"Coffee Grinder Love" available to read online for free!

 

Thanks to the good folks over at Cosmic Horror Monthly for publishing my story, "Coffee Grinder Love"--which you can read for free on their website. Or why not pick up the issue? They're actually pretty nice physical copies with little weird illustrations and images referencing Weird Tales, and the covers are awesome.   

This was one of those stories that once upon a time had been accepted elsewhere, but alas, that publication, like so many, went tits up. This is a weird one (no, duh!), about a woman named Anya who cannot make a proper cup of coffee, not on Earth, and not anywhere in the galaxy. The story was inspired by an early 1960's Folgers commercial, which is so hyperbolic, it is its own skit. 

Short Story: Froggers

Again, I'm behind on announcing short story pubs. I do absolutely want to announce this one since the editor, Sam Bellotto Jr., is an awesome dude and probably deserves more credit than the likes of Lois Tilton give him. (She wants Hard Stuff, huh? I get ya. *wink wink*)

"Froggers" is my latest story from Perihelion Science Fiction, and is actually one of my oldest stories too; as in, it's seen A LOT of rejections. Despite what some silly editor said, thinking this was about current events, it's not. This pre-dates current events by a few years. Though I do have this crystal ball...

What are Froggers? So glad you asked...

And step up they did. One frogger—maybe male, but then again, they all looked the same—faced me on the terminal, its beady obsidian eyes on either side of its head stared at me. Always gave me the shivers. The scanner materialized a 3D form of the frogger’s body: bipedal humanoid with massive gut, thick neck, and wide flat head. The scan revealed active cultures churning in the frogger’s bowels, crawling on its slick skin. Froggers were best buds with these microorganisms, couldn’t live without them. Just watching those yellow dots dance all over the 3D form made me want to toss up lunch. 

So we follow cynical Joen as his day only gets worse--snot rockets, anyone? Eck! Then from worse to weird.

Funny thing: this story, like Neither Heaven Nor Hell, was originally written in 3rd-person, but once again, an editor of another magazine didn't "get" my 3rd-person style (which is written very close to the character's perspective) and asked for a change. That editor of course never got back to me. Go figure.

In other news, "The Ungreat Escape" will be in Milo James Fowler's upcoming space opera collection, called BEYOND. More about that on its release date of August 15th!

New Stories from Grimdark Magazine and Saurday Night Reader

Looking for some black comedy to morbidify your day? Well, I've got just the stories...

First up, "A Recipe for Corpse Oil" published in Grimdark Magazine issue 3, available from their website or Amazon. There's a R. Scott Bakker story in the issue, or rather, half of a Bakker story. (I'm not familiar with the author myself, but apparently he's well-known. )

Here's the synopsis that I used in my submission email for Corpse Oil: Tavin is a pick-pocket, though not a very good one. But a shopkeeper gives him the opportunity to make a bit of coin, and all it requires is one thing: collecting
human chins.

 Gritty? Grim? Sure. But Tavin is great fun.

But you know what's freaky? Corpse oil is a real thing within the black magic world of Indo-Maylay mythos. "Corpse oil is collected by removing the dead corpse’s chin (using a knife to cut through the bones) and cooking on a hot pan until the oil oozes out." Link.

For story-purposes, Tavin collects chins from live victims. (And if you've read my story Spring Cleaning, then you already know what a Toyol is.)

Grimdark Magazine was another zine that I had my eye on, and was very pleased to have a story accepted by them, especially since I like these niche markets that seem to exist on the fringe of publishing. The editor, Adrian Collins, was very pleasant to work with as we went back and forth on editing changes--if there was something I felt strongly in keeping, it was kept. So big thumbs up for this publisher.

Next up, "Goose Effect" my third publication (hey! I think they like me!) from Saturday Night Reader. It's free to read, and just might make you rethink those geese.  

New Flash Fiction: A Wizard's Day Journal

Some fun for your Friday (in case it wasn't fun enough already), I have for you "A Wizard's Day Journal" over at Grievous Angel. Free online, so you can check it out whenever.

Every story has a story, or at least a trail of rejections in its wake. Normally I don't post about rejections, but I think this is a special case, because I find it a personal victory that this story got published (with pro-pay, I might add) despite some ass-hat accusing me of ripping off "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" from Disney's Fantasia. I would hope anyone with eyes could see it's not a rip-off, but a running joke. Wizards/sorcerers just seem to have a bad handle on brooms.

So here's the comment in its entirety from a slush reader over at Every D@y Fiction. The rejection itself is nearly a year old, and obviously there have been changes made to the story. Emphasis mine because the guy wrote too damn much.

I got some good chuckles out of this (my first time reading). There are a few good threads in this, though none of them really make it all the way through (as we would like to see in a plot for EDF) except the broom. And the problem with the brooms was that I saw it as a direct rip off of "Sorceror's Apprentice", the "Fantasia" broom scene where as brooms are destroyed, they come back in multitudes from the shattered parts. My other main problem here is, I'm afraid, the overall premise: this isn't a Day Planner, it's a journal. The Wizard is writing things down as they happen, not as pre-made appointments (I have never kept a day planner to jot down everything I had already done). Perhaps making this have a he-said she-said vibe where the Wizard tells us the plans for the day in the first half and then writes in his journal that night would work better? In that way, we could see the "before and after", lending even more humor to the "after" segment as things go wrong. Writing in a journal might also work better with this ending, the poor MC sittign in a motel doubting his whole occupation. Technical issue: I wasn't sure what this meant: "...must cash it in later in case it bounces." Wouldn't you want to cash a potentially-bouncing check ASAP so as to go back to the debtor and get your money? How would ashing it later make more certain it doesn't bounce?
-- Joseph Kaufman  

Now this was a rejection to a rewrite request, but EDF has a very odd policy of having completely different people view the rewrite, which I dislike. You have one person offering you suggestions on the first draft, then another person disregards those suggestions made on the second draft, telling you you should've done something else. Frustrating? Yes! See my post about rewrite requests for more on the topic.

On top of that, you got a slush reader who has no concept of etiquette. There's a lot, and I mean A LOT, better ways to convey the idea that the story is too similar to something without accusing the person of ripping off anything. For example, when I was on a forum critiquing another writer's story, I noticed the story had many of he same elements as X-Men: there was violent conflict between humans and mutants, and the main character had diamond-hard skin, like Emma Frost. So I asked the writer if she were a fan of comics, because the story reminded me of X-Men (and to some extent, Spider-Man). Writer said she didn't read comics or watch the films. So despite similarities, it was more coincidence than rip-off.

I did contact the editor at EDF about the rejection, but I didn't specifically point out the rude slush reader, which in hindsight, maybe should have. I just thought the editor, who made the rewrite request in the first place, should see it. Well, she wound up agreeing with the slush readers. She did make an offer that I could, after making major changes, query and resubmit. But if I was going to put that kind of effort into a story (again), I expected more than three measly bucks.

Interestingly enough, I haven't submitted to EDF since then. Probably because my flash stories sell to better paying markets.

New Stories! "Zeitschatten" and "A Beastful Hunger"

The month of a July was a dry one in terms of publications, but now I've got two new juicy stories out.

First off, a wee 100-word piece (that's 100 words exactly), "A Beastful Hunger", from Saturday Night Reader. The website also has optional rain effects, to give you the ambiance of sitting at home on a rainy day; kind of neat, I think.

Secondly, my sci-fi horror "Zeitschatten", from Wanderer's Haven Publication (free to read). Quick excerpt:

Cold pressure. Nerves on fire. Sick sensation in her stomach, as if something reached into her very soul and torn a piece off.

She squeezed her eyes shut against the pain, prayed. Please God make it stop. Make. It. Stop.

This is a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Shadow", which I really enjoyed but it lacked an Event which would cause the narrator's shadow to separate; it just sort of does. So I fixed that, plus it's written in my awesome style, haha.

As for the title, it means "shadow time" in German. I know Hans Christian Anderson wasn't German, but zeitschatten sounds so much cooler than its English translation. Also the issue of trying to give horror stories interesting titles that won't give away the meat (or nasty lil' giblets) of the story. If you've noticed, horror stories tend to have the most mundane titles of all.

So watch out for those shadows, you never know where they may go off to.

Updates from a Slacker

Not entirely slacking, but I do feel like I haven't written as much lately. Partly because I've been editing/writing for an indie game Hellenica--a steampunk JRPG set in ancient Greece, hopefully coming out at the end of the year.You can check out the developers' blog here if you're interested to find out more.


But there's been some news in the past few weeks.

First off, publications!

"Astreya's Fish" over at Chrome Baby, which is free to read. If you've read By the Stars You Will Know Her or Oh Deity, My Deity, then you've encountered Astreya before. At some point, I'll get around to writing the fourth installment that'll wrap all these stories together. I just haven't gotten on it since none of those stories have been big sellers. *sigh* But it'll happen...one of these days...

Other publications:  "Detergent" in Bete Noire issue #15  --a black comedy sci-fi flash piece. Need to buy the issue, but here's a snippet: 

“We need detergent so--”

“How could you?” She frowned. “You should at least wait until she dies.”

He sighed. “But that’s taking too long. We need soap now.”

“Absolutely not!”

“I think we’ve kept her long enough, past her usefulness anyway. What does she do now? Except cost us credits. I mean, how many hips do we have to replace on her?”

“She’s not a refrigerator.”

“I agree, our fridge has never given us trouble.”

In space, you gotta get your soap from somewhere, right?

And yet another flash piece, "The Last Old House," in Horror D'oeuvres.


Some acceptances, one from an awesome anthology called Unfettered--stories which revolve around illustrations by Terry Whidborne (I chose the one with gnomes on stilts crossing tentacles). The same publisher is open for another neat anthology idea: The Lane of Unusual Traders. The pay is really good, so it's something worth checking out. 

Short Story: Double Feature!

So April looks to be a busy month with lots of publications coming out. For me, I've got two sci-fi stories. First up...

"Mapping in the Darkness" over at Perihelion, which you can read for free.

Mitch cranked the wheel of the SEV as he backed out of the ship’s cargo hold, and onto Plutonian soil. 

“Hey! Careful,” Jerome said from the lavatory.

“You knew I was going to do this, so why didn’t you hold it?”

“It’s not my fault I had a bean burrito.”

This is a dark comedy with one part Lovecraftian horror (if you're familiar with Lovecraft mythos, then you might recognize the aliens from "The Whisperer in Darkness"), although not in the way Lovecraft would've had it, but frankly, I consider far better (as we all know, Lovecraft didn't write characters). I love, love, love dark comedy, and took a good deal of inspiration from Dan Meth's short cartoon Google Earth Guys. Unfortunately, this story was held back due to a lack of ending. I kinda knew that, yet you know how it is, if you don't have a real drive to solve a problem, the problem just slides on by. Obvious good news is that editor Sam Bellotto Jr. gave me that shove.  

Second up...

"Spirit Flare" in Spark: A Creative Anthology, Volume V. The anthology should be out by now, but guess there's some delay--but hey! there's always preorder! 

Yeah it's a YA story; not that I set out to write YA stories but this happens to be one. It's got Hopi Indians in space, which as you imagine is not often done, so much so that I actually got my first personal from Strange Horizons with this story.

I quite like learning about other cultures and their traditions, and one perspective in Hopi culture is that age is a determining factor of how good a person you are (i.e. the older you are, the more likely you are to be a morally good person). Which does make a bit of sense since stupid or bad people usually die young. But I do find the concept fascinating compared to modern day trends, where beauty is the height of purity. I would actually like to explore this theme more in-depth, beyond the confines of a YA story. 

And I have to share this because this illustration is amazing. I rarely get art done for my stories, so it's a real treat to see something inspired by my work, and it has such a great retro-style going for it.

Seriously, is this not cool?

Flash Fiction: Twisty (aka best story evar!)

How can you say this is bad? It's awesome!

What's that calender? You say it's April 1st? Well that can only mean one thing: best story evar! from Unlikely Acceptance. And by that, I mean terrible story.

The man leapt to his feet. “Ha! Vampire, you have met you match, for I am a--” He opened his jacket to reveal rows of wooden stakes. “Vampire hunter extraordinaire!”

“How unfortunate for you,” Freebie said, and pulled a raw steak from her boot. “I’m a vampire hunter hunter.”

So the title "Twisty" should be a dead giveaway that it's about twists--twists upon twists, so twisty that it twists the sense out of your twisted brain.

Why twists? Because nothing will kill a story faster than a poorly done twist. Unsurprisingly, this hasn't deterred writers from doing said poorly done twists. For example, just look at Dean Koontz's The Taking --I loved that book till the end, where a middle finger would've been a more suitable ending than the one readers got.

So yes, bad twists are bad and make for bad fiction. Also things like overdone cliches, lack of story coherency, not keeping track of character names, and unsatisfying endings will all be major ticks against your writing.

Let this be a public message for you wannabe writers out there (and maybe you pros, too). Don't write anything resembling this crap--unless you're me, then totally write this crap.   

Short Story: Spring Cleaning

So here's a season appropriate story--not the intention, but pretty darn good timing on the publication, if I do say so myself (and I do).

"Spring Cleaning" took first place in On the Premises "21 and up" contest/issue 22, and they routinely run these contests (no fee), so check them out some time. Funny too, because this is only the second time I've entered one of their contests. Last time it was humor, and obviously our senses of humor didn't match up.

Oh, and one of the nicest things that any editor has ever said about one my stories:

Congratulations on writing the first­ place story! I loved this one and wasn’t surprised at all when the other judges did too. Of the ten finalists, yours was the only story not to receive a “no” vote by any judge. (Even our second and third place finishers had one detractor apiece.) 

If that ain't flattery, I don't know what is!

As for the story itself, the inspiration was something I stumbled on while researching about the leyak--the Indonesian version of the penanggalan, except it's a bit more of a shape-shifting sorcerer. (I swear, East Asia has the coolest creatures.) And I came across this tidbit from a brochure site of all places!

Nyepi. Once a year, at the spring equinox, every community holds a general cleaning-out of devils, driving them out of the village with magical curses and rioting by the entire population. This is followed by a day of absolute stillness, the suspension of all activity, from which the ceremony takes its name. Nyepi marks they New Year and the arrival of spring, the end of the troublesome rainy season, when even the earth is said to be sick and feverish (panas). It is believed that then the Lord of Hell, Yama, sweeps Hades of devils, which fall on Bali, making it imperative that the whole of the island be purified.

So I fell in love with the idea of a poor little demon who is, quite literally, swept out of Hell and has survive on Earth. "As expected, Earth was a terrible, terrible place. At least in Hell, he was dry and warm."


By the way, "Bantu" means "help" in Bahasa Indonesia. Also, shadow-puppetry or "shadow play"  is a pastime in Indonesia. See, I do my research. :)

Flash Fiction: Eye of the Beholder & Oh Deity, My Deity

Halloween may be over, but there are still treats to be had--unless you went to the grocery store and found the leftover candy wiped out--or perhaps you'd prefer a horrific trick or two?

First up is Eye of the Beholder from Horror D'oeuvres; it does require a subscription to read the whole thing, but hey--if you enjoy horror in flash form, they have plenty of that. Also, they've got a book club deal. Very pleasant experience working with the editor, nice and prompt, and pays on acceptance. Funny thing is, I almost didn't send this story there, because I didn't think it was dark enough. It's not. It's just fucking weird.

How weird you ask? No spoilers, but it does involve an eyeball in a very unusual place. Further hints: inspiration for this story came from Japanese ghost story Shirime and the lewd Goatse.cx meme, also riding a lot of public transportation in the Phoenix area. Oh, the weird things you will find while waiting for the bus...

And secondly, Oh Deity, My Deity from Black Frost Media--a newish market who also pay on acceptance. If only more markets could do that... You might recognize the deity character from a previous story. It's more of a prequel piece, and I'm currently shopping around a pre-prequel flash with Asteya, then sometime in the near-future I'll get around to writing the final fourth piece which will tie all the stories together. At least that's the plan.

This is also one of my rare 2nd-person POV stories. I kind of stopped writing 2nd-person after a number of rejection from editors saying they didn't like it. Psssh. I still stand by that 2nd-person is a perfectly fine POV, people just need to get that stick--or is it eyeball?--out of their ass.

Hope everyone had a happy and safe Halloween, and here's looking forward to Thanksgiving. Although according to the stores, it's Christmas already!    

August W1S1 Update

Yeah, I'm late. Had caught on unfortunate case of summertime cold, and have been stuffing tissues up my nose for the past few days. Cold medicine doesn't seem to work, but then again, it's those gel tablets, and I have to wonder if those are even digestible.

Anyway... What were August's stats?

Stories written: 2 (1,400 weird tea story and a last minute flash piece)
Stories submitted: 26 (including resubs)
Stories accepted: 2
Stories rejected: 28

I knew August was going to be a rejection-heavy month, all the editors coming from their holiday, I guess. I had gotten quite a few personal rejections, and... geez. I'm embarrassed on behalf of these editors and/or their slushreaders. These personal rejections revealed a complete lack of reading comprehension--you know, that skill you learned back in the 3rd grade for book reports. If these rejections were summaries of how well the editor/slushie understood the material, then they would've flunked. Big time.

I don't write complicated stories, steeped in symbolism and metaphor. I'd say they're pretty straight-forward. So it's mind-boggling that editor/slushie's could get them so wrong. Like bang your head against the wall till it leaves a bloody spot wrong.

Anyone else scared for the state of literacy?

It's not enough just to read. You have to consume the material, chew it several times, ponder about what you just chewed, and spit it back out. It's not a difficult process, and should come automatic while you're reading, but obviously very few do it. It's more like they take a lick of the story, and decide if it tastes funny or not.

On the positive side, had some acceptances--one of which is already up at Indian SF. I know the concept behind Birth of a Witch has been done many, many times before--two separate editors told me so--but, this was the 3rd story I had written, and I felt it had some merit, even if the material wasn't new. As they say: there are no new stories, just new ways to execute them.

Also published was Great Find (4th story down) over at Perihelion. Kind of annoying that there isn't a direct link, but hopefully you don't mind scrolling.

Enjoy!--and good luck with writing, avoiding the cold/flu/whatever malady the news has hyped up this year. 

2013 storySouth Million Writers

So this was something interesting that I stumbled across via someone else's blog. It's a contest strictly for online publications, which I thought was brilliant.

I'm a cheap bastard, so most of my reading is made up of the free stuff online; and although quality varies, there really are some great stories and publications that don't receive the recognition that they deserve. Some notable mentions are COSMOS Online (although it seems they're currently not publishing fiction), Abyss & Apex, and Ideomancer.

Only one of my stories qualifies for the contest this year, The Ungreat Escape. But I know there are lots of W1S1 writers who have fantastic stories in web-based zines. If you've got a story (to those few of you who comment or even bother to visit), or know one you'd like to share, link it below I'm curious to read.

Contest ends August 3rd, so the sooner the better! And everyone and anyone can vote. Hell, you can even vote for yourself...although that would be selfish and I'd rather do the noble thing and vote for another worthy writer.

So check it out and vote for your favorite online story!  


ETA: Forgot that Invitation is also eligible for nomination since it's 1,300 words, but... It's not exactly my favorite story. I mean I like it for what it is, but it doesn't compare to my later stuff.