It's up!

Already!
Check it out: http://www.flashfictiononline.com/

Happy New Year, y'all.

Sale to Flash Fiction Online

I've gotten word that my story "The Human Clockwork" will appear in the January Flash Fiction Online, a new pro-paying flash market. I'm really fond of this story, but it's been tricky to place it; I'm thrilled to have it go to a good home.

Slowly easing myself back into being productive after the holidays. Last night we thoroughly cleaned the office, which was dusty and full of crap; today we tackled the rest of the house. It's been a few weeks since we cleaned, and while it was a lot of work today, it is lovely to have the house back in shape, and makes me feel much more willing to take on the rest of my life!

Sean made salt bagels this morning. They were really good, and I think we have a lot more homemade bagels looming in our future.

The Holiday Report

We had a lovely lazy weekend, and it's been really hard for me to get back into being productive; I just want to laze around for a few more days.

The best present: Sean convinced some of my favorite writer friends to write short stories about birds. Then, he had his second grade class draw a bunch of bird pictures to illustrate the stories - and put it all together into a charming little book. The authors, so you can be totally jealous: Amal El-Mohtar, Ken Scholes, Joy Marchand, Sean Markey, Sara Genge, Ken Rand, Christie Skipper Ritchotte, and Michael Livingston. Thanks to everyone who contributed!

High tea at the Beehive Tea Room, many inches of snow on Christmas Eve, a gorgeous quillwork cardinal from my parents, and lots and lots of time just napping.

How were your holidays?

Happy Holidays from Shimmer!

Stop by the Shimmer site and read our free holiday story: What Child is This I Asked the Midnight Clear, by Ken Scholes.

I hope everyone's having a delightful holiday season!

Recent Acquisitions

Had a busy day of accepting the other day!

In 2008, look for new fiction by:

Becca De La Rosa: Becca's had stories in Strange Horizons, LCRW, Ideomancer, and other fabulous places.

Jessica Wick - Jess is an editor at Goblin Fruit; this is her first appearance with us.

And welcome back to two authors who appeared in our Autumn 2006 issue:

Nir Yaniv - his first story with us, A Wizard On the Road, got an honorable mention in the Datlow/Link Year's Best!

Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Her first story with us was King of Sand and Stormy Seas. Look for her other stories in Fantasy, Reflection's Edge, and upcoming in Coyote Wild.

Shimmer Subscription Drive

And now it's Shimmer's turn to have a subscription drive.

From now until January 10, anyone who subscribes (or renews!) will get a special limited-edition chapbook of "What Child Is This I Ask The Midnight Clear," by Ken Scholes. We're raising our prices in January, so this is your last chance to subscribe at the current rate.

Won't you consider subscribing today?

The Clockwork Jungle Book

Shimmer is pleased to announce the Clockwork Jungle Book: a special double-length issue of steampunk animal parables, guest-edited by George Mann of Solaris Books. It's scheduled for release in Autumn 2008 - and we're now open for submissions. (And yes, we'll continue reading stories for our regular issues.) Check out the guidelines, and then send us your most fantastic steampunk animal tales.

Fingers crossed for a terrific evil robot monkey story! I can't wait to start reading the submissions.

John Joseph Adams did such a great job with guest-editing the Pirate issue (thanks, John!); we were really interested in exploring another guest edited issue. I learned so much by turning over the reins to Cap'n Adams. Really looking forward to the opportunities this project will present!

Ahoy! Another Pirate Review

Grasping for the Wind has a detailed review of the Pirate issue.

These ten stories and 1 interview are well written, and were good choices
for a speculative fiction magazine’s issue on pirates. The fantasy, horror
and/or sci-fi elements were neatly incorporated into the pirate stories.

Read the whole thing for details.

An Aurealis Finalist!

Angela Slatter's "The Angel Wood," published in Shimmer's Autumn 2006 issue, has made the short list for the Aurealis Award! The winner will be announced January 26, 2008; fingers crossed!

Congrats, Angela!

Two Acquisitions

Over the weekend, we purchased two stories:

"What to Do with the Dead," by Claude Lalumière
"One for Sorrow," by Shweta Narayan

I'm so pleased.

In other news, the second printing of Shimmer's pirate issue has arrived, and copies will go out in the next day or two. Some people have been very patient . . . but your wait is nearly over.

The Finish Line!

Yesterday, I woke up with a cold and took the day off from work. I sneezed and coughed my way to 50,000 words for nano (finishing with half an hour to spare!) and got a bunch of Shimmer work done, as well.

Today was going to be a relaxing day off - I had nothing more planned than a nap. But I've found myself doing dozens of tiny domestic and administrative tasks - none very important, but getting a big stack of them done is satisfying, and clears the decks for getting down to more important work in the next day or so.

I still have another 50,000 words or so to do on the novel. My plan is to work in 20-minute sprints - they were very effective during Nano, and I see no reason to change now. So every day (except Saturdays) I'll do one sprint with Skipper and/or Sean. And I suspect there will be plenty of days when I'll just keep rolling - but my target is to do some writing just about every day.

New way to procrastinate: I'm volunteering at Distributed Proofreaders - which proofs scanned text for Project Gutenberg. They have a wide variety of texts to proof - right now I'm poking at a book called "Christian Phrenology," which is pretty fascinating.

And if you would like to see lots of pictures of our snowy world, check out Sean's blog.

Ahoy! Pirate Reviews!

Check out what Sam Tomino of SF Review has to say about the Pirate Issue.

I'm sick of pirates. I was never a big fan of them and this wave of pirate stuff in pop culture has not endeared them to me. When I saw that the Shimmer Vol. 2, Issue 3 was "The Pirate Issue", I groaned. What would I encounter here? I needn't have worried. I enjoyed all the stories.

The MSS Shimmer: Converting the pirate-haters, one reader at a time! Thanks, Sam!

And Cap'n Adams has a swell reader review on his blog:

Finished reading the issue […] this weekend…really enjoyed it! Overall, the presentation was excellent, and your brief intro set the tone perfectly. I liked how there was a wide range of stories, touching on different aspects of the appeal of the pirate and the various forms of piracy.

I think it’s a great idea for a little magazine to do a special issue like this. I would like to see more small press magazines doing it. The focus on one theme/topic seems much more interesting than a magazine of general spec fic stories. It felt more like an anthology, but at an affordable price.

She goes on to offer capsule reviews of each story.

Looking forward to hearing what more of our readers think. Speak up!

Another lesson learned . . .

This one's about backstory.

Writing a choose your own adventure novel gives me the opportunity to give my heroine a different backstory in each thread. The basic backstory is that she was raised in Africa on a chimpanzee refuge, but fled at age 15; our story starts 15 years later. The reason she fled can totally change, though, which is fun. So far I've had her flee a homicidal insane father, and flee to establish her independence from her radical chimp activist parents, and there will be several other reasons, too.

So it's fun to consider radically different backstory possibilities, and see the impact of motivations (she fled b/c of fear) vs the primary facts (she started a new life as a private investigator).

But the main thing about backstory? Most of the threads don't need it at all, beyond brief references to the basic facts. I've been avoiding backstory in a lot of threads because it just adds to the complexity (is it this thread where she killed her mother? or was she kidnapped by the religious cult in this one?) - so I've only gone into the deep backstory when it's absolutely necessary. And 90% of the time, it is not necessary. People want to read story, not backstory.

Just two things to keep in mind when you're launching into a 5,000 word flashback about your heroine's childhood - consider a bunch of backstories before settling on the best one; and whenever possible, just skip the backstory altogether.

About 3k words to go on the nano novel, and then I'll be an official winner.

Nanowrimo 2007

So I'm about 35,000 words into my nano novel, and it's going really well. This is my seventh time (hit 50k four of those times, and surely will this time, too), and I'm really pleased with it. It's just falling into place, without the glaring structural problems I've had in previous attempts. I've learned a ton from all the other ones, and it's always worth doing, for me - but this time it's just working; I think I'm actually going to have something worth editing once this is all over.

It's a choose your own adventure novel, which is a crapload of fun. The format presents its own challenges - it's tricky to work in all the information I need in all the various downstream scenes, and tricky to keep everything straight (did I maim the antagonist in this thread? or was it the other one?). But it's fun to see how my protagonist's choices play out, and liberating to be able to just kill her off whenever I want.

It also forces me to have a very active protagonist. Something *has* to happen in every scene - no sitting around navel-gazing, no long pointless scenes that go nowhere. Every scene *has* to lead to others. She *has* to choose something in every scene - things can't just happen while she reacts. And the choices have to be significant enough, and distinctive enough, to spawn different threads that can carry their own weight. A lot of times I've thought, let's have her do A or B, only to realize that B is a really boring choice, or too similar to something I've already done - so I've had to rethink things to consistently make the choices more significant.

And that's a good thing - who wants to read about a character who never does anything, never makes any real choices, never has to deal with the consequences of her actions? I hope I'll be able to remember this lesson next time I'm writing a regular story.

Tools of the trade:

I'm mapping out the options with bubbl.us, a free online mind-mapping application. It's very simple and easy to use, and when you delete a bubble, there's a little explosion, which I like, because I am three.

I'm writing in yWriter, which lets me work on each scene as an individual unit - this would be a nightmare in a single text document, or even a collection of them. yWriter keeps it all together for me.

And I'm listening to Pandora.

Happy Halloween from Shimmer!

As a special Halloween treat, we're delighted to present a brand-new story from Vylar Kaftan, free and online. Grab some candy and settle in to read Something Wicked This Way Comes today.

Congrats to Ken Scholes!

He's just sold his first novel (and 4 sequels!) to Tor. It's a really good novel, and Ken's a really great guy. Huzzah!

http://kenscholes.livejournal.com/31745.html for details.

The Pirate Keyboard

Avast! Check out this fine piratical keyboard.

(Thanks to Mike Munsil for drawing it to my attention!)

More Year's Best Honorable Mentions

Woo-hoo! There are more! Here's the full list:

Aliette de Bodard, "Through the Obsidian Gates," autumn
Samantha Henderson, "Route Nine," winter
Matthew Mantooth, "Litany," spring
Tom Pendergrass, "Sell Your Soul to the Devil Blues," winter
Angela Slatter, "Bluebeard," summer
Angela Slatter, "The Angel Wood," autumn
Angela Slatter, "The Little Match Girl," spring
Nir Yaniv (translated by Lavie Tidhar), "A Wizard on the Road," autumn


And my story, "The Minotaur's Rabbit," published in Apex #7, made the list, too! What a lovely surprise.

In further "today's been a great day" developments, we got Shimmer's pirate issue off to the printers today.

I also went to my first yoga class in months; it was great (though very challenging in spots!). Aha, I thought after the class, I am full of energy - so THAT'S how I used to get stuff done, before I got distracted by other things and got way behind. Clearly I need to find a way to work yoga back into the schedule.

Aliette de Bodard's Honorable Mention

Aliette reports that her story, Through the Obsidian Gates, received an Honorable Mention in the Datlow/Link/Grant Year's Best! Her story appeared in our Autumn 2006 issue. (We've still got a few copies left - if you want one, snag it on our Back Issues page.)

I think Obsidian Gates was the first Aliette story I read, back before Shimmer ever existed. I was really glad to see the story show up in my slush pile one day (and Aliette was a delight to work with through the revisions!). It makes me very happy to see this story get some recognition.

Congrats, Aliette!

Day Three. . .

So I'm on Day Three of being sick. I'm exhausted, my brain is full of pudding, I'm achey, and my throat is raspy. I spend most of my time reading or napping or just sitting stupidly and watching TV.

I think it's the pudding-head that bothers me the most. I'm happy to spend the weekend curled up in bed with a book - I just wish I had the brains available to enjoy it.