I'm starting to regret letting Alison and Lori touch my baby in Baltimore considering what kind of crud they've come down with. At least it looks like I haven't gotten it...yet.
But let's talk about why we're really here today. Me. You may have heard around the blogosphere that I shut down the webzine I ran for three years called DEMOLITION. I won't go into the reasons why anymore, there are plenty of sites out there talking about it. What I want to talk about is where we go from here. It's probably horrible to admit, but one of the reasons DEMOLITION has lasted this long is because many of the times I considered shutting it down I had stories out for consideration at other webzine and thought I might karma-jinx myself by shutting down the site. Two of those stories went on to be featured in print anthologies so it looks like I made the right choice. But I've pretty much exhausted the webzines I can submit to so I'm concentrating more on print markets, and more specifically my novel work.
Eventually though I'll get back to writing short stories and some of them won't have a print market available. Thuglit and Plots with Guns will still be my go to zines and it makes me happy that they're still around. I look around and a lot of the guys who started publishing in the webzines shortly before me or at the same time seem to be moving nicely through the layers of publishing. Sarah Weinman has a great essay on this in THE PRISONER OF MEMORY AND 25 OF THE YEARS FINEST CRIME AND MYSTERY STORIES (which also features my story CADAVER DOG) and I mean consider this list: Neil Smith, Victor Gischler, Dave White, Ray Banks, Mike Maclean, Russel McLean, Scott Wolven, and others who started off publishing almost exculsively online and who have gone onto bigger things. I'm assuming I'll be on that list shortly.
As I phase out of my initial webzine layer of my career, there are a few goals I still have with the short story. I want to have an original short story accepted for a print anthology, I want to be invited to contribute to a print anthology, and I still want to have a story in BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES. And then there's the issue of getting a book deal. I'm sure all of this will fall into place over the next few years and it's exciting to contemplate. And I'll get a great bosst to my creativity this weekend because for the first time since 2001, the Lions failed to sell out a game so they won't be on TV to distract me.
Now I just need to stay away from the radio.
Good luck with the bosst to your creativity.
Posted by: Jeff Shelby | October 24, 2008 at 08:09 AM
Well, if you're on the cusp after starting in the zines, then that may mean I'm only a few years away (or so...)
In that case, I'm definitely pullin' for ya!
Posted by: Jake Nantz | October 24, 2008 at 08:47 AM
Jeff is in editorial mode this week, eh?
Ezines are cool. Tribe published a piece of mine a while back and I had a blast writing something short for a change.
Posted by: Lori G. Armstrong | October 24, 2008 at 05:33 PM
The first fiction I ever had published was a short story -- Getting Rid of January -- on the e-zine InterText. It made it into "The Best of InterText" which gave me the confidence to keep writing. E-zines rock!
Posted by: AlisonGaylin | October 25, 2008 at 10:23 AM
From everything I've learned the past 5-10 years, from all the young authors whose debut book deals came and went (and weren't followed up with another deal), I would be less concerned with "getting a novel published" than with building a more secure platform for yourself.
I personally don't want to be published with a major publisher until I know for certain that I can sell 5,000 copies of a novel completely on my own.
The mentality of "get published first then figure out how to sell the books" seems unwise. With all of the options available in 2008 for establishing in a low-risk way whether you can sell a 5,000-copy print run, it seems more responsible to me to develop a firm readership first before entering into a publishing contract.
With Demolition, you created a platform... it seemed like the next step would be to see if that readership would buy a book that you published on your own while maintaining the platform.
Just my two cents worth.
Stacey
P.S. I interviewed Michael Connelly Friday:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NECw_d0Tpc
Posted by: Stacey Cochran | October 26, 2008 at 11:06 AM