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?)

Original Fiction, “Concerning your Recent Creation of Sentient Horse-things on the Next Planet Over,” at Flash Fiction Online

It’s story release day again! This one is egregiously silly, and details just about what you’d expect.

It’s flash, so I’ll not waste your time summarizing it. Head on over to Flash Fiction Online to read “Concerning your Recent Creation of Sentient Horse-things on the Next Planet Over” right now!

(This is my second time appearing in FFO, and my first since I’ve started reading slush there. Since all submissions are anonymous, slush readers can still submit—we just aren’t allowed to vote on our own work at all. I’ve had several rejections since I started slushing before this sale broke through.)

My story “The Butterfly Disjunct” a free read on @QuarterReads this week.

My short story “The Butterfly Disjunct,” which first appeared in Spark: A Creative Anthology Volume IV (as “Butterflies”), is available to read for free this week only over at QuarterReads.

Go give it a read (if you haven’t already), and sign in to rate it if you like.

My story “Masks” now available in English and Chinese

In March, I had the pleasure of writing a story for SFComet, a website dedicated to bringing more science fiction to a Chinese audience. I and several other authors were given a theme (“big bang in brain” / 脑中大爆炸) and ten days to write a SF story of between 1500 and 2500 words.

It was a lot of fun, if a little challenging. I ended up with a story set on a generation ship, with an LGBT spy protagonist who has a connection with the ship’s AI inside her head.

The story is called “Masks,” and it’s now available in English as well as in the Chinese translation. Here’s a preview:

Min can tell by the way the man in the lizard mask drums the fingers of one hand on the surface of his desk that he is angry. She avoids the bright green glimmer of his eyes, wishing she were anywhere but here. Wishing she remembered who she was supposed to be.

“This is all you bring me?” the man asks, his voice raspy with distortion. In his other hand he holds the latest chip Min has stolen, heavy with data on Ship’s communications to the other surviving colony ships and its route away from Earth-long-gone.

Min says nothing. She is not strong enough to answer, cut off and alone as she is.

Intrigued? Go read the rest of “Masks” over at SFComet.

I’ll be appearing in the Lane of Unusual Traders

Or at least a story I wrote will.

This was my first time writing for a shared world story, and it was quite a bit of fun. My story, “A Solitary Stair,” is about a free-standing staircase with a possibly mystical past.

The Lane itself is a project being put together by Tiny Owl Workshop, an Australian small press which likes to do unusual things. (They once published stories on throw pillows, for instance.) You can read more about the lane, including a few already-published stories, here: http://thelaneofunusualtraders.com/stage-1/

If you’d like to join me in the lane, a submission window for short stories of 1500-3000 words is open until May 31st. I’ll be hoping to submit something myself, as well!

Original Fiction: “Some Salient Details About Your Former Lives” at Plasma Frequency

I somehow didn’t spot this one when it came out, but I have a piece of flash fiction up in January/February’s Plasma Frequency Magazine.

The story, “Some Salient Details About Your Former Lives,” is very loosely inspired by Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the character of Agrajag, that hapless multi-mortal being whom Arthur Dent inadvertently kills thousands of times.

Of course, my story isn’t much like Hitchhiker’s Guide. It’s more of a fantasy than anything, and while it does deal with a similar set-up, it shakes things down in a very different way.

Go give it a read over at Plasma Frequency and let me know what you think!

Some Salient Details About your Former Lives, by Stewart C Baker

Five reprints now available on Quarter Reads

Do you like stories? Do you like quarters? Do you like reading? Do you like reprints? Do you like five?! (Fnord)

Wait, wait, wait. Where was I going with this…?

Ah, right. I have five new reprints (does that even make sense?) available over on Quarter Reads as of right now. Here are links to each, and where they first appeared:

If any of those sound like they’d be up your alley, go give them a browse!