Tag Archives: S.C. Butler

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, editing, Writing, Zombies Need Brains

Monday Musings: A New Anthology and Submission Advice For Writers

By now you might have seen the posts across several social media platforms: There is a new Zombies Need Brains Kickstarter campaign underway. For eleven years now, ZNB has been publishing quality short fiction from teams of established professionals and new voices found through open calls for stories. We’re doing three anthologies this year, and before I get to the advice part of the post, I wanted to take a bit of time to tell you about them.ZNB Kickstarter image

The first anthology is Were- 2, and is edited by Joshua Palmatier and S.C. Butler. The original Were- anthology came out in 2016, and featured stories about were-creatures other than werewolves. This new anthology has a similar theme. I wrote a story for Were-, one I still love, called “A Party For Bailey.” For my were-creatures I chose bears, and that’s all I’ll say. I’m sure you’ll love Were- 2 — its anchor authors include Randee Dawn, Auston Habershaw, Gini Koch, Gail Z. Martin and Larry N. Martin, Harry Turtledove, Tim Waggoner, and Jean Marie Ward.

This year’s second anthology is Skull X Bones. It’s a pirate anthology that I will be co-editing with Joshua. We will be looking for speculative fiction stories of any sort (fantasy, paranormal, science fiction, horror), as long as they focus on pirates. Our anchor author lineup includes Rod Belcher, Alex Bledsoe, Jennifer Brozek, C.C. Finlay, Violette Malan, Misty Massey, and Alan Smale.

Finally, Joshua will be solo editing a follow up to the Ampyrium anthology that was published earlier this summer. Ampyrium is a shared fantasy world that debuted in seven novella-length stories written by Patricia Bray, S.C. Butler, Esther M. Friesner, Juliet E. McKenna, Jason Palmatier, Joshua Palmatier, and me. The new anthology, Ampyrium: Merchant War, will have anchor stories from all seven of us, plus another seven stories (or so) from an open call.

So, as a long-time ZNB editor (Skull X Bones will be my sixth ZNB anthology), and a longer-term ZNB author (in addition to those I have edited, I have written for a half dozen ZNB anthologies), what advice can I offer to writers hoping to sell stories to one collection or another? Each ZNB anthology receives literally hundreds of open call submissions. Usually we take seven or eight stories. So you want your story to stand out in good ways.

1) Pay close attention to the anthology themes. When we ask for stories written, say, about pirates, that doesn’t mean the story should merely mention pirates or have one corsair as a background character. It means pirates, of whatever sort, should be so central to the story that without them, the narrative does not exist. For an anthology like Ampyrium: Merchant War, you should probably plan to read some or all of the first anthology, to familiarize yourself with the setting and the themes of those original tales. Speaking as an editor, I can tell you that I reject more stories for not being on theme than for any other reason.

2) Read the submission guidelines. This is important for ANYTHING you submit to any market. All editors are swamped with stories and short on time. We want to find great stories, obviously, but we also want to get through our slush piles. When I get a story that’s written in a tiny font, or that is single-spaced (which makes a story MUCH harder to read), or has wonky margins, or a weird font color, I tend to start reading it with a negative attitude. The writer in question has already ticked me off by ignoring the guidelines, and now I’m looking for one more reason to reject the story and move on to the next one.

You don’t want that. You want to do everything right in terms of formatting and following directions, so that I read the story with an open mind, so that I accept or reject the story purely based on the quality of the writing and narrative elements. Follow. The. Guidelines.

3) Proof your story. Then proof your story. And then proof your story again. Look, typos happen. All of us who edit for ZNB are also professional writers. We all have typos in our own books and stories, and chances are we could read through them 100 times and still not catch every little error. But that said, again speaking as an editor, finding two or three typos on the very first page is much like receiving a story that didn’t follow the GLs (see above). It makes me wonder if the author of the story cared enough to edit. Taking pride in our work means, in part, making our manuscripts as clean as possible.

4) Think about your narrative — and how it relates to the theme — as broadly as possible. Joshua has said, in offering advice on panels, “Your first idea is not necessarily your best idea.” And he’s right. Sometimes, a great idea comes to us immediately. Those moments are magical, but relatively uncommon. More often, our first idea is the most obvious one, which can mean that it will be similar to the ideas of lots of other writers submitting to the anthology. Let your ideas for your story steep a bit. Give them time to take you in truly innovative directions.

5) Develop your ideas. My second most common reason for rejecting a story is that the idea of the narrative failed to move beyond just that: an idea. A story is more than a cool premise. A story is about characters, be they human or fantastical or alien. A story brings some sort of change or progress to the lives of those characters or to the world around them. If your synopsis of the story you’re submitting doesn’t include something about characters, their lives, and the way things change for them, chances are you need to rethink your story. And I would add this — generally speaking, if the word count of your story is under 2,500, it probably needs more development. We rarely take stories that are shorter than that, not because we want you to pad your word count, but rather because it takes time to develop a plot into something more than an idea.

The open call for stories for this year’s ZNB anthologies will begin soon after the Kickstarter ends. So, first things first: We have to fund the projects. We are already a quarter of the way to our goal, which is great. But we still have a long way to go, and we need your help!!

Thanks, and have a great week!

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, editing, Writing, Zombies Need Brains

Professional Wednesday: Writing For a Themed Anthology . . . And My Story Idea Revealed!

With the Zombies Need Brains Kickstarter well underway, and our pledges slowly creeping up on our ambitious funding goal (four anthologies instead of three this year, to mark ZNB’s 10th anniversary!), it is time for my yearly “Writing For a Themed Anthology” post. This post, though, has a bit of a twist, which I’ll share with you at the end of the essay.

This year, I am hoping (Kickstarter gods allowing) to co-edit Artifice and Craft, with my dear friend, Edmund R. Schubert. Edmund is an experienced editor, a fantastic writer, and one of my very favorite people in the world. He and I have been friends for a long, long time, and have worked together on many projects. He edited and contributed to How To Write Magical Words, the book on writing I co-wrote with A.J. Hartley, Faith Hunter, Stuart Jaffe, Misty Massey, and C.E. Murphy. He also edited a couple of my short stories when he was lead editor of the Intergalactic Medicine Show. And I edited a story of his for Temporally Deactivated. We have, however, never co-edited before this. I’m excited.

GALACTIC STEW, edited by David B. Coe and Joshua PalmatierThis will be the fifth anthology I have edited for ZNB (after Temporally Deactivated, Galactic Stew, Derelict, and Noir). For each of them, we have had literally hundreds of submissions for about seven open slots. Getting a story into these anthologies is really hard. We editors have the luxury of being highly selective, because we have so many stories from which to choose.

I have found that no matter the theme, there are recurring categories of stories my co-editors and I tend to reject. The first category is fairly obvious, and encompasses the vast majority of rejections: Some stories just don’t work for one of several reasons. The writing might be too rough, the prose unclear and inelegant; the plot might be too hard to follow (or even indecipherable); or the character development might be weak. Put another way, some stories simply aren’t ready for publication. This is fairly self-evident. When reading slush, we expect to encounter a lot of stories that need too much work to be up to standard.

But then there are two other categories that are far more important for our discussion today.

A) Some stories we get are beautifully written and have really fine core ideas. But they fail to move beyond their conceptual strengths and delve into the emotional and narrative potential of those ideas. I can’t tell you how often we read stories like these, and it’s deeply frustrating. Yes, a themed anthology demands stories that have strong conceptual underpinnings. But the idea is only as good as the story it inspires. It’s not enough to show us the great idea. Authors need to develop those ideas, to give them meaning by building compelling characters and creating tension and suspense and all the other emotions that come through in effective storytelling. So if you submit a story, make sure you give us more than an idea. Give us a fully realized story.

B) Some stories we get are brilliantly written AND developed beyond the conceptual to dive into emotion and character arc and all the rest. But they’re not on theme. This year’s theme for our anthology, Artifice and Craft, is pretty simple. The story needs to have at its core some piece of art that has magical or supernatural qualities. It can be any kind of art, from a painting or sculpture, to a theatrical production or musical composition, to a piece of fine furniture or a piece of short fiction. It’s not enough to have the work of art in the story. It needs to be central to the plot, so that if the work of art were taken out, the entire story would collapse. We will make this clear in the call for submissions. And yet, I can guarantee you that we will receive dozens of stories that aren’t at all on theme, or that, for instance, feature a magical artist who creates great art (which is NOT on theme) or that mention a magical novel, but focus on a scheme to steal the book, rather than on the book itself. (Again, that is NOT on theme, because you could replace the book with, say, a diamond, and you’d have the same basic story.)

So make certain you are following the theme as it is described in the guidelines. Make sure you are doing more than just jotting down an idea, that you’re developing that idea with character work and emotion and tension and conflict and all the other good stuff we writers like to do. And then go to town! Because writing for anthologies is really fun.

Finally, allow me to share with you my own story idea. I am editing Artifice and Craft, but I am also an anchor author for Dragonesque, which will be edited by Joshua Palmatier and S.C. Butler. The theme of Dragonesque is dragon stories written from the point of view of the dragon. Fun, right?

So, the dragon in my story is going to a re-enactor, a dragon who does Renaissance Faires and such. Each weekend she allows herself to be “slain” by a knight, and in return she is paid in gold. Except, she’s getting tired of losing all the time, of letting herself be humiliated by these pretend knights. And during the weekend on which my story focuses, she decides to take matters into her own talons, as it were . . . .

Our Kickstarter is going well. We’re about 2/3 of the way to our funding goal. But if I’m going to write my dragon story, and if Edmund and I are going to find the best magical-work-of-art stories available, we first have to fund the anthologies. So if you want to read great short fiction, and/or if you want to have four new anthologies to which to submit your work, please consider supporting the project! Thanks so much!