short: this, the 666th post in this self-effacing puddle of wasted productivity, is not worth your time, unless you want to know why I won't be able to escape 2009 as anything other than a Unix administrator.
I had a meeting with my editor last week. She said that all of her clients are having difficulty getting anything published. Charlie, while not exactly suffering from a lack of irons in the fire , has complained repeatedly of late that it's very difficult to actually write something suitable given the dynamic nature of our times. It's almost as if we're marching towards the McKennian novelty singularity. It certainly seems the novelty is relentlessly increasing by the moment.
In a recent conversation with Toby Buckell , I was complaining about the paucity of new, good genre fiction being published, and that what is being published is pretty crummy. Mind you, I say this while my first publication is actually in publication, and I hold in my hands the followup to Cyteen, so my worldview may be somewhat limited.
But I'd also like to point out Jason Sizemore's Apex Books , which is fairly well the poster child of this phenomenon. Without Apex, a significant venue for authors on the fringes of fiction (no, we really don't need any more Tom Clancy Jr.'s, Stephen King & King Jr.'s, Elmore Leonards, Larell K. Hamiltons, and so on; there are plenty) is going to disappear. If you'd like a look at Jason's particular flavor of fiction, I'd have a look at The Dead and Metty Crawford. Now, Zombie Fiction is not really my cup of tea (although, admittedly, I do actually have a draft of a story involving the living dead, but it's hardly in-genre – it's a romance), but if you read the headline of Apex Books' site, Where Science Fiction and Horror Collide, you can see why I'd be concerned.
I've complained in the past that I am unfairly classified into either "horror" or "science fiction," and if there's a penis or a nipple involved anywhere, that it's also erotica or, heaven help me, pornography (If only I could just write pornography and be done with it! Somehow, I'm not satisfied with traditional sex-and-gender roles and simple semen-goes-everywhere scenes. I want to explore nuances that pornography just doesn't cover, and maybe I'm the only one who finds semen-as-grey-goo interesting). What happens, then, when publications like Apex close their doors, Duotrope and Ralan are full of "closed markets," and we, authors, are greeted with announcements like "henceforth publication of works shall be considered payment in itself for license to use said works." (Do I really want to be published so badly that I'll give my work away simply to see it on paper?)
Toby's reply was that I should just look for more stable markets, and come up with a metric for judging stable or reputable. The only one within easy grasp is payment. If we put the minimum at $.05 a word, which is pretty low, considering Gupta worked out to 3,000 words and Tissue just another 3,000 words. For the 6,000 words aggregate, I could possibly profit $300, which is generally speaking, less than I make in a day (although admittedly at a job I loathe). And, at $.05 a word, I close off a lot of markets like the very market that published both stories. It is important to mention this because one of those stories was in fact published in the same issue as the above-mentioned Metty Crawford. So it would seem that the markets I watch, and the markets to which I hope to submit my work, are drying up, becoming unusable as that escape from day-to-day drudgery of being Your Unix Janitor, or are narrowing so tightly as to be palatable to everyone while pleasing, uh, people other than me, and of course not being appropriate venues for my work.
It would seem the juxtaposition of my work with Mr. Sizemore's would indicate that my work is not necessarily unpublishable or unpalatable, but then other authors are making money, and I'm sitting on the sidelines, griping.
Sadly, if I had the money to give Apex, it would probably have been gained by being published by somebody like Asimov's or Analog, neither of which would actually publish something I would give to Apex.
I realize I haven't made much of a point here except to complain that people aren't supporting publishers like Apex (including myself!) despite the fact that it is a necessary resource for authors who are pushing the envelope of comfortable science fiction (and horror, and erotica, and pornography, good grief), or indeed fiction itself. Because of this, authors (including myself!) are struggling to make a living writing, and their only recourse is to write and publish middling, (to borrow the McKenna adjective) habitual fiction which only exacerbates the problem of most contemporary fiction being dull and uninspired while tolerating only the smallest degrees of cross-genre, non-genre, and I suppose I could say even offensive deviations from the norm.
I would say, "give Apex some money!", but what I really wish people would do is just read more. I think even publishers have lost hope that people will buy more books. Their only bet is to publish the most mundane, available work they can, in the hopes that everyone with an IQ of 101 can read and appreciate it.
