First up, let’s get this out of the way —

Puerto Rico is undergoing a humanitarian crisis thanks to Hurricane Maria.

It’s not good, and it’s getting worse.

It’s devastation, literally and emotionally, for the people of Puerto Rico — which, please remember, is an American colony that already gets the short-end of the stick, and it exists under a president that right now feels very comfortable railing about NFL players taking a knee to protest the oppression of black lives but who apparently has little interest in shining a light on an ongoing American crisis.

Anyway, to get to the meat of it —

For Houston, I donated sales to two of my books (Blue Blazes and Hellsblood Bride) to Americares. (As such, I was able to donate $250.) This time, I’m going to donate profits of my Mega Writing Bundle to the Hispanic Federation, taking a page from Lin Manuel Miranda. You are of course able to donate directly to that charity! But, for the next seven days, if you grab a copy of the Writing Bundle, which gets you ten books for twenty bucks (eight writing books and two novels), you’ll also be donating to the Hispanic Federation.

[Link to Writing Bundle: here]

[Also, Lin Manuel’s Twitter account is worthy of a follow, not just because it’s Lin Manuel, but also because he’s been charting some of the help that the Hispanic Federation is doing for PR.]

Anyway!

Other Updatery-Floo-Dee-Doo

Tomorrow, Good Lord Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise, I’ll be in Philadelphia at the B&N Rittenhouse Square to help Fran Wilde usher in the third and final book in her Bone Universe series. (The one caveat is we’re dealing with a small bronchial plague in Das Wendighaus, so that’s a variable. I’m doing okay, my wife less so, so I’m hoping to make it.)

Then, next week I’m off to Pelee Island for the Pelee Island Writers Retreat.

Then: NYCC.

Then: back with Fran and Kevin Hearne in San Francisco (Borderlands!) on October 17th, Portland (Powells!) on Oct 18th, and Seattle Oct 19th. Quick deets at Kevin’s blog! Kevin is launching his most excellent Plague of Giants, Fran’s rocking Horizon, and I’ll be launching my new book about narrative and storytelling, Damn Fine Story.

Then: home again.

Uhh. What else?

Exeunt remains a giant book. I’m pretty sure I should be done it by now. It’s 800 pages (in Word), currently 182,000 words, and it just… keeps… going.

Invasive is still on sale: $4.99. Zer0es is, too. And the third Miriam Black book, The Cormorant, is now $3.99 for Reasons Unknown and for Timeframe Unclear.

I think that’s it for now.

Onto the macros.

The first of which I love very much:

Because though you’ve seen the ladybug, you haven’t seen the spider.

And another cool camouflaged spider:

Here, have some weird fungus! It’s in your brain now! It’s taking over!

And that’s it for now.

You can always find more of my pics at my Flickr account.

Shine on, you cuckoo rhinestones. Shine on.

Making a video game is like working for a blood-thirsty dictator – you spend a lot of time validating the player, who just wants to shoot people in the face. And if there’s one thing Walt Williams has learned from working in the blockbuster game industry, it’s that nothing good comes of validating people who aren’t him.

After his misguided attempts to become an air force chaplain, Williams made the bold choice to move from Louisiana to New York City to try his hand at becoming a writer. All it took were a few dead-end writing gigs and a depleted bank account for him to take an entry-level position at a top video-game publisher, opening his eyes to a brave new digital world.

In his revealing memoir, Williams pulls back the curtain on life inside the astonishingly profitable yet compulsively secretive game industry. Informative and comically irreverent, Walt exposes a world abundant in brainpower and outsized egos struggling to find the next great innovation.

ALL THE WORDS WERE MINE

This may seem like common sense, but somehow this came as a surprise to me. You see, I’ve spent the last twelve years exclusively writing video games. Writing a game is like writing a screenplay, except that every page or so, I write, “Bad guys appear; player fights them,” and then pick up writing ten to fifteen minutes later in the story. On top of that, the script is written while the game is still being developed. Characters, dialog, locations, set pieces, action beats – all can vanish or change at any moment. Writing games can be a dizzying, thankless endeavor. Sometimes it feels like speeding down a hill in a shopping cart while trying to disarm a bomb with a dull pencil. That’s why I love it.

Writing Significant Zero was different. There was no player, artist, or level designer waiting to step in and take control. I didn’t know what to do with that freedom. I’d spent so many years putting words in the player’s mouth, that I’d forgotten what it was like to have a voice of my own. It took the entire writing process for me to grow comfortable with my own words. Even now, I worry that certain parts might not be relatable to every possible reader. That’s the game writer in me. I shut him up by reminding myself that a book doesn’t have to be everything to everyone. A player wants to experience a game on their own terms, but a reader wants to step into the author’s mind and discover what joy and horror await them.

“HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY” ONLY APPLIES TO YOU

When I called my father to tell him I’d sold my book, the first thing he said was, “Son, I’m proud of you.” He then followed it up with, “I hope they’re paying you enough to make it worth pissing off all your friends.” That was something I had not considered.

When you write a memoir, you quickly realize that your stories are not yours alone. They also belong to your friends, family, and coworkers, none of whom asked to be in a book. So, I decided the only person who’d get thrown under the bus was me. This doesn’t mean I altered stories to make other people look better. I just went out of my way to use anecdotes that made me look worse. And do you know what happened when I did that? My book became more interesting and relatable. No one needs a book that makes my friends look bad. But a book about how I’m an idiot who somehow turned out okay is a book that might actually be worth reading. Of course, pulling that off is harder than it seems…

I HAD TO BECOME A CHARACTER

Writing about the past is hard, because we’re constantly changing who we are and how we feel. Whether we age like a fine wine, or devolve into some kind of primal, mutant jackass, we tend to view our past through the filter of our present. We judge ourselves, edit our memories to better fit our personal narrative, and even delude ourselves into believing things that never happened. It’s natural. Everyone does it. When writing Past Walt, it would have been so easy to smooth out his rough edges, make him seem cooler or more competent. Believe me, it was tempting. No one ever would have known, except for me and anyone who’d talked to me for longer than fifteen minutes.  But – and this is important – you’re not allowed to do that if you’re writing a memoir. When telling a true story, you can’t make shit up, even if it’s funnier. Non-fiction is tricky that way. To stop myself from falling into that trap, I had to mentally disconnect myself from Past Walt, and write him like he was a character, rather than a reflection of who I am today. His actions had to exist without my commentary or hindsight, leaving you to decide whether he’s charming, insufferable, or just kind of a dope.

FEAR WAS MY FRIEND

The further I got into the book, the more vulnerable I felt. I was scared of what people would think, not of the book, but of me as a person. My flight instinct would kick in, and I’d have to stop myself from erasing or reworking whole sections just to save myself from scrutiny. Eventually, I began to recognize my fear as a sign that I was on the right track. If I felt nothing that meant my writing was safe or inconsequential. However, if I was afraid… if I suddenly felt the need to fake my own death and run away to the wilds of Montana… then I knew I was writing something true. My fear became my compass. Every time I sat down to write I had to find it, feel it, and then dive in as deep as I could go.

YOU’VE DONE MORE THAN YOU KNOW

I once believed there were only four types of people who should write memoirs: rock stars, presidents, people who almost died, and those who were about to die. Everyone else lacked the experience necessary to write a memoir. Sadly, I am not America’s first rock star president who famously cheated death, buffed up, and then died again, all so I could kick the Grim Reaper’s ass. And that’s not for lack of trying. Still, what have I done that’s worth writing about? Everything, really. Same goes for you. Life can seem rote, but living through it is rarely boring. When writing about the past, describing an event is sometimes less important than how it felt. The feeling is what left an impression. That shared language of emotion is the one thing you and the reader will always have in common. When spoken properly, even the smallest actions can seem grand.

 

* * *

Walt Williams lives in Louisiana with his wife and daughter, where he splits his time between writing and failing to keep his flowerbeds alive. He’s known mostly for writing video games, in particular SPEC OPS: THE LINE and the upcoming STAR WARS: BATTLEFRONT II.

Walt Williams: Twitter | Instagram | Website

Significant Zero: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | iBooks | Audible

I walk sometimes.

I walk with the dogs. We walk through all seasons, down backroads, past farms, past barns, past fields. We walk over mower clippings, dry and dead leaves, and after a hard rain or a big storm, we walk over the jellied frog bits left behind. Today I walked and found a praying mantis climbing on my shoe, because apparently this is the Year of the Mantis. We are besieged. And that’s fine.

For years, we have also walked over nuts and the hulls that once held these nuts.

The hulls are green or brown, like smaller walnut exoskeletons. Is that the word? Exoskeletons? Who cares, I said it.

The nuts are white or a very light brown, tapered at the tips and with faint ridge lines running top to bottom. For the past many years, I have found one purpose for these nuts: they are most delightful to step on. They make an endearing crunch. It is easy to imagine that you are, in fact, stepping on tiny huts as a monstrous kaiju, or stepping on the delicate toe-bones of your many enemies. The crunch is incredibly pleasing: a faint hesitation before the crackling pop. It has the satisfaction of eating a cereal that stays crispy in milk.

These nuts are delightful to squirrels and chipmunks, who hoard them viciously and then, as is their way, forget where the fuck they put them. Trees, you see, are smarter than squirrels — they count on the fuzzy little dipshits to bury so many nuts and seeds that they forget where they buried them, so then new trees can be born. The squirrels either forget or become road paste, proving that trees are not only smarter than squirrels, but also potentially more cruel than squirrels, counting on their inevitable demise in order to spread their saplings.

This year, we appear to be having a mast year for these nuts — a mast year meaning, a year of superfluity. More nuts than usual appear. (Roll the tape on a 2016 election metaphor.) And this year, our dogs have taken to… well, eating them.

They hunt them like truffle-hungry pigs.

The one dog hunts them, then discards them. The other eats them.

I figured I’d better suss out what these nuts are, because they’re probably poisonous. The dogs are not wise. The dogs lick butts. They eat poop. They will, given half-a-moment, eat a poisonous mushroom. Dogs are wonderful, but let’s just say they’re not getting into a good school.

I searched. I Googled. I beseeched the gods.

And it turned out, we have hickory nut trees.

Shagbark hickory nut trees, which is to say, the trees have shaggy, loose, dangling bark — as if they are constantly trying to be rid of their own TREEFLESH, as if they are suffering from some kind of BARK LEPROSY.

And it turns out, you can eat hickory nuts.

(Dogs can, but mostly shouldn’t. Not poisonous immediately, but over time.)

One day I picked one up.

And I knew immediately I shouldn’t eat it. It’s a cardinal rule, isn’t it? DON’T EAT SHIT YOU FIND IN THE FUCKING WOODS, WEIRDO. That mushroom? Don’t eat it. That bug? Don’t eat it! That hamburger? Why is there a hamburger in the woods? That’s a trapburger, probably put there by a trapburger spider. Don’t eat that. Run away. Call somebody. Jeez.

Also, don’t eat weird nuts you find.

Just don’t do it.

That’s Life 101, man. PUT THAT WEIRD THING DOWN AND GO EAT A TACO.

But then —

Then I thought, it’s getting weird out there. I’m not a survivalist. I’m not a doomsday prepper. But I’m starting to feel that frequency, you get me? I’m kinda sorta like, UH-OH, all the time. A constant series of UH-OHs, endlessly looping in my head. Like, if you told me, IN SIX MONTHS, CIVILIZATION WILL HAVE FALLEN, I’d be upset, but also not precisely shocked, either. I’d nod and say, “Uh-huh, okay, okay.” I would maybe subscribe to your newsletter.

But that makes me worry even more: how unprepared am I? Am I really prepared for the collapse of civilization? I can’t eat my blog. My blog won’t even exist. I can maybe use the comp copies of my novels to build a shelter. I guess I could hunt and kill my neighbors, but — *whistles* — that seems drastic. Wouldn’t it be easier if I… learned to live off the land? Wouldn’t it be ideal if I learned how to forage like a fucking forager in the woods? The pioneers did it. The native peoples did it before, y’know, those goddamned pioneers came and fucked everything up.

I thought, I can do it, too.

I can eat these nuts.

And I did. I took that nut, and I gently pressed on it with my sneaker until — yes, yesss, there came that gentle mouse-skull crackle.

But I did not press down all the way. I then took the nut, peeled away its UNFEELING CHITINOUS EXTERIOR and then got at the nutmeat inside.

(There is no less palatable a phrase than “nutmeat,” by the way, unless of course you are so inclined to add “moist” to it as an adjective.)

(MOIST NUTMEAT.)

(Sorry.)

The nutmeat — okay, let’s just call it “the nut” — had a wonderful smell. A little bit pecan, but also a little bit butter-and-maple-syrup. It had a pancake satisfaction to it.

Then I put it in my mouth.

It was sweet. A little vegetal. It had that maple syrup vibe.

Like a sassy pecan, or a flirty walnut.

It appealed to me in more than just taste, though — it appealed to that ego-fed hipster thing that lives inside some of us, right? “I discovered a new thing,” you think, and it’s the same thing that tickles your mental perineum as when you discover some strange new coffee or a weird new fruit or some rad new YOGURT BAR where they serve like, MONKEY YOGURT or some shit. You both want to be the one to have discovered it and Instagrammed it and you also want to take all your friends down to the place, “YOU GUYS YOU NEED TO TRY THIS SMALL-BATCH LOCALLY-SOURCED MONKEY YOGURT, YOU CAN HAVE IT HOWEVER YOU LIKE, MY FAVORITE WAY IS TO ADD IN THE ESSENCE OF BANANA WATER AND BEE LEGS AS WELL AS A FINE DUSTING OF EXFOLIATED PYRITE.” I suspect this is in part just ego-boo, but maybe there’s also something evolutionary at work — the pride of discovering a thing that can both feed your tribe and also give you the social boost juice to go along with it.

Who knows.

Either way, I ate a random nut.

And it was good.

But then I thought, this is not a good thing I just did. I just took my sneaker, which may or may not have particles of dog poop on it, and I rolled it across the thing I just ate. I’m no better than the dogs. That’s how you get butt-worms. That’s not how you become the Cool Guy In The Village Who Discovered Those Tasty Nuts. That’s how you become Creepy Dave In The Faraway Hut Don’t Go Near Him He Has Raging Out-of-Control Butt-Worms.

I thought, I need to do this right.

I gathered some nuts.

I took them home.

I tried to crack them, which was a lot like trying to crack a safe with a pair of chopsticks. It just didn’t work. Mister Google said: “Use a hammer.” So I used a hammer, and I hammered the nut, and the nut spun away and hit my son in the head, and he frowned at me and I said YOU SHOULDN’T BE NEAR DADDY WHEN HE’S DOING IMPORTANT WORK and I left it at that. Then I got a pair of pliers, and that did work, except for the part where it obliterated the shell and the nutmeat (ew) into an inedible paste.

So, I thought, this shit isn’t worth it.

These nuts are stupid. Fuck these nuts. These are fucknuts. That’s where that word comes from, I decided. But. But! Maybe this was a lesson. A lesson I needed to learn. Sometimes, good things are worth it. A hard hike will take you to a beautiful lookout. A wonderful marriage can take some deep soul-searching. Sometimes to get the reward, you gotta put in the effort.

I renewed my assault.

I collected more nuts. A whole goddamn bucket’s worth. I wandered the roads and byways, the woods and forests, gathering nuts like a man-shaped squirrel. My wife watched me with grim fascination, and at one point she asked me, “Is this where you’re becoming an old man? Like, officially?” And I said YOU GO TO HELL I’M GOING TO GO OUT ON THE PORCH AND LISTEN TO BIRDS AND CRACK MY NUTS AND DIE PEACEFULLY.

Okay I didn’t say that, I instead said, “Yes, probably.”

But I did go watch a pileated woodpecker, which was nice.

These, then, were the nuts I collected:

And I got a fancy new nutcracker, too.

This was my setup last night:

I thought, here it is. Here we go. It’s worth it time. Time to make the nutmeat, baby. And already I had visions of harvesting tons of hickory nuts and cornering the market on hickory nuts because nobody sells hickory nuts, ha ha ha, I’m a genius, I thought.

A FUCKING NUTMEAT TYCOON. COUNTING MY NUTMONEY, DIVING IN AND OUT OF IT LIKE SCROOGE MOTHERFUCKING MCDUCK.

I gathered my supplies.

My son gathered around, excited.

My wife remained at a distance, dubious.

I placed the first nut into the NUT-CRUSHING CHAMBER:

Then I pulled the lever —

And the damn nut-cracker slipped out of my hand, onto the floor.

“Misfire,” I said.

“Oops,” said my son.

My wife frowned.

I tried again. Pressure. PRESSURE.

Nothing.

“I need to mount this somewhere,” I said.

“No,” my wife said, as her long, well-reasoned argument.

My son said, “Let me try,” and he’s six so I knew he wouldn’t be able to do it, but then I was like, oh shit what if he can, he will totally upstage me. But, bonus: now I have child labor, so that’s nice. Still — no, nope, he couldn’t do it, either.

I fidgeted with the nut (get your head out of the gutter) and tried again.

This time —

Kkkk.

It was happening.

KkKKKT.

I did it! I crushed a nut!

I AM PROMETHUS STEALING NUTS FROM THE NUTGODS

I AM HERO MAN FEEDING HIMSELF AND HIS FAMILY WITH NUTMEAT okay still ew, FEEDING HIMSELF AND HIS FAMILY WITH THE GOLDEN HICKORYFLESH, that sounds better, AND NOW NONE CAN DEFEAT HIM

OR ME BECAUSE I AM HIM

WHATEVER SHUT UP

So, here we go, I thought. Let’s get nutty.

The next one I crushed, I crushed hard.

As in, I pulverized it.

Okay, fine, cool. I read online that you can take a pick of some kind and extract the hickory goodness, so I did that — got a dental floss pick thingy, and began scraping meat out of the shells, scrape, scrape, scrape.

After about ten minutes, I had:

Okay, you know, that’s not good. That’s not a good ten minutes worth of effort. That’s like a… a shitty ROI, isn’t it? Urgh. I could’ve taken no time and just eaten an apple. I could’ve made a grilled cheese sandwich in half the time. This was not good.

My son said, “Can I have one?”

“That’s your college education right there, hands off.”

He looked at me and wandered away.

As the saying goes, slow and steady wins the race. I had started to figure out these nuts. They were a mystery, and I was the Hercule Poirot to solve them. I knew that if you put them in lengthwise, and applied increasing pressure, you could get the shell to crack without disrupting the golden hickory goodness inside. That was the secret, I thought. I had their number.

I continued to crack nuts.

One out of every three nuts would be intact.

The others would be pulverized.

So I would scrape, scrape, scrape.

My arm started to hurt.

My wife and son where in the other room, watching TV.

Their life was ongoing. Mine was here, at the dining room table, judiciously cracking nuts. Sometimes one would explode in the NUT VISE, and throw shards of sharp shell into my face. I would scream when this happened. “I am enjoying this,” my wife said, probably being serious.

I kept on. They didn’t understand.

NOBODY UNDERSTOOD MY GENIUS.

An hour went by.

I put a nut into the vice.

I applied pressure, squeezing, squeezing —

It popped open.

And maggots spilled out.

I screamed.

Two maggots writhed inside the shell.

“I AM XANTHOS,” the first maggot said, rising to greet me.

“I AM VORTHOX,” the second maggot said, coiling in the dark.

In gurgled simultaneity they said, “WE ARE THE COSMIC WORLD-EATER WORMS. YOU HAVE HATCHED US. WE ARE UNLEASHED UPON THE EARTH. NOW WE WILL CHEW THROUGH THE PLANET AS SURE AS WE WOULD CHEW TO THE HEART OF AN APPLE. BUT FIRST WE WILL TEACH YOU THE FIRST LESSON OF OUR KIND, WHICH IS THIS: HICKORY NUTS ARE BULLSHIT, AND DUDE, YOU COULD JUST GO AND BUY A BUNCH OF PECANS AT BULK, YOU FUCKING DINGLEBERRY. NOW LET US FREE SO THAT WE MAY CONSUME THE FABRIC OF THIS REALITY BEFORE WE MOVE, MAD AND STARVING, ONTO THE NEXT.”

“Is everything okay in there?” my wife asked.

“Yes,” I lied.

I scooped up the nut with the twin maggots and I quickly threw it outside, where I’m pretty sure the one dog ate it, so that’s cool.

My son said, “What were those?”

“Maggots,” I said, neglecting to mention their names.

“Oh, cool,” he said, and it was kinda cool, in a gross way.

“I think I’m done with these nuts,” I said to my wife.

“That’s probably for the best,” she answered.

I looked down at the nutmeats of my labor:

That was about… ohh, 15% of the total nuts I collected, if I’m being generous.

I thought, fuck it, let’s just roast them and be done.

Weary and hallucinating, I put them in the oven with some salt.

They were fine.

I ate them and had mild diarrhea.

Hickory nuts are bullshit, I’m going to go buy pecans instead.

But I have heard that if you peel the bark, and you smoke it, and then boil it with some water and sugar, you can make shagbark hickory syrup and —

My wife, from the other room: “No.”

Good point, lady, good point.

(Don’t tell her, but I already collected the bark.)

* * *

Having been desperate to rid herself of her psychic powers, Miriam now finds herself armed with the solution — a seemingly impossible one. But Miriam’s past is catching up to her, just as she’s trying to leave it behind. A copy-cat killer has caught the public’s attention. An old nemesis is back from the dead. And Louis, the ex she still loves, will commit an unforgivable  act if she doesn’t change the future. 

Miriam knows that only a great sacrifice is enough to counter fate. Can she save Louis, stop the killer, and survive? 

Hunted and haunted, Miriam is coming to a crossroads, and nothing is going to stand in her way, not even the Trespasser.

The 5th Miriam Black book — out January 23rd, 2018

Preorder Raptor & Wren: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Another mantis shot.

We are inundated with praying mantises this year. So many my dog stepped on one while walking. (It was okay, to my surprise.) I daily help at least one mantis across the road. In just the past few days I’ve seen them on our fence, our mailbox, on various trees and shrubs.

They are everywhere.

Curiously, we’ve also had a (very welcome) uptick in honeybees and monarch butterflies. Why? No idea. I usually spy a couple monarchs a day. And honeybees — dang, if I took all the honeybees I’ve seen in the last 5 years and added them up, they would still fall seriously shy of how many I’ve seen this summer. They are everywhere around here. It’s been good.

I’m sure it’s some apocalyptic burst: the insects have figured out that THE REIGN OF MAN IS AT AN END, and they’re retaking territory. But hey, whatever, they deserve it.

ANYWAY, still sick over here, still on deadline, so go forth and have a good one. Maybe I’ll see you at B&N Bethlehem (4-6pm) this Saturday, or B&N Rittenhouse next Tuesday giving big ups to Fran Wilde’s Horizon launch, byeeeee.

So, every good story has an argument.

It has more than a point-of-view — it has a point. Maybe it’s one you intend, maybe it’s one that crawls up out of the wet goop that is your unconscious mind. Who knows? Either way, the story exists and the story says something. It’s not an obvious thing. It’s more the plumbing behind the walls than the walls themselves. But it’s there. Whispering its message through the vents.

That’s a story’s theme.

Today, I’m going to give you a theme.

And you’re (duh) gonna write a story using it.

That theme is:

“To fix something, you first must break it.”

That’s it.

You have 1500 words.

Due by: Friday, 9/22, noon EST.

Write it at your online space. Link back here. Etc.

Nearly ten years ago, two LOST geeks decided to start a book review blog. They determined that together they would read the latest and greatest releases in genre fiction and aspired to post at least one review a week each. Most importantly, they were eager to create a conversational space dedicated to discussing genre fiction online.

Those two women — spoiler alert, it’s us — created The Book Smugglers. Since its inception in 2008, The Book Smugglers has grown and changed in many ways, from the genres of books covered to the types of reviews and conversations held in this space. The one thing that remained constant, however, was our desire to discover and share new books and authors with the world.

Three years ago, we Book Smugglers found ourselves in a unique position, as first time nominees for a Hugo Award for our blog for Best Fanzine, and contributors to Best Related Work finalist, Speculative Fiction 2012. For a while, we grappled with our next Big Step. Other bloggers before us had gone the writer route–they became authors in their own right by penning their own SFF narratives, or compiled and sold rights to collections of nonfictional writings. Neither of those routes seemed completely right for us Smugglers–although the idea of publishing new voices appealed to us strongly. We had just finished editing our first nonfiction anthology, Speculative Fiction 2013, and hungered to do more–but this time, we wouldn’t just scour the internet for essays about SFF already written and posted by others.

This time, we wanted to take it a step further, to discover, edit, and publish brand new short fiction.

And so, in 2014, Book Smugglers Publishing was born. Our mission was (and remains) to find and publish diverse, subversive fiction about and from underrepresented perspectives, for readers of all ages. We launched our very own short fiction program by opening submissions in April 2014, and publishing our first season of stories in October.

From the outset, we were determined to make Book Smugglers Publishing’s short story program distinct from other SFF zines and publishers in terms of content and structure. Instead of having a rolling call for submissions timed to specific magazine issues published throughout the year, our submissions would open for a limited time and focused on a central theme that would change each year; e.g. subversive fairy tales in year one, first contact stories in year two, superhero fiction in year three, and gods and monsters in year four. We would comb through hundreds of submissions to find the best, most interesting, most subversive stories, publish them for free online, but also make each individual story available as an ebook for sale. Some stories we even made available as limited prints or via more broadly available print on demand editions, as either stand alone pieces or collected in larger anthologies.

Starting a short fiction program from scratch has been one of the most rewarding things we’ve ever done–but it also was one of the hardest things we’ve ever attempted to undertake. As we head into our fourth year as publishers and tenth year as bloggers, with an active Kickstarter campaign to help us continue to find and publish awesome new short stories from different voices–here are a five things we’ve learned in starting our short fiction program from scratch.

THERE WILL BE A TON OF SUBMISSIONS.

You would not believe the sheer volume of submissions received. When we first announced our short story call to action, both of us were slightly terrified that no one would want to submit to us–after all, we were bloggers and writers/editors of nonfiction, so maybe authors would scorn this small indie venture from two nerds. We needn’t have worried–in our first year of short stories, we received over five hundred submissions. That number increased exponentially with each subsequent call for submissions, as our program grew and became more established in the SFF world. So you think you want to start a short fiction program? Make sure you have a lot of time built in so you can read through the inevitable inbox-slaying digital reams of submissions.

MAKING CHOICES IS HARD. YOU WILL ALWAYS WANT TO BUY MORE THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY AFFORD.

Just as you will receive hundreds, if not thousands, of short stories, you will inevitably find that there are many awesome stories in the batch and you will want to publish more than you can possibly afford or handle. If you’re running your short fiction program with other editors and have to jointly determine which stories will make the cut, be prepared for an editorial battle royale. (And also be prepared to be sad because you won’t be able to publish everything you want. Choices are hard.)

SHORT STORIES ARE A TON OF WORK.

This seems like something that everyone knows. But, in the sage words of MTV’s Diary, you think you know… but you have no idea. (Until you’re actually in the heart of it, that is.) Reading through submissions and selecting the stories you want to publish are just the tip of the iceberg–there’s the entire editorial process, the commissioning and editing of cover art, the actual digital creation and distribution process, the wrangling of contracts and royalty statements, and so on and so forth. All of the different touchpoints that are involved in the genesis and life cycle of a short story are the same as they are for longer form fiction–you just have a much shorter window to turn it all around and make it real.

YOU WILL SECOND-GUESS YOURSELF. A LOT.

Did we pick the right short story? Did our editorial direction actually make the story stronger and more cohesive? Do people care about what we’re doing? Do they want more stories? Less stories? Should we open up submissions to include reprints or translations? There are a myriad of questions that will haunt your every move, especially as you start out on your first short fiction publication endeavor–we just remember to trust our gut, and believe in our authors and our choices.

DAMN, DO WE LOVE READING SHORT FICTION.

The most important thing of all, the best takeaway and lesson we’ve learned over publishing short fiction, is that we love reading short fiction. Even when we’re slogging through some weaker submissions, even when we’re facing impossibly tight deadlines and the specter of Real Life is threatening to interfere with our ongoing pub schedule–the constant that remains is how much we love SFF short stories. We have the joy of reading and working on some truly unique, memorable, and poignant SFF that challenges the status quo. We have the incredible honor of finding and nurturing new and burgeoning voices in speculative fiction from around the world–who otherwise may never have been published or discovered. We love what we do. And, at the end of the day, publishing short fiction reinforces why we do all of this in the first place.

(Our first ever Kickstarter campaign is in its second week and we are hoping to fund a brand new season of short stories – under the theme “Awakenings” – at a higher pay rate to authors, along with commissioning paid non-fiction work for The Book Smugglers.)

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The Book Smugglers are:

Thea James is a Hapa Filipina-American who works for Penguin Random House by day, and is a Book Smuggler by night. When she’s not at The Book Smugglers or swamped in pending papers and proposals, she can be found blogging over at Kirkus with Ana. (If she’s not there either, try the local bar.)

Ana Grilo is a Brazilian who moved to the UK because of the weather. No, seriously. She works with translations IRL and hopes one day The Book Smugglers will be her day job. When she’s not at The Book Smugglers, or hogging our Twitter feed, she can be found blogging over at Kirkus with Thea or podcasting with Renay at the Hugo Award-nominated podcast Fangirl Happy Hour.