The writer reanimated
Tuesday, July 29th, 2025 07:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizvogelI finished the third Dix Dayton story today.
"Finished" for values including some brackets and asteroid research, of course. But it is a functional story with a beginning, middle, and end, and my alpha reader laughed at the right part. I first started this thing 2 years and 5 months ago, and it's had more false starts and changes of course than anything else I've ever written. Turns out, once I stopped trying to make it "sciencey" enough for Analog*, it's a perfectly fine little story and what remained to be done practically wrote itself. (For values of "wrote itself" that took all day and involved bribing myself with cookies, but hey, it worked.)
* For those who aren't aware, Analog was recently bought by an outfit called Must Read Publishing, along with Asimov's, F&SF, Ellery Queen, and Alfred Hitchcock. Unfortunately, the new owners have been sending out absurdly rights-grabby, author-unfriendly contracts. SFWA and assorted other entities have gotten involved, and the latest version of the contract I've seen is unquestionably an improvement -- but only because the first version was a dumpster fire on a train wreck that was plunging over a cliff. Now the fire is out and the train's back on the tracks, but it's all still sailing over the cliff edge. So I won't be sending this or any other story to any of the listed magazines until/unless this garbage stops and they offer a contract in line with industry standards and respectful of authors. Which sucks, because the editorial staff at Analog have always been lovely to work with, and they seem to like my stuff. But, silver lining in the tornado, taking that pressure off removed a wall that was stopping me far more than I realized, and let the story be what it wanted to be. Even if nobody else buys it either, that's worth a lot.
"Finished" for values including some brackets and asteroid research, of course. But it is a functional story with a beginning, middle, and end, and my alpha reader laughed at the right part. I first started this thing 2 years and 5 months ago, and it's had more false starts and changes of course than anything else I've ever written. Turns out, once I stopped trying to make it "sciencey" enough for Analog*, it's a perfectly fine little story and what remained to be done practically wrote itself. (For values of "wrote itself" that took all day and involved bribing myself with cookies, but hey, it worked.)
* For those who aren't aware, Analog was recently bought by an outfit called Must Read Publishing, along with Asimov's, F&SF, Ellery Queen, and Alfred Hitchcock. Unfortunately, the new owners have been sending out absurdly rights-grabby, author-unfriendly contracts. SFWA and assorted other entities have gotten involved, and the latest version of the contract I've seen is unquestionably an improvement -- but only because the first version was a dumpster fire on a train wreck that was plunging over a cliff. Now the fire is out and the train's back on the tracks, but it's all still sailing over the cliff edge. So I won't be sending this or any other story to any of the listed magazines until/unless this garbage stops and they offer a contract in line with industry standards and respectful of authors. Which sucks, because the editorial staff at Analog have always been lovely to work with, and they seem to like my stuff. But, silver lining in the tornado, taking that pressure off removed a wall that was stopping me far more than I realized, and let the story be what it wanted to be. Even if nobody else buys it either, that's worth a lot.
Thoughts
Date: 2025-Jul-30, Wednesday 02:05 am (UTC)Disappointing. We picked up a subscription to Asimov's for Christmas, and it has turned out to be full of bleak, depressing, not even very well-written content.
*ponder* Maybe it read like slush because it was slush, if enough writers said "fuck it" and quit submitting things there. Somebody's always going to take the bait, but it can lower the quality a lot.
Frustrating, because I had thought of trying a different magazine, but if they're all owned by the same place then there's probably no point. :(
I hope you find a better home for your writing. I've done conventional publishing but have found crowdfunding much better, and I do that on Dreamwidth.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2025-Jul-30, Wednesday 05:39 pm (UTC)There's enough lead time between story-acceptance and publication that what you're seeing now was probably bought under the old ownership & old contracts. But in the coming months... yeah, I know of several writers who are pulling stories or refusing to sign the new contracts. And it's going to tend to be the more experienced writers, because they're the ones who are plugged into the whisper networks, they're the ones who know this is *not* standard industry practice, they're the ones who know they *can* push back on a bad contract. Which may open up more slots for newer writers, but at the expense of them getting screwed by bad contracts, which is deeply not cool.
I'm glad the crowdfunding approach is working for you! I've looked at it, but it requires a certain type of effort that I'm both bad at and don't enjoy. ;-) So it's still conventional publishing for me -- just not with the big three magazines (or the big two in mystery, which I also dabble at writing in). :(
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Date: 2025-Jul-31, Thursday 06:34 pm (UTC)RIP Analog.
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Date: 2025-Aug-06, Wednesday 02:56 pm (UTC)ETA: And hey, the story has already collected its first rejection, out in the wide wild world. Onward, little story, onward!