge body of stories and novels which had their day and are now remembered by few. Some, perhaps most, have something to recommend them, and it can be an interesting experience to look back with modern eyes on the storytelling of previous generations.

This should be a “Recently Read” feature, but the antiquity of the material deserves special consideration.

Back in “the day” Ace had a marvellous format for mass produced SF, their ”doubles” series. They published, in a variety of formats, 261 volumes between 1952 and 1973, the device for 221 of them being that the novels had a separate cover back and front and the text read from the outside to the middle for each, the books being opposite ways up. We have just eight volumes in our home library and I read them as a youngster, so it comes as a walk down memory lane to reread one. I can’t remember what prompted me to pull a volume off the shelf but I at once found myself reading a 1964 outing for one of the talents of the era.

The late Arthur Bertram Chandler (1912-1984) was one of my favourite SF writers as a child. He was a British-Australian sea captain who wrote some forty novels and numerous short stories, and I must admit on coming to research his career, I have read only a smattering of his work, contained almost entirely in the old Ace editions. His style was a frank one, full of the daring-do of the day, men were real men, women real women and – you know the rest of the line from the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide. He had interesting ideas carried off with a kind of real-world appeal, which, like so many writers of half a century ago, strove to express the future through invention and technological progress rather than any evolution of the human condition. His spacemen of centuries hence read much like the rugged merchant marine officers of, well, the 1950s.

I read The Coils of Time, one of his stand-alone novels, published in the Ace M-series in 1964. A quick read, I’d guess around 40, 000 words, the sort of paperback one would pick up at the station bookshop to while away the commute morning and evening for a week, and next Monday flip the book over and read the other. It was a great idea, really, and it certainly moved a lot of novels by a lot of names which are graven in the history of SF – Murray Leinster, Leigh Bracket, Damon Knight, Jack Vance, John Brunner, Edmund Hamilton, Kenneth Bulmer, Fred Saberhagen, Samuel R Delany, and that’s just a sampling… It’s a who’s who of SF in the early Sixties, and as such the collection deserves respect.

So, from the perspective of 52 years on, how does it fare? Well, beyond a certain naivety in the telling, it fares quite well on a number of points. The novel is set on Venus, which alone should cause eyes to roll nowadays, but Chandler was clearly taking serious notice of the most up to date scientific information available as he had retired the fabulous visions of Venus as a sister world to Earth and got it right in a number of ways. He speaks of Venus being bereft of life but for viruses, the surface being dust-dry, stormy and utterly inhospitable, requiring armoured spacesuits for humans to venture outside their habitats, under a dim, yellowish overcast. With the exception of the 90-Earth atmospheres surface pressure, sulphuric acid clouds and temperature that would melt lead, he got it pretty much right. This is significant as it was four years before Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison released their famous anthology Farewell Fantastic Venus, a collection of stories and essays from 1932 onward speculating about the planet. The early view of it as hospitable had been done to death both by radio astronomy and data sent back from the Russian Venera series space probes: forever after, Venus would be as we have come to know it – a lifeless hell.

Check out the above collection here.

Chandler, however, manages to have his cake and eat it too. A time machine has been invented but instead of moving the subject forward or backward in linear time, it causes the subject to move “sideways” between parallel universes, and in that universe Venus is habitable, a traditional alien jungle filled with exotic and dangerous life, with the added benefit of being so unremittingly hot that nudity has become enshrined as customary behaviour. This was a mechanism for spicing up narratives in a still quite hidebound age, and provides for a Burroughsian bacchanale in the same narrative as machine guns and rocket ships.

Another interesting point concerns those rockets – in “our” universe rockets are long obsolete, having been replaced by a reactionless space drive, perhaps something along the line of control of gravity (though the EM drive being assessed over the last few years obviously comes to mind) while in the “other” universe rockets remain state of the art, in a very Fifties-ish way from the description.

The time machine itself is not terribly convincing, though working with gyroscopes and rotating moebius-bands evokes thoughts of the shearing EM fields postulated to pull open wormholes, and so impressively built for Carl Sagan’s Contact. Think of this one as the pocket-size version of the same idea, and in that much it has an actual grain of plausibility.

The meat of the novel is the adventure on the alternate Venus, in which our protagonist finds himself hiding out with a resistance group, hunted by a totalitarian state, desperately trying to convince others he has come from a parallel universe, and escape the fate of institutionalised torture at the hands of the interrogators. This all smacks of Nazi times even more so than the Cold War of the age, and this is fair – the war was only twenty years before and shaped the very world view of society. The hero who crosses the gulf of time and/or space to find and be reunited with a lost love is an established trope providing a motive for stepping into the machine, but the sexism of the age flows freely off the page to our 21^st century sensibilities and one is conscious of compensating, translating situations into modern-speak, as it were.

Some other fantastical Venus-related stuff...

Chandler’s writing style is competent, but he employs the now-forbidden passive voice at times, while at others is repetitive in search of literary impact. Let’s say there is nothing challenging about it, and the narrative style would be very much what the commuter would seek for a half-hour’s distraction.

Pulpy? Yes, certainly – but it’s not necessarily a derogatary term. Honest storytelling? For sure. There were some great stories told in their day and many pleasurable hours of reading from the pulps, and I would place Chandler’s work in this vicinity, while acknowledging I have probably not read his best stuff yet. It’s exciting to think, over thirty years after he left us, I have his most important titles yet to sample.

Cheers, Mike Adamson