Yesterday I received my ISSN number from the government for my magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies.  Of course I’ve been operating for six months already and publishing for three. I’ve gotten reviews in The Internet Review of Science Fiction and Locus, and last week I learned all about nominating for the Hugo Awards. But somehow getting that official label from the FCC made it all seem a bit more real.  Pretty cool.

In the January episode of the Odyssey Writing Workshop podcasts (I’m the Odyssey alum who who edits those podcasts from tapes of workshop lectures), award-winning author Nancy Kress, who’s written three brilliant how-to books on writing fiction, has a neat comment about dialog. She says that her stories did not sell until she started making dialog the heart of all her scenes–at least the scenes where characters were together and interacting.

Which is a really neat idea. Dialog is how real people interact, often with all sorts of layered subtext masking their true emotions. Dialog type and style also show a lot about characters’ backgrounds and attitudes. As Kress points out, dialog was the original element in all written fiction because all fiction used to be drama, stage plays, which are almost all dialog.

On New Year’s Eve, I went to see a regional production of Twelfth Night. I’ve read the play twice and have seen it produced many times over the years, but halfway through, I started thinking about Kress’s idea. The minor character of Fabian lounged silently through his entire first scene, seemingly unnecessary as Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek riposted back and forth. But Fabian had an important role in the next act helping Sir Toby develop his plan to embarrass Malvolio, through dialog.

The dialog let them settle on the details of their scheme, while also explaining it clearly to the audience. If it had been a prose narrative, all that information could’ve been communicated through internal monologue, but it wouldn’t have been near as interesting–or as dramatic. Fabian may have been window-dressing earlier, and several other characters were too at other points in the play, but he was indispensible there as a dialog foil.

So I got to thinking about Kress’s idea all over again. My stories come the most alive when there are multiple characters interacting, which I usually do through dialog. But other long stretches feature my protagonists alone. Perhaps I need to add more secondary characters, more Fabians, around them to get dramatization through dialog at the heart of my scenes.

My fiction submission stats for 2008:

46 submissions (all short fiction; two more than 2007)
47 rejections (seven more more than 2007)
1 story under extended consideration
2 contracts offered
1 contract accepted
1 story published

It was another interesting yet trying year. I continued to get passed up to head editors at pro mags, about half the time, and I continued to get a lot of “almost” rejections from editors at semi-pro mags. Which is good, but I’d rather at least be getting those “almost” rejections from the head editors at the pro mags, if not of course actually selling some stories. I’m still not consistently able to lure editors into my dense stories of round characters and lush settings.

In my stats post last year, I mentioned two stories in unresolved submissions situations and my hope that at least one of those would result in a sale. Neither did, which was very disappointing. This year, a different near-miss situation resulted in another story remaining under extended consideration. I should hear back on that in a month or so, and I’m hopeful on that one too.

Like last year, I had a contract offered that was soon rescinded, but in this case I was the one who passed. It was from an award-nominated semi-pro venue, but the editor had just that week made offensive public comments, including some directly to or about two excellent young writers who I know and admire. I wanted to sell that story worse than I can put into words, but after what the editor had done to those two people I greatly respect, I just couldn’t accept the contract. The story is still on the submission carousel and I hope it will eventually sell.

I did make one sale this year, after a seventeen-month dry spell. That was a great relief, and I’m delighted to find a great home for a very good story that had been misunderstood by editors at several top markets. And an exciting, up-and-coming home it is–Space and Time magazine. I’m very much looking forward to seeing that one published.

My story in Weird Tales last January didn’t seem to catch much attention from bloggers or SF/F review sites, so unfortunately there hasn’t been any coattail effect from it. Perhaps I can improve on that when my story in Space and Time comes out.

Overall, this year was similar to last year, which suggests I didn’t make a significant leap in the quality of my fiction. Or that my particular brand of character-driven secondary-world short fantasy isn’t a priority right now for the major markets. Or most likely, a combination of both. In last year’s post I mentioned I was working on specific strategies to improve a major element in my fiction. That effort is ongoing, and I am making progress. The coming year will show whether it improves my submissions results.

The Washington Post Book World had two interesting articles last Sunday, both of which taken together show two different data points on the ever-changing landscape of modern commerical publishing.

An essay about the recent funeral of legendary publisher Robert Giroux, of Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, used the retrospective of his long literary career buying such seminal 20th-century works as The Catcher in the Rye to comment on the very different and currently shifting nature of commercial publishing. The essay was more geared toward mainstream literary fiction rather than any specific genre, but its overall mood seems quite reflective of the current times.

And a column by Michael Dirda, noted reviewer of SF/F and a Guest of Honor at Capclave 2008, listed many of the best and brightest among the small presses that have emerged in the last decade. Most of those on his list are SF/F presses like Wildside and Night Shade–I don’t know if that’s because Dirda, with his SF/F reading experience, is more familiar with SF/F small presses or if it’s because there are more small presses in SF/F than in other genres.

The small press movement is very important to me because they publish far more short fiction than the larger publishers–not only anthologies and collections but many magazines–and also because this year I joined their ranks in my own small way by starting a magazine.

It will be fascinating to see where things go from here, especially in the world of short fiction. If Clarkesworld Magazine and its clever publisher Neil Clarke are any indication, audio short fiction may be one of the new frontiers.