DOUGLAS SMITH | Writing the Fantastic

I'm delighted to have one of my books included in the first ever fantasy ebook bundle from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and delivered by StoryBundle. The bundle runs from today to Thursday, November 2.

This bundle offers twelve excellent fantasy titles, all from SFWA pros. Pay a minimum of $5 to get the basic bundle of four titles. Pay $15 or more, and get all twelve titles. Buy the bundle here and check out this page for more information.

Founded in 1965, SFWA is an organization for published authors and industry professionals in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and related genres. Some of the proceeds of this bundle will go to support SFWA in its mission to support, promote, inform, defend, and advocate for professional fantasy and science fiction writers. #SFWApro

My short story "The Red Bird" has been reprinted recently in the Japanese fantasy anthology, Tales of the Sunrise Lands, from Guardbridge Books in the United Kingdom. Love this cover, shown here at the left.

"The Red Bird" first appeared in the long-running, award-winning, Canadian speculative fiction magazine, On Spec, way back in 2001 in their "World Beat" issue. The story was an Aurora Award finalist in 2002, and remains one of my personal favourites.

I'm proud to see it in such good company in this wonderful anthology of fantasy tales, all set or influenced by the Land of Rising Sun. It's also quite cool to get a cover credit.

Tales of the Sunrise Lands is available from Amazon worldwide and in the UK from Guardbridge Books.

My novel, The Wolf at the End of the World, has been getting a lot of love lately. First it was featured in a BookBub promotion earlier this month, and now it's part of an excellent ebook bundle called Heroic Tales available here from BundleRabbit.

This is a huge bundle, folks, featuring nineteen (!) titles for only $4.99. You can buy directly from BundleRabbit or, if you prefer, from any of the major ebook retailers, including Amazon, Kobo, B&N, and Apple. Nineteen books for under $5! Come on, that's hard to beat. Grab it before the bundle goes away.

And to help promote this great bundle, the hero of The Wolf at the End of the World, Gwyn Blaidd, agreed to come out of seclusion in his Northern Ontario retreat to talk a little about himself and the story with fantasy author A. L. Butcher. Read Gwyn's interview here.

The excellent audio fantasy fiction magazine, Far Fetched Fables, has my Aurora Award winning novelette, "Spirit Dance," up on its site now, and you can listen to it right here (2023 update: FFF site no longer operating).

I'm really happy with the treatment FFF gave to the story. Mark Kilfoil, a fellow Canadian, does a wonderful job with his narration, nailing the voices, pronunciations, and rhythm of the prose and story.

Far Fetched Fables is one of several fiction podcast sites under the District of Wonders umbrella, the other sites being Tales to Terrify (horror, in case you couldn't guess) and Starship Sofa (SF, again as you probably guessed).

How would you like to own, at an incredible bargain, ten books that readers like yourself have already voted to be the best examples of speculative fiction published in Canada? Well, here's your chance. I'm once again curating an Aurora Award ebook bundle for StoryBundle.com that contains more winners and finalists for Canada's premier speculative fiction award, the Aurora Award. These Aurora bundles will now be an ongoing series on StoryBundle, running twice a year (until we run out of titles!), so they make a great way for you to build your library of the best in Canadian speculative fiction.

The Auroras are awarded annually by the Canadian Science Fiction & Fantasy Association (CSFFA) for excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy. The award started in 1980 as the Casper and was renamed the Aurora for the 1990 awards. I'm honored to have won the Aurora three times and to have been on the final ballot another sixteen.

This Aurora bundle again delivers a great mix of SF and fantasy, adult and YA novels, as well as a selection of short fiction. The books included reflect the long history of the Auroras, with titles spanning a quarter century of Canadian speculative fiction from 1992 to 2016.

This time, the bundle provides a great introduction to several wonderful series, including the first book in four separate series and the second book in a series that can be read as a stand-alone title. It also lets you sample the rich tradition of Canadian short speculative fiction, with two acclaimed collections.

I'm teaching a three-week workshop at the Humber School for Writers on how to market and sell short fiction. The course will be based on my writer's guide, Playing the Short Game, and runs on three consecutive Tuesday evenings starting on March 28, 2017. Each workshop session will be three hours, running from 6:30-9:30pm. The classes will be held at Humber's Lakeshore campus at 3199 Lake Shore Blvd West.

You can register for the workhop via the Humber School for Writers site.

Here's an outline of what I'll cover in the workshop:

Week 1

Chapters 1-2: Introduction to the course / Why are you writing? / The benefits of short fiction to a writing career.

Chapter 3: Understanding rights and licensing for short fiction

Chapters 4-6: How to judge when is a story ready to submit to a market / A strategy for selecting your target markets / How to find short fiction markets

Week 2

Chapters 7-8: Selecting the right market / How to submit short fiction to a market

Chapters 9-13: What not to do when submitting / What to do after you've submitted a story / How an editor selects (or rejects) a story / Dealing with rejections / When to stop submitting a story

Week 3

Chapters 14-15: What to look (out) for in short fiction contracts / Working with an editor

Chapters 16-17, 19: What your first sale really means / Dealing with reviews

Chapter 20-22: A writer's magic bakery / Selling reprints / Selling foreign language rights / Selling audio rights

I was approached via Twitter recently by Chris Byron, who teaches grade 8 in the Westmount Charter School in Calgary, Alberta. Chris tweeted that he'd enjoyed my collection Chimerascope (pictured here) and was using some of the stories, such as "Scream Angel" and "Jigsaw" to teach creative writing to his students ("Jigsaw" was written for the anthology Odyssey (Wonder Zone #4), which was aimed at grade 7-8 students with all stories based on the Ontario curriculum for those grades).

That in itself was cool enough, but after chatting via Twitter and email, Chris invited me to meet with his students via Skype and answer some questions about my life as a writer. We did the Skype call this week, and it was much fun. Well, for me at least. Hopefully, the kids enjoyed it as well. Here's a summary of some of the questions (italics) and my best recollection of what my answers were, many of which can be found in more detail in my writer's guide, Playing the Short Game.

Q: I like your hockey analogy for how writing professionally takes time. When did you feel you were ready for the Show?

As a writer, you don't know if you can sell professionally until you actually do. I started writing short fiction and recommend it for new writers, because short stories are a great way to learn how to write prose, even if you plan to eventually move to novels. Plus short stories let me find out early if I could actually sell anything I wrote. I was writing stories for about a year and sending them out before I got my first sale.

Q: As a writer, what does your day entail? Is it ritualized to heighten productivity?

Just a reminder of my upcoming workshop for anyone in the Greater Toronto Area. This will be of interest to any short fiction writers who follow me here. I'll be giving a 2-hour workshop on how to market and sell short fiction at the Whitchurch-Stouffville Public Library on Thursday, January 26,2017 from 7-9pm. The workshop will be an introduction to some of the material covered in my book Playing the Short Game: How to Market and Sell Short Fiction.

During the two hours, I will give you critical advice and answer your questions on how to sell your short stories to professional markets and to build a career as a short fiction writer. Topics I'll be teaching in the workshop include:

• rights and licensing for short fiction;
• a strategy for selecting your target markets;
• finding short fiction markets;
• selecting the right market;
• submitting short fiction to a market; and,
• what not to do when submitting.

$25 includes the workshop and a copy of my book. Registration is required by January 24. You can register online at http://www.wsplibrary.ca or by calling the library:

If you're in the GTA region, I hope to see you there!

I have a story in a new anthology just released by the HWA (Horror Writers Association). The antho is called Group Hex and features an impressive line up of stories from the Ontario chapter of the HWA. So yeah, an all-Canadian, all-local horror anthology. This is volume one, as our chapter is planning to make this an annual publication.

My story is "By Her Hand, She Draws You Down," which first appeared in the excellent UK dark fantasy magazine, The Third Alternative (now Black Static) in 2001. It was an Aurora Award finalist and was selected for Best New Horror #13 the following year. And yes, this is the story on which the award-winning short film of the same name was based.

I'm thrilled to be included with such a great collection of authors, who include Kelley Armstrong, Nancy Kilpatrick, John R. Little, Julianne Snow, Suzanne Church, Stephanie Bedwell-Grime, and many more.

Here's the back cover blurb:

The Great Lakes Horror Company presents this collection of 19 new and previously published horror stories from some of the best writers lurking on the chilling shores of the wild and wicked north. Cannibals, zombies, vampires, vengeful gods, psychotics and the supernatural are just a few of the terrifying things waiting for you in this collection featuring members of the Horror Writer’s Association Ontario Chapter. Gathered here are award-winning best-selling authors, bold and bloody newcomers, and more than a few unhinged souls telling tales that will make your blood run cold.

Illustrated by celebrated genre artists, Group Hex Vol. 1 transports you to the hungry shores of future worlds, to the heart of mystical planes, and to the rooms of what seem like perfectly normal suburban houses…but they aren’t. And after reading these tales, you may never be the same again.

The antho is available at most ebook retailers, including Amazon.

I've had a spate of short story sales lately, including one previously unpublished story ("The Last of a Thing," which I blogged about here) along with a bunch of reprints.

Why so many reprints? Why so few new stories?

Well, to answer the first question, I continue to submit my previously published stories to markets that accept reprints. I can do that because I've always been careful about ensuring the rights for my stories revert to me after the original publication.

If you're a writer and don't understand what I'm talking about, you need to check out my book, Playing the Short Game.

Reprints are found money plus they give me the opportunity to find new readers who haven't come across my work before. So reprints are a win-win.

But why am I not announcing more sales of new short fiction? Even "The Last of a Thing" was a story I wrote a while ago.

The simple answer is that I'm focusing on novels now. I finished a new novel, the first book in an urban fantasy trilogy, earlier this year and am now well into the second book of that series. Plus I have another Mysterious Writing Project, which is neither short fiction nor novel, that is consuming my available writing time. More on both of these projects in future blog posts.

For now, just know that I will have the following short stories coming out as reprints over the next few months:

• My Aurora Award finalist story, "The Red Bird," will be reprinted in a Japan-themed anthology from Guardbridge Books in the UK, tentatively titled Sunrise Lands. The ebook version of the story is pictured at the left;
• "By Her Hand, She Draws You Down," both an Aurora finalist and a Best New Horror selection, will be reprinted in a HWA (Horror Writers Association) anthology, Group Hex (Volume 1), containing stories from Ontario HWA members; and,
• My Aurora Award winning tale, "Scream Angel," will appear in the anthology, Survivors, from Lethe Press, edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj

And, of course, as mentioned in a recent post, "Scream Angel," was also narrated and presented as a podcast on StarShipSofa. All of these stories, by the way, are included in my collection, Chimerascope, and are also available as stand-alone ebooks. Check my bookstore for buying links at all major retailers if you're interested.