Bryce Beattie's Blog, page 14

Genre Literary Magazine Parody Cover, #2

Once again, click for full size.

I would like to state, for the record, this is totally not just because Clarksworld rejected my last submission.

Genre Literary Magazine Parody Cover, #1

I’ve been designing some parody covers for use in the video for my upcoming crowdfunding campaign for StoryHack Action & Adventure. (The campaign will launch within a day or two of Issue 0 getting released.) They are kind of going to be a throwaway gag, and I probably won’t use all of them, so I figured I’d put them up here. After all, I don’t want all this messing around to go to waste.

So, without further ado, here’s the first cover. Click for the full-size version.

 

On a related note, I sent out the first round of rejections for the magazine this last weekend. That was kind of interesting. The good news is that I’m getting an even better mental picture of what I’d like the the magazine to be. Also, apparently my definitions of “action” and “adventure” are different than most people’s.

By action I mean that there should be characters actively engaged with an antagonist (or entity) who represents imminent physical danger. Fistfights, car chases, vine swinging (alligators or spikes below), all that. But the protagonist must have an active role in it, rather than just having stuff happen at him/her.

By adventure, I mean the character does awesome things (is proactive) in a exotic (not mundane) situation. Heroics often enter in. The protagonist can be in a cool time period, a fantasy world, or have a bizarre profession, something about his/her situation should transport me, the reader, out of the boring real-life world. After reading, I should be able to say a main character “had an adventure.”

I promise not to ramble so much when I post the other covers.

Magazine & Site Updates.

Thanks to some old & new friends as well as some advice from the editor of another modern pulp, the call for submissions is out there and getting found. I know this, because my inbox is filling right up. I was going to wait until the submission period was over to start reading, but it has become apparent that I will die crushed under a pile of digital fiction if I do that. So I’ve started reading the slush pile and I’ll begin sending out some responses by the end of the week.

There will be some minor changes here on the blog over the next couple of weeks to organize and make room for magazine stuff.

StoryHack Action & Adventure, Issue 0 Call for Submissions

Submissions are open until 12:01 AM, April 1, 2017.

I recently started reading lots of short fiction. As I’ve picked up a few different magazine titles, I’ve noticed that there’s not really a lot getting published of the stuff I like to read best, which is pulpy action/adventure. A couple of genre-specific titles have come and gone, with one or two still having a go at it, but I’d like to see a place that specializes in action/adventure across genres. So that is what StoryHack Action & Adventure is intended to be.

My end goal is to launch a professional-rates-paying magazine. Lofty indeed, I know. To this end, I’m going to fund an “Issue 0,” paying less-than-professional rates, as I’m not made of money. I’ll do a magazine-sized print layout, and I’ll also commission a cover and a bit of interior artwork. And then I’ll use the produced Issue 0 as a part of a crowdfunding campaign, to prove I have the skills to bring it all together. If the crowdfunding thing works, then I’ll see if I can get the magazine to be self sustaining.

What I’m looking for

To steal a joke, StoryHack Magazine will publish both kinds of fiction – action and adventure.

I’m open to any genre, as long as there’s at least one good meaty action scene in there. Bonus points for extra adventure. And I’m serious when I say any genre. Sword & sorcery, lost world, occult detective, alien fighter pilot, western horror, you’re limited only by your imagination. Think Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dashiell Hammett, Doc E. E. Smith. Think fun and energetic.

You should know, however, that I’m not going to select erotica or extreme gore.

I’ll consider any short story/novelette length 1,000 to 14,000 words, but I do have to cap the payments. Sorry.

What I’ll pay

$0.01 / word, $50 max for worldwide 1st print and ebook rights with 3 months exclusivity. I’ll make a sample contract available if you want.

How to Submit

Just send your submission, formatted appropriately, in a .doc, .docx, .odt, or .rtf file to submissions at storyhack.com, with the subject line of “StoryHack Magazine Submission”. Make sure in your email you include your name, the name of your story, and your pen name (if different). Also please include a one or two sentence synopsis/teaser.

I’m going to give submissions about a month. They will close on 12:01 AM, April 1, 2017.

Once I’ve selected stories, It’s time to send out contracts, pay authors, commission art and do the layout. I think that’s about 3 weeks worth of stuff, but I may be a tad optimistic.

Once everything is all set, then I’ll upload the magazine to all the stores and get on the process of making the electronic version free everywhere. That should happen relatively fast.

Then I’ll launch the crowdfunding campaign.

If you’re interested in following my progress on this, sign up for the StoryHack Irregular (emails)

The apple cider vinegar experiment.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been drinking a little bit of apple cider vinegar first thing in the morning. I’m not sure what, if any, physical benefits I’ve reaped. However, I can tell you this: my willpower is up 413%.

Once I’ve forced myself to gag that crap down, everything else seems easy.

#LTUE2017 was awesome.

My wife and I had plans last weekend which fell through. I was sad. And then I remembered that it was also Life the Universe and Everything weekend. So I asked her if she wanted to go, she took a look at the schedule of events, and she decided to give it a try. After all, we already had a babysitter lined up. You can’t just let that go to waste.

I’ve never been to a writer’s conference before. After attending LTUE, I’m sorry I waited so long. I picked up a ton of good tips for the marketing end of a writing carrier. I also got heaps of new insights and reminders on the craft side of writing. I made a couple of new friends and even did a bit of networking. Look forward to a couple more interviews in the coming weeks. Best of all, I came back with a renewed desire to finish some stories.

My buddy David J West introduced me to a bunch of the folks from Immortal Works Press, a new small publisher from my neck of the woods. They were all super nice.

One of the last sessions of the conference I attended was an audience participation game called “Choose Your Own Apocalypse.” This edition was Moriarty vs Umbridge vs Dracula. A bunch of the Immortal Works people are also part of a writing group called the Space Balrogs, who apparently put these on at all the local cons. I laughed pretty hard, and I’ll make more of an effort to attend from now on.

There was a session with this guy who had been in the Army’s “remote viewing” ESP program. It was real life X-Files. Super Fascinating stuff.

The biggest problem in attending a conference like this is the amount of stuff that I added to my reading queue. Now I’m never going to get through it all.

Anyway, I came home happy and exhausted. And I only made it to 2/3 of the conference.

I need a beta reader or two…

I could really use a beta reader or two for an urban fantasy/supernatural-y short. If you’re interested, email me. The address is bryce at this very website.

Or comment on this post would work.

How to Accept Submissions

One of the other major facets of starting a literary magazine is the receiving and sorting of submissions. There is no way anybody would send me, a nobody, a printed submission in this day and age, so I’m not going to bother with a physical slush pile. As I’ve looked around, there are a few options for accepting submissions.

Email – Of course, this is the simplest to implement. Just have authors send an email to a dedicated email address. And I could set it up with tagging/folders to stay organized.
Submittable – Submittable is a web app that handles everything for submissions. I understand it has lots of options on the publisher end. A couple of the magazines to whom I’ve submitted use it, and it’s pretty easy for an author to use, too. The biggest hangup for me is the price. They have 2 levels of subscription, one at $31/month and one at $66. That’s not totally absurd, but it’s just not something I want to pay at launch. Another tiny hangup is it appears to have a few too many options.
[https://www.greensubmissions.com/](Green Submissions) – It’s a free to use submission manager app. It is nowhere near as slick as Submittable, and does not appear to be quite as user-friendly. It is however, free to use. I could also buy the software that powers Green Submissions, but it doesn’t look like it’s been updated in a while, nor do I know how easy it is to customize. And besides, if I want to make it better I might as well…
Make my own – this is a problem among many programmers I know, myself included. A big part of me just wants to code up my own submission manager. Like I’ve already put down like three different starts on code.

Since the magazine I’m thinking about would be just me running it, I’d start with email. It’s easy to use and keep organized, and nobody should have a problem using it.

Get Your Horrorscope Today

A while back I was going to play with building apps for android/ios, so I built a little app that generates bad fortunes/horoscopes. I never followed through on the apps, but I did build all of the text-generating stuff. It’s kind of like a hyperactive cross between a long-winded magic 8 ball and a pessimistic mad libs book.

I dug up the code while organizing my mess of a “open projects” folder and decided to put it up for all to see/mock.

Dr. Bilk’s Horrorscopic Misfortune Telling Machine

And comments/suggestions/whatever about it should go here.

Here’s Dr. Bilk. He lives a life of science and mysticism.

Short Story Contracts

I’m pretty comfortable with the technical portions of publishing, prepping files and the like. One part of the process I know very little about is the legal side. And I figure if I decide to do this thing, I’d better do it right. So over the past little while, I’ve been reading up on author contracts. It has been very useful that many magazines put up a template on their website. It looks like a large percent of mags use the SFWA’s model magazine contract as a starting place. It’s got good comments so you can understand the legalese.

Here are a few of the ones I’ve been looking at:

Model Anthology Contract – SFWA
Model Magazine Contract – SFWA I’ll probably use this one as a starting place if and when I decide to launch a magazine project.
Metaphorosis Magazine’s Contract pdf
Lightspeed Magazine’s Contract
Scribes Valley Publishing Short Story Contract
Podcastle Short Story Contract
TANSTAAFL Press Publishing Contract – Anthology – pdf
Thanks to Doug Lance from FictionMagazines.com, who sent me a copy of their template contract as well.