News

The Spoils of Springfield - Alex Wilson

Jaguar Woman - Silvia Moreno-Garcia

River Water - Becca De La Rosa

The Fox and the King’s Beard - Jessica Wick

A Painter, A sheep…” - Nir Yaniv

The Clockwork Jungle Book

Shimmer is pleased to announce The Clockwork Jungle Book. Think steampunk animal parables! It’s a special double-length issue, guest-edited by George Mann of Solaris Books, scheduled for Autumn 2008. Now accepting submissions. Read the guidelines for more details.

Now GET WRITING!

Grasping for the Wind had this to say:

These ten stories and 1 interview are well written, and were good choices for a speculative fiction magazine’s issue on pirates. The fantasy, horror and/or sci-fi elements were neatly incorporated into the pirate stories.

Check out the full review here.

They also have an interview with John Joseph Adams (of Fantasy and Science Fiction), who guest edited the pirate issue.

GFTW: You were recently invited to be a guest editor for the Pirate Issue of Shimmer Magazine. What was your approach to choosing stories for this issue?

JJA: One of the things I wanted to do with the Pirate Issue is have a broad range of pirate stories, which took some liberties interpreting the term “pirate.” Of course, there are some stories in the issue that are your typical iconic Caribbean-style pirate, but it was important to me to have a certain diversity represented. So that was one factor.

You can read the rest of the interview here.

Angela Slatter’s story The Angel Wood, from the Fall 2006 issue of Shimmer, has made the short list for the 2007 Aurealis Award.

Congratulations, Angela!

This time from a reader, who writes to John Joseph Adams of the pirate issue, and has many nice things to say.

I liked how there was a wide range of stories, touching on different aspects of the appeal of the pirate and the various forms of piracy.

I think it’s a great idea for a little magazine to do a special issue like this. I would like to see more small press magazines doing it. The focus on one theme/topic seems much more interesting than a magazine of general spec fic stories. It felt more like an anthology, but at an affordable price.

Check out the whole post at J.J.A.’s blog.

Sam Tomino of SFRevu says:

I’m sick of pirates. I was never a big fan of them and this wave of pirate stuff in pop culture has not endeared them to me. When I saw that the Shimmer Vol. 2, Issue 3 was “The Pirate Issue”, I groaned. What would I encounter here? I needn’t have worried. I enjoyed all the stories.

Head on over to SFRevu to check out the rest of the review!

Chris Gerrib gave the Winter Shimmer issue quite a nice review

Second, I finally got around to reading the Winter 2007 issue of Shimmer Magazine. If you’re not subscribing to this magazine, you’re missing a real gem. This edition seemed to be heavy on fantasy stories, but still well worth the price of admission. Highlights include:
* Juana and the Dancing Bear by n. a. bourke (spelling his), a lovely fantasy story about a Spanish princess and a talking, dancing bear. It’s quite nice.
* Duets, by Philip J. Lees, is a story about a harpist whose got a way with the ladies. He gets a pleasant surprise from his latest conquest, a fellow musician.
* Michael Livingston’s Catch of the Day was an unusual first contact story, but quite interesting.
* Sparrow and Egg, by Amal El-Mohtar, was a very short but surprisingly touching story. It’s really a parable for parent-child relationships, and quite memorable.

Questions about the story

Where did the idea come from?
A few years ago I spent two summers selling along the Costa de Luz in southern Spain. It’s not as popular as the Costa Brava or the Costa del Sol, and if you arrived on a calm day you wouldn’t know the reason why. The wind can be ferocious. Levante, from the east, can last for weeks and reach 8 or 9 Beaufort (gale force).

For awhile I was actually stubborn enough to try getting around on a bicycle. I distinctly remember one day: pushing the bike up a hill against the wind, a sudden gust pulls a loose pack of envelopes out of my bike pouch and skywards, a riffling like wings, like a flock of paper birds.

I remember another day, sitting in my tent at the campgrounds after a day’s work and listening to chairs and tables falling over, watching trash and leaves blow by. When it got like this, there wasn’t much you could do except sit and watch and listen. I was then working with my girlfriend (now wife). That kind of wind could spoil our work for days at a time. That was mostly when we fought, or felt doubts about being with each other, or wondered about our future together (international relationships can be difficult — she’s Argentinian). It’s usually somewhere in the midst of these aching moments in a relationship that one becomes conscious of the extent of their love for the other, and just how much one is willing to sacrifice. Anyway, you can see how the story idea came out of all this.

Do you work with a critique or writers group?
Yes, since the ClarionWest workshop. There were 18 of us, and we’re all (more or les) online together these days.

How did the story change as you developed it?
The ending changed. I had the two leaf-bodies dying together in an early draft. It was too sappy, not as interesting.

Questions about writing

Who do you write for? Yourself or someone else?
Myself and everyone else.

How long had you been submitting before you made your first sale?
About a year.

How did you celebrate your first sale?
Pizza. If i remember correctly…

What writing projects are you presently working on?
Lots of short stories. A few false starts on novels. I read in and between a lot of genres, and what I’m working on reflects that.

Favorite short story read this year?
“Snow,” John Crowley

Favorite book read when you were a child?
“The Never Ending Story” , Michael Ende

Random Questions

If you could trade places with anyone, who would it be? And Why?

This question is trickier than it sounds at first. If I traded places with Ghandi, for example, India might not have gained its independence so early, and something altogether wonderful might be happening this minute instead of me writing this at my desk.

I’m not sure I want to fiddle with history like that. Even in fiction, it’s a very tricky thing to fiddle with history. But the reason I mentioned Ghandi is because I’m intrigued by his ability to focus on people’s strengths and talents as opposed to their weaknesses. It’s said he had an extraordinary talent for this. I wonder what it would feel like, to have that kind of compassion.

Favourite food?
Falafel.

All-time favourite movie?
That’s a tough question, but my favorite movies this past year were “In the Mood For Love” and “2046″, by Directory Wong Kar Wei. They’re loosely related — see the first one first.

If you had a working time machine what advice would you give a younger self?
Give me another ten years or so to answer that question.

Philip J. Lees’ short story, Duets, appears in the Winter 2007 issue of Shimmer. Check out his website.

Questions About The Story

Where did the idea come from?

From seeing the light reflecting off my guitar, maybe? From the Shakespearian line, “If music be the food of love, play on”? The truth is, I don’t remember.

How did the story change as you developed it?

I think this was one that came into my head pretty much fully formed, in terms of both plot and style. After all, it’s quite short. It was just a matter of writing it down (just!).

You know the advice “Sometimes you have to kill your darlings.” Was there a scene or line that it really hurt to cut, but cutting it made the story stronger? May we reprint that scene or line? Or link to a very old version so that we may marvel at how much it changed?

The nice people at Shimmer asked me to cut the original introduction—about 100 words. I didn’t really want to do that, although I could understand the reason for it. Whether the story is stronger for the change is, I think, a matter of taste. As a reader, I have an old-fashioned preference for a slow opening to a story. I enjoy the sensation of a door opening on a different world and being drawn into it, immersed in it, before the action begins. The modern tendency is to hurl the readers directly onto the bobsleigh run and let them figure out where they are and what’s happening while they’re already hurtling down.

In the case of “Duets,” the short opening introduced the first person narrator and set the tone of the piece. Not strictly necessary, I admit. I think the story works fine without it. By all means print the deleted paragraphs if you like (though I have the feeling this answer is not what you were looking for).

As a rule, I feel pleased when I can cut something from a story. It means that I’m making an improvement, and that I’m close to getting it the way I want it. My early drafts tend to be underwritten, rather than overwritten, so the first revisions usually involve more adding than subtracting. Pruning away the dead wood is the final stage.

How is this story like your other work? How is it different?

Duets is not typical of my work, but then, none of my stories are (insert smiley here). Really, though, my fiction is all over the place, from literary stories involving characters I’ve encountered while living in Greece, through crime and mystery (sometimes with a speculative element, sometimes not), magic realism, fake mythology, to straight science fiction with spaceships and aliens.

Duets was something of an experiment in a couple of ways. It was the first time I’d written anything that involved magic (although whether the reader interprets it in that way is a matter of choice: as Clarke’s Third Law states, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”). More importantly, I wanted to play around with a more formalized, but at the same time lyrical style of writing, aiming to use musical rhythms in the prose and musical metaphors in the storytelling.

Questions About Writing

What writing projects are you presently working on?

I just finished a short story that examines the intersection of TV game shows and euthanasia. I have two or three other stories half written and I will finish them very soon, really I will. I’m also working on my third novel, Triple Jeopardy, which is a cult religious futuristic ecological thriller detective mystery story set in multiple alternate quantum realities. So far, I have a complete outline and the opening chapters. Another work in progress is a non-fiction article about how the Internet will affect home computers and the software industry (I am, or was, a bona fide computer scientist, among other things, so I have some credentials for this kind of speculation).

On the business side, I’m seeking a publisher for my second novel, The Changelings, which is about space exploration, human cloning, planetary colonization, interracial relationships, and all that kind of thing. At some point, I hope, I’ll also need to find an agent to represent me. I try to keep the short story submissions going out on a steady basis, not letting them languish on my hard drive.

Are you satisfied with traditional labels for genre fiction? Do words like “speculative,” “slipstream,” and, for that matter, “genre” cover it? What would you suggest?

I don’t like putting labels on any kind of creative output or on the people who produce it. However, I recognize that publishers, booksellers and the reading public (if there is such a thing any more) need to have a way of categorizing fiction. There are serious problems, though. To start with, nobody can agree on standard definitions. I once put a story of mine through a critique group and at the end I asked the question: Is this a science fiction story or not? The answers ranged from “Definitely a science fiction story” to “Contains no science fiction elements at all.” I wasn’t surprised. Then there’s the lack of consistency. Much of Michael Crichton’s fiction, for example, fits my personal definition of science fiction (I think that Jurassic Park fits any reasonable definition of science fiction), yet most people don’t think of Crichton as a science fiction author.

Living in Crete has made me more aware of mythology, and when you think about those ancient tales it’s clear they were the science fiction and fantasy of their time. Take the story of Daedalus and Icarus, for example—a story that almost everyone knows. I would say that it is clearly science fiction, because technology plays such a pivotal role. The Minotaur was an animal-human hybrid—another science fiction trope. Hercules was the first superhero, and so on. So what we call ’speculative fiction’ and think of as something cool and modern is in fact one of the oldest forms of storytelling.

If we absolutely must have a name for it, I suppose I prefer speculative fiction, which at least suggests that it includes some aspect of the unreal, be it magical or technological. Using a catchall word like ‘genre’ is just a way of dodging the problem.

In any case, I’m happy to leave the labeling to the professors and the literary critics. I don’t think it matters what you call it: there’s just good writing, and not.

Do you think living for so long in a different country from the one where you were born has contributed to your writing?

Definitely. Learning about another culture has been fascinating in itself, but has also given me a different perspective on the society I grew up in. People who spend their whole lives in a single cultural milieu inevitably come to believe that the values and codes of behavior they’re familiar with are simply “the way things are” and don’t realize how much of it is arbitrary. So what is seen as polite in one culture can come over as priggish and standoffish in another, for example. On a broader ethical level, a large part of what people consider as “right versus wrong” is not a matter of absolutes, but can change depending on the local conditions and the point of view. Being aware of that gives me more freedom as a writer, because I don’t have to be blinkered by presuppositions. Matters like this have always been grist to the writer’s mill, of course, and if you look at writers’ biographies you find that many have lived in more than one country or have traveled extensively.

In more practical terms, becoming fluent in modern Greek has made me more aware of the capabilities (and the limitations) of my native English. With languages, as with cultures, there’s a huge difference between knowing just one and knowing two.

Do you have a specific food or drink that you consider a writing staple?

No, though I do tend to treat myself to a bottle of good wine to celebrate good news on the writing front (like having Duets accepted by Shimmer).

Do you work with a critique or writers group?

I used to participate in the Critters on-line workshop and I learned a lot there. I exchange critiques with a number of other writers, some of whom are present or former members of that workshop, others not.

Does your work tend to explore any particular themes?

I’m interested in characters who learn something about themselves, through the way they respond to circumstances or the way they interact with other people. One of the grandest themes in fiction is when a character, through stupendous effort, transcends his or her own limitations and becomes more than before. Of course, you can’t do that all the time or it would become trite.

On the other hand, I think that speculative fiction is a wonderful way of carrying out thought experiments involving technological or social issues. It’s much better than plain philosophical discussion because it lets you ask the question, “What if . . .?”, while being free of any constraints whatsoever.

It’s been said that readers can be divided into two groups: those who like The Iliad and those who like The Odyssey. Which camp are you in?

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the former; on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, the latter. On Sundays I can’t remember the question. Really! Who comes up with this stuff?

Of course, the correct answer is that readers can be divided into two groups: those who believe that people can be divided into two groups, and those who reject such a ridiculously simplistic notion.

Random Questions

What is your darkest secret?

I’m sure there must be one, but it’s so horrendously awful it’s erased itself from my conscious memory.

Have you ever eaten a crayon? Tell us about it.

Not crayons, but as a child I used to chew on plasticine. That’s what we used to call it in England. I think in America it’s usually just called modeling clay. Lots of different, bright colors, for kids to play with. I can still remember the taste. Yum!

Fast food: Yea or Nay?

Neither. It’s an oxymoron.

All-time favorite movie?

Hard to say. Citizen Kane and The Third Man would be on the list. Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is certainly a leading candidate. Several of Gilliam’s other movies, too. Richard Attenborough’s semi-biographical Gandhi was amazing. Kubrick’s 2001 is still my yardstick for science fiction movies.

What are some of your hobbies?

I play bridge on a fairly regular basis. In the cooler months of the year I like brisk walking for getting the blood and the creative juices flowing. I listen to a lot of music, mainly jazz. I enjoy web programming and sometimes I even get to do it for money.

Is there anything that you would sell your soul for?

No. Anybody who’s read any significant amount of fiction knows that it’s always a really bad idea.

Quiz: How many writers does it take to change a lightbulb? Please explain your answer:

Certainly not more than two. More than two writers together as a group are incapable of accomplishing anything at all practical. Two writers might be able to collaborate long enough to do it, but by the time they finished they’d also have changed the socket, the light fitting, and the entire décor of the room.

So that leaves us with one writer. However, the correct answer is NONE: because writers like the dark.

Angela Slatter’s short story, The Little Match Girl, appears in the Spring 2006 issue of Shimmer.

Questions About the Story

Where did the idea come from?
I had signed up for my Masters in Creative Writing, looking at rewritten/recycled/reclaimed fairytales and was wondering where to start. I was sitting on the bus one day, thinking “Which fairy tale from childhood affected me most?” and remembered that my Mum had read The Little Match Girl to me when I was about 9 and it devastated me! She died!!!! That’s not a story for a kid! So, I started to think about TLMG and who she might have been (rather than a defenseless child), and that’s how my girl became someone who stands outside of society and refuses to bend to what others think she should do. I started scribbling it on a piece of paper on the bus, then had to decipher my handwriting at home later.

How did the story change as you developed it?
The main change came when I decided to use the matches to segment the different stories of her life – they provide the threshold moments for her. Things flowed much better from that point on… It was mainly a structural thing because the story itself came pretty much full-blown to my mind.

You know the advice “Sometimes you have to kill your darlings.” Was there a scene or line that it really hurt to cut, but cutting it made the story stronger?

Mmmmm, I think the only thing I refused to cut was the last line! My supervisor felt it did not work but I was determined it should stay because it summed my character up perfectly in her refusal to obey – she chose her own fate and I was very determined that the last line should stay. Funnily enough, that is the thing most readers comment on, how much they love that line and how powerful they think it is. Yay!

How is this story like your other work? How is it different?
It’s like my other work in the genre and the strong female character. It’s unlike my other pieces in that the main character is stripped of all her ‘helpers’, and her solution to her situation is definitely the most extreme.

Questions About Writing

Who do you write for? Yourself or someone else?
Me. Me, me, me! It’s the one area that I’m totally selfish in (I hope).

What writing projects are you presently working on?
I have 2 chick-lit novels half finished; and have a novel about suicide in families started (I’m taking that with me to the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop this year in the US). I also have started a book of re-written fairy tales for kids.

What time of day do you prefer to do your writing?
I’m a night person. On weekends I get up at the crack of midday, wander around for a while and start writing about 2 in the afternoon at the earliest…then I may write until the early hours of the morning. I try to write 500 words a day on weekdays, just to maintain the discipline – even if I throw out those 500 words, I’ve at least made myself do what I’m supposed to do. On weekends I write more. I heard yesterday from a friend that another mutual acquaintance had written his latest novel in 18 days – 4000 words a day for 18 consecutive days…I was filled with equal parts admiration and professional hatred!

Favorite book read when you were a child?
Ahhhhhh…? Too many. I loved Enid Blyton books when I was little and fairy tale collections; then as I grew older I read a lot of Nancy Drew mysteries; then ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, ‘Tangara’, and ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ in my teens…

Random Questions

If you could trade places with anyone, who would it be? And Why?
I just kinda like being me. Everyone has their problems, so if you swap lives you just swap your set of problems for someone else’s – so better the devil you know. If I could time-travel? I’d be a muse in a salon in eighteenth century France (great dresses).

Watch much TV? If so, what shows do you watch? Which shows are guilty pleasures?
TV is the thing to do at the end of a bad day; turn it on, stare at the pretty colours, and just zone out. There’ s a lot of crap on TV at the moment, nothing I rush home to watch. Am waiting for the return of Oz (fifth season about to run in Australia), I miss Sex and the City desperately, hate Desperate Housewives, I know NCIS is bad but I just can’t help watching it (think I may be mesmerized by Mark Harmon’s eyebrows). Any British cop drama is worth watching – especially the Val McDermid ‘Wire in the Blood’ series.

Favourite restaurant?
A place in Sydney called ‘Vamps’…superb food but the problem is that I’m now living in Brisbane! So, in Brisbane: CruBar or Luna Lounge or Ouzeri.

Cat or dog person? (or something else, like birds, iguanas, or even evil robot monkeys?)
Cats are cool coz they are dignified; dogs are great when you want unconditional love. I like them both…but don’t have any pets at the moment apart from the traditional Brisbane geckos.

If you had a working time machine what advice would you give a younger self?
It will all be okay – relax more, stress less. And don’t dye your hair blonde EVER.

Quiz: How many writers does it take to change a lightbulb? Please explain your answer:
None – you can always write by the light of the laptop…