Collaborative Success

In recent years I’ve done more collaborative writing with my sister, Jen Downes, including a couple of short stories, one of which recently scored a placement.

Our horror short “The Brandstatter Watch” a tale of the undead set some hundred years ago in the English southwest, was picked up by the new horror title Tales of Horror. This was a delightful surprise and is our first full-on collaboration to see pint. You can find it in the third issue of Tales of Horror, at https://talesofhorrormagazine.com/product/issue3/

The magazine has expressed an interest in seeing some other material from us, and we’ll be putting something together in the very near future.

Other collaborations include an SF short currently on submission to an anthology, and joint ideas for further tales of occult investigator Inspector Trevelyan, including a first full length novel. These stories were a joint creation many, many years ago, and which lay fallow in a notebook for most of them , until the day came I dusted off the idea and got a couple of stories down on disc.

You can catch Jen’s writing blog at:  Jen Downes Writes

Watch out for more collaborations as time goes by!

Cheers,

Mike Adamson

 

Recently Read: Skylark Three by E. E. Smith

Years ago I reread and reviewed The Skylark of Space by E. E. Smith (1890-1965), a seminal work of science fiction for one salient fact—it was the first ever depiction of a starship. It was written well over a hundred years ago and first published in 1928, serialised by editor Hugo Gernsbach in Amazing Stories, and it must have been an immediate hit because the second novel appeared, also in Amazing, from August, 1930.

I have the Panther/Granada paperback editions from the early-mid 1970s—the very same copies I bought when I was a preteen. The Chris Foss covers were major selling points, paintings that just jumped off the shelf at the browser and said ‘buy me!’ That was the glory days of Foss’s productivity: he could churn out three covers a week, so much in demand was his work—it characterised his generation, in a sense. His paintings certainly spoke to the young me with a sense of not just futurism but of the most up to date sort, a compelling vision that lent credence to the work between the covers (not that his paintings ever really depicted what was going on in the book).

The cover of Skylark Three shows a great space vessel in the act of blowing up as three very different craft race by, implicitly an act of battle. Fair enough, there are space battles in the book, and with the visual hook dispensed with, as well as the nostalgia, what’s under the covers?

A most interesting sojourn, to say the least, made curious and oh, so much a period piece, for the simple fact this novel was written 95 years ago. It reflects then-current American society—strong moral values, a willingness to get tough when the need arises (as it frequently does), women who fetch food and black people don’t seem to exist. What else would it depict? It moves on from the stereotypes in the first novel in a way, because the woman accompany their husbands as functional members of the ship’s compliment, taking part in its operation (as well as fetching food). To be fair, Seaton’s wife is show to be a brilliant classical musician, taking he violin with them into the depths of space, a surprising artistic interlude amongst the unremitting technicality of the piece.

Smith, considered the founding father of the “space opera” subgenre, wrote almost compulsively in the vernacular of his times, and sometimes the reader puzzles over the slang of 1930. The characters talk so quaintly to our ears, and not the formal, over-verbose 19^th century way so familiar from the writers of the previous generations, but in a strange admixture of both precision and slang that must have been how the mass market expressed itself in those days. It underlines the way H P Lovecraft thought (they were born in the same year), for he was writing at the same time and his characters and narrative sound precisely nothing like this, even when he is dealing with his contemporary United States.

In Skylark Three, Smith takes is heroes Seaton and Crane and their wives, Dorothy and Margaret, back into the depths of space, to the system of the multiple green suns near the heart of the galaxy, into the midst of war and terror. A new power has emerged, destroying wherever it touches—the Fenacrhone, travelling from far across the galaxy bent on universal conquest. It is up to Seaton (the acknowledged ‘Overlord’ of the planetary systems since his last visit—yes, a white American is the unquestioned ruler of multiple civilisations!) to convince the many races of the cluster of the green suns to work together to resist this scourge, and he recruits the best science and industrial capacity of each to this end. He ends a war between old adversaries, visits multiple planets with strange civilisations (Smith had a lot of fun creating them), and orders the construction of a new vessel to replace his now clearly obsolete Skylark II.

Smith was a scientist, a chemist by training like Isaac Asimov, and it is clear that his mind ran on through tracts of technical thought, addressing concepts that would become familiar much later in time. Star Trek, 35 years later, drew on concepts well known to Smith’s readers—the tractor beam, for instance, directed energy weapons, force fields, and of course faster than light travel. The manipulation of matter, its interchange with energy, is also depicted, though in different terminology, as we see “force” beams and “orders of force” levitating objects, assembling them from raw materials and so forth.

A prime tool is the “educator,” a machine of alien derivation, which allows the transfer of knowledge, experience and empirical data between minds (shades of the “BIG RAT”in Gerry Anderson’s 1968 series Joe-90, which formed the central gadget of a whole show). The characters use the device to absorb instantly the language of any alien race they encounter, and to provide knowledge of English to other races, as well as acquire the technical and scientific knowledge of the finest minds out there, thus improving their own ship over and over. This neatly avoids the elephant in the room of so much TV science fiction—why almost all the alien races and isolated cultures we ever encounter not only look fundamentally the same as ourselves but speak fluent English, most of them with American accents...

The speed of light is mentioned, though no relatavistic effects or consequences. Perhaps, when the publisher gave Smith a free hand to update his narratives for their re-release in later decades, he found incorporating Einsteinian cosmology either prohibitively difficult, or that it simply forbade the possibility of his narrative, and he sidestepped the issue by ignoring it. Indeed, Smith acknowledged his Skylark novels to be science fantasy, in contrast to his 1930-31 novel Spacehounds of IPC, (completed immediately after Skylark Three) which takes place entirely within the solar system and was, he felt, his only work of genuine science fiction. (Readers did not respond so well to it for this very restriction, however, and no sequels followed.)

Interestingly, amongst all these concepts, the word computer never appears, though he describes automated systems which to us seem obviously computerised.

The thing that jumps off the page, however (after his often erratic narrative to dialogue balance—early chapters seem almost entirely composed of the latter) is attitude. Seaton, the polymath, though not the most brilliant mind on the ship, is a self-appointed master of worlds, willing to scheme the destruction of a whole civilisation to save others—redeemed by his humanistic inability to do so at the last moment: that task he left to a friend from a warrior race who had no compunction about pushing the button. Would we call that a cop-out today? Smith certainly revelled in the absolute destruction of a malevolent foe: every last ship in space, one by one, then incinerating their homeworld. Finally, when the eponymous Skylark Three actually takes flight, he details a racing voyage out of the galaxy on the trail of a vessel bearing survivors of the evil Fenachrone to a new world in a distant galaxy to begin again, bent on returning one day to annihilate all competition in the home galaxy. The outcome is of course their inevitable destruction. This, we would call today, genocide—and it was done by the hero.

That’s the difference a century makes, but consider the time in which he was writing. This is the same general era in which Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote his Venus novels, and I think I see a parallel, inasmuch as that both writers were observing the insidious rise of fascism. The Nazi Party in Germany was parading and trumpeting and throwing its weight about, eventually taking power in 1933, and writers were using fiction as a way of saying something about it. Burroughs highlighted the armies and secret police forces, the evils redolent in such rogue states, while Smith, just a few years earlier, described technology coming to the rescue, stopping very dead indeed an entity bent on doing what Hitler did, but on a galactic, even universal scale. In that light, perhaps the nature of the story is understandable, reassuring its readers that the will to defend against an implacable enemy really did exist.

One last bit of nostalgia begs to be mentioned. When I reached Chapter 3, there was a bookmark in the volume, just a business card, for an engine rebuilders. The phone number has too few digits, not even the eighth digit added to all Australian phone numbers in 1976 or so. That bookmark must indicate where I got up to when I read the book as a preteen, before finding it too heavy going and moving on to something else. I doubt that business has existed in a great many years. I put the card back where I found it, and there it shall remain, another piece of history that is now much older than the novel was when I bought this edition. Passage of time, eh?

Mike Adamson

 

The Year in Review (2024)

 

Year Nine of this enterprise has now drawn to a close, and this is my annual review of progress. Last year I was able to report a gradual shift in emphasis from short form to long, as single-author volumes became more of a practical proposition, and I have spent considerable time this year in pursuit of this goal.

Crimson Blade took much longer to deliver than expected, but went to Hiraeth at the end of October and is due at press any day now as I write this. The Remarkable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Volume 1 was released by Belanger Books earlier this year, and Volume 2 has now been delivered, along with Of Old Gods and Dreamlands, my H P Lovecraft anthology. In progress at this time, is Sherlock Holmes: Ravensgate for release in 2025, and Tales of the Middle Stars Volume 1, to appear with Jay Henge Publishing in Sweden also during the coming calendar year.

The bulk of this work has been tackled in the last six months, which says something about current productivity levels. I also could not have done it without the amazing input of Jen Downes, my editor and companion in creative efforts. We have co-written some stories this year, and have more collaborations to come.

Now for the raw data:

In the last nine years, I’ve made 3295 submissions (176 in the last twelve months, a marked decline from the 270 last year, which was itself well reduced from the previous year). I have 266 placements (12.39:1 submission/acceptance ratio, up from 12.78:1 last year, which was up from 14.53:1 the year before that, which bettered 15.11:1 in the previous year). Over five consecutive years this ratio has tightened down, suggesting that while overall numbers are not high, I am more efficiently targeting my work to markets that really want it.

With the shift toward single author volumes I have had less time and inclination to blanket the short story market with submissions, so my total number of submissions active at any one time has fallen. I have averaged forty-something active submissions logged at Submission Grinder during the year (32 at this point, including some old ones that must be dead by now—I have periodic clear-outs), sometimes as high as fifty, sometimes thirty-something.

These figures also indicate 2861 rejections or other null-responses (that tells you how slow things have been in the last year, a surprisingly small increase on the previous total), giving an overall rejection/acceptance ratio since 2016 of 10.75:1—improved for the fifth year running (2023: 11.65:1, 2022: 13.18:1; 2021: 13.52:1; 2020: 14.27:1).

During 2024 I made 180 submissions, almost a hundred less than the previous year, which was itself way down on the year before. This alone is a good indicator of my shift in emphasis. I had 21 acceptances, my second-poorest year in terms of total numbers since the very beginning. My submission : rejection ratio was 8.57:1, slightly poorer than last year’s 7.23:1. So, although total numbers were low, I was targeting material quite effectively, and my mystery writing was an almost 100% acceptance result.

Things seem to have been slow on a day to day basis, and that’s reflected in the figures. An average of 17.38 days elapsed between acceptances in the year, almost twice as long as last year (which had many more acceptances). Again, this is a function of the shift away from concentrating on short stories, which have by and large attracted disappointing pay scales. I recently scored a pro publication, and if I could do that more often things would be different, but it constitutes a statistical outlier at this point.

I completed 23 new stories in 2024, 15 of which were Sherlock Holmes pieces, almost all of which went directly into print with either Belangers or MX, or were written to complete The Remarkable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Volume II. I produced 42, 040 words of science fiction, fantasy and other genres, while my Sherlock Holmes short stories total 159, 200 words, for a grand total of 201, 240 words produced during the year. This is a markedly greater output than either of the two previous years, and does not count novel work.

At the end of 2023 I expected to write some eight Sherlock Holmes stories in the coming year, and in fact almost doubled that figure. I will make no firm predictions this year, but write to the markets as they present themselves.

As mentioned above, my second title with Belanger Books, The Remarkable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was released not long after midyear, and I have already delivered the second volume, for release when schedules permit in 2025. The third volume of the series is over half complete at this time, as are two other Holmesian anthologies. I am approaching 50, 000 words on my second Sherlock Holmes novel at this time, also scheduled for publication during 2025. My next volume coming up for release should be Of Old Gods and Dreamlands, my H P Lovecraft collection.

I have recently put together a list of projected work over the next three years, including projects for my established group of small presses but also embracing a number aiming into the professional arena. I have a novel near completion which I would be happy to offer out for agency representation, and another project to begin with which I could sound out local publishers on a non-agented basis. These are all ‘test-the-water’ ventures, and success in any particular area will shape the way things move from that point.

My total accepted wordcount now stands at 1, 390, 888 words, not counting novel length projects.

That’s it from the statistician for another year. 365 days from now will mark ten years since I decided to take the writing game for a spin, and I hope to have new milestones to report by that point, including extra small press releases plus, I sincerely hope, agency representation to the professional marketplace, with pro contracts in the offing.

Cheers from South Australia,

Mike Adamson

Header image royalty free from Unsplash, Aaron Burden photo

Keeping Output High

 

I have sorely neglected this writing blog but there’s a good reason—my output has never been higher nor more focused. In short I’ve been busy with the business of writing, and forgot to update my commentary in the process!

Just before Christmas I delivered my H P Lovecraft anthology to the publisher (keeping their ID under my hat at the moment, at least until the Kickstarter goes live), who have launched a horror enprint and seem to be doing very well with it. And very soon I’ll be delivering my second Sherlock Holmes anthology to the same company as produced the first, with my next writing priority being to finish my second Sherlock Holmes novel for them also. Taken together, those three projects are about a quarter of a million words.

A few days ago I worked up a ‘to-do; list of future writing projects. Two of the three projects above headed that list, then other projects ran on—and on—and on. I projected writing over the years 2025 to 2027 inclusive, and came up with something like eighteen book projects, being both novels and anthologies. This is a tremendous amount to contemplate in a three year period, but it’s not all to be built from scratch.

Three new Sherlock Holmes anthologies are already half or more filled. One is an SF collection requiring only two stories to finish it. One is a novel needing only a couple of chapters and an epilogue. Another is a novel to be derived from an existing movie script, another a finished novel to begin the rounds after a final polish pass... That cuts it down to something like about three projects to work up from scratch in any one year, and that’s doable.

My fervent hope is that a professional agency will be in the mix before too long, and some of these projects can enter the professional stream. Of course, that doesn’t mean the top-end semi-pro endeavour will falter in the slightest, and it will be my great pleasure to continue to send a considerable output to market via that stream.

This all comes down to an output of something like a quarter of a million words per year, not counting incidental short story submissions and placements. But I would have to say that the burgeoning of the book side of things has already toned back the short story aspect. It’s far more productive and far less frustrating to work up a book for a publisher who is eager and waiting for it, than to continue to swim upstream on the rejection roundabout, wondering if you’ll ever see a professional payday.

I’ll post my annual roundup of stats on January 7^th, marking nine years since I launched this writing endeavour, and there’ll be some telling numbers on the way things have shaped up lately.

Cheers, and thanks for reading,

Mike Adamson

Rolling Out The New One!

Okay, I’m rolling it out here late—because I’m so out of touch with the blog there are times I forget it’s clamouring for new posts!

The fact is there’s so much on in Real Life it’s a wonder I can think of specifics at all... Between my second Sherlock Holmes novel half way along and other projects in the offing, I thought I had a lot on, but a serious medical diagnosis in the family changes everything, and there’s nothing you an do but put what needs to be done first, and do it with a will.

Yes, as you see from the header, my second Sherlock Holmes volume is now available. The Remarkable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is my first anthology, collecting ten stories from the pages of Belanger Books anthologies, Strand Magazine and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, plus brand new stories never seen before.

This is an anthology of my canonical stories to the tune of around 100, 000 words, and was rele4ased in September, 2024, after a very successful Kickstarter campaign that saw the project funded many times over.

The adventures span the years 1881 to 1889, and deal with entirely mortal cases—no supernatural themes or thematic crossovers. All being well, this will be the first in an ongoing series—as indeed is my novel. A second volume is almost complete in terms of contents—I need only two more stories to flesh it out, and The Remarkable Adventures Volume Two will be in the pipeline, though quite when it’ll put in an appearance is an open question.

More certain, my second novel, titled Ravensgate, is in development and should be in the 2025 publishing schedule; and at this point a collection of my Lovecraftian cosmic horror writings is also slated for a 2025 appearance, the manuscript being in preparation at this time—I wrote the foreword this morning!

Here are some useful links. Go here to view the Kickstarter page, which features a marvelous promotional video trailer, courtesy of the multi-talented Brian Belanger:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1606726313/the-remarkable-adventures-of-sherlock-holmes

And here is the Amazon purchase pink, for hardback, paperback and Kindle:

https://www.amazon.com/Remarkable-Adventures-Sherlock-Holmes/dp/B0DJ8LWQVK/

Eight Years and Counting

I remember like it was yesterday—the first confident submission of this campaign to get my foot in the door of the short story market. I sent a Roman era ghost story to a magazine called Liminal. I was full of hope, but of course inexperienced—green, if you like—and had no real idea what to expect. I’d made a few experimental submissions in the previous months but wasn’t counting those. Well, Liminal didn’t take the story, nor did they ever take anything from me, and ceased publication a couple of years ago. But that ghost story placed four days ago with Black Beacon Books, in a freshly-polished form, so my original confidence was vindicated at last!

At the eight year mark I’d have to say I’ve raised my game. I’ve tuned what I’m doing to better match the market, certainly I’m focusing on those parts that are most welcoming: perhaps a third of my expected placements in the coming year will be period mystery, or speculative fiction in a certain group of markets where I’ve encountered my best success. That still leaves two thirds on the submit-and-see principal, so nothing has changed in that respect.

However, I am beginning to move into novels and single-author anthologies, and this is the main step-up, or direction change, in my modus operandi.

This is my eighth annual review of progress/state of play post, and 2023 has laid the foundations for ambitious steps to come.

Here's the raw data:

In the last eight years, I’ve made 3119 submissions (270 in the last year, a lot less than the previous year). I have 244 placements (12.78:1 submission/acceptance ratio, up from 14.53:1 last year, which was up from 15.11:1 the year before that, which bettered 16.008:1 in the previous year). It’s gratifying to see this consistent positive decrease over the last four years, as my rate of placement is improving across the board despite all influences of market, economics, style or whatever).

However, my total number of submissions in play has eroded considerably, as my attention has been focused less on short story writing and more on long-form work. Submission Grinder shows some 32 submissions in play at this time, of which a few early ones are likely dead or in limbo, and this figure is less than half my tally for this time last year. These figures also indicate 2843 rejections, giving an overall rejection/acceptance ratio since 2016 of 11.65:1—again, an improvement for the fourth year running (2022: 13.178:1; 2021: 13.52:1; 2020: 14.27:1). The statistician in me sees these numbers and despite any negative feedback on individual works from individual markets—I certainly get it—I know I must be doing something right.

In the 365 days of 2023, I made 275 submissions (well down on the 368 of last year), of which 38 gained acceptances (my second-best year ever after 2021 with 41). This is a submission/rejection ratio for the year of just 7.23:1, a dramatic increase over last year’s 11.5:1, which improved from 2021's 12.375:1, and, most importantly, also edges out 2020's 7.67:1. While it may not have felt like it on a day to day basis, I seem to be doing better than at any previous time.

Average time between acceptances in Year Eight was comfortably down from 2022’s 11.4 days to just 9.60 days—not quite as good as 2021’s 9.125 days: it seems hard times are still with the reading and publishing world. The long dead patches still occur, and with fewer submissions in play I’ve noticed that the previous pattern of long and short period rejections don’t cluster as they used to—I simply go more periods with neither acceptances nor rejections, just...nothing.

One or two semi-professional, placements have come along—with NewMyths, for instance, always a pleasure.

Rather shockingly, I find my new fiction productivity has been at its lowest ebb since the process began, just 16 new stories completed in 2023, half of which are Sherlock Holmes tales. They total 131, 793 words, down from last year’s 175, 871. This is balanced perhaps by my reworking of older pieces to find homes.

I have 300 stories registered at Submission Grinder, a modest increase over last year’s total, though excluding different versions of the same story which in a few cases are listed there for my own reference.

Once again, Sherlock Holmes is my hottest area of endeavour. I have an estimated eight stories to produce in 2024, all of which have target marketplaces and excellent chances of acceptance. I now have eleven placements with Belanger Books anthologies, and have found a home also with MX Books’ ongoing Anthology of New Sherlock Holmes Stories series. I have placed a third story with Strand Magazine, and an confident of others in future.

My novel Sherlock Holmes: A Tradition of Evil, was released by Belanger Books in August, 2023, and marks the beginning of a new chapter in this endeavour. It has been well received so far, with predominantly five star reactions at both Amazon and Goodreads, and I should be writing my second novel during 2024. My Sherlock Holmes short story output for 2023 was 78, 083 words, slightly up on last year, and excluding a single story as yet unfinished.

I also have three single-author anthologies in development: a collection of my vampire tales forthcoming from Hiraeth Books in the US, which is now at an advanced stage of readiness, plus Holmesian and Lovecraftian volumes also on the table for this year. Also, a chapbook is due out soon from Black Hare here in Australia, a psychological thriller titled If Thine Eye Offend Thee. This will be in format with my previous release with them, The Salamandrion.

My total accepted word count stands at 1, 248, 985 words—this including all reprints and solicitations, as well as podcasts—there have been a few (links on my author site).

The Inspector Trevelyan Mysteries has scored an extra placement, a tale appearing shortly in Black Cat Weekly. A George Trevelyan novel is now very much on the cards, probably for 2025, which on the back of an expanding small press track record may be a flag-carrier for the next level of this enterprise.

That's the view from this particular keyboard as Year Eight melds into Nine. Short fiction is beginning to give way to long form work, and my small press credits are expanding (both novels and collections based in large part on preexisting work, though always with some new material for freshness). I hope a year from now I have more big steps to report!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Royalty-free image from Unsplash.

A Busy Year, and More to Come

I have soooo neglected this blog! The truth of the matter is that the blog was created to support my writing career, serving potentially as an affidavit of my presence and reality as a writer for those in the publishing trade, and as my career has grown busier I’ve had less time to reflect those events on the blog. (Plus I’m never sure how many people are or aren’t reading here—am I keeping this record pretty much for myself? I would like to think a few readers do indeed drop by!)

2023 has been a busy year! While the regular review roundup is due on January 7^th, which will be the eighth anniversary of my launching my bid to be a professional writer, here is so much to reflect on.

This year saw my Sherlock Holmes novel A Traditional of Evil released, a genuine milestone. I’ve written a fair few novel-length projects in my time, but this is the first genuinely professional outing to see print, and there’ll be more to come, with a second novel to be written in 2024. Coming early in the year there’ll be a second chapbook from Black Hare Press, the psychological horror piece If Thine Eye Offend Thee, and I have so far lined up what should be three single-author anthologies for the coming year.

The last story is now on paper for a collection with Hiraeth Publishing in the US in the horror/action/supernatural field, and the material is being brought together for not one but two anthologies with Belanger Books—more on these when the time comes.

The launch of my author website some months ago was another big stride, and there are updates on the way, a major one in the next round providing a wealth of reading.

So despite how quiet I’ve been, things are indeed busy, and big things are coming!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Royalty-free header image from Pixabay