Category: Short Stories

Navigating Woke SF, Part 1: Short Story Markets and Author Blacklists

Last year, I had a short story published in the anthology Again, Hazardous Imaginings: More Politically Incorrect Science Fiction. Not only was it one of my highest paying short story sales to date, but it also made it onto the Tangent Online 2020 Recommended Reading List with a *** rating, their highest tier. Only 13 out of 293 stories on the list received that honor—and making the list at all was an accomplishment!

But a funny thing happened after the anthology came out: for a stretch of several months, I stopped receiving personalized rejections for my short story submissions, and instead got only form rejections. Normally when I write a cover letter for a short story submission, I mention the last three markets that I was published in. For example: “My stories have recently appeared in Again, Hazardous Imaginings; Twilight Tales LTUE Benefit Anthology, and Bards and Sages Quarterly (forthcoming).” In a typical month, I’ll get maybe a dozen or so form rejections and a couple of personalized rejections, depending on how many stories I have out on submission.

Back in March, I started to notice that I wasn’t getting any personalized rejections. Suspecting that my publication credit in Again, Hazardous Imaginings wasn’t helping me, I decided to change things up and only list my publication credits for stories listed in Locus Magazine’s Year In Review issue. My thinking was that all of the Hugo and Nebula eligible markets give their yearly reports in that issue, and since all of the editors want to acquire stories that are likely to win awards, a publication credit in one of those markets is more likely to get them to pay attention.

Lo and behold, I started getting personalized rejections again.

Just to make sure I wasn’t imagining things, I exported my data from The Submission Grinder and made a quick table of my submissions returned for each month going back to July 2019. Before “The Promise of King Washington” was accepted in February 2020, I was getting roughly one personalized rejection for every 5-8 form rejections. Then, for most of 2020, I went through a dry spell where I didn’t have many stories out on submission. Towards the end of the year, I got back in the saddle, and my personalized-to-form rejections ratio returned to what it had been earlier… but then Again, Hazardous Imaginings was published in December, and for the next three months, I received no personalized rejections at all. Then, around March-April, I stopped mentioning my publication credit in Again, Hazardous Imaginings… and I started getting personalized rejections again.

So what happened? Is there some sort of unofficial blacklist for stories published in Again, Hazardous Imaginings? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know if any of the other authors in the anthology have had a similar experience, nor do I know for certain that mentioning the anthology in my publication credits caused this particular issue. It could be that I was submitting to higher paying markets at the beginning of 2021, and those markets just happen to be more stingy about personalized rejections. It could be that the pandemic has just sapped everyone’s energy.

But now that I’ve made this table, the one thing I cannot say is that the whole thing is just a figment of my imagination. There was a three-month period where I saw significantly fewer personalized rejections than usual, and it just so happened to coincide with the publication of the anthology Again, Hazardous Imaginings and my mentioning it as a publication credit in all of my cover letters.

It’s no big secret that most of the traditional short story markets in science fiction and fantasy trend somewhere between liberal and super woke. All you have to do to get a sense for this is subscribe to their podcasts or read their stories online. For most of 2020, I was subscribed to every science fiction podcast, and I frequently ended up skipping episodes because either the story was too woke, the author bio was little more than a checklist of intersectional victimhood groups, or the editor went off on some sort of political rant (typically of the “orange man bad” variety) that had little or nothing to do with the story. You can also get a good sense of the woke-ness by looking up these magazines’ submission guidelines and reading their diversity statements.

So for the last couple of months, I haven’t been listing Again, Hazardous Imaginings as a publication credit in any of my cover letters, and the response to my stories appears to have returned to the old normal… but it doesn’t sit right with me. Why should I have to hide that I was published in that anthology? Why shouldn’t I be proud of it? It did make Tangent Online’s recommended reading list with three stars, after all. Why should I waste my time submitting my stories to science fiction and fantasy markets that would see that publication credit as a black mark?

In other words, why not blacklist the blacklisters?

When an author decides not to submit their stories to a particular market, it’s often called a “self-rejection,” since the author has already decided that the story won’t be published before the editor gets a chance to consider it. But this is a little different. It’s not my own story that I’m rejecting, but the market as a whole. It’s making the conscious decision that if a magazine is too woke, I’m not going to have anything to do with it.

Here’s another way to think about it: why should I hold out for a year or longer, hoping to earn a couple of hundred bucks for it, when most of the markets that pay that well either aren’t interested in publishing the kind of politically incorrect stories that I tend to write, or aren’t going to publish an author like me who isn’t demonstrably woke enough? Even if I only end up selling it to a semi-pro market for less than fifty bucks, if it only takes a few months to make the sale because I’m not wasting time with the woke markets, does that make it worthwhile?

Or here’s yet another way to think about it: what other benefits do I get with my short story sales, besides how well it pays? If short stories are essentially advertisements for my other work, does it actually make sense to seek publication in the super woke markets, whose readers are mostly woke? Or does it make more sense to be published in the more conservative-leaning markets, with readers who are more likely to enjoy the other stuff that I write? And what about networking with similar-minded authors and editors? I made some really great connections through the anthology Again, Hazardous Imaginings, and even brought Andrew Fox, the editor, onto my newsletter for an interview. It was great!

All of this is happening as we’re starting to see an anti-woke cultural backlash gain momentum. Smarter people than me with a finger on the pulse of the culture say that the Snyder Cut is where the tide began to turn. The thing that tipped me off to it was the surprising waythat Coca-Cola walked back their critical race theory training after the “woke-a-cola” scandal. To my knowledge, there was no organized boycott, yet for a large corporation to backpedal so quickly tells me that they really took a hit to their bottom line.

In the coming months, I think we’re going to see a huge cultural shift against the woke moral panic that has gripped our nation for the last couple of years. That in itself is a subject for another post, but what it means for SF&F is that a lot of these woke awards and woke short story markets are well on their way to going broke. The few that endure will become niche markets for a very small audience that has completely divorced itself from the cultural mainstream—including the vast majority of SF&F readers.

Is it really worth hitching my wagon to such a horse? Or is it better to take a gamble on the up-and-coming markets that might not pay as much, but also aren’t carrying all the woke political baggage as magazines like Uncanny or Lightspeed?

Of course, if the answer to all of these questions is “yes, Joe—go for it!” the next big question is how to determine if a market is too woke? Because some of the markets have diversity statements that are fairly conservative-friendly, like “we welcome submissions from writers of all backgrounds!” and don’t use any of the woke value-signalling terms like “folx,” “latinx,” “QUILTBAG,” “indigenous,” “black bodies,” etc. In fact, I’m pretty sure that many of these markets only put out diversity statements to pacify the woke moral crusaders, in the same way that many boarded up stores and restaurants put up BLM signs hoping that the rioters sorry, the “peaceful protesters” would spare them.

One way to determine this is to look at which markets are chasing the wokest awards. The Hugos went woke in 2015, when “no award” swept the categories dominated by Sad Puppies nominees. That was really the moment when the fandom split, and the anti-woke readership abandoned the Hugos in disgust. The Rabid Puppies swept the 2016 nominations in what amounted to a hilarious sabotage operation (“Pounded in the Butt by Chuck Tingle’s Hugo,” hehe), but by 2017 that had all come to an end.

With that in mind, I went through all of the Hugo Awards to see which markets had either won an award or published a story that had won an award since 2015, and which markets had either been nominated or published stories that have been nominated since 2017. Here is what I found:

Hugo Winning Markets since 2015

  • Uncanny (5)
  • Lightspeed (1)

Markets with Hugo Winning Stories since 2015

  • Tor.com (5)
  • Apex (3)
  • Clarkesworld (2)
  • Lightspeed (1)
  • Uncanny (1)

Hugo Nominated Markets since 2017

  • Strange Horizons (5)
  • Beneath Ceaseless Skies (5)
  • Escape Pod (3)
  • Fireside (3)
  • FIYAH (3)
  • The Book Smugglers (2)
  • GigaNotoSaurus (1)
  • Cirsova (1)
  • Shimmer (1)
  • Podcastle (1)
  • Uncanny (1)

Markets with Hugo Nominated Stories since 2017

  • Tor.com (37)
  • Uncanny (18)
  • Clarkesworld (5)
  • Beneath Ceaseless Skies (3)
  • Fireside (2)
  • Lightspeed (2)
  • Asimov’s (1)
  • Strange Horizons (1)
  • Nightmare Magazine (1)
  • Diabolical Plots (1)

The counts for nominated markets/stories do not include the winners, but do include all of the nominations for 2021, even though the winners have not yet been decided.

I haven’t yet settled on a standard for deciding which markets are too woke for me to submit to. I suppose that’s something I’ll have to decide on a case-by-case basis, and for any who choose to follow my lead on this, it will have to be an individual decision. But I am rethinking the way I submit and publish my short stories, based on this experience. This post has already gone too long, and I still haven’t worked my new strategy out, but if you have any suggestions or ideas I’m interested to hear them.

Are short stories worth publishing?

Every couple of years, I get the short story bug and write maybe half a dozen short stories in the span of just a few months. Then, I get really excited about putting them up on submission, and for the next couple of years I systematically send them out to all the professional markets… and then the semi-professional markets… and then, when only a couple of them actually sell, I self-publish them. My enthusiasm gradually dies down, until I catch the short story bug again, and the cycle repeats.

When I caught the short story bug last year, though, it was immediately after NaNoWriMo, where I wrote 50k words of short stories instead of 50k words of a novel. That was so much fun that I think I’m going to do it every year. In fact, I may try out Camp NaNoWriMo too, just for the fun of it.

But this post isn’t about whether short stories are worth writing. That’s an artistic question, and the answer for most writers is probably some version of “yes, but…” The big question on my mind, however, is whether short stories are worth publishing—that is, are short stories worth it from a career/business perspective?

Several years ago (during one of those times when I’d caught the short story bug again), I wrote a blog post about whether it’s possible to make a living as a short story writer. I speculated that if you spent a year writing two short stories a week, that would give you a hundred stories by the end of the year. Keep it up, and after a few years you would have so many stories that by sheer numbers alone, you could do it.

Dean Wesley Smith came to a similar conclusion back in 2016, and again in 2018. The basic idea is to write like a madman out of hell, keep each one on submission for a couple of years, and self-publish them on a shoestring budget so that even if each one only brings in a few extra dollars, by sheer numbers alone, you make a decent living.

There’s just one problem.

There’s a site called The Submission Grinder that crowdsources writers’ rejection letters and acceptances to produce a lot of useful data on all of the various short story markets. After crunching this data, I discovered there are between 30-50 science fiction and fantasy markets that pay better than 5¢ per word. Most of them are temporarily closed at any given time, and very few of them accept multiple or simultaneous submissions. Furthermore, they all average about 25-30 days to respond to submissions.

What this means is that if you write faster than one short story a month, after only about a dozen stories or so, you will start to run out of available markets. Unless you write under multiple pen names or across multiple genres, you will very quickly develop a backlog of stories that won’t get submitted, simply because there aren’t enough places to submit to. So instead of taking one or two years for each story to work their way through the markets, it will take several more years or perhaps even decades, during which time those stories aren’t making any money for you at all.

As for self-publishing, I am currently experimenting with a lot of different ways to publish short stories, but what I’ve generally found is that short stories can be useful to do just about every other thing except make money selling them directly. If you price the singles at $2.99, you might sell as many as one or two per year, making less than $5. If you price them at 99¢, you may sell as many as a dozen per year, if you’re lucky—again, making less than $5. I didn’t have much luck getting bundles of 3-5 to sell, but larger collections of 10 to 12 stories do occasionally sell, and at a decent enough rate that I’m earning more on those stories than I would if I’d sold them individually as singles. But short story collections don’t sell anywhere near as well as novels.

So if you’re going to publish short stories, the best way to maximize earnings is to submit them to all the professional markets first, and to work your way through those markets as quickly and efficiently as possible. But that requires throttling your output, otherwise you’ll soon end up with a massive backlog of stories waiting for a place to send them. And self-publishing them all isn’t a panacea, because it’s very difficult to make money selling short stories directly. They can be useful for other things, like building your email list, converting readers to fans, and marketing your author brand, but all of this requires making those stories free—at least the singles, if not the collections.

But when you think about it, that makes sense, because most short stories are published for free anyways. When you sell a story to a professional or semi-pro market, it usually ends up on a podcast feed or a website somewhere, available for free in some form. These days, an avid short story reader doesn’t need to spend a dime to find high quality stories produced very well. If they do spend money, it’s usually because they’ve made a conscious choice to support an author, or a magazine, or an anthology that they love.

So is it worth publishing short stories? If you can break into the professional markets, probably yes, otherwise I’m not so sure. And while the best career writing advice is “be prolific,” I do think there’s a point at which the marginal cost vs. marginal benefit of writing another short story really doesn’t make any sense. I suspect that threshold lies somewhere around the point where the submissions backlog starts to build.

I’ll still keep writing short stories, because I do want to crack into those professional markets, and I do think the ancillary benefits of self-publishing short stories makes it worthwhile. But at best, it’s going to be a sideshow compared to everything else I do. Most likely I’ll reserve short stories to NaNoWriMo or Camp NaNoWriMo, and not even bother writing them for the rest of the year.

NaNoWriMo 2020 Day Thirty

It’s done! I did it! Hit the big 50k word mark in thirty days! The T-shirt is on the way!

Here are all of the stories that I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2020:

  • “Lord of the Slaves” (about 9,200 words)
  • “The Real Hell” (about 3,700 words)
  • “The Scales of the Space Whale” (about 9,800 words)
  • “A Fatal Rebirth” (about 1,000 words)
  • “The Manchurian Paradox” (about 4,000 words)
  • “Schrödinger’s Diaper” (about 800 words)
  • “The End of Elysium” (about 9,000 words)
  • “The Final Turning” (about 1,800 words)

The difference was made up by six stream-of-consciousness character interview exercises that I did for the main viewpoint characters in my current WIP, Queen of the Falconstar. Final word count for NaNoWriMo 2020: 50,044.

My favorite story to write was probably “The Scales of the Space Whale,” an upbeat humorous space opera piece, but “The End of Elysium” was a close second. That one is a post-apocalyptic piece, very reminiscent of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and I wrote both stories with help from the Mythulu cards.

All of these stories are going to need some serious revision before I feel that they’re ready to submit. But at a rate of 1-2 stories per month, that shouldn’t be too hard to do.

This was a lot of fun! I definitely would like to do it again next year.

NaNoWriMo 2020 Day Twenty-Six

  • Words written: 2,682
  • Total words written: 39,545
  • Stories written: 6
  • Character interviews written: 4
  • Total words behind: 3,788

Catching up! Slowly, but surely. We’re in the home stretch now, and with just over 10k words to go, I think I may actually be able to pull this off. It’s gonna be close, but I may just be able to do it. Maybe if I also do author’s notes for the short singles I have yet to publish, hmm. That could pad things out.

Looking ahead, I’m going to revise and clean up all these stories before submitting them, probably at a rate of 1-2 per month. If I can use these nanowrimo stories to get into the habit of writing 1-2 short stories per month, that would be fantastic.

Thanksgiving went really well for us this year, but it’s late, and it seems that Mrs. Vasicek fell asleep while putting the baby down. Better sign off and go see to that.

NaNoWriMo 2020 Day Eighteen

  • Words written: 2,344
  • Total words written: 26,730
  • Stories written: 4
  • Total words behind: 3,270

My graph on the nanowrimo.org site looks like a wavy shadow following the line where I should be. Still in the game, just not where I should be. If it keeps going this way, maybe I’ll do a stream-of-consciousness interview with each of the major characters from Queen of the Falconstar to pad out my numbers at the end. Or would that be cheating? I guess I could use them as bonus content after the novel comes out.

Anyways, good progress today. Instead of working on that Mythulu story, I dusted off an old short story outline from the trunk and decided to run with that instead. It’s turning out pretty good, perhaps even pro material–if all of the professional professional short story markets in science fiction didn’t skew so damned hard to the Left. But even though this one is clearly political, I’m writing it in such a way that either side can pick it up and run with it. Hopefully. But I’m not going to take out that creepy slogan that keeps popping up everywhere, “build back better.” Because those Davos crowd creeps, with their Great Reset, are truly the enemy. Do you know how much good I could do for the world right now if I had a death note? Which would also make for a great, yet unsaleable story.

NaNoWriMo 2020 Plans

It’s been a long, long time since I attempted to do NaNoWriMo. Usually, I have something else on my writing schedule which prevents me from taking off a month for another project. I think my last NaNoWriMo attempt was in 2013, but even then I was juggling that with another WIP, and the WIP won out.

This year, though, I’m trying something new and workshopping my current WIP, Queen of the Falconstar, through my writing group as I write it. Since I can only workshop up to 4k words per week, I’ve been lining up a sizeable backlog that already runs through the first week of November. In the next couple of weeks, I think I can line up writing group submissions through the whole month, which frees me up to work on something else.

Instead of a novel, though, I think I’m going to shoot for 50k words of short stories. My submissions queue has dwindled down to only four stories, and it looks like I’m going to end up publishing three of those in an anthology soon since they’ve pretty much exhausted the available markets. So I really need to write more short stories.

I’ve got a couple of stories planned, but not enough to fill all 50k words, so there’s going to be a fair amount of discovery writing going on. Hopefully that helps to throw my creative mind into a higher gear, which is kind of the point of NaNoWriMo in the first place: to show that writing under pressure can actually make you more creative. Since there are also five Sundays in November, and I make it a practice not to write professionally on Sundays, that amps up the pressure yet again, since it means that I need to write more than 2k words per day.

It’s going to be a challenge, and there’s a good chance that something will come up and I won’t be able to make it, but I’m shooting for it anyway. Wish me luck!

A New Short Story Plan

So I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how best to leverage my short stories, not just from the traditional publishing angle, but from the indie publishing side as well. The problem is that self-published short stories really don’t sell much, so after you’ve sold them to a traditional market, what are you supposed to do?

I’ve tried all of the following things, with varying levels of success:

  • Publish single short stories and charge only 99¢.
  • Publish single short stories and charge $2.99.
  • Bundle 3-5 stories together and charge $2.99 to $4.99.
  • Bundle 10-12 stories into a collection and charge $4.99.
  • Give the singles away for free.
  • Turn the singles into newsletter magnets to gain new subscribers.

Taken individually, there are problems with all of these strategies. Short story singles don’t earn very much at any price, and while they garner a lot of downloads if you make them free, they don’t really lead to sales of other books unless they’re part of a larger series. Even then, not so much.

The bundles and collections don’t do much better. Dean Wesley Smith says you can bundle 3-5 short stories together just fine, (or at least, he used to say that) but I tend to think that readers prefer collections with at least 10-12 short stories in them. At this point, I don’t self-publish a collection unless it has at least 40,000 words.

Short stories can be useful as newsletter magnets, but I’ve found that first-in-series books get a higher CTR than standalone shorts. Besides, it’s much more useful to send a follow up email to a first-in-series book (“Have you read ____ yet? Here’s what comes next.”)

So what’s the best way to self-publish short stories?

Let’s take a look at this from a reader’s perspective for a moment. These days, most short stories from the magazines are available for free. They’re either available on a podcast feed, like Uncanny or Escape Pod, or they’re published on a website for a limited time (sometimes for an unlimited time.) There are a handful of magazines like Asimov’s and F&SF that put their content behind a paywall, (usually a subscription of some kind) but there are also magazines like Clarkesworld that put their content up for free on the podcast AND offer an optional subscription. In fact, I believe it was Clarkesworld that discovered that revenue actually went up when they put everything out for free.

So as a short story reader, there’s really no need for me to purchase single short stories, since so many of them are available from the magazines for free. In fact, I would probably prefer to get my stories from a magazine, since I know they’ve been vetted by an editor. If I like a particular author, I may pick up some of their short stories, but I’m more likely to wait until they’ve bundled them into a collection of some kind, just to maximize the value.

Anthologies are a different story (sorry for the pun.) I have yet to see a short story anthology that isn’t priced like a regular book—no free or 99¢ ebooks. That’s probably because, as a short story reader, I know I’m getting a bunch of stories for that price. It’s kind of like buying an album, back in the days before Spotify: I know I’m going to get a couple of stinkers, but I also know that I’ll get some really great ones too. But if there are only 3-5 stories in that bundle, I’m going to think twice before buying it unless it’s at a super deep discount price. After all, I can always get my short story fix for free.

So if there are enough high-quality short stories availabe from the magazines for free, and self-published singles don’t really earn much at all, what’s the best way to go indie? Here’s my thought: sell anthology-sized collections at full price and make all the singles free, with the backmatter in the free stories pointing to the collections.

As a short story reader, I’m already used to paying for anthologies—and I’m more likely than other readers to buy them, since I’m the kind of reader who seeks out short stories. So if I pick up a handful of free short stories from an author and come to really enjoy her work, I’m already primed to buy her collections when I finish each story—and that makes the backmatter of each free single the best place for her to advertise her collections.

It’s a bit like first-in-series free, except instead of the one free book pointing to the rest of the series, there’s a bunch of free short stories all pointing to the same one (or two or three) collections. The typical reader is probably going to need to read a few of an author’s short stories anyways to really become a fan, so making all of the stories free could really be the way to go.

Of course, the big downside to this as an author is that you probably can’t sell reprint rights to the stories that are available as free singles. Why would an editor buy your story for their publication if it’s already available for free? So you would have to make the singles free for a limited time, if selling the stories to the reprint markets is part of your strategy.

But if you’re going to eventually bundle those stories into a collection, that’s not really a problem. Publish them as free singles as soon as the rights revert back to you, and then take down the singles when you have enough of them to put into a collection.

So under this hybrid publishing system, the typical lifecycle of a short story would look something like this:

Stage One: Submitting to the Traditional Markets

The goal of the first stage is to sell first publication rights to a professional or a semi-pro market (typically a magazine or an anthology.) So before self-publishing, you would submit to all of the traditional markets, and keep the story on submission until it has sold. But you would have to limit yourself to the markets with a pay rate that you’re willing to accept, otherwise you might as well just self-publish.

If my goal is to be a 6-figure author, I should value my time at $50/hour at least (since $50/hour X 40 hours/week X 50 weeks/year = $100,000/year.) That means I can use my writing speed to calculate my minimum pay rate. If I can write 2,000 words in an hour, then that’s $50/2,000 words, or 2.5¢ per word. Round that up to 3¢ per word, and that’s the minimum pay rate that I should be willing to accept.

Once the story has sold, the contract will dictate when I can self-publish. Most contracts have an exclusivity period of a few months to a year. Every contract is different, so how long the story remains in this phase depends on each contract.

Stage Two: Self-Publishing as Free Singles

This is where you start to implement the strategy that I discussed above. As soon as the rights revert back to you, you self-publish them as short story singles—but rather than trying to make money with them, you give them away for free in order to point readers toward your collections.

In other words, after a short story has been traditonally published, it goes through a temporary period where it’s used as a free loss leader. This period ends as soon as the author has enough shorts to bundle into a novel-sized collection—but since there are always at least a few free singles floating around, it serves as an effective way to attract new readers and win over new fans.

Stage Three: Collections and the Reprint Markets

This is the final stage, where you take down the free singles and bundle them into collections instead. Once that’s done, you update the backmatter in all of the other free singles to include links to buy the new collection, and the story starts to earn money for you again.

Because the story is no longer a free self-published ebook, it makes sense to start submitting to the traditional markets that buy reprint rights, since why not? At this point, it’s free money. I generally don’t accept anything less than 1¢ per word, since I’ve found that the token-paying markets don’t make an appreciable dent in any of my stories’ lifetime earnings, but that’s just me.

I think this three-stage lifecycle may be the best way to extract the maximum value from my short stories. Like pawns in the game of chess, it’s not what each story individually is doing, but how they’re working together. A self-published single that sells only a dozen copies (if that) per year isn’t doing much for me, and while I can use them to gain new subscribers, there are more effective tools for that than standalone short-stories.

In any case, I’m going to give it a try. It will be interesting in a few months to see how it turned out!

2019-09-26 Newsletter Author’s Note

This author’s note originally appeared in the September 26th edition of my author newsletter. To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.

So for this newsletter’s author’s note, I thought I’d do a roundup of all the magazines that have published my short stories in the last six months. There’s a surprisingly large number of them. They’re all great publications, so if any of them look interesting, feel free to give them your support and pick up a copy or two.

(As a side note, I’ve found that some email clients break my hyperlinks if I have too many of them in one email. I’m going to put the links in anyway, but if they’re broken for you, please let me know.)

First, my story “The Janus Anomaly” appeared in Kasma Magazine in May. It’s still up on the website, if you want to read it. They did a great illustration for it too!

The story is about a science officer on a scout ship that encounters an alien anomaly, and she can’t tell if she’s losing her mind or if she’s the only sane one while everyone else is crazy. Also, the story takes place in the same universe as the Gunslinger Trilogy.

Second, my story “The Gettysburg Paradox” appeared in the July issue of Bards and Sages Quarterly. The ebook copy of the magazine is available on most ebookstores, and you can find the link here.

The story is about a time traveling tourist at the Battle of Gettysburg who learns that almost all of the combatants are (not so secretly) time travelers themselves. In their efforts to reshape the world, they’ve all converged on this one turning point in history, making it the largest battle ever fought on American soil.

Third, my story “The Curse of the Lifewalker” appeared on The New Accelerator just last month. This is my third story that the good folks at TNA have picked up, and they publish new stories weekly with a very reasonable subscription model to their site.

The story takes place in Utah Valley a couple of hundred years after the apocalypse. Humanity has been afflicted with a blight that shortens all of our lifespans to 25 years, but the main character is one of the few people who is immune. But because of how things have changed in the intervening centuries, his immunity turns out to be more of a curse than a blessing, as he gradually becomes an outsider in his own community.

Fourth, my story “Lizzie-99XT” appeared in last month’s issue of Serial Magazine. The digital copy of the magazine is $2.99, and the print copy is $4.99. There are a bunch of other stories in this issue, and all of them are about life and death decisions.

Next month, I have a couple more stories coming out. “Starchild” will appear as a reprint in Bards and Sages Quarterly, and “The Infiltrator,” a never before published story, will appear in the anthology Not Far From Roswell. So be sure to keep an eye out for those!

Finally, here is the cover art for Edenfall. Check it out!

I’m very happy with how it turned out. The illustration is by Hideyoshi, aka Lorenz Ruwwe, who did the cover art for Genesis Earth. I still have to go through the edits, but that shouldn’t take longer than a week, and the ebook will be up for preorder shortly after. The release date will be in December.

“Lizzie-99XT” published in Serial Magazine!

It’s another week, and I have another short story out, this time in Serial Magazine! Here’s what the editor has to say about it:

We kick off ISSUE TWELVE with “Lizzie-99XT” by Joe Vasicek. This futuristic sci-fi tale follows a half-human, half-AI space pilot as she travels the galaxy to fight in an interplanetary war. She’s doing all she can to protect the lives down on Earth, but what type of life can this pilot truly have if most of it is spent lightyears away from those she loves?

“Lizzie-99XT” is a hard military SF piece about a starfighter pilot whose consciousness merges with the starfighter’s AI in order to fly it. She’s tasked with saving the world from a horde of alien invaders, but when battles are fought at near-light speeds, everything can change in an instant, and the home that she returns to may not be one that she recognizes.

Basically, it’s a cross between Neon Genesis Evangelion and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, except more uplifting. Probably. Also, it’s a short story, not a novel (or an anime series… yet). If that sounds intriguing, pick up a copy and read it today!

Buy Serial Magazine Issue 12