Yesterday, Ellen Datlow posted her long list of Honorable Mentions for her 2013 Best Horror of the Year, and six Shimmer stories are among the mentions:

From Issue #16:

The Revelation of Morgan Stern, by Christie Yant
The Binding of Memories, by Cate Gardner
Word and Flesh, by Dennis Ginoza
The Life and Death of Bob, by William Jablonsky

From Issue #17:

Out They Come, by Alex Dally MacFarlane
Love in the Time of Vivisection, by Sunny Moraine

And Shimmer badgers?

Our Nicola Belte got a mention, with her story, “B,” from The Journal of Unlikely Entomology #5!

Both issues of Shimmer are available in our back issues if you missed out the first time around. Thanks, as always, to Ellen Datlow for the time and work she gives to this genre; what an amazing number of things she reads every year!

You can read the full listings on her site!

This has been one of the most challenging years I’ve ever experienced, personally and professionally. 2014 has contained losses — some we expected and some we never saw coming. 2014 has contained reams of bad news dropped upon, oh look, reams of bad news.

I wonder: was the world always like this and we just never knew, but now we can’t not know, because we are constantly connected to a world larger than our neighborhoods; we are global now, “living in the future” we say, watching as events half the world away impact our daily lives.

We carry the world in our pockets — the news is always there, sought or not. No stumbling out to a newspaper box to get the headlines, they’re already stacked in your phone. The news is no longer a sound bite on television — you can watch in real time as life, terrible and glorious life, unfolds in streets across the world. And that world is huge and often terrible, and overwhelming.

Time and again, because of that, I come back to short fiction.

A short story allows me to narrow my focus and slow my breath — I did this as a kid in school, too, though only in looking back did I realize it for what it was. For a few precious pages, I don’t have to think about what is happening anywhere else; for half an hour, I can sink into a wholly new world — or a hidden aspect of our own — and vanish.

If you find yourself needing to pause and take a breath, I hope these four stories allow that. They explore loss and recovery in equal measure–all the thistles and dandelions growing up through Isa bloomed at once, out of season, in a riotous bouquet. These four stories close out an amazing Shimmer year, which means our printed annual is on the horizon. These four stories encompass a hope that we carry on the face of strange doings; that we keep taking the next step, even if we don’t know exactly where it leads.

As 2014 winds down, be excellent to each other, and remember to breathe.

E. Catherine Tobler
Senior Editor

Buy Issue #22 | Subscribe to Shimmer

E. Catherine Tobler’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her first novel, Rings of Anubis, is now available. Follow her on Twitter @ECthetwit or her website, http://www.ecatherine.com.

If you take the badgers to the movies…

They’re going to want popcorn (with Hot Tamales, thank you)…

…the closer the blue planet Melancholia comes to earth on a collision course, the more the just-married sister falls apart, and her depressed sister regains her peace and equilibrium…the dread in the film builds as the characters take turns using a wire loop to measure the increasing diameter of the approaching planet. This isn’t a traditional horror film, but it scared the heck out of me…

…I watched Chuckie when I was a kid and didn’t watch a movie scarier than that Halloween movie with Bette Midler for YEARS.

The original Psycho with Anthony Perkins scared me so badly, for a long time after, I wouldn’t take a shower if I was in the house alone. Good thing we also had a bathtub, or I would have been scaring a lot of people myself.

But…bathtubs, tablecloths, eyeballs, Diabolique… NOPE…

But House…House is like…crack on fire…with flooding and glitter…

And then I watched The Ring and couldn’t watch anything even remotely scary for years…

…OH MY GOD GUYS I AM SO BAD AT SCARY MOVIES…

The French film Martyrs is the first one I thought of. Totally brutal and disturbing and strangely beautiful. I want to watch it again, but I can’t quite work myself up to it…

…I thought about Martyrs, then thought that might be….way too much. It’s one of my That Was a Really Good Movie But I’ll Never See It Again movies…

Eyes Without a Face — also file under “strangely beautiful,” all those dogs in the kennel…

The Shining…or Alien, though I haven’t seen that for eleventy billion years…

(Home Alone, because tarantula –why would anyone agree to let it crawl on their FACE?)

…seeing Chuckie as a kid is enough to terrify anybody…

I will probably pick The Congo because I was too young when I saw that…

…did you want a horror movie? I can name an actual horror movie…

Oh, heck no–doesn’t have to be straight up horror. I mean, even Gravity is scary on some level, right?

Gravity scared the hell out of me…

…the 1989 Woman In Black done for British TV. It’s the only movie that’s ever made me yell and hide my eyes as an adult, watching it…

House of Leaves was pretty freaky tho…

We are excited to tell you that Shimmer author Sam J. Miller will be taking part in the New York Review of Science Fiction Reading series, on January 7! Sam shares the bill with Jennifer Marie Brissett, and will be reading his upcoming Shimmer story, “Allosaurus Burgers.”

By their titles, these stories don’t have much in common, but by their ends, you may find commonalities indeed! Kim and Ada make their Shimmer debuts in Issue #17.

Kim Neville, “The Fairy Godmother”

I attended Clarion West last summer. Our week 2 instructor, Stephen Graham Jones, sent around a story called “The Hitman” by T.C. Boyle, and invited us to write stories using the same structural framework. I was intrigued by the challenge of working within these constraints and still creating something that was entirely my own. I think “The Fairy Godmother” represents who I am better than anything else I’ve written.

Read the rest of the interview here!

Ada Hoffmann, “The Herdsman of the Dead”

I’m weird about process. I have trouble with truly open-ended time and take too long deciding what to do if I have a choice. So I make up an insanely detailed process schedule which is supposed to include and prioritize every activity I could want to do ever. Then after a while I get tired of it and make up a new one. I was setting myself a lot of sharp deadlines earlier in the year, which worked really well for a while and then turned counterproductive. Right now my process has me writing in short bursts throughout the day, with a lot of breaks for reading and chores. It mostly works. I’m sure if you check back a year from now, I’ll be telling you why this process was terrible and I needed a different one.

Read the rest of the interview here!

The people who need to read this post won’t read it.

The people who need to read this post (but won’t) are the ones who send Shimmer blatantly misogynistic stories. Rape stories – that slut sure got what she deserved. Necrophilia – at least the bitch is quiet now. Transphobia. Racism. Balls, balls, balls, and more balls. And worse. There are markets that welcome those stories, but we’re not one of them. We’ve tried to make this clear on social media, in our guidelines, on this blog. We’ve tried to make this clear with the entire body of work we’ve published.

The people who need to read this post (but won’t) write about 50% of the stories in our slush pile. That’s 250 or so stories a month.

Just think about that for a second. That’s an awful lot of grossness, even if they just get a form rejection after the first paragraph full of sexist clichés and balls.

The people who need to read this post (but won’t) think their stories are suitable for Shimmer. The people who need to read this post (but won’t) think I should pay them the professional rate of five cents a word for their work.

The people who need to read this post won’t read it, because they think they’re just *fine*. The people who need to read this post (but won’t) believe they are such gifted writers that they don’t need to be thoughtful about their submissions. The people who need to read this post (but won’t) are so God damn entitled that even if they do read it, they’ll assume it’s not about them.

It is.

Sometimes, Elise and I complain about slush on Twitter.

@ecthetwit Dear slush, are you kidding me? ARE YOU KIDDING ME.

 

@bethwodzinski Slush isn’t ALL balls. There’s also pee!

 

@bethwodzinski Rewriting slush to add dinosaurs. HUGE IMPROVEMENT. For example, this story about an inflatable sex doll? SO MUCH BETTER with a velociraptor. you know?

 

@bethwodzinski “This time will be different,” vowed the velociraptor, as he walked carefully toward the inflatable sex doll.

 

@bethwodzinski “I just wrote a story about handjobs and my balls. I know, I think I’ll send it to Shimmer!” — everyone all the fucking time.

Someone I respect contacted me privately to suggest that complaining publicly about slush isn’t professional. Further, good writers might believe we’re talking about them, and be discouraged.

Maybe it *is* unprofessional to complain.

Or maybe it’s unprofessional to send your ballsack fanfiction to Shimmer.

In this culture, silence signals acceptance.

Fuck that.

That said, is snarking on twitter an effective form of speech and social change?

Probably not.

But neither is reading sewage in silence.

So if you’re thoughtful enough to wonder if this post is about you?

It’s not.

Thank you for being the other 50% of our submissions.