My Nebula nominations

Saturday at midnight was the deadline for members of the SFWA to nominate works for the annual Nebula awards. I nominated five short stories in that category:

The Gods That Men Don't See, Amy Sterling Casil

Smoke and Feathers, Juliette Wade

Waiting for Medusa, Jack Dann

I Come from the Dark Universe, Cat Rambo

A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel, Ken Liu

I also nominated in the Novella category Wakulla Springs by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages.

All of these, except for the Ken Liu story, were brought to my attention by the authors themselves, either independently or in response to my own outreach effort for "Hearts Made of Stone". I felt they were all worthy efforts. I found the Ken Liu story in a search for something clearly alternate history. All great stories.

Dearth of markets

Over the past few years, the number of markets for short science fiction has dwindled. Every time I get a rejection and look to send the story out again, I see a few more markets either going out of business or closed to submissions.

I suppose the subject is on my mind because of the news that the next issue of the quality semi-prozine Electric Velocipede will be its last. I've tried to sell them a story for years, without luck; I only met Publisher John Klima a few months ago at WorldCon. He's published it since 2001; it won a Hugo award in 2009.

Since the Recession kicked in, I've seen a steady stream of magazines fold because either they ran out of money, or the people involved ran out of time and money. These publications, especially the smaller ones, are a labor of love for dedicated fans, and it must be gut-wrenching to fold a magazine because of job constraints.

Since I don't write hard s-f, my pool of markets is smaller than it might be for some others, and when you take into consideration that I can write very fast, I end up dropping some very good stories into very small markets. Over the long run, through, I feel spreading my stories far and wide has helped my reputation as a writer.

And even if a story is originally published in a small venue, it may still have a good second life in an collection or anthology. This is a little trick I stole from Joe Lansdale.