Plenty Happening!

 

In the weeks since I last posted, a few interesting things have happened. First of all, I didn't win the Derringer Award—I had no real expectation of doing so, but the nomination was a most pleasant surprise, and I am now being referred to as “Derringer Award-nominated author Mike Adamson...” in the mystery field, which is nice!

As the cover above suggests, I have appeared once more in the Australian SF mag Alien Dimensions, this time with a double-header. The mag specialises in extraterrestrials, as its title suggests, and for this extra-large (360-page) edition the editor took not one but two stories—both part of my “Takes of the Middle Stars” opus. In this issue you'll find “Downtime at Ranger Station.” one of the “Colonial War” arc, as well as “Keeper of the Ways,” an early episode of the arc leading up to what should be my first “Middle Stars” novel, though no indications yet on when that might be. Catch Alien Dimensions #24 at Amazon:

AlienDimensions #24 Digital

AlienDimensions #24 Print

On April 21^st, my “Middle Stars” short “Rain Girl” went live at Wyldblood—catch it here.

Placements have been generally slow of late, and what's come my way has been largely non-paying reprints or other token-payment situations. Other writers have commented on the drought they're experiencing, so the industry as a whole seems to be feeling the pinch of the difficult times we're living through. This much is to be expected, but that makes it no less frustrating.

However, for the really good news, see the next post!

M

A Pleasant Surprise!

Being nominated for an award is always the most pleasant of surprises, and I was more than thrilled to discover such a recognition had come my way recently.

My mystery piece “The White Calf and the Wind,” one of my “Inspector Trevelyan Mysteries,” has been nominated in the category of ”Best Long Story” for the 2023 Derringer Awards. The graphic of the finalist pool appears below. This came right out of left field—it was published in Black Cat Mystery Mgazine #11, in February, 2022. It had previously been accepted for the magazine Hybrid Fiction, due for release in September, 2020, but this was one of those occasions when an accepting market folds before release.

The Derringers are organised by the Short Mystery Fiction Society, which has been around since 1996.

The awards are announce around May 1^st each year, and I shall be on the edge if my swat until then!

Cheers,

Mike Adamson

Recently Read: The Lost World

 

NB: This essay is about the original, not Michael Crichton's 1994 Jurassic Park sequel, for which he somehow was able to use the same title in some monumental generic cash-in. Presumably a lot of money changed hands.

Reviewing a book that's 111 years old seems like redundancy at best, but there are always new things to be said, and from my perspective it's more than interesting to read other works by the same hand that created Sherlock Holmes.

I read a copy that has been in the house for a very long time, the Pan paper back of 1977. It's in surprisingly good shape, only the spine is faded somewhat. The cover design is reproduced above. The first thing that struck me was that Conan Doyle's style is as distinctive as a fingerprint, not simply in the usage of terms and forms which are no longer found in the language, but his very way of putting words together. It's a dynamic style, to be sure, forward-moving, and the writer strikes an excellent balance between suspense and the implied knowledge of what's to come.

The Lost World was published in 1912, the same year as A Princess of Mars, and for the reader of embryonic science fiction it must have been an exciting age, with names like Doyle, Wells and Burroughs actively producing, and Verne as the Old Master of the genre. This is of course the first outing for Doyle's other larger-than-life character (created some 25 years after Sherlock Holmes), the irascible Professor George Edward Challenger, that polymath of the Herculean physique and the pompous, arrogant, overbearing and didactic nature.

Certainly this aspect of Challenger's character I felt may have been ever so slightly overstated in the first third of the book, such that one felt him rather a caricature, yet from most of the description one also cannot help seeing the mighty Brian Blessed in the role: the booming voice, the stature, the beard of Assyrian proportions—he was born for the role, yet was never cast in any production. (As close as he came was Professor “Atlantis” Atticus in Lost Secrets of Atlantis, first of the two MacGyver TV movies from the early 90s. The character was, in most ways, Challenger without the aggravation.)

Conan Doyle was clearly well-read on the scientific views of his time, including the vitriol and competition between dignified specialists, and public reaction to same. The 19^th century was the age of public debate of scientific discourse, epitomised by the epic battles waged by Huxley on behalf of Darwin (see, for instance, Stephen Jay Gould's essay Knight Takes Bishop? from Natural History magazine, which can be found in his 1991 collection Bully for Brontosaurus), and Doyle gives us two such confrontations. They make for a wonderful arena in which big egos can clash, with much elegant oration in the process.

The concept, that isolated populations can exist without pressures which would change or destroy them, is entirely valid. Here, Doyle placed his survivors of the distant past into a closed ecosystem atop a towering plateau, quite inaccessible before the age of flight. It is based on the real-world Mount Roraima, in Venezuela, though magnified many times in size and placed in Brazil. The real mountain does indeed feature unique forms of life on its summit, though no dinosaurs, sadly.

The next thing that strikes the modern reader is the unfortunate schism between the frames of reference of then and now. The text is both racist and sexist by modern standards, with its frequent references to blacks and Amazonian Indians in derogatory or patronising terminology, and sometimes explicit reference to the Europoid male as the pinnacle of evolution, which is both racist and sexist on one package. There is only one female character, who appears as a motivating device in the first chapter and as an irony in the last, her behaviour a general dismissal of females in general, one might feel. Thus this dimension to the tale is something which must be placed firmly in its historical context, and left there.

This is likely also the fundamental reason that the book has never been filmed as it was written. Productions have always hit the high points, the gist of the story, but no production has ever been without female characters, whether a female member of the explorers' company, or the fur-clad cave-girl encountered on the plateau (which, as I recall, was a device of both the Irwin Allen 1960 movie, and the Canadian TV series from about twenty years ago). No such character exists in the book, indeed there are no “cave men” as such, but a tribe of Amazonian Indians who migrated onto the plateau by a secret path and made a home there, eternally at war with the “ape-men” who form the principle enemies of the book, other than nature itself.

And once more, we find an element that could not be introduced to an adaptation—the war between the humans and their savage, cruel, pre-human cousins, in which the Europeans join to exterminate the ape-men as a force and consign the survivors to slavery—as if that were the natural and correct order of things. Modern sensibilities choke first of all at the thought of largely killing-off a unique species, and then at the creation of a subjugated menial class. But in 1912 such things were viewed differently, and one can only remember this as an academic reality. New Sherlock Holmes fiction tends to be sanitised in such respects, so we can more comfortably view Victorian times trough modern eyes.

The Lost World is a classic example of what is today referred to as epistolary fiction. The lead character, Edward Malone, is a journalist, sent along on the expedition to report every foot of the way, and the text, told in Doyle's usual first person style, constitutes his account. Most of the chapters are framed as the letters Malone sends back to his editor in London, describing their adventures. This is a clever way to tell a novel and works well.

Doyle's descriptive skills don't often get a workout in his Sherlock Holmes stories on account of the need for brevity in the short format, indeed I can bring to mind only one stand-out example, from the only proper novel in the cycle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, being the pages describing the journey to Baskerville Hall. In The Lost World he has the chance to wax lyrical in his descriptions of the Amazonian jungles and waterways, and finally of the plateau itself, which constitutes delicious world-building. A writer inevitably hears some faceless first-reader's carping complaint that “all this exposition is unnecessary, this book could be a whole chapter shorter,” as if conciseness were some goal in itself. I would rather think that beauty of language and immersion in topic were equally worthy objectives, especially when one has room to move in long-form composition.

The Lost World has been filmed on at least six occasions. The 1925 silent production was the showcase for the first real outing of stop-motion special effects by the great Willis O'Brien, mastermind behind the FX of King Kong several years later. It wowed audiences so profoundly that the film was lengthened by a few reels of soap for some reason, yet audiences had no problem sitting through that lot to get the FX sequences. The test reel of the dinosaur material was presented by Conan Doyle at a meeting of professional magicians, at which he invited them to figure out that particular magic!

The next time it was filmed, Irwin Allen did the honours, early in his career, before his TV science fiction opus of the 60s, or his disaster movies of the 70s. He gave us a highly derivative version of the story, moved up to contemporary times, lizards with rubber appendages, filmed in slow motion to appear huge, cavegirls, and, if memory serves, even a volcanic sequence at the end. Claude Rains played Challenger at the head of an all-star cast. The great Michael Rennie, of The Day the Earth Stood Still, played Lord John Roxton, the big game hunter and all-round adventurer of the piece.

1992, just before the coming of Jurassic Park and its revolutionary digital dinosaurs, saw a film production, with John Rhys-Davies as Challenger. Another film version with Patrick Bergin as Challenger appeared in 1998. I can say I know nothing at all of these productions!

The BBC made a TV production in 2001 with closer adherence to the book in many ways, including the pteradactyl brought back to London and presented to the Zoological Society at the end. They used their brilliant CGI shop to generate the dinosaurs, springing off their ground-breaking series Walking With Dinosaurs, which launched so many other productions.

The most recent production (to my knowledge) is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, a three-season (1999-2002) TV version from Canada, which lodged the explorers permanently on the plateau, and introduced tribes with which they could interact, and of course female characters. Their digital dinosaurs were notably poor, though about ten episodes in they could afford a better T. rex model than the rubbery one they began with.

The story remains eternally fascinating, and one can only imagine the impact it had on the post-Edwardian world. To present living dinosaurs was a thoroughly new and catchy idea, and to do so through the lens of contemporary science, rather than some fantasy scenario, was most compelling, as witnessed by its notable and ongoing success in print. A century later the book can be enjoyed at many levels—as grand adventure in the steps of Ryder Haggard and Talbot Mundy, certainly, definitely as a window onto its times, and lastly as its own self: the pioneering vision of a brilliant writer who combined the real with the not-real in a way that made it seem possible. And that could be said to be the real goal of all speculative fiction.

Mike Adamson

200—At Last!

 

It's been a long time coming, but two days ago I hit another milestone—two hundred placements. Australian e-mag Etherea will be featuring a reprint of my “Middle Stars” outing “The One that is All,” and I look forward to their always-spectacular layouts.

When I began this adventure, just over seven years ago, ten placements seemed a long way off, and I remember my elation to hit a hundred. Two hundred leaves me feeling more professional, or at least more accomplished, yet if I consider my income-potential in proportion to the volume and effort, I would be kidding myself to think that.

Instead, I'll see it as a punctuation pointing a long journey. At my current rate of placement, I would expect to see the three hundred mark in about three years, but it's clear that simple volume of acceptance does not open doors at the top end of the market. I have fewer pro placements now than I did five years ago. Instead of trying to find that magical portal, I would sooner go sideways into novels, and of course that's what's happening with a release due later in the year—more about that when we go to contract!

For now I'm going to enjoy this personal milestone, take a moment to reflect, and recharge the batteries for the next challenge—more stories, ongoing marketing, and watching carefully for the main chance to go long-form whenever it comes along.

Cheers,

Mike Adamson

Latest Additions

 

Just a quick preen—here are four recent publications to add to the shelf.

Abandoned, from Legion of Dorks, an anthology of lonely, vacant spaces, picked up my “Tales of the Middle Stars” story “A Silent Sphinx,” a tale of a lone scoundrel who happens upon an alien ambiguity—that which is utterly unknown yet foreboding in the extreme. This is part of an arc leading to my first “Middle Stars” novel, still in planning.

Buy here. 

Extraordinary Visions, from the North American Jules Verne Society, is a compendium of stories based on the worlds of that great French early master of science fiction and the strange. They picked up a piece from me based on 20, 000 Leagues Under the Sea, my second such tale published. Enormous scope exists for further adventures of Nemo and the Nautilus, both before and after the classic novel's events.

Buy here. 

Cosmic Crime Stories, issue for September 2022, from Hiraeth Books, features my short story “The Value of Meaningless Malaise,” a short piece critical of medicine and looking at how even miracle therapies could be abused by the unscrupulous. This is a reworked, extended version, giving the piece more oomph, as the original, written many years ago, seemed a bit flat.

Buy here. 

The above title is also available through Booktopia.

And lastly, ParABnormal, issue for December 2022, also from Hiraeth Books, features “The Witch of Wendover,” a medieval horror piece and something of a departure for me. It offers a fresh twist on the grim proceedings of a witch trial—maybe there was, just occasionally, a whole level of hidden meaning, and mercy from the least expected corner.

Buy here.

The above title is also available through Barnes & Noble.

It's always nice to receive contributor's copies, and they have quite overflowed the first shelf. If I was to finish collecting all the physical publications I have appeared in which did not actually give copies, I'm sure I would have a full second shelf by this point. I have visions of one day having an entire book case—in a swanky writing study—filled with the volumes I've been featured in. Okay, maybe at this point it's just a nice fantasy, but we have to look ahead in life, don't we?

'Till next time,

Mike Adamson

The Million Word Milestone

When I made my first tentative submissions in late 2015, I did so with a belief in my own ability to write a good story, while being under no illusions when it came to the competitive nature of the market. Selling stories is not easy, it took me four months to make a sale, and four months more for it to appear in print before the door seemed to creak open just a bit, and the placements began to flow. At that point I could not have seriously looked ahead to being able to report that I have now placed over one million words of short fiction.

This morning Hiraeth Books in the US picked up a reprint of my fantasy short “The Fall of the Dark God,” which first appeared in Lovecraftiana back in early 2017. This is the first of my “Avestium” fantasy series, and was actually my first fantasy story in total, written longhand (if memory serves) back in the 1990s, and polished a great many times over the years. This placement takes me to 1, 004, 417 words that have been accepted for publication, including all reprints and indeed a couple of pieces accepted for print but which failed to appear due to markets folding before the edition could be released. The point is, the stories got past the gatekeepers, and that's what's important here. Stories actually in print will be a whole other running calculation, and it'll be interesting to see what figure I've reached actually on paper (or digits) too.

I am closing in on my two hundredth placement, which will be the next major milestone, but a million words placed feels like the ultimate round figure. A million. Imagine substituting “dollars” for “words.” That gives you some idea of the volume, when you think of the buying power. A dollar for every word that has got past the gatekeepers in the last seven years would buy a very nice home indeed.

Unfortunately, the pay scale, averaged out, is about one percent of that. Pro markets pay very nicely, but accept very rarely, and while all writers are eternally hopefully of making it past those particular gates, the odds are correspondingly low. I know folks who have been in the game a lot longer than me and can't get into the top end of the market. Heck, yesterday I had a rejection from Analog which came personally from the editor in chief, and that's an accolade for me as it seems to say I made it past all the first-readers!

I wonder if the next million words will take seven years? We shall see—and maybe there'll be a few more lucrative sales along the way!

Cheers,

Mike Adamson

Header image by LuminaObscura from Pixabay

A Magical Number?

 

“It was seven years ago, this very day, that Mr Marley left us...” Or...

“Marley was dead—as dead as a two-year-old un-responded submission.”

Okay, I couldn't help the Dickensian reference, but it really has been seven years—today—since I made my first story submission in earnest. Late in 2015 I made a few experimental submissions to test fire the method, and I'd had a few unpaid placements in the previous two years which encouraged me to get serious about the game, but January 7^th, 2016, is the date inscribed in my memory as the day I really launched my bid to be a writer.

Maybe seven is the charm—they used to call it a magical number in the ancient world, and with the seventh year complete I have in some ways positioned myself for success to come. This is my annual review of progress/state of play post, and 2022 has been an interesting excursion in many ways.

Here's the raw data:

In the last seven years, I have made 2849 submissions (401 in the last 365 days). I have 196 placements (14.53:1submission/acceptance ratio, up from, 15.11:1 last year, which was am improvement on 16.008:1 the year before, indicating a steady positive decrease over time, regardless of all other factors). I currently have about 70 stories out, and my record is around 105-110, though to be fair there must have been a fair few multiple submissions and dead/in limbo subs among that lot. These figures also indicate 2583 rejections, giving a rejection/acceptance ratio of 13.178, also an improvement for the third year running (down from 13.52:1 in 2021, and 14.27:1 the previous year).

During the calendar year 2022, I made 368 submissions, scoring 32 placements (even with 2017 and 2020). This is an acceptance rate of 11.5%, down from 2021's 12.375%, but still well above 2020's 7.67%. Covid isolation has gone by (indeed, the world is behaving like the pandemic is over—funny, a hundred people are dying a month from this disease in my state alone, but, horrifyingly, society has normalised that), which might account for fewer people reading. But outlets continue to fold as well, reducing market breadth, though new magazines come along as brave publishers give it a go.

Average time between acceptances in Year Seven was up from last year's 9.125 days to 11.4 days, a sign of harder times all round. I've gone through dead patches so long I would be forgiven for wondering if I would ever see an acceptance again! But in real terms it's about the same as 2020's 11.7, which was an improvement over the previous year.

Professional placements, what are they? I don't believe I've had one in the last year...

On the face of it, productivity has been somewhat low, just 33 stories this year, totalling, however, 175, 871 words, a major jump on last year's 104, 309 words (and not far behind 2020's 186, 585). There are at this time two stories unfinished, straddling the New Year period, and it must be remembered in these totals that this year I have extended into novels, with over 50, 000 words of a near future SF project committed to digits, plus an entire mystery novel of 78, 500 words completed, edited and submitted in the same period—more about this in due course. Totalled up, this is around 400, 000 words of output in the past twelve months, which I'm pretty sure is the record for me.

I have 287 stories registered at Submission Grinder, and some 420 in my personal list (this includes work on pseudonyms).

As with last year, the standout in 2022 is again my success as a writer of Sherlock Holmes. I'm continuing to write (two new stories in prep at this time), and have appeared in seven Belanger anthologies to date, with acceptances for two more, and a second placement with Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine. Strand Magazine actually solicited a second story from me (still waiting to hear back about it), and I was recently invited to submit to the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories anthology series, a charity collection coming out around quarterly in support of the Undershaw School, for children with learning disabilities, run out of a house that once belonged to Conan Doyle. This is a great honour, the tables of contents of these anthologies are a who's who of major talents, and I could not be happier.

My Sherlock Holmes output for 2022 was 62, 392 words, not counting the two still in prep, and I may as well reveal that the 78, 500 word novel I completed during the year is also a Holmesian excursion. I expect to have good news about that one in due course.

My total accepted word count stands at about 987, 000 words—I really wanted to pass the million mark, and the 200th acceptance before the end of 2022, but the market seems sluggish at this time. Perhaps this is to be expected, in view of the cataract of crises pouring over the world these days, from floods to wars, and disease to monolithic corruption.

In terms of period mystery, The Inspector Trevelyan Mysteries is continuing to develop, about half a dozen stories so far, plus two Sherlock Holmes crossovers (they are contemporaries). I have high hopes of an anthology at some point, and very possibly a Trevelyan novel too.

Also during 2022, I was invited to write a jacket blurb for a horror collection, Howls from the Dark Ages, published by the Horror Obsessed Writing and Literature Society, a group in Centennial, Colorado. I did a most enjoyable online Q&A with their members in August, 2021, and was invited to submit to their disaster horror anthology, Howls from the Wreckage, due out soon.

On the table with Hiraeth Books are two anthologies, a full collection of my Lucinda Crane, Vampire/Hunter stories, and a volume of three novellas of historical fantasy—more about those when things mature.

That's where I stand at the end of Year Seven, on the brink of the two hundredth acceptance and the millionth word past the post, with a novel and single-author collections in progress. I hope one year from now I'm reporting some real developments on all fronts!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Header pic: Image by Nile from Pixabay.