Sure seems like Shimmer's getting a lot of selkie stories lately. What's up with that? I read three just this afternoon, and I spotted a few others in our slush pile (they were assigned to other editors). Getting that many stories of one type makes it tougher for any of them to succeed with us - even the most genius selkie story tends to seem tired when it's the fifth one you've read in a few days. I'm not saying I'm anti-selkie - just a little weary.
And even if I were anti-selkie, that wouldn't mean much. I was and remain firmly anti-gnome - yet we published Michael Livingston's "Gnome Season" in Issue 4 (this would be a fine time to buy an electronic copy of that issue, don't you think?).
So is there a moral here? I guess so, but it's a weak and slippery one. Don't submit stories that are similar to dozens of other stories in the editor's pile. How are you supposed to know what's in the editor's pile? You can't. You can, though, read widely in the field and get a sense of what's been done already, and what's fresh ground. How are you supposed to know what an editor's getting tired of? You can't, beyond the standard lists of What's Tired (for example, Strange Horizons has a fine list) and the occasional editorial blog post.
But what makes this such a treacherous moral is that there are always exceptions - even vehemently anti-gnome editors run gnome stories once in a while. It happens.
So I'll let you all draw your own conclusions about what to do with your selkie stories.
Mostly, I'm curious about why there are so many selkie stories in my slush pile right now. Was there a selkie anthology that recently closed to submissions? Did the Association for Selkie Pride start a grassroots campaign to raise awareness for selkie-Americans? Or is it just one of those random things, like the month back in the fall of 2005 when I kept getting nun stories?
Now all I need is a selkie-nun crossover story. C'mon, who's game?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Really? You got a slew of nun stories in autumn 2005? I remember the horde of phallic-inspired stories, the abundance of reworked fairy tales, the plehtora of stories about ghosts and dead people, but I never got any nun stories. I feel cheated.
The selkie thing is my fault. I am telepathically instructing every writer in the world to create and submit those so that my stories about male-to-female transsexual superheroes battling rabid vegetarian PETA mutant-activists in London's Underground will seem like a breath of fresh air to editors.
I think you need a nun-selkie story where the nun shaves her head as part of the strange and eerie doin's. I'm not sure what effect this would have on the selkie side of things though.
Hmm, maybe not so good.
Never mind...
So are you saying you are inundated with lots of gnome stories? I find that really hard to believe. Stories about true liberation are hard to come by...
lol I could give you another totaly differnt kind of Selkie how about a company that uses it as there name and has some increadable art work :) take a look at the artwork at http://www.selkierescue.com/data-rescue-software.php that is one good looking Selkie
I've been trying to write a nun/selkie slash story for you, but I just can't seem to force the words out. Rather it is as if the words have forseen the fate I have in store for them, and have run off screaming in the opposite direction.
Probably just as well. All I've been able to put to paper is the first line; "Dear Penthouse Letters - I never thought it would happen to me, a middle-aged nun from Western Kansas, but it did..."
Post a Comment