DOUGLAS SMITH | Writing the Fantastic

Please tweet this! Here's a note from Sandra Kasturi and Brett Savory, co-publishers of ChiZine Publications, the wonderful folks who have done such a great job publishing my collection, Chimerascope:

"Recently, Leisure Books, due to financial difficulties, had to cease its sponsorship of ChiZine.com. There is a note up on ChiZine.com explaining the details, but this has no effect on ChiZine Publications. The sponsorship agreement never covered CZP, and CZP never had any business relationship with Leisure—we're not an imprint or subsidiary; we are a privately held company. Rumours we are going out of business or in financial trouble are completely false. If anything, based on advance numbers for our Fall books, we're doing better than ever. Don't miss our October 22nd Toronto Fall launch!" —Brett & Sandra, Co-Publishers

And I will add that you should check out the amazing CZP catalog for an excellent selection of novels and collections from this up-and-coming Toronto small press, a catalog that prompted this response from Publishers Weekly:

"Chizine Press continues to hit the mark. I don't know what's in the water up in Canada, but it's turning out some great writers, and CZP is finding and publishing them with amazing alacrity. If I could subscribe to a publisher like a magazine or a book club—one flat annual fee to get everything they publish—I would subscribe to CZP. I think the only U.S. imprint I would say that about is Orbit, and CZP is just a touch better at hitting the literary-and-deeply-creepy mark that I love so much."

Woo hoo! The film adaptation of "By Her Hand, She Draws You Down" received 5 Nominations at the Oklahoma Horror Film Festival, including Best Short Film, Best Director and Best Editing (Anthony Sumner), Best Actress (Zoe Daelman Chlanda), and Best Actor (Jerry Murdock).

Congrats to Anthony, Zoe and Jerry, and everyone involved. You guys did a great job and deserve this. Hope that you win them all! The film festival runs Sep 3-5 in Tulsa.

The movie based on my short story "By Her Hand, She Draws You Down" is competing in the Vampire Film Festival Trailer Contest in New Orleans!

Cool! And you can view the entries and vote! Follow this YouTube link to view the trailer, and if you like it, please click on the "Thumbs Up" icon at the bottom! You'll need to log in to either your Google or YouTube account to vote.

The story is not a pointy-toothed (or sparkly) vampire tale, but it is definitely a take on vampirism. Some selected reviews:

"a haunting variant on the vampire legend with an understated and brutal ending." —Publishers Weekly, Jan 2010

“Highlights among the stories include Douglas Smith's delightfully creepy ‘By Her Hand, She Draws You Down,’ about a young woman who is driven by a mysterious hunger to sketch people and steal their life force as her horrified lover looks on.” —Kristine Huntley, Booklist (the review journal of the American Library Assoc., 2002)

“...examines vampirism from an unusual and genuinely horrifying angle.” —Nick Gevers, SF Site Review, 2001

"I was reminded of the tone of some of Harlan Ellison’s best work, particularly those collected in Deathbird Stories, where many of the protagonists seemed to be the unwitting victims of dark, irrational forces." —Mike Driscoll, The Fix, November 2008

“...a title that rules. ...psychic vampirism, creepy street performers, the horrors of small coastal towns. And Smith took the story somewhere that surprised me. The twist is sustained.” —Jay Lake, Tangent Online, November 2001

Read all the reviews here. Hope that you'll check out the trailer! You can read more about the movie here: here.

Another nice review for my second collection, Chimerascope, this one in the August issue of Broken Pencil, The Magazine of Zine Culture and the Independent Arts:

"Smith is obviously a gifted writer in the genre of science-fiction. … Smith paints his worlds so well that you are transported within a paragraph or two and remain in transit until the short story ends -- a challenging feat to be sure. Smith takes common science-fiction topics, such as love between alien races, and manages to find a new way to have his tales unfold. … Smith tells them with a flair that breathes life into his characters. … [The] familiar traits that drive human needs and wants -- such as ambition, pride, love, hate and fear -- are what piece these stories together and give them a life of their own."

Read the full review here. Read more about Chimerascope here, including excerpts from all the stories and more reviews, and how to order.

I have a "new" story, entitled "A Bird in the Hand," in the upcoming anthology, Warrior Wisewoman 3, due out this month. See right for the beautiful cover.

I include quotes around "new" because I wrote this story fourteen years ago, the second story that I ever wrote (so if you do track this one down, please be gentle). I'd actually sold this story a couple of times in the past, but those markets both folded before the story was published.

For any short fiction writers out there, there is a lesson here. Despite the mounting pile of rejections and the frustrations of two close calls, I kept the story in the mail (or email), and was finally rewarded with a sale to a respected anthology series. How many times did I keep it in the mail?

Sixty-five. That's right. Sixty-five swings and a miss (not counting the two phantom sales) before it found a real home and saw the light of published day. This is my record for rejections before a sale, breaking my previous high (set last year on a story written the same year as this one) by ten.

If any of you have read my story "Spirit Dance," this is another tale about the Heroka, my race of shape shifters, and the Tainchel, the shadowy covert government op that hunts them. An early review states "a very interesting turn-around story, in which our expectations are upended at the last minute. ...a good read, and sadly, far too relevant to our own present world."

I've been approached by Benoît Domis of DreamPress regarding a publishing a collection of my fantasy stories in France. We're still working through the details, but it would be published sometime in 2011. More info to follow. Benoît was formerly the publisher and editor of the excellent French dark fantasy magazine, Ténèbres, in France, which published two of my Heroka shapeshifter stories, "Spirit Dance" and "A Bird in the Hand." Check out their great covers here.

Assuming that the nice people at the Edmonton Public Library get their requested Canadian Council grant funding, I'll be doing two readings in Edmonton the weekend of May 27-29, 2011. One of the readings would be on Sunday May 29 at EPL's monthly Writers' Corner (these take place the last Sunday afternoon of the month), and another would be at the Strathcona County Library, a very short distance from Edmonton, on either the Friday or the Saturday. More details to follow in January once we hear about the funding request.

Well, I'm a tad late with this update, but I'm way behind on updates in general.

I'd blogged earlier about having my first story, "Spirit Dance," picked for this excellent anthology that celebrates the depth and range of Aurora Award winning short stories over the three decades since the award was first presented in Halifax in 1980.

The anthology includes work by James Alan Gardner, Isaac Szpindel, Eileen Kernaghan, Daniel Sernine, Robert J. Sawyer, Julie Czerneda, Élisabeth Vonarburg, Candas Jane Dorsey, Yves Meynard, David Nickle, Karl Schroeder, Edo Van Belkom, Hayden Trenholm, Laurent McAllister, and of course, myself, with an introduction by Jean-Louis Trudel.

It's wonderful to be included with so many fine Canadian authors, but it's also fun to be in there with so many friends and mentors who have links to my writing.

Julie Czerneda has purchased stories from me wearing her editor hat. Rob Sawyer, along with Carolyn Clink, was the guest editor who originally purchased "Spirit Dance" for Tesseracts6 in 1997. Yves Menard did the translation from Parisian to Quebec French when the story would later appear (as "La Danse des Esprits") in the fine Quebec magazine, Solaris.

The Canadian SF&F community is a small one! This is a great sampling of the best of Canadian speculative fiction, and I heartily recommend that you check it out. From Nanopress in Montreal.

"BY HER HAND, SHE DRAWS YOU DOWN," the short film based on my story of the same name, is an official selection of the 2010 DragonCon Independent Film Festival!!! DragonCon is a huge 4-day genre convention with over 50,000 attendees spread over 4 hotels in Atlanta, complete with its own film festival. Congratulations to the cast and crew! Here's a list of the BHHSDYD's upcoming film festival appearances so far:

• DragonCon Film Festival, Sept 3-6, Atlanta, GA
• Killer Film Fest, Nov 12-14, Foxboro, MA
• Dark Carnival Film Festival, Nov 19-21, Bloomington, Indiana

Here are some reviews of the original story:

"...a haunting variant on the vampire legend with an understated and brutal ending."—Publishers Weekly

“...delightfully creepy...about a young woman who is driven by a mysterious hunger to sketch people and steal their life force as her horrified lover looks on.”—Booklist, the review journal of the American Library Assoc.

"I was reminded of the tone of some of Harlan Ellison’s best work..." —The Fix

“...a title that rules. ...psychic vampirism, creepy street performers, the horrors of small coastal towns. And Smith took the story somewhere that surprised me. The twist is sustained.”—Tangent Online

Check out here for the complete story behind the movie, including a trailer, photos from the shoot, and some very cool sketches used in the film.

All ChiZine Publication titles, including my new collection, Chimerascope, are now available in several popular ebook formats through a number of online retailers, including Amazon (Kindle), Crossroad Press (PDF, MOBI, and EPUB), and Wowio (PDF). And they're all DRM free!

ChiZine co-publisher Brett Savory:

"From the beginning, we've been plugged in digitally. We used Twitter and Facebook to reach out to fans and they responded. We think e-books will grow, and grow fast, as mobile devices like smartphones and things like the iPad become the way people consume digital entertainment. And though some say there are risks of piracy, we're not using DRM technology, which we see as getting in the way of our user's ability to enjoy our titles."

To order Chimerascope in paperback or ebook format, check out the ordering links here.