SALE to Realms of Fantasy!!!
Just got word from Shawna McCarthy that she will be buying my historical fantasy (S&S inspired) novelette “The Fortuitous Meeting of Gerard Van Oost and Oludara” for Realms of Fantasy!
slushmaster just put up a post about it here.
And congrats to good friend tlmorganfield who sold one in the same batch!
As we used to say back in Texas - YEEEE-HAAAAW!
I’m very thankful to have had some great writing success this year, and it just keeps getting better. Having a story appear in Realms of Fantasy will be a dream come true. Not only is RoF my favorite magazine, this is my first SFWA-qualifying sale. This is the culmination of four years of learning, writing, critiquing, revising, researching, submitting, and workshopping.
And a lot of thanks are in order for this particular sale. Since short fiction doesn’t allow a lot of opportunities to thank people, I’m going to do that here.
First off, to Douglas Cohen, the famous slushmaster, for discovering this story in the (quite large) RoF slushpile. I will forever be one of his “slush survivors”--and proud of it!
Next, to Shawna, for buying a magazine length-limit novelette from an unknown like me. And for running a great magazine like RoF in the first place. Not only do they publish many of my favorite authors, the art is gorgeous (I can't wait to see the story illustration!), the non-fiction interesting, and it's also the only magazine where I can read about fantasy fiction AND video games in the same place! :)
This story passed through three rounds of critiquing along the way. And since I never throw out a critique, I still have all of the names to share here.
First, I sent the raw story to Critters and got it cleaned up enough to submit to Viable Paradise. At Critters, I received crits from longtime friends Aliette de Bodard and Tony Pi, from the always-consistent Bill Siderski, and a host of others including Christine L. Golden, Daniel Barrett, Brian Clarke, Ron Hurst, Scott MacHaffie, Crystalwizard, and Gail Torgerson. Andrea M. Henry gave me a particularly excellent critique, and Benjamin Hall's critique was so glowing it made me blush! These longer stories are often bypassed, so I was pleased to get that many.
Second, it got critiqued at VP itself. My critiquers included Debra Doyle, Steven Gould, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Benjamin Biggs, Eric Griffith, Heather McDougal, Leonard Richardson, Pat Scaramuzza, and Amy Stapleton.
And an extra big thanks to Cory Doctorow. Cory not only told me he loved the story, he grokked the entire context of what I wanted to do (above and beyond this one story) without any prompting from me. He also gave me a spot-on list of things to change that had a major effect on the story from that point on. Absolutely amazing.
So after I integrated the VP feedback, I sent it for a final cleanup pass to Zoetrope, where it was reviewed by another longtime friend Russell Bittner, and also Marie Shield, Lesley C. Weston, Henry Otis Clarke, and Clark G. Solomon. This is a very non-speculative fiction bunch.
I think having critiquers from three different backgrounds really made this an accessible, polished piece.
If any of you are reading this, THANK YOU ALL so much for your critiques!
Whew! I probably won’t write up a list like that again any time soon. But, this sale is worth it.
Out of all the thirty-plus stories I’ve written, this one is my favorite, so that makes it extra-special that it found a good home. Since RoF is my favorite magazine, I don't see how I could have found a better one.
And, to close this most excessive of posts, I wanted to finish with a couple of personal tidbits. I read some twenty books to research this story, all of them in Portuguese, and a good portion of those were sixteenth-century primary sources. I put my heart and soul into this one, and fell in love with the protagonist duo along the way.
So that's a warning, you can expect to see a lot more of them in the future. :)
It just doesn’t get much better than that!
And with that, I'm off to celebrate!