Robert Bagnall's Blog, page 8

They Who Scream America

...is the name of my new weird/paranoid pulling back of the curtain on how the world really works, as featured in the latest issue of Mithila Review which, I've just learnt from Wikipedia, is the "only international science fiction and fantasy magazine published from India".  Don't know why, but that make me a little bit proud - and only bolsters my suggestion that you go buy yourself a copy.

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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

Nobody needs to get hurt, nobody needs to hurt anyone - naturally, you cockwomble, it's all a fiction

I recently celebrated my 50th rejection from Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores (not quite sure how this should be recognised - a golden email, perhaps?).  I've had some near misses with these guys before, and here they delivered a variation on the theme with a good-cop-bad-cop routine:

I really liked this story and in many ways savored the author’s quips and whims of the whip smart, tart mouthed, elderly archaeologist. I don’t think I will be forgetting her any time soon

balanced by:

the character interactions border on irritating and unfortunately the story depends on them as there is not much else going on. Even the framing device is superfluous to the banter. All told it doesn't make much sense, and comes off as more of an inside joke than a story meant for publication

or:

I have read several stories by the author that are consistently good...

...but the wheels and levers that makes the story work didn’t hold up for me.

The feedback ends with a real stinger:

The story includes the killing of insects; not sure if that's a problem according to CRES's submission guidelines.

Seriously?  I can't kill a mosquito?  In a fucking story??  What sort of batshit crazy world is this?

I'm currently reading an anthology of Buddhist Beat writings, and looking forward to giving it a two-star rating on goodreads.com (ain't poetry great, the way there's so much white space the pages almost turn themselves - shame about the words).  In one of the few moments that pokes its head above the bilge and arse gravy, William S Burroughs, a Buddhism sceptic, reluctantly takes part in a Buddhist retreat, and the first thing he does is fashion a fly swatter:

"I think this no-killing obsession is a nonsense.  Where do you draw the line?  Mosquitos?  Biting flies?  Lice?  Venomous insects?  I'd rather kill a brown recluse spider than get bitten by one.  And I will not co-exist with flies.   Little spider in a web at the window.  He's all right.  But I hear a rustling on the shelf above my bed.  I light a candle and there is a spider about an inch across and a brown spider at that.  Might be a brown recluse.  Any case, too big to live in my vicinity.  I feel better after it is dead, knowing it can't get on my face while I am sleeping."

Well, there's your answer, Bill.  Nowadays, you can't kill it even if you've made it all up...

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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

Disappearing (possibly, even, fast)

Do yourself a favour, and make your way to issue #27 of Bourbon Penn, where you'll find my dream-logic contribution, The Disappearing.  And then work your way back through the other twenty-six issues of this excellent publication.

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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon.
You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

Strike one!

No, not entirely sure what it means either, other than it has something to do with baseball, which seems to be rounders for people who can’t grasp cricket, and that there are three of them, and they’re not good news.

My first strike, if that’s the right term, is actually rather a good thing: it’s my story Sunrunner in Third Flatiron’s latest - indeed, their thirty-first - anthology, After the Gold Rush, and my third for Juliana Rew’s ever-excellent series.  Do check it out, and do check out the preceding thirty.

I’m counting it as my first strike as it’s the first of three professional publications that I’m allowed before I am ineligible for the L Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future competition, in which I’m struggling to get my obligatory two silver honorables (sic) this year.

You may think, with a novel and fifty-odd stories published that I have been long-since ineligible, but the shorts have either been below the 3000-word limit that the judges see as flash, or haven’t been paid at a professional rate.  And the novel that gives this blog its name, 2084: The Meschera Bandwidth?  Well, that needs 5000 sales to count against me.  So, if some four thousand nine-hundred and ninety odd of you want to club together…

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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. That, and T-Shirt Sales.

...is the title of my contribution to Mystery and Horror LLC's ninth 'Strangely Funny' anthology, release date tbc.

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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

Stay classy

I have, for the last year and half or so, been a member of the British Science Fiction Association.  You'd think, being British and a writer of science fiction of reasonably long standing, I'd have been a member for years.  However, I've long struggled with the notion of what such an association is for, given that, for most, the production of written science fiction is a solitary activity, excepting the popular parlour game 'Drabble'.  It's not as though they give you more direct line of sight to publishers or agents, which would be of value to me.  Yes, I suppose if we were all knee-deep in TV or movie science fiction, then we'd need to be more collaborative, but wouldn't working in that milieu make that happen anyway?  And as for discussing the consumption and enjoyment of science fiction, isn't that what pubs and beer are for?  Deeper analysis than that risks treating genre fiction as having more explanatory power or meaning than it has.  I mean, the vast, vast majority of the time we're just trying to entertain.  End of.

The BSFA's publication Vector shows what happens when it's-just-a-bit-of-fun is taken way, way too seriously, with articles of various degrees of pretention or portent disappearing up their own fundaments in a haze of pseudo-intellectual nonsense.  Imagine not just every slice of burnt toast contains the face of Jesus, but you've decided you can predict the future from his facial expressions.  And whilst I'm grateful the BSFA produce it and post it out to me, the fact that it's available free on the interweb makes paying a membership fee even more questionable.

One notable exception from the trend towards social science PhD leather elbow patch unreadableness is Marie Vibbert's article 'Jobs and Class of Main Characters in Science Fiction', which I enjoyed considerably.  Now, I could bang on about the utter, utter misunderstanding of the concept of class that predicates Marie's analysis, but it turns out she's American, so obviously class, to her, is all about money, whereas in Britain it's all about... well, class, obviously - which is separate from, albeit wonkily related to, demography, which is more about what's going on here.  That apart, it's an interesting take on authorial choices without seeing patterns in the clouds that just ain't there.

You've previously seen how I like a good bit of Excel, so I though it may be mildly amusing if I were to put my own stories, both published (50-odd) and unpublished (40-odd) through the same analysis, partly to see whether I diverge from the norm, and partly to judge whether there's some fundamental difference between what the market's bitten on and what they've spat back at me.

Marie, using a semi-scientific but, to me, entirely reasonable salad of Orion SF Masterworks, BSFA award winners and a 'best of' Google search, gives us this result, compared to Pew Research figures on US norms:

And my survey says...

So, what to think?  Well, firstly, my unpublished work looks a lot like the sci-fi universe, whereas my published work looks more like real life.  And, overall, I'm a lot less inclined to give my protagonists unrepresentative positions of power and influence than writers generally.  I wasn't expecting to draw the conclusion that I'm right and it's the rest of the industry that's wrong, but if that's what the numbers say...

Tempted as I am to end there, it's probably nothing other than noise.  But, if there is meaning to be gleaned, it may reflect British versus American mores (which I don't think Marie even acknowledges, let alone tackles), far better expressed and discussed here.  I get why Americans want their heroes to be starship captains and superheroes - if my nation had precious little history, I'd want Arthurs and Beowulfs too - but get Britons to write sci-fi and you end up with Doctor Who, Hitch-hikers and Red Dwarf.  We don't want people with power, we want outsiders and the oppressed middle, because that's who we look up to and feel most kinship with, respectively.  That's why many of my stories have people of ability trapped below the decision makers, implementing absurdity despite themselves: lions led by donkeys.  Not sure that trope makes it across the pond unscathed every time.

However, like Marie, I had difficulty assigning class to a lot of my characters.  Some - God, Death, a sentient refrigerator - I simply excluded, but others - a "magician", a teenage girl, kids - made me ponder.  The conclusion I've come to is that much of the time what I'm writing is an every(wo)man, a placeholder, a cypher we can all hang our own faces on.  I'm writing me, even if that me is another gender, age or race, because that battle to overcome hurdles to get to what you want, whether that's to survive a near-death encounter or just sell some t-shirts, is universal.  And, after all, isn't that exactly why we write and read fiction?

Trouble is, you can't stretch a simple, universal truth like that into a pseudo-academic Vector article...

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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

After Abercrombie

Serendipitously, after recent posts outlining my somewhat laissez faire attitude towards simultaneous submissions, life comes along with an example of the scenario I may have to spin as reality when trying to gloss over my misdemeanours: a submission long-since given up as lost in the ether and subsequently pitched to other markets, that is accepted totally out of the blue.
The story is a sci-fi flash called 'After Abercrombie' and the venue in question is the Page & Spine Fiction Showcase.  In fact, the message wasn't just that it had been accepted, but that it would be published the next day, and $20 would be finding its way into my PayPal account (and has done so).
I'm doubly confused as this seems to be Page & Spine's death rattle, having rebranded themselves as the unpaid market P&S.  No contract came with the acceptance, writers' guidelines have been removed from the old site, and my email enquiry about terms, particularly exclusivity, has not been responded to.  So, I guess, there is no exclusivity.  Not sure what else to conclude.
Other than suggesting you take a look.

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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic. 

You'd have thought they'd have emailed

I don't want to give you the impression that I occasionally Google my own name, but I occasionally Google my own name.  Not having an agent or a press-cutting service (did any of those outlast the Reagan administration? did they ever exist outside of pulp novels?) I would otherwise miss out on things like Austrian Spencer's review of The Dead Inside on Goodreads:

"Highlights for me were discovering Robert Bagnall, Sarah Jackson & Marcus Woodman, all of whom I’ll read more from this year."

I'd also miss out on finding a reference to myself on File 770 going back almost a year and a half (I said that I only Googled myself occasionally) reporting that my story 'The Thirteenth Floor', published in Third Flatiron's 2019 anthology 'Gotta Wear Eclipse Glasses' (did I mention I have a story forthcoming in their next?) made the British Science Fiction Association Awards 2020 longlist in January 2021.
This, I admit, is news to me.  My understanding is that stories have to be nominated by somebody other than the author, so person or persons unknown and who I never paid in unmarked bills must have liked the yarn enough to nominate.  I'd only been a member for about three weeks at that point and was still working out how the whole BSFA thing worked, but they had all my details...  You'd have thought they'd have emailed or something, to let me know...
Meanwhile, back where people do give me a heads-up as to what's happening, here are two items for your virtual shopping basket.  Firstly, JayHenge's 'Grandpa's Deep-Space Diner' came out a couple of weeks ago with a reprint of my story 'The Fool' about an idiot with a fruit pudding.

Secondly, all credit to Patrick O'Ryan for getting the first issue of 'Medusa Tales' out of the door so quickly - my bad mermaid story 'Devil Ray at the Doorway' was taken less than four weeks ago.  Best of luck to both him and the magazine.

# Click on the images or search for these on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

Like side two of the first Tindersticks LP

Writing about recent successful story submissions requires a degree of cognitive dissonance on my part.  On the one hand, it's a tale of manuscripts that have sat on the shelf, dowdy and unloved to the point of having grey hair and half-moon glasses, finally finding their dancing partners.  On the other, of new stories still wet behind the ears flying out of the door before they have a chance to absorb carping feedback and get boiled down in the inevitable rewrites.

As far as the former go, a pair recently sold have racked up ninety-nine rejections between them, before finding success with submissions number one-hundred and one-hundred-and-one.  And another with fifty knockbacks under its belt is, at least as far as the Grinder is concerned, just about the longest standing unrejected submission with three different venues at the same time.

And that last point, of simultaneous submissions, is where I have a slight confession to make.  I've previously blogged about my take on (not) observing publishers' rules about simultaneous submissions, and have now been hoisted ever so slightly by my own petard.

Of course, I blame the fact that I seem to have hit a rich vein of form, like side two* of the Tindersticks' first LP (insert your own metaphor, musical or otherwise), where what I write turns swiftly to sales.  It's temporary, of course.  You can’t bottle lightening, and all that.  Even the Tindersticks couldn't keep it up, although my recollection is that Simple Pleasure was damn good.  But I've had one story sell on its first outing, and another sell twice in its first four showings at market, in the style of Max Bialystok.

In my defence, m'lud, I cite statistics.  I submit each story, maybe ten times a year, and have a success rate of one in thirty, meaning stories normally take three years, on average, to sell.  Only around a third of my stories are with more than one venue at any one time, and most of the time those markets allow simultaneous submissions.  So I reckon the chances of two venues, neither of which accepts simultaneous submissions, both accepting a story within a narrow window of opportunity should happen, on average, every century or so.  But that's on average, and assumes my stories remain average, which I don’t think they are - even if the 10,000 hour rule is bunk, the practice must be showing, right?

So, without saying which are the spinsters and which the debs, all of the following new, original, and previously unpublished stories sold in a dizzying ten-day period:

'The King of China's Mirror', an alt-history horror with a dash of Leibniz has been taken by Shoreline of Infinity , as previously blogged when at the rewrite stage.'Sunrunner', a tale of an eco-terrorist or freedom fighter (all depending) will be in Third Flatiron's next anthology After the Goldrush.'One Heart Beats as Two', cyberpunk with Shakepeare, will be in Australia’s  Aurealis .'Hell is...', will be my sixth story on Daily Science Fiction - and, as if to illustrate the point above, they only rejected three submissions since my last acceptance.  My first three publications with them were each three years apart, whereas now I’m disappointed without an annual appearance.And, as you already know, 'Devil Ray at the Doorway' will be in the newly launched Medusa Tales .

* of the double vinyl, of course, the tracks from 'City Sickness' to 'Marbles', not the CD, where side two presumably means the printed picture of the flamenco dancer on the face not read by the laser.  Precisely what ‘side two’ may mean to anyone under forty reading this for whom music inevitably means a Spotify download is anyone's guess...

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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic. 

If it's okay for Billy

I'm a great believer in it being bad karma to talk about stories before they're picked up by a venue.  So it's proved with my rewrite for Solarpunk, which they didn't like enough to take.  Win some, lose some, move on.

So, let me test the writing-gods once more by relating another rewrite request.  This one's for Shoreline of Infinity, for which I have a certain fond regard.  I've exchanged emails with editor Noel Chidwick, who comes across as genuine and approachable. It's British - proudly Scottish - so I get the sense that we're a bit more aligned in our sensibilities compared to some of the more overly-focus grouped and offended-on-behalf-of-others American venues.  I know the editor of The Best British Science Fiction has a lot of love for it.  Plus I see it's recently put its rates up.  Obvs, it's the last one that really counts.

My story having been with them since last June, this was the feedback I got:

Very well written and observed - it cracks along at a fair pace. At first I was thrown by the genre-mix: cop/crime-alternate reality/fantasy... But by the end, I think it worked. I was convinced. However, the problem I have is that it's a first person story in which the narrator appears to be heading towards her death. So how did she relate the tale? And if she survived, how? If the story could be rewritten in the third person, I think it'd work far better.

Now, I'll say straight up, that I've never had the slightest problem with the idea of a first person narrator - the 'I' of the story - dying.  If it was okay for Billy Wilder, it's okay for me.  And I'm aware that we're not alone, Billy and me.  In fact, I've struggled to see what the objections could be, and this from somebody who would rather be torn apart by wild animals than do up the bottom button of a waistcoat.

The Moonlighting Writer suggests those reasons may be because:

you annoy your audience (answer: I write to unsettle);it's jarring (answer: this particular ending is the cliff-hanger where the narrator may or may not die, so I'd say it's a natural ending); or,it robs you of the possibility of a sequel (answer: it's a short story, and I don't think I've ever written the same character twice)My understanding is that Sunset Boulevard got a fair amount of stick at the time for the device, although it doesn't seem to be coming to the surface of my Google searches.  Perhaps I read it in Cameron Crowe's excellent Conversations with Wilder, which I no longer have, or perhaps I've misremembered?  If true, I suspect it was more the shock of the new than a fundamental feeling of being cheated.  If anything, Sunset Boulevard merely kicked the door open for hoards to follow - just look at the examples on that TV Tropes link. 

Thinking it through, I can only conclude that for you, dear reader, these characters we paint through black pixels on white, or inky scribbles on paper, are real.  They're not the constructs they are for the writer, who builds them from some skeletal armature, chooses their clothes and voice and gait and preferences and tics.  It's a game for us, but, hey, you buy into it.  You really buy into it.  Perhaps that's the fundamental difference between writer and reader.  You don't see behind the curtain.  Maybe you don't even want to see behind the curtain...

Of course, when it came to the rewrite itself, principles disappeared.  I may have just painted the writer as god, but compared to editors...

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And, just to try to balance the karma out a bit, some news on a story that has been taken: Medusa Tales, who publish 'stories of transformation', will be running Devil Ray at the Doorway, my tale of a bad mermaid in a tsunami.

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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.