Short Fiction In A Fast Market

by Celina Summers

Over at our parent company, Musa Publishing, we've been working with the family of American science fiction pioneer Homer Eon Flint. Flint is one of the original sci fi writers, a hack writer for the pulp magazines of the nineteen-teens through the mid nineteen-twenties. He's best known for his series of pulp novels about Dr. Kinney—forays into planetary exploration from the imagination of a turn of the century imagination: The Emancipatrix, The Devolutionist, The Queen of Life and The Lord of Death. But Homer Eon Flint also had a healthy string of short stories published—and what was, to us, a treasure trove of unpublished short stories as well.

Working through Flint's entire body of work has been professionally fulfilling for me, but it's also called to mind an era most of us can't imagine—a time where submissions were all snail mail, no ifs, ands, or buts. For generations, authors typed and retyped their stories, getting each page picture perfect, then slipped it into an envelope, went to the post office, and mailed it to an editor. That's why Vella Munn, Flint's granddaughter and multi-published author, was able to bring us all these stories that never saw the light of day. Because back then, when an editor rejected a story, he sent it back to the writer.

Some of my favorite childhood books were semi-autobiographical novels about young women who write—Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy stories, L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. All three of these classic tales occur within forty years of each other—from the Civil War of Alcott's impetuous heroine Jo, to the American world of Lovelace's charmer Betsy and the Canadian Prince Edward Island of Betsy's contemporary, Montgomery's adopted redhead Anne. All three girls began writing at an early age. All three girls began to send out their stories while still high school aged. Their descriptions of their maiden efforts were very similar.

'When she finished a story she copied it neatly and sent it away with return postage enclosed to The Ladies' Home Journal or The Delineator, The Youth's Companion or St. Nicholas. As regularly as she sent them out, they were returned. But Betsy was stubborn. If a story came back in the morning from one magazine, it went out in the afternoon to another. She kept a record in a little notebook of how much postage each manuscript required, when it went out, and when it came back.'(Betsy and Joe, Maud Hart Lovelace, 1948)

Anne's experience was similar.

'One day Anne took to the Post Office a long bulky envelope, addressed, with the delightful confidence of youth and inexperience, to the very biggest of the "big" magazines...A week of delightful dreaming followed, and then came a bitter awakening. One evening, Diana found Anne in the porch gable, with suspicious-looking eyes. On the table lay a long envelope and a crumpled manuscript.
"Anne, your story hasn't come back?" cried Diana incredulously.
"Yes it has," said Anne shortly.
"Well, that editor must be crazy. What reason did he give?"
"No reason at all. There is just a printed slip saying that it wasn't found acceptable."' (Anne of The Island, Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1915)

See? The form rejection has a long and storied history, and it hasn't changed much since the days of Homer Eon Flint. If anything, the only change is that getting those form rejections is much quicker. The fastest rejection I ever received was ten minutes.

That one stung.

But within a few minutes of that ten minute rejection, that story was on its way to the next magazine on my list. The turnover time was less than half an hour, from writing the query letter and sending the submission, to rejection, to sending the sub to another publication.

Sometimes, I don't think people realize exactly how substantially the publishing industry has changed. A hundred years is an amazingly short time historically. Heck, the last ten years have seen probably the biggest changes. When I was shopping my first novel, the majority of publishers still wanted paper submissions and queries. Now very few do. Home Eon Flint, whose stories foretold space travel and genetic testing—what would he think of publishing now? Of the immediacy of results? Of devices that could carry hundreds of stories at the same time and take up about the same amount of space in your briefcase as a notepad?

I wonder.

With the market faster and the reader demanding more top quality fiction at a greater rate, the speculative fiction market is alive and well and going strong. There's a lot more variety now. Magazines are dedicated to sub-genres now—the market has so many niches in it that every new year narrows the focus of periodicals even more. For the spec fic writer, this is a great thing. Instead of one or two playgrounds, we're now standing in an amusement park of themes—with something for everyone.

So maybe next time you get a form rejection, you can thank your lucky stars that it's 2012 and not 1912. A ten minute rejection is no fun, but at least you can move on quickly.

A ten month rejection? Not so much.

First Anniversary Greetings from the Editor in Chief

by Celina Summers

Penumbra is one year old today.

How bizarre is that? A year ago, we pushed our first issue out on a raft made of bamboo into the hurricane that is publishing, and the darn thing didn't sink! In fact, that raft is still going, gradually strengthening along with the changes and additions we've made to the magazine, and now we have hundreds of you on board as well.

That definitely makes the journey more pleasant, as it should. When a magazine gains an audience, a dedicated readership, it's much easier to determine what types of stories they like.

So to me it only seems fair that you, the Penumbra reader, gets to toss us your two cents' worth on this, our first anniversary. If you could take a minute to answer the poll we've posted on this page, it will assist us as we continue to build Penumbra into the type of speculative fiction magazine that you want to read.

It is our greatest hope as we continue our mission to meet the needs of the readers who have been stranded after the demise of some of our long-time favorite sf/f magazines. We want to continue to grow and develop with our readership—a readership that multiplied swiftly after we offered to fulfill the contracts with the Realms of Fantasy subscribers. After we assumed those subscriptions, everything at Penumbra suddenly seemed more real…more pertinent.

With today's release of our Edgar Allan Poe issue, we've come to the next step for Penumbra. We will seek recognition from Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and other spec fic organizations. We will strive to publish stories both from familiar names and debut authors. We will seek additional markets, reviewers, and awards recognition for our authors and their stories. We will continue to offer industry master classes to the authors, staff, and interns of Penumbra and its parent company, Musa Publishing, in the hopes of better equipping writers for careers as professional writers.

But above all, we will continue to offer you, the reader, the best examples of short fiction possible in every issue.

As an editor, I have to tell you that this year has been an absolute pleasure for me. I've enjoyed reading every submission, every story. I've been honored to work with a pair of amazing columnists, Lori Basiewicz and Richard C. White, who I think are among the best spec fic columnists out there right now. And then our staff: Alisha, who does layout and design; Brandie, who keeps me running on time; Dianna, who started with us at seventeen, continues to do a grown-up job at her internship; Sarah, who's not only the first set of eyes on Penumbra submissions but also does our monthly book reviews; Jane and Jude, our newly arrived interns; Cory, who has worked with me from the beginning to create the internal aesthetic and catch all those pesky comma mistakes; and, of course, my partner in crime Kelly Shorten, who creates the most visually stunning covers I've ever seen for a digital-only magazine.

Thank you for being a part of the Penumbra experience. We look forward to seeing you every month, right here, with a new issue for you to enjoy.

The Things That Make Us Write—Muse or Music?

by Celina Summers

Usually, when I write something for Musa or Penumbra, I'm writing with my editor's hat on. Today is a little different; I have my writer's hat on. My agent and I joke about that in our emails—some are sent to Celina the Editor and others to Celina the Writer, and it's Celina the Writer who's here today.

I have a confession to make. I'm one of those writers who's inspired to write because of songs, plays, movies, and books. I don't need those stories; I need the way those stories and songs make me feel.

The first novel I ever wrote, a really horrid epic fantasy very much in the style (okay, fan fiction) of David Eddings, I wrote to the soundtrack of Return of the Jedi. One of the projects my agent is shopping now was written to Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera—but only a specific version of POTO, with a specific cast, and a specific and set lineup of songs that doesn't mirror the order in the show. Another of my current projects I am writing to Sheherazade by the nineteenth century Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov. But then, for fight scenes (I like to kill stuff), I always use the same playlist and the same songs, highlighted by "Battle of the Heroes", composed by John Williams for Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith.

So, yeah. I'm not ashamed to admit it. I have theme music for my books.

I'm not the only author to do this. In fact, I know quite a few authors who have theme songs or playlists they write to. I tend to prefer orchestral music without vocalists for most of my writing music. Phantom is the big exception to that, but after years of musical theater, I learned to block vocals from my mind. It's a defense mechanism if you get cast in three successive productions of The Sound of Music, believe me. But The Phantom of the Opera sparked an idea for me—not a riff of Phantom, mind you. But the play and its music inspired me to set my magical realism series in the world of professional American theater—a world I know very well. And why not? Phantom has plays within the play, and all the action of the plot takes place backstage. I've seen multiple productions of POTO, on Broadway with three different casts, the movie version with the best-looking deformed man in history (Gerard Butler—I would totally have picked your Phantom over Raoul! Totally.), and now the 25th anniversary London production DVD. Every time I have seen Phantom—and particularly as a member of the audience—I have left the theater in an uplifted kind of reluctance. I wanted the play to keep going. I wanted to know what happened next. I pictured my coloratura self in the lyric soprano lead and created new adventures in my head. The show, and particularly the music, made me want to create. On top of that, however, the music from Phantom ties me to a tragedy from my youth. A school friend of mine from the sixth grade on was killed in an accident, and at his viewing, the POTO songs Music of the Night and Journey to the Cemetery were played over and over.

So the music has a specific meaning to me, both with my history in the theatrical world and also with an event that even now, I look back upon in sorrow. Those emotions, those personal claims upon my history and psychology, are evoked by the music—and I use that to fuel my writing for certain projects or for certain types of scenes.

It's not just music, though. Occasionally, other things will strike a spark in my imagination. A passage from a letter written in the 1800s gave birth to an alternate history set in the Tudor era. A lighting direction from a new play festival a decade ago stuck in my head and birthed the Darkshifters of my dark fantasy series. If it weren't for a recurring nightmare, I'd never have been able to conceptualize a story based upon an evil Harlequin.

And Obi Wan Kenobi stating emphatically, "Only the Sith deal in absolutes" set off an entire satire based on a writer's lack of comprehension of absolutism that will probably never see the light of day.

What? A girl's got to make a living somehow. Sorry, Mr. Lucas—but the line was funny.

So why does inspiration work this way? Maybe some writers can sit down and say to themselves, "Today, I'm going to write a space opera about cats that fly space shuttles and shoot mouse-shaped asteroids out of the belt between Mars and Jupiter." I'm not one of them…although that sounds like a good idea for a YA. After a lifetime spent in the arts, I find my inspiration in the moods that art or literature or music create in me. I can put in my Les Miserables CD in and let the music from that show serve as an accompaniment to the story I "see" in my head—the story that unfolds like a movie in my mind's eye and graciously permits me to relate the characters and the plot in a Word document file that someday, after much revision, editing, and beta reading, might just become a book.

There's a reason why the Muses are the patronesses of the arts in Greek mythology. Their responsibilities encompass the arts as known to the Greeks, and whenever a writer puts pen to paper, we pay homage to the idea of the Muses—we credit them with inspiring our work. Our word 'music' is derived from the Muses—so for me, at least, it's an easy leap that wonderful music can motivate an author to create an equally wonderful story.

But then there's the down side. How many times have I heard a writer, frustrated and nearly desperate, waiting fruitlessly for the Muse to appear? How many times has a writer blamed the absence of the Muse for the silence of their pen, the stalling of their stories?

You can't wait for a mythical Greek goddess to show up in your office and open up the cupboard in your mind where your story is kept. Got some bad news for you—mythical means "doesn't exist", and the fact of the matter is that inspiration, regardless of how it's sparked, is internal. Music from Phantom doesn't make me write. The response that music evokes in me—that's what makes me write. The magic onstage during a production of the show make me leave the theater feeling like I, too, am magical—and that magic is released in the form of a story.

So the next time you're sitting at your computer, playing never-ending, mindless games of Spider Solitaire while you wait for the Muse to descend in a cloud of glitter and magic and lead you past the plot snag that's got you stymied, perhaps the answer isn't floating on Mt. Olympus. Perhaps the answer is in a song, a book, a film that makes you feel like a magical moment was created. Perhaps the answer is in the scene where Severus Snape finally reveals his heart and story to Harry Potter in a tear. Maybe, that last beat where Rhett Butler says, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" will evoke that creative response in you. Give yourself and your imagination time to relax in someone else's world—or words—creations that have always spurred that artistic synchronicity in your soul Because in the end, while the spark may be external, the fire that blazes in every writer is decidedly internal.

In other words, don't be afraid to search for it in places other than the wall over your desk.

From the Editor's Desk

Comparison and Contrast
by Celina Summers

Over the last week, I've been glued to the television watching swimming. Once, every four years, Americans have enough interest in swimming to actually televise it. It's funny—so many people speak so knowledgeably about the sport when you know full and darn well they don't have a clue about what it takes to be an Olympic medal swimmer. I was a mediocre swimmer at best, and I spent 3-4 hours a day every day working out in the pool, running, or lifting weights. So I find it a little funny to hear people say, "Well, Michael Phelps looked really tight in the semi of the 100 fly last night."

Looked really tight? The man is six foot four inches, one hundred and ninety-four pounds, and has an arm span of over six and a half feet with abs you could slice ham on and legs taller than anyone who competed in gymnastics. I think it's anatomically impossible for a guy who put the lank in lanky to ever look tight.

That being said—

Right now, across the world tens of thousands of people like myself who swam competitively in their youth but gave it up are shaking their heads. Michael Phelps has been to—and won gold at—three Olympics. That's twelve years of international caliber swimming. It doesn't even count the years before that and how hard he worked to even get to that level. Hours upon hours of work seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, since the twentieth century. He didn't just wake up one day as the greatest swimmer who's ever lived. Nope, he worked for years to gain that status and earned every ounce of the eighteen gold and four silver Olympic medals that now hang around his neck.

So I always find it baffling that people think writing is easy.

You don't just wake up one day and write a bestseller. Writers spend a lot of long, lonely hours—sitting at their desks getting words down on paper, editing and revising, cutting and rewriting. We have to. I wish that the very first time I sat down and started to lay a story out on paper that it had been a perfect manuscript, that I landed the first agent I sent it to, sold it to the first publisher she sent it to, and sold out of the first printing before the book was released.

But that's not quite the way it worked out—for any writer that I'm aware of.

Just as an Olympic champion swimmer spends years upon years of his life in the water, swimming lap after lap, working on his stroke and kick, stretching his endurance to the longest possible moment, and gaining his top speed one thousandth of a second at a time—the writer must also work out intellectually, spending years upon years within their stories, consigning those stories to paper and reworking them until they are the best possible representation of their writing. You can't expect someone to jump into the pool for the first time at twenty-four and swim a world record time. Why, then, would you expect someone to write the next great American novel right out of the gate? Heck, for that matter, why would you expect your first draft to be the final draft?

Why expect gold right off the bat?

Writers' expectations should be more realistic. And just like a top athlete, achievement comes after you've established the daily repetition of exercise—word counts or scene goals, a set amount of work completed day in and day out with gradually increasing goal expectations. Sometimes, life conspires so you can just jump right in. In my writing life, for example, I started off as a full time writer because of an accident that kept me from working. Those long days after that accident, I sat alone in our apartment for eighteen hours a day while my husband worked two jobs to keep our heads above water—no internet, no cable television, not even a telephone to break up the monotony. Every morning, I woke and climbed into my recliner, powered up the computer, and wrote. I rarely went out, even more rarely found some other way to engage my mind. All I had was my story, and I steeped myself in that world. I cranked out six 150,000 word first drafts in three months.

And I look back at those first drafts and cringe.

Writing is a tough business. Whether you write epic or flash, you must be trained for success by constantly working to refine and improve your craft. And just like Michael Phelps has his coach, Bob Bowman, the author has her coach—her editor. Bob Bowman helped Phelps to trim seconds off his time; an editor helps a writer to trim the unnecessary and tighten up her manuscript. You may hate working with your editor at the time—God knows I've yelled at the computer screen a lot during edits—but the end result of that work makes you glad you did it.

See, the whole purpose of training, whether you're an athlete or a writer, is to make the very difficult look very easy. As writers, we're surrounded by tons of people in real life who confide, "I plan to write a book some day"—like it's an easy thing to do…like just anyone can do it. (Unfortunately, we editors rarely escape that person at the party, who then proceeds to pitch their story to us and talk confidently about how much money they intend to make. It's a conversation that never ends well.) But writing isn't easy. Writing is hard. Writing takes training and patience, meticulous attention to detail and the dedication to sit down at the computer every single day. Athletes like Michael Phelps have a big advantage, too. Phelps started swimming competitively at age seven. Writers, on the other hand, write competitively much later in life. Sure—I have trunk novels from when I was in my late teens, but I'll burn them before I let someone read them now.

So while we all sit back in admiration as the greatest Olympian and swimmer of all time finally hangs up his goggles, stop and think for a minute of writing as a sport. Sit down and set your goals, then determine the training you'll need to meet those goals. Take the guidance of your coach/editor, and use that knowledge to improve your work. And while you'll never get that national anthem moment on the podium, with the dedication and drive every successful writer needs you might get that quiet moment in the middle of the night when a new review comes out of one of your stories and you feel the triumph of a job well done.

And until Bravo comes up with a writing reality show (and I would so audition for it, by the way), that's the medal ceremony for people like us. Unless, of course, you play the Star Spangled banner every time you finish a story.

Kind of cheesy, but hey—if it works, it works. I'm not going to judge you for it.

From The Editor's Desk

How Literature Affects Everything…Even the Olympics
by Celina Summers

Okay, I'll admit it. After the brilliant opening and closing ceremony from China four years ago, I wasn't holding out a lot of hope for the English response for this year's Olympics. But the beginning of the ceremony made me eat my words—I thought the transition between an agrarian, idealized England to the Dickensian grime and darkness of the Industrial Revolution that then faded away, leaving the molten metal in the Olympic rings was amazing.

Then, the show made a departure from the glam and the hype to something much closer to my heart.

No, not Mr. Bean's homage to Chariots of Fire.

The great stories in children's literature written by British authors—J.M. Barrie with Peter Pan, P.L. Travers with Mary Poppins, Dodie Smith with 101 Dalmations, and Harry Potter with J.K. Rowling—were center stage during England's welcome to the world's athletes. Literature? At the Olympics? Not quite as strange as it might sound—the original Olympics in ancient Greece held competitions in athletics and the arts. The original Olympics were held every four years from 776 BC to 394 AD, when the Roman Emperor finally put an end to the festival held in honor of the king of the gods, Zeus. The winners of each category were immortalized at Olympia, the site of the games, their names and visages left for posterity in the ring of champions

In fact, literary works had to be at least twenty thousand words in length, in dramatic, epic, or lyric categories. What an opportunity we missed! When I was a kid, I dreamed of being an Olympic swimmer, just like everyone else on my swim team. I grew up less than an hour from the home pool of Tracy Caulkins, who at 14 was the best female swimmer in the world. Tracy got cheated out of her best shot at the Olympics when the Americans boycotted the Moscow games. The gold medals she earned four years later in the Soviet-boycotted Los Angeles games didn't have quite the luster that she deserved. But regardless, as a swimmer a few years younger than Tracy, the Olympics were my dream—and I could imagine myself on the starting blocks, swimming the race, looking up for the score…accepting my medal while The Star Spangled Banner plays…

So much for that. Obviously, even as a kid my imagination was running rampant.

But if the modern Olympics still had literature competitions? Music? Art? There are rumors that the 2016 games will have a ballroom dancing category added, which is a step in the right direction. And it seems only fitting that the modern games, based as they are on a ritual religious observance, should honor art as well as athletics—something I think the British organizers gave a nod to with their inclusion of the great British writers in the opening ceremonies. After all, if it weren't for writers, our knowledge of the ancient games would be significantly smaller. For example, the funerary games for Hector in the Iliad give us, the modern reader, a glimpse at what the Olympics must have been like. Even in the centuries before the birth of Christ, winning the Olympic Games was a source of pride for the competitors as well as their countries or city/states—and that was for discus and sculptors, wrestlers and singers, runners and poets.

In 1952, an art exhibition was substituted for the contests at the Helsinki games, and the art competitions never returned to the Olympics. The International Olympic committee instead voted to include a cultural program at all Olympic Games, to promote understanding of the myriad cultures represented in the countries who participate. And so we, the modern writers of speculative fiction, lost our chance to compete for the medals in our chosen field. We can only watch as athletes are crowned with the laurel wreaths of the victors, can only applaud as they lower their heads for their gold medals, and tear up when, above the stadium or pool or field, our national anthem plays high and sweet in the summer air.

But we, as writers, have other rewards. We have the joy of seeing our stories being published, the warm glow of good reviews, the innate satisfaction in the hundreds or thousands of silent readers who love the stories we gave them. We have the long nights at our desks when the rest of the house is quiet, immersed in the characters and plot lines that populate our minds. And some authors, who climb the highest pinnacles in our craft, have the ultimate honor—just like an Olympic champion in any sport—of giving back to the people who love what they've done.

I doubt that many people are aware that Peter Pan creator J.M. Barrie left all the royalties from his works to Great Ormond Street's children's hospital for the duration of the copyright. As a result of the amazing popularity of the Harry Potter franchise, J.K. Rowling has made incredibly generous contributions to literary programs, programs for single mothers, and the Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Who needs medals against a legacy like that?

Barrie's bequest to the sick children of London was a gift of such genuine love, given back to the readers who looked upon his story of the boy who could fly with magic and wonder in their eyes. But even before that, a gold medal already hung around his neck. The timelessness of his characters, the passion and delight of his stories—all this brought a measure of escape to countless children, lighting the way through the darkness and horror of the long nights when German fighters were bombing London.

When the world is literally exploding around you, sometimes imagination is the only thing that can free you.

So modern writers may not have a medal to display proudly over the mantel and when we finish a story, the national anthem might not play. But no matter what genre we write or the age of the readership for whom our stories are intended, we all reach a moment when we, too, feel like we're on the podium. Our stories are inspiring those people who, for a moment, joined with our characters on a journey through our imaginations. Our books are our legacies. And while I may never accrue a readership that would permit me to be as personally generous as J.M. Barrie or J.K. Rowling, I can still look back at some moments of my career and know that I once made a difference in someone's life. You don't need money or a gold medal to create a legacy, in much the same way that generosity isn't measured in the number of zeroes on the checks you write to charity.

A writer's generosity is measured with the stories she or he shares with the world.

The tradition of arts and the Olympics stretches back to ancient times, when the greatest poets and sculptors once competed just like the athletes under the grueling heat of the Greek skies. The opening ceremony for the thirtieth Olympic Games of the modern era harkened back to that relationship—a reminder to us all that the arts—and in our case, literature—has a place in Olympic lore. There's no better time to remember that than now, as we cheer on our athletes in the London games.