The Rumpelstiltskin Retellings at Expanded Horizons...
... is a story with a past.
I wrote it years ago, inspired actually by the oratorio form.
The internet had just been made accessible to the public at large, and the main public forum was Usenet. (It still exists, incidentally, but most groups are so spam-filled that they're unusable.) I converted the 'oratorio' into a usenet format, and sent the story out. I wasn't living in the US, there were no electronic submissions those days, and no online zines. Sending stuff out was difficult. The story came back and sat around. Every so often, I took it out, and revised it. When Andrew Burt started Critters, I joined, and other members (including yhlee ) gave me some very encouraging feedback. That was in 1998.
Eventually, the world changed. Blogging arrived, and was clearly an even more suitable frame for the story than Usenet. The story morphed into "The Rumpelstiltskin Retellings: A Series of Poetic Blogs."
I ran it by my critique group. One of the members was my Clarion classmate, Justin Whitney, who said "That would make a great short film!" I thought it was just a comment, but a few days later, he asked for permission to try. When he showed me the script he'd written, I was delighted. Meanwhile, the story was accepted by Les Bonnes Fees (LBF), an online fairy-tale magazine.
Things happened. The editor of LBF was expecting a baby, and the magazine went into hiatus. All the planned time-lines got pushed out. Justin left San Francisco. I thought the story was buried, both as text and as video.
It was when Justin sent me an e-mail saying the film would be showing at the Scary Cow film event that I realized he had actually completed it. I promptly bought tickets, informed people who I knew might be interested, and e-mailed LBF. I was hoping to co-ordinate the release of the story with the film, but it was not going to happen.
The 10-minute film, Rumpled, was awesome. And when, a few days later, it became available on internet and people asked me where they could read the original story, I really wanted to have the story out there. Rather reluctantly, I withdrew it from LBF (which at this writing is still on hiatus, the editors now being new parents), and offered it to Expanded Horizons, which snapped it up.
Expanded Horizons has perhaps the most author-friendly contract I've encountered. The only rights they buy are the right to put your story on their website. They are okay with reprints and simultaneous submissions. They pay promptly.
And they publish promptly, too. Here is the story in the Expanded Horizons magazine.
I wrote it years ago, inspired actually by the oratorio form.
The internet had just been made accessible to the public at large, and the main public forum was Usenet. (It still exists, incidentally, but most groups are so spam-filled that they're unusable.) I converted the 'oratorio' into a usenet format, and sent the story out. I wasn't living in the US, there were no electronic submissions those days, and no online zines. Sending stuff out was difficult. The story came back and sat around. Every so often, I took it out, and revised it. When Andrew Burt started Critters, I joined, and other members (including yhlee ) gave me some very encouraging feedback. That was in 1998.
Eventually, the world changed. Blogging arrived, and was clearly an even more suitable frame for the story than Usenet. The story morphed into "The Rumpelstiltskin Retellings: A Series of Poetic Blogs."
I ran it by my critique group. One of the members was my Clarion classmate, Justin Whitney, who said "That would make a great short film!" I thought it was just a comment, but a few days later, he asked for permission to try. When he showed me the script he'd written, I was delighted. Meanwhile, the story was accepted by Les Bonnes Fees (LBF), an online fairy-tale magazine.
Things happened. The editor of LBF was expecting a baby, and the magazine went into hiatus. All the planned time-lines got pushed out. Justin left San Francisco. I thought the story was buried, both as text and as video.
It was when Justin sent me an e-mail saying the film would be showing at the Scary Cow film event that I realized he had actually completed it. I promptly bought tickets, informed people who I knew might be interested, and e-mailed LBF. I was hoping to co-ordinate the release of the story with the film, but it was not going to happen.
The 10-minute film, Rumpled, was awesome. And when, a few days later, it became available on internet and people asked me where they could read the original story, I really wanted to have the story out there. Rather reluctantly, I withdrew it from LBF (which at this writing is still on hiatus, the editors now being new parents), and offered it to Expanded Horizons, which snapped it up.
Expanded Horizons has perhaps the most author-friendly contract I've encountered. The only rights they buy are the right to put your story on their website. They are okay with reprints and simultaneous submissions. They pay promptly.
And they publish promptly, too. Here is the story in the Expanded Horizons magazine.