Living in the Moment

by Laura Hardgrave

I don’t care what anyone says—writing awesome, short speculative fiction stories is hard. Writing short fiction is a challenge in itself, but when you add in that lonesome planet out in the middle of nowhere, that new tech that needs thorough descriptions, or that cool fantasy race that popped into your dreams one night that’s when the real fun begins. Every word in a short story must be carefully crafted and have a purpose. If there’s no purpose for a line of dialog or that interesting description, both are best left on the chopping block. That’s tough when you’re describing things no one’s ever read about.

That’s also one of the reasons why science fiction and fantasy short stories are so fun to write (and read!). That challenge kind of calls to us and chants an eerie tune, daring us to fully flesh out new worlds, characters, plots, conflicts, emotions, and deeper, resonating meanings that shine in as little words as possible. We have to be extremely delicate when choosing what we say and how we say it. It’s all in the details. When readers are able to read a paragraph and get a true sense of where the main character is, what he/she is feeling, and where the risks of the story lie, that’s more than just great storytelling—that’s magic.

I think that’s why I tend to write my short fiction in what I call moments. We all have our own methods, of course, but I like to guide my short fiction using character snapshots that are made of emotions. One scene may be driven by my main character’s intense curiosity. I’ll allow that character to have a moment with his/her sense of curiosity, then I’ll take the emotion one step further and move the plot forward while keeping my character’s frame of mind as the driving force. If a word, description, or line of dialog doesn’t make sense for that emotional snapshot, it will generally get omitted or saved for another moment.

Once the plot’s moved forward enough to force a change in the emotional snapshot, I’ll shift gears and form a new moment in my mind. These moments usually surface as full-scale images that will also provide the details of what imagery and scenery I describe. Since speculative fiction short story descriptions need to especially be tight, I find this method also helps keep my tendency to go overboard with descriptions down (what can I say—I like the shinies).

I may want to describe how gorgeous that duo-moon sunrise looks, but my main character? Oh, no. She’s far too busy running from a herd of police droids. She may notice the way a single ray of sun reflects off her shuttle in the distance, but that’s about it. And that’ll be the line of description that gets mentioned. If I’m ever in doubt of what to say, I stare into the eyes of my character’s emotional moment and instantly find my answer. It works well. When my characters cooperate, that is. Some characters are prone to harebrained ideas more than others. Gotta keep an eye on those!

Laura Hardgrave is an MMORPG video game journalist by day and a LGBT speculative fiction author by night. She kind of frantically dives back and forth between writing short stories and novel-length fiction. She’s currently working on a series of fantasy novels with a huge host of characters and a bit of inter-dimensional travel.

Learn more about Laura on her blog or follow her on Twitter.

A Shallow Recess?

by T. D. Edge

At the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop, a well-known SF writer said to us, "The secret to success is to find your niche and exploit it." He's probably right.

During the SF conference earlier this year, a panel of book editors told an audience of mostly new writers that if they want to get published, they can't afford to write in different genres; and ideally they should have written the first 3 novels, all with the same characters, before even approaching them.

Well, I had no idea what my niche was when I wrote my first children's novel. It was about a 13-year old science nerd with no social skills who gets taken to what he thinks will be an academy for gifted kids. But when he turns up, the academy is a cottage in the Welsh hills and the two professors who recruited him are going to teach him to play table soccer instead. Apparently, a mad genius is draining the world of champion spirit via the game, and only our kid can save us. Niche that!

Okay, so that was back in the 1980s when a children's publishing house was more like Hogwarts than the law firm-ish offices of today. My editor didn't have a large beard and pointy hat, but she had the magical power to choose the books she wanted to publish, work on the cover design with the author, and put the book out without as much as a sneer in the direction of the non-existing marketing team.

By the time my next book was ready, however, the sales team had arrived. Everything changed, including the cover design she and I had created. On the sales teams' version, my two main characters were (un)magically changed from bright but girl-ignorant lads to cool, girl-magnet teen dudes. "But," I said, "it won't just be the girls who're disappointed when they read what these guys are really like." Apparently, though, it didn't matter if the cover was as genuine as a Nigerian funds transfer offer, if it drew in the punters, who cared?

Still niche-averse, I published a few more YA/children's books, but also had quite a few rejected by editorial committees, acquisitions committees, and probably the committees' committee, too.

Time for a change!

I decided to switch to my first love, Science Fiction. I thought I'd better start fresh so in 2006 I attended Odyssey, one of the six-week US workshops. It was great to just write stories and critique other people's, and to be in a classroom again, learning stuff from top writers and editors. Even if we got the niche advice there, too. It was also good, as an Englishman, to learn to hug without wincing.

After Odyssey, I started sending out short stories, now almost wilfully un-niche like. I found a new freedom with short fiction, to try different styles, different voices, genders, beliefs, and so on. I also carried on attending workshops, two in Oregon, for example, taken by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, who taught in the opposite direction to much of what I'd learned before. Damn that elusive niche.

I've sold around 30 stories now, no two of them really in the same niche. I might have sold more if they were, I don't know. All I do know is that if writing is fun and exciting and challenging for the author, I think it's likely to please readers, too.

A story of mine just won the New Scientist/Arc Magazine short fiction prize. It's about a town full of bio-toy Cockneys and talking animals, trying to save themselves from the encroaching electro-bio-mechanical sludge by helping their human master, Dave, to fall in love. I wrote the first few pages a couple of years back with absolutely no idea why or where it was going. I just loved the setting and the characters and the language. I went back to it several times, but couldn't see where to take it. Eventually, I got the rest of the story and finished it. But still no niche . . .

T. D. Edge won a Cadbury's fiction competition at age 10, but only did it for the chocolate. His short fiction has appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including Arc, Realms of Fantasy, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Flash Fiction Online. Terry has been a street theatre performer, props maker for the Welsh National Opera, sign writer, soft toy salesman, and professional palm-reader. He is also proud of being the youngest-ever England Subbuteo Champion, and one of his current writing projects is Subbuteo for the Soul.

Learn more about T. D. Edge on his website.

Those Onerous Overdone Outlines

By Larry Hodges

I used to outline in great detail. I'd do a detailed listing of each scene, with a paragraph or two describing what happens. I'd also have lengthy notes on the side, including character bios, descriptions, and notes on just about everything else. I'd also have pages of dialogue I planned to use - I'm always jotting down interesting snippets of dialogue that pop into my head.

When I did my first novel, I outlined in great detail. My notes totaled 12,000 words. After writing 23,000 words of the novel, everything came to a crashing halt. The novel just wasn't working, and I was bored out of my cranium writing it. The problem was I'd painted myself into such a detailed outline and plot that there was nothing really creative to do. I was just connecting dots, and the result showed.

I went back to it a year later, and threw out the detailed outline and most of what I'd written. This time I put together a very loose outline, with a few sentences outlining each chapter instead of the detailed outline of each scene I'd had before. The only detailed thing I worked out was the ending. Excluding research notes I'd already done (much of which I would still use), the outline was about two pages. I also had the many pages of dialogue I'd put together.

As I wrote the novel, the creative juices flowed. I'd start each chapter by reading the few sentences that outlined what was supposed to happen, then make the rest up as I went along. I'd often leave the outline which wasn't a problem as long as I continued to move in the general direction of the planned ending. I learned I could do whatever I wanted.

The novel still involved a lot of research, but I did most of that when it was needed, either looking it up on the spot, or making a note and researching it later.

As I wrote, the characters became more developed, and I created character bios as this happened. Later, I went back and fleshed out the characters, especially in the early chapters before I had started this practice.

I regularly browsed the dialogue pages I'd written, cannibalizing them whenever pieces fit, and sometimes even writing scenes in such a way that I could use a great piece of dialogue I'd written. This seems to be the one part I like to do in advance. Not only is it fun--I often act out the dialogue when no one's around--but I think it's helped turn dialogue into a strength of my writing. A key thing is to make sure the dialogue fits the scene--if you force it, the reader will know.

Using this new approach, productivity, creativity, and (hopefully) quality shot up.

I wrote a second novel that went much easier. I again used only the loose outline, plus many snippets of dialogue I wrote as I thought about the novel. After several rewrites, both novels are now making the rounds.

For short stories, I also have cut out the detailed outlines in favor of looser ones, along with bits of dialogue written in advance. I still like to work out the ending before my work is complete--a tip I learned from Isaac Asimov--but even that changes if I come up with a better ending. For short stories, I put together at most a half page of bullet points, a few side notes, and start writing. My new outlining strategy seems to have worked as I've sold over 60 short stories and have agents expressing interest in the novels.

Larry Hodges is an active member of SFWA with numerous short story sales. He was the 2010 Garden State Horror Writers Short Story Competition Grand Prize Winner. He's a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and a full-time writer with five books and over 1300 published articles.

To learn more about Larry Hodges and his work, please visit his website.

Counting Sunrises

by SS Hampton, Sr.

Ray Bradbury died on 5 June 2012. He was an iconic science fiction and self-proclaimed fantasy writer. I grew up in Kansas reading his stories and, as a result, learned of the many worlds that lay beyond the flat, tornado-prone state. His death is a loss to the literary world, and his loss is a reminder of my own mortality.

I was young when I began brooding about death, my own in particular. In that respect I preceded the Gothic culture and its’ death-obsessed kids that became popular 10-20 years later. Now, in my late fifties, I find myself brooding about it once again.

If memory serves me correctly, I think Captain Jean Luc Picard said it far more eloquently than I could have ever dreamed of (ahem, yes, I know he’s not a real person): “There are far more sunrises behind me, than before me.”

During those angst-filled days on the Kansas prairies, I read an article about Vincent Price, the classic horror actor of the 60’s. You know, The Fall of the House of Usher(1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Mask of the Red Death (1964), and other horror movies of a similar vein. It seems he was an art collector, gourmet cook, writer, and when Sears & Roebuck wanted to offer fine art reproductions for the average homeowner, they asked Mr. Price to choose the art. It was reported that even a museum or library asked him for all of his personal papers so that future historians could access his history and thoughts.

I was stunned by reading of such a request. Imagine—historians going over your personal correspondence to and from family, friends, even editors and publishers; reading your notes, perhaps even charting the evolution of a story from first notes, first draft, second draft, and then, a final manuscript. For someone to receive such a request seemed, to me, to never be forgotten. Never disappear from history. The idea was almost like...immortality.

Fast forward…

I kept writing, I even started seeing success—no Pulitzer Prize in Literature, or multi-million dollar contract yet, but one can always hope. In 2004 I joined the Army National Guard, was mobilized for active duty, and after almost two years stateside, I and many other Cavalry Soldiers volunteered for deployment. Suddenly, pre-deployment training was finished. We were headed for Kuwait, though the mission would take many Soldiers into Iraq every day, where insurgents waited with AK-47s, RPGs, and IEDs.

Again, my sense of mortality became somewhat acute.

I made sure I packed all of my writing folders, books, magazines, and personal papers. Each folder contained story drafts and final manuscripts, research material for that particular story, and e-mails between myself and the website or e-magazine that published the story. I wrote the museum that serves my tribe, for I am a Native American and explained where I was going. Though the possibility might be slight, I asked if they would accept my writings and personal papers, “just in case.”

The museum said “yes.” It was with a sense of relief and a smile that, during our brief leave before deployment, I set off on my “farewell tour” to visit my children, my grandchildren, and my mother and step-father—just, in case.

Fortunately, there was no “just in case.”

So, once more I am reminded of my own mortality due to the passing of someone I never met, but whom I admired and respected.

But, no matter how many sunrises remain before me, I know that when I cross over, somewhere in this world my name will remain. Maybe there won’t be many people beyond family and friends who will remember me, but my name is out there on e-books and e-stories waiting to be downloaded by someone, someday. And maybe someday, a person may pluck a thick writing folder from a special collections shelf, and wonder what the first draft of a story looked like compared to the final manuscript. They might even think, “Who the hell was SS Hampton, Sr.?”

Gee. If that ever happens it’s almost like…immortality.

SS Hampton, Sr. is a full-blood Choctaw of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, a divorced grandfather to 13, and a veteran of Operations Noble Eagle (2004-2006) and Iraqi Freedom (2006-2007). He continues to serve in the Army National Guard, where he holds the rank of staff sergeant.

Hampton is also a published photographer and photojournalist, an aspiring painter, and is studying for a degree in anthropology. His writings have appeared as stand-alone stories and in anthologies from MUSA Publishing, (The Lapis Lazuli Throne), Melange Books (Intimate Journeys; R.U.S.H.; Christmas Collectibles 2010; and Hearts of Tomorrow), Ravenous Romance (Back Door Lover), and Dark Opus Press (In Poe’s Shadow), and as stand-alone stories in Horror Bound Magazine, Ruthie’s Club, Lucrezia Magazine, The Harrow, and River Walk Journal, among others. In 2012 he has another story forthcoming in an anthology from Edge SF & Fantasy (Danse Macabre), as well as a stand-alone story releasing from MuseItUp Publishing.

See It Before You Write It, Then Get Busy Daydreaming

by Robert Lowell Russell

Every writer has his or her own way of starting a story, so with the caveat that what works for me isn't going to work for everyone, here's how I do it (fair warning, I'm a "pantser").

My stories usually start with a single visual scene in my head, and when I have the scene fixed in my mind, I add a second scene. My job then becomes making sense of the two scenes. It may seem easy to get characters to go from point A to point B, but I often have no idea who my characters are at this stage, and there may be no obvious connections between points A and B.

There are probably certain advantages to starting with characters, then building a world around them. But I like building my world first, then plunking the characters into it and letting them fend for themselves. I also think starting with visual scenes makes it easier to "show" rather than "tell."

With Path of Stones **spoiler alert**, I deconstructed Hansel and Gretel. I started by visualizing a trail of white stones running through a fairy tale forest, then added a scene of a man sitting in a bar, staring at one of the stones in his hand. The challenge was then explaining how the man fit into a story about a couple of kids, and how I got from a fairy tale world to a modern day setting. It was an interesting process. The story started at 1.6K words, ballooned to 6K, was pared to 4K, and was finally condensed to 3K. During the rewriting process, I lost the original bar scene, the Empire State Building, Charles Darwin, Annie Oakley, a sexy witch, and bunch of other stuff.

One advantage of the "plotter" style may be that a writer doesn't end up with as many unusable parts when he or she is finished with a story (Though I tend to recycle my best story fragments. Sexy witches = writing gold!). But I like getting messy, and I like getting weird. My two starting scenes usually serve as corner pieces of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, and with those scenes in my head, I daydream about my story, twisting and turning the middle pieces, deciding what fits and what doesn't. This lets me "work" even when I'm not sitting with an outline in front of a computer, and I've learned to trust my instincts when I write.

However, if you're going to write this way, you need to be able to track a lot of things in your head simultaneously, and make sure you have solid critics reviewing what you write. Our brains work to fill in the gaps of what we perceive, so you need more than one set of eyes to spot the inevitable gaps.

Some final words of advice: bang it out, polish it, fire it off, then cross your fingers. And if you're not having fun, you're probably doing it wrong.

Robert Lowell Russell once aspired to become a history professor, but found working with the real world too constraining. His works in progress, a series of short stories and a novel, incorporate elements of his previous research in Native American history and culture.

For links to more of Rob's stories (or to see him dressed like a ninja) visit his blog.

A Kiss in the Dark

by Michele Lang

I adore short stories, love to both read them and write them. I believe we are in the middle of a short story renaissance, and as a reader I’m a happy beneficiary of the times.

However, writing the short story has mystified as well as bewitched me. As a novelist, for the longest time my short stories turned into partials when I wrote them. When I did manage to finish them, I struggled to bring them in under 10,000 words.

There’s a time-bending element to short stories, a magic about them. How do short story writers manage to compress a world of unforgettable characters, and a profound change in that world, in 5,000 or even 2,000 words?

I wanted to learn that magic for myself. For a solid year, I wrote shorts that read like chopped off first chapters of novels. While I loved the characters and their worlds, I didn’t have the skill to grant them a resolution, the chance of a life after the story. My poor characters just kind of dangled, waiting for what happened next, off-stage, after the end.

I knew I needed to learn more. But I couldn’t grasp the essential difference between a short story and a novel.

They aren’t miniature novels, so what are they?

Last year, at an anthology workshop on the Oregon Coast, I got some advice from Denise Little, a brilliant editor, and she clarified the mystery for me. She told me to think in terms of musical composition:

A short story is like an instrumental solo;
A novella is like a duet between two instruments, say a viola and a flute;
And a novel is a fully orchestrated concerto, with a tripartite structure, complex harmonies, and a contained aesthetic.

A short story won’t tell you all about its world – it can’t. It can’t tie up all the loose ends, it can’t tell you the backstory of all the major characters. The major characters don’t overcome and transform essential flaws in their natures. There’s no room for all of that.

What a short story will do, in fact does do better than a novel, is portray a window into a moment. It captures the essential truth in the music of a single life. It’s a song sung without backup instruments, it’s a hymn, or a lullaby. And a short story can linger in your memory as long and as vividly as any novel.

Stephen King once said (and I’m paraphrasing) that a novel is like a marriage while a short story is a kiss in the dark from a stranger. And yet, there are kisses that reach across memory and transcend time, to change you forever.

And that is why I love short stories.

Michele Lang writes supernatural tales: the stories of witches, lawyers, goddesses, bankers, demons, and other magical creatures hidden in plain sight. She is the author of the LADY LAZARUS historical fantasy trilogy (Tor).

Learn more about Michele on her website.

Writing Short Speculative Fiction

by Pauline J. Alama

I was a bit daunted, at first, by the idea of blogging about the process of writing short speculative fiction. I avoid con panels about the writing process, because they tend toward heavy moralizing, loading a ton of “shoulds” (you should write every day, you should accept criticism gratefully, you should be relentless in editing your stories to perfection) onto a process that I believe should (oops!) be playful.

Let me circumvent that moralizing tendency by writing in praise of imperfection.

I’m no good at drawing, having the manual dexterity of a cow, but I enjoy it anyway. Once upon a time, my son asked me to draw the Big Bad Wolf, and I wasn’t sure how to do it. I looked at a picture in The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales of the wolf in Grandma’s nightgown. That can be a terrifying image: the predator disguised as a nurturer. The first nightmare I can remember from childhood was finding in my Aunt Betty’s chair not a beloved curmudgeonly aunt, but KING KONG! The wolf in Grandma’s nightgown can evoke the same nightmarish sense of betrayal and insecurity.

But when I tried to draw him, the wolf didn’t look scary. He looked a bit embarrassed. Thence came the inspiration for my “fractured fairy tale.”

If I’d drawn the wolf perfectly, the subtle wind of inspiration would have lacked a chink to enter my soul. Very often, too, books I thought had stupid endings or infuriating plot holes inspired me to write my own stories. Creativity doesn’t flourish in the sterility of perfection: it needs to be nourished by the fertilizing manure of error.

Pauline J. Alama is the author of the fantasy novel The Eye of Night Bantam Spectra 2002) and stories published in Realms of Fantasy, Abyss and Apex, and various anthologies. A lifelong fairy tale fanatic, she published a fantasy based on three Grimm tales in Sword & Sorceress XVIII (DAW 2001), and encountered the Grimms’ scholarship during a
doctoral program in Old English. Although driven out of academia for her controversial theory of the Klingon origin of Beowulf, she lives happily ever after in New Jersey with her husband Paul, their firstborn child, and two royal cats.

To learn more about Pauline and her work, please click HERE.

Jay Werkheiser talks about the Horror of Short Fiction.

Short Horror Fiction

Jay Werkheiser

Let me set the scene for you. It’s early 1992. I’m fourteen. And I’ve just written a short story. I know it’s not perfect. I know it’s not what anyone would call publishable, but I do know there’s something in this story writing business that I like. There’s potential here. There’s enough room to go exploring and never run out of places to see. There are more stories to tell. Plenty more. 
Anyway, let’s talk horror fiction. Specifically, let’s talk short horror fiction.
First off, why horror fiction? Why write something which will potentially upset, disturb or frighten the reader? Why not aim to add to the world instead of taking away from it with a horror tale? Well, this idea is, frankly speaking, crap. It exists on the basis that horror fiction must always and only be a negative. It must always lessen the reader and writer. There’s an important issue (other than it being crap) which negates this. 
Who’s to say a horror story has to be only concerned with pain, suffering and misery? Who’s to say it has to be as violent and gross as, say, aSaw film? Take Susan Hill’s excellent The Woman In Black. Without question, this is a horror story. The horror of grief, the horror of the past, the horror of the unknown. And there’s no OTT violence or gore. Just as there isn’t in some of John Connolly’s short work. Or some of Stephen King’s. Ultimately, there’s nothing to stop a horror story featuring death and violence but actually being about bravery, love and hope. Even if does feature lashings of the red stuff, then I can live with that. People might complain about it, might say it's unpleasant and lowbrow and won't someone please think of the children? Does anyone say that when they turn the news on and a bomb's gone off somewhere, killing and injurying dozens of people? Does anyone say that when the camera pans over the bloodstains on the concrete or the holes in buildings that used to be windows?
Now obviously, the Susan Hill example is a novel rather than a short piece but the principal remains the same. The short story writer just has less room to play with than the novelist. That doesn’t have to be a problem, though. Some of the most powerfully written and entertaining works of fiction I’ve read have been short (Stephen King’s The Last Rung On The Ladder, and Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado to name just two). Speaking personally, I love to write short fiction. While my focus now is much more on novels, I won’t stop producing a short story when the right idea for one hits me. If I don’t, then when that idea for a nasty little tale with teeth eager to bite comes along, it’s either get it down on paper or risk it biting me. And biting. And biting.
Incidentally, the story I wrote when I was fourteen is pushing twenty years ago and I still get the same sense of happiness and potential when writing short fiction now as I did back then. And I definitely still get the same sense of exploration as I did then. 
So why not pick up your pen and paper and come exploring with me? Be warned, though. We might go into some dark places. 
In fact, I guarantee it.

Closure in Short Stories By Stephanie Campbell

Closure in Short Stories

By Stephanie Campbell

            We've got the perfect short story. The words are flowing, our blood is pumping, and everything is coming out oh-so-perfectly. Until we reach the very end. Suddenly, it's blank. The story itself is fantastic: there are twists and turns and back-story. The main character is wonderful and desirable. Yet, how do we top such a fantastic story with an ending? How do we leave the readers feeling appeased by what they read instead of cheated? That is why I think that short story endings are one of the hardest things in the world to write. I'd take a 75,000 word novel any day.

            But there are ways to give a short story a good ending, one that leaves the reader feeling excited instead of cheated. We can even do this without killing the protagonist, which seems to be a common approach to running away from the “short story” slump. One good way to do this is to have a set objective before the story starts. Do you want the main character to get the girl? Okay, you make sure that it happens. Do you want your person to walk away from a bad situation? Well, that's really great.

            Some general rules of short story endings that I follow:
            A) Have an ending prepared. Sometimes I'll even write the ending first and then write the rest. This is my method, so it may not work with everyone, but I call it “setting the marker.”

            B) Drama, drama, drama! For some reason, dramatic endings work really well in short stories, as far as I've seen. I always feel more appeased when the main character walks away from a bad situation than at any other time.

            C)Remember you audience. Just because you know what's going to happen to your characters after the ending doesn't mean that they do. Remember to remember your reader, and they will remember your story.

            D) Practice. Write the endings for a few short stories that you have no intention to write. The more you write them, the better you get.

            Examples are a good thing too. Read as many short stories as possible to help you further navigate the story. Think of a good short story ending as an ending to a relationship. If you leave a relationship feeling cheated, then you will be bitter and hateful toward the person. If you leave a relationship with good closure and understanding of the situation, then you leave the relationship feeling appeased. Give your readers something to feel good about.

            While I don't think that writing the ending to a short story will ever be a pain-free ordeal, I hope that I have given you some ways to at make your life easier. Short story endings can be fun with the right weapons at your disposal. Don't forget, that's what short stories are for the reader and writer: fun.

Stephanie Campbell is the author of Dragon Night, published by Musa's Urania Imprint. You can buy her book here

Penumbra Cover First Issue

Penumbra's first issue is set!

For our inaugural arts-themed issue, which goes on sale October 1, we've selected a group of fantastic authors. Larry Ivkovich's story The Turin Effect is our featured story. We also have Butterfly by Tom Brennan, The Square That Hides a Thousand Stories by Daniel Ausema, Vivid Rendering by David G. Blake, and Inked Upon Thee by Courtney Crites.

We selected these stories from a pool of over three hundred outstanding submissions, and are proud to kick off Penumbra with such a talented group of writers.

You can pre-order Penumbra's first issue on the Musa Publishing site beginning September 1, 2011 at the Musa Publishing website at www.musapublishing.com. You can also subscribe to Penumbra, which will be published monthly, at the same site.

Excitement Is Growing at Penumbra

It's kind of hard to blog right now. I want to act like a completely spoiled brat and bounce up and down on my chair yelling, "I know something you don't know! I know something you don't know! Neener neener neener!"



But I won't. I promise.



This weekend we'll be announcing the lineup of the inaugural issue of Penumbra. The first issue of any magazine is really important, especially to the people who decide which writers/stories to publish. You second guess your decisions. (Is this really the best story? What about...) You want to ignore things that you're paid NOT to ignore.



Like budgets. Or word counts.



And in the end, you just get all the stories together and fiddle with them, reading them over and over until you decide which arrangement is going to work the best. That pretty much encapsulates my night, and considering that I'm blogging at three in the morning should tell you how *not* easy this was.



But at last it's done. And not just THIS issue, but I have the next TWO done as well, which gets us through the end of the year. This afternoon we spent an hour going through cover art images and that got me stoked too. So tonight, then, I've been luxuriating in outstanding short fiction from writers all over the world. Experience levels run from debut authors who've never been published to established pros whose resumes make me very jealous.



Interested in joining them? Take a look at the special calls for themes Penumbra has set up.



Happy writing! And remember: keep an eye on this blog and the Penumbra website for the announcement of the writers in the first issue.

Penumbra launches on October 1, 2011.

PENUMBRA OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:

Sports and games:

Have a football story with an interesting twist? Invent a bizarre game on another world? Or, did you have a game on this world go horribly wrong? Well, if your story is around 3k or under, we want to see it!

CALL ENDS SEPTEMBER 15, 2011.

Shakespeare:

We have a deep and abiding passion for the Bard and his works. So if you've reworked one of his plays into your story, or have Shakespeare as a character, or even if you write the story PAST his plays—as long as there's a speculative fiction twist, then it might find its way into this winter, 2012 issue.

CALL ENDS OCTOBER 31, 2011

Steampunk:

Create your best gizmos and gear up for the goggle-gouging fun that is steampunk. And yes, at Penumbra, gaslight fantasy counts. All steampunk, all the time—which means anything goes for this issue as long as it's firmly rooted in the subgenre.

CALL ENDS NOVEMBER 15, 2011

Musa EMag 2011 Issues, New Opportunities and Spec Fic Everywhere!

Over the past few weeks, we've been playing with several different directions for Penumbra EMag, the upcoming electronic magazine from Musa Publishing. It's not easy to put a publishing house and a magazine together at the same time. But...well...we like challenges. At the moment, this whole process is exhilarating. Reading and adjudicating submissions, playing with different stories for different issues, working on layout and design, viewing art—all of these processes have been a lot of fun, believe it or not.



Each issue will be themed. Some of those issues will just have the genre as the theme, but others will be centered around a concept, one that lends itself to all three genres we accept. For example, the issue we're releasing on October 1, 2011, to launch both the magazine and Musa will be an arts-themed issue. Every story deals with either music or painting or writing or dancing or scultping—you get the idea. I *personally* am so impressed by the beautifully written, evocative, outstanding works of shorter fiction in my final selection group that I get excited just thinking about it.



Not very editorial, you say? You need to meet more editors.



The November 1, 2011, issue is death-themed. Yeah, I know: that creates a broad spectrum I can choose from, but I like that. Besides, you can never have too much death, now can you? (That would be the spec fic hack in me talking. I have more fun writing a great death than anything else) The December 1, 2011, will feature stories involving travel (time travel included!).



Once we get into the beginning of 2012, we'll have our sports-themed issue—either spec fic treatments of real-life sports or created sports in other worlds/eras/societies. What better way to survive Super Bowl Sunday than with a jai alai game in Hell? And then, there's my particular favorite, the Shakespeare issue. Reworking Shakespeare into a different genre—hardcore sci fi Romeo and Juliet could be a lot of fun. If Sense and Sensibility can hook up with zombies, just think how much fun Hamlet performed with hamsters could be! Or, conversely, stories that deal with Shakespeare in other ways—like an urban fantasy that takes place at a Shakespearean festival. We're looking at an all-steampunk issue, a space opera issue, an homage to Ray Bradbury whose short story All Summer In A Day still has one of my favorite sentences ever:

It was as if, in the midst of a film, concerning an avalanche, a tornado, a hurricane, a volcanic eruption, something had, first, gone wrong with the sound apparatus, thus muffling and finally cutting off all noise, all of the blasts and repercussions and thunders, and then, second, ripped the film from the projector and inserted in its place a peaceful tropical slide which did not move or tremor.

Let's just say the possibilities are endless. Speculative fiction is grand that way. (Authors—please don't submit for these potential themed issues until we issue a specific call for that issue. Thanks!)



In the next week or so, we'll be setting our lineup for each issue. One of the other exciting things we're doing with Penumbra is our Rising Talent free read. Every month, we'll select one of the manuscripts from a newer author that makes it to the later rounds of evaluation and publish it on our site for Penumbra fans to check out. That author will get paid a flat fee for the story—so yes, it's a sale!—and we'll introduce him or her to speculative fiction readers. We are also adjudicating art submissions for each issue. The art director will select her top five picks each month and use them in the magazine, and readers will be able to vote for their favorites. The artist who wins the monthly contest will get a cash prize of $50 and a commission for another piece of featured art in a future Penumbra issue.



Not too shabby.



So stay tuned. Keep an eye on what's going on. We'll list special theme submission calls, information about our authors and great deals for the readers. Excitement is building in the Penumbra offices—and hopefully that excitement is contagious.