One more success story to share: I sold a tale called The Blood of Thousands to Down in the Cellar.

It’s my second sale there, the first one being a rather gruesome little thing I called The Bloofer Lady. My wife Gere has sold them a story, too, a fine dark fantasy called Dream Thief.

The Blood of Thousands likely will be in the summer issue, coming up soon. More details when I get them.

– Steve

You can read a review of Return of the Sword, the new anthology of heroic fantasy from Flashing Swords Press, right here in The Fix.

The anthology includes a story from me, The Mask Oath, along with a lot of familiar and new names. It was edited by Jason Waltz, who drops by here now and then, sometimes under the guise of Howard Von Darkmoor (The Brooding One).

Anyway, the review was written by a woman who says she ordinarily does not read sword-slinging fare, and was a bit uncomfortable taking it up. Guess what?

She liked it.

– Steve

Lyndon Perry at The Fix has some very nice things to say about Frank Byrnes and his A Thousand Faces: The Quarterly Journal of Superhuman Fiction, No. 3.

Oh, and Perry has nice things to say about my action-packed story in that particular issue, The Bigger They Are …

– Steve

P.S.: I failed to mention that my flash story, Acid Man will appear there, probably in the fall. Acid Man is sort of tangentially in a roundabout peripheral way almost related to The Bigger They Are …. It features a supporting cast member from that story — Ooze.

This continues a series of posts outlining things I’ve noticed in reading short story slush for our upcoming Carnvah House anthology, “The Infinity Swords,” and in reading slush for ezines and submissions for critique groups. I’m going to highlight things that got stories bounced from consideration. I won’t identify authors or specific stories, because my purpose isn’t to embarrass anyone. And I should add I’ve committed most of these slushpile sins myself, so if you recognize yourself in any of these posts you should realize you’re not alone.

Deja Vu

Anyone who reads much fiction knows the feeling. “I’ve seen this before.”

Well, nothing turns up the volume on that deja vu feeling like reading slush. Guaranteed. By the time you’ve gotten to your third or fourth sexy elf wench in one reading session, you’ve had more than enough. You never, ever want to see a sexy elf wench again.

I know what some of you are saying. Everything’s been done, it’s impossible not to repeat something somebody did before, all the good plots are taken …

Well, maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t. I don’t know. But I do know that writers absorb pretty much everything they read, watch, encounter, hear, etc. It all goes into a blender-brain, and it comes out when we write. Something we saw or read decades ago — so long ago we don’t remember knowing it — can end up in a story we wrote yesterday. That happens, and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. With artistry, you can make all those things mere brushtrokes in something new. I mean, painters all use the same colors, right?

But, for crying out loud, when your brain starts tossing that stuff into your fiction go back into the story and get rid of the stuff that everyone saw in the theaters just a few years ago. and definitely eject the stuff they’ve probably seen on DVD a dozen times. Yes, I’m talking “Lord of the Rings.”

Some submissions for “The Infinity Swords” could almost have been cut-and-pasted from the screenplay. I recall reading one story and wondering why the writer didn’t just go ahead and call his character Aragorn.

I have no idea how many subs featured mass combat at a portcullis, a la the siege at Minas Tirith. One or two even featured winged creatures swooping down on the combatants. One story, full of really strong prose, lost me when the giant battering ram was drawn up to the city gates.

I recall a while back reading a story in which a man turned into a big snake — the author thought it was the most original thing ever, but all I could think of was James Earl Jones doing the slither in “Conan the Barbarian.”

So stay away from iconic movie images — especially recent ones, especially from blockbusters, and most especially from blockbusters directly related to the genre you are writing in. Because the last thing you want to have happen when an editor is reading your story is to have him stop and think, “Damn, I really need to watch ‘Conan’ again.”

– Steve

OK … here’s a pirate tale for you. Robin & Ben: Or, The Pirate and the Apothecary by Robert Louis Stevenson is a recently acquired favorite of mine. I read it a few years ago in a Stevenson omnibus we have in our house. (And that’s just part of the joy of books — I have no idea when we acquired the ominus, but years later I made a lovely discovery upon cracking it open. Ah, literature …)

I like this one because I find it vastly entertaining, period. A word to those who either dislike poetry in its entirety or to those who love it with rigid purist passion: This is a story, with all the traditional story parts, told in verse form. If you hate poetry, stay away. If you love poetry enough to snarl when you encounter near-rhymes, or if slight alterations of meter drive you out of your mind, then you might want to skip it, too. Stevenson employs near-rhymes and he boggles the meter now and then.

But if none of those poetical concerns bother you, and you’d like to read a brief but amusing story about piracy and thievery of various kinds, and a pirate’s no nonsense reponse to uncaring crime, then read on.

Oh, and if you are one of those misguided souls who believe end-stop rhyme is the death of all poetry — you’re wrong, but I digress. Suffice it to say this one will make you jump up on a rock and decry its clumsy end-stop rhyme. So skip this poem — and go read some Robert Frost or Shakespeare and get over your end-stop rhyme inhibitions.

And don’t give me any guff about popping a poem on here and calling it great short fiction, because this one’s a story, damn it, rhymes or not!

Anyway, have at it and feel free to come back and tell us all what you think of this one.

– Steve

Here’s another short story I really love — Split Cherry Tree by Jesse Stuart.

It’s about another place and time, but it manages to resonate today. There’s a timeless quality to it, and to me timelessness and universality of theme are what make a story great. Change is constant, and every generation will go through the things Dave and his dad experience in Split Cherry Tree. Read more »

This continues a series of posts outlining things I’ve noticed in reading short story slush for our upcoming Carnvah House anthology, “The Infinity Swords,” and in reading slush for ezines and submissions for critique groups. I’m going to highlight things that got stories bounced from consideration. I won’t identify authors or specific stories, because my purpose isn’t to embarrass anyone. And I should add I’ve committed most of these slushpile sins myself, so if you recognize yourself in any of these posts you should realize you’re not alone.

Visualize, Please

Sometimes, writers don’t clearly think through the things they write. They just write things that make the reader go, “huh?” It’s a very quick way to get bounced from a slushpile. Read more »