My stories are now on AnthologyBuilder (which is having a sale!)

I just recently learned of a website called AnthologyBuilder. It’s basically a way to select whatever available stories you want from your favourite authors and bundle them all together into a fancy printed anthology.

Sounds like a neat concept to me, so I added some stories:

  • Behind the First Years
  • How to Configure your Quantum Disambiguator
  • Selections from the Aarne-Thompson Index for After the End of Things
  • Oubliette
  • Raising Words

If you like any of those and would like to read them in a shiny print-on-demand anthology together with stories by other authors, you can see my author listing at AnthologyBuilder.

Also, if it is something you want to do, now’s a great time to do it, because from now until September 25th, anthologies are 15% off.

(And, of course, “Behind the First Years” is coming out soon in the Science Fiction Short Stories anthology by Flame Tree Publishing alongside work by new and classic writers. So that’s an option too!)

Podcast Reprint: “Behind the First Years” at StarShipSofa

My story “Behind the First Years” has been produced as an audio version by the venerable StarShipSofa!

You can listen to it (as well as Bogi Takács‘ excellent “Changing Body Templates”) for free(!) on your electronomagical computationy device of choice via the following link: StarShipSofa No. 402: Stewart C Baker and Bogi Tacáks

(If you like my story and want to pick up a printed copy, it’s one of the many stories in the forthcoming “Science Fiction Short Stories” collection from Flame Tree Publishing. You can pre-order your copy on Amazon or [if you live in the UK] through the Flame Tree site itself.)

Out soon: “Science Fiction Short Stories” anthology from Flame Tree Publishing

My story “Behind the First Years” will be included in this anthology, which is due out at the end of the month (after a few printing-related delays).

If you’d like to pre-order it ($18.75—a pretty good deal for a fancy hardcover!), here’s the Amazon link: http://amzn.to/1ieyQ5z

If you’re in the UK, you can also order it direct from the publisher at http://www.flametreepublishing.com/Science-Fiction-Short-Stories.html

(And one neat thing about that last link is that it has previews of the contents—including the first page or two of my story!)

The idea behind this anthology is to mix together contemporary and classic SF writers, so I’m sharing the pages with luminaries like Mark Twain(!) and Edgar Allen Poe(!) and Edith Wharton(!) and Nikolai Gogol(!) as well as a few of the many excellent writers I call friends: Keyan Bowes, Beth Cato, Philip Brian Hall, Alexis A. Hunter, Rachael K. Jones, and M. Darusha Wehm.

Update: incidentally, I just learned that the story I have in this anthology is being podcast by StarShipSofa tomorrow. I’ll post a link when it’s available!

Writers of the Future V32 Q2: A winner is me! (With bonus rules clarification!)

I’m pleased to be able to announce that–after entering the Writers of the Future contest every three months for about four years–I’ve finally managed to break into the winner’s circle! And not just that, the story I submitted for the 2nd quarter this year (Volume 32) managed to snag first place in the quarter.

Woohoo!

If you’ve been following the contest’s blog (or if I have you friended on Facebook), it may seem a bit odd that I’m announcing this on my blog now, about a month behind the official announement.

Part of that delay has just been logistical: I have family visiting, and haven’t had much time to sit down and write anything. Another part, though, is squishy-feelings-related.

In particular, it has to do with the contest’s reason for existence, which is to give “new and amateur writers” a fairly high-profile break-through to pro-writer-dom. Once a person has had four short stories published professionally (i.e. At 6 cents per word and with a high enough circulation—in practical terms, published by an SFWA-qualifying market), they can no longer submit to the contest.

So how do I, who currently have something like 27 stories on my bibliography, still qualify? Heck, I qualify for membership in SFWA, the professioal association of science fiction and fantasy writers. I feel more than a small amount of imposter syndrome at work—if, weirdly enough, in the opposite direction than usual.

The short version is: I didn’t have enough pro-paying short stories published yet to disqualify me.

The long version (quite long!) is below:

A large number of my publications are not at pro rates. Also, the contest does not count flash fiction (1000 words or below) as a short story. Technically, none of the stories on my bibliography are disqualifying, so far as the contest is concerned. This is because of the other fine-print style detail in the rules: the word “published.”

I do have two sales on my bibliography that would count against me: “Fugue in a Minor Key” to Galaxy’s Edge and “Behind the First Years” in a reprint sale to Flametree Publishing’s Gothic Fantasy: Science Fiction anthology.

However, neither of these has actually been published yet, so they don’t count against me as far as Writers of the Future is concerned. Since none of my actually published pro-paying works are longer than flash-length, they don’t either.

But that (to me) feels weird. I like flash fiction, and it’s most of what I write and publish, so I decided to count flash fiction as short stories even if it meant disqualifying myself before I was actually disqualified. (Micro-fiction and other super-short stuff, I didn’t count.)

When I sumitted in April, I had the following three pro-paying pieces of flash fiction published:

“Oubliette,” at Flash Fiction Online (April 2014)
“Little More than Shadows,” at Daily Science Fiction (November 2014)
“Configuring Your Quantum Disambiguator,” at Nature (February 2015)

One below the four publications required by the contest (flash notwithstanding).

After submitting my last entry, I published another two pro-paying pieces of flash in August and September:

“Concerning Your Recent Creation of Sentient Horse-things on the Next Planet Over” at Flash Fiction Online (August 2015)
“Love and Relativity” at Nature Physics (September 2015)

That would put me at five publications at pro rates (but still zero short stories—so far!), over my personal comfort level and what I feel is the spirit of the rules, if not the letter. (Of course, now that I’ve won the thing, I can’t enter again anyway, but even if I’d gotten a form rejection I would have stopped submitting.)

It does make me feel better to know I’m not alone in this. Friend and former winner Martin Shoemaker voiced similar sentiments in a Facebook post recently, and Anaea Lay (ditto friend and former winner) also talks about the weirdness of “backwards imposter syndrome.” (Although in my case, I’m more surprised than having feelings of being too worthy to be worthy.)

I’m in good company, in other words.

Once I’m all the way over the weirdness of reverse-imposter syndrome, I’ll be pretty excited about this win. I’ve been entering the contest for a long time, and even though I’ve proven to myself via other publications that this isn’t a fluke, I definitely appreciate the boost to morale that my fiction is winner-quality. And I’m sure that on a practical level, I’ll learn a lot at the workshop which is part of the prize. I still have more misses than hits, when it comes to submissions-to-sales ratio. Anything that can help with that will definitely be appreciated.

Flash Fiction: “Love and Relativity” at Nature Physics today

Okay… 5 days ago. (insert joke about relativity here)

Interestingly, as Colin Sullivan points out in his intro, both of the flash fiction stories I’ve sold to Nature deal with multiple universes in some way or another.

While my previous story was a humorous take on evil twins and quantum disambiguators, though, this one is a more serious tale about experimental space travel and the potential disasters thereof. But it’s also about the importance of not letting those disasters stop further experimentation. And the even bigger importance of family–however you define it.

On another note, the story is partly inspired by the photo of sari-wearing female employees of ISRO, as I mention in my Future Conditional guest post about the story. Consider this little tale my small way of saying that I think that photo and everything it represents is awesome.

Anyway, hope you enjoy the story!

“Love and Relativity” at Nature Physics

(Oh, and I guess I should mention that it’s supremely nerdy, in that it’s written in the style of an annotated bibliography… Nobody’s perfect, right?)