Name: Tim Kane

Age: 40

Author of: “Vanity Mirror”

Current Geographic Location: Chula Vista, California

Twitter: @timkanebooks

Website: timkanebooks.com

Recent publications: “Moth and Rust”, published in September 2011 by Nevermet Press in the Stories in the Ether anthology (buy it here); “Zombie Maker”, published in June 2008 by Bards and Sages in the Legendary Horrors anthology (buy it here).

Which zodiac sign where you born under? Pisces

If a magic fish granted you one wish, what would it be? Probably to eat me. I mean, it’s the fish’s wish.

What inspired your story? Reading about a Chinese legend about a race of creatures that live in mirrors. It came from The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges. In ancient times, there was a war between these creatures and mankind. The Yellow Emperor used magic to enslave these creatures in mirrors, forcing them to mimic our movements. If you stare into the depth of a mirror, you may sometimes see the fish shimmering just at the edges, ready to throw off its shackles and restart the ancient war.

Did you listen to music while writing it? No. I like to concentrate on the writing without distraction. I do, however, drink plenty of coffee.

How many rewrites did you do before submitting? Several, though I don’t really count. I never want to rush the writing, even flash fiction.

What is your favorite bit?

“The face in the mirror showed eyes too large to even be human. A silvery sheen coated his skin. Dotted along it were…Scales?”

In light of some recent problems at other publications, we’ve included a new clause in our contracts from here on out:

If the Publisher chooses to cancel publication of a story less than 30 days before the release of the anthology, for any reason other than having received evidence of plagiarism within the affected story, the Author will receive payment for the work, even though it will not be published. Evidence of plagiarism will render the story unpublishable, the Author will not be paid, and will further be prevented from working with Dagan Books in any capacity for a period of at least one calendar year from the date of notification.

We like transparency here at Dagan Books, so we’re sharing this clause with you. It’s also a warning, in its way. If we can prove that you even submitted something plagiarized to us, you’ll go on a “do not hire” list for a least a year. Depending on how egregious your use of someone else’s work, you may stay on that list indefinitely, and never be accepted for publication by us, ever again.

Hopefully this is simply a routine notice, and we won’t ever have to use it.

- Carrie Cuinn, Publisher

Name: Polenth Blake

Author of: “Thwarting the Fiends”

Current Geographic Location: England

Twitter: @Polenth

Website: http://www.polenthblake.com/

Recent publications: “Visions of Destruction Series, Mixed Media” published in July 2011 by ChiZine, and “Missed Connection: Lizard in the Dog Park” published in November 2011 by Strange Horizons.

Which zodiac sign where you born under? I’m a fishmonkey.

If a magic fish granted you one wish, what would it be? I want my own airship, so I can travel the world (at a suitably leisurely pace, with plenty of time for tea).

What inspired your story? The story was inspired by my own feelings of having a lost cultural past. I can guess at some of it, but I’ll never really know. It’s been forgotten, and all that’s left is fragments. This is a story about a child trying to piece together his own fragments, mixed in with a bit of Alice in Wonderland and a few goldfish secrets.

Did you listen to music while writing it? If so, what, and why? No. I have hearing problems, so I like it quiet.

How many rewrites did you do before submitting? I did one major rewrite and a lot of little edits. The first line never changed.

What is your favorite bit?

Broccoli wanted to give it a hug, but he didn’t know if fish liked hugs. He didn’t know if explorers liked hugs either. They were probably too brave to need them.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 24,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 9 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

So far, the best subs for BF have mostly been wry and/or metafictional, which has been fun to read. I would love to see more adventure, more pulp, more suspense, more passion, more emotion. I would also love to see stories where the connection to the theme is a bit less obvious from the get-go; it should go there, yes, but perhaps from unexpected angles. Most of all, I want diversity: in theme, in style, in genre, in provenance, etc.  I want to be surprised; so I don’t want to be too specific.

You still have plenty of time to submit! Please see our submission guidelines for more information.

Thank you for your support, your patronage, your patience, and your readership.

We wish you the best this holiday season and in the new year.

- The Staff of Dagan Books

http://daganbooks.submishmash.com/submit

Looking for the guidelines for this project? Please see our post about it HERE.

We will accept submissions from December 15, 2011, at noon EST, to midnight EST on March 31, 2012.

Q. Who should I address my novel submission to?

A. All novel submissions are read by our Publisher and Head of Acquisitions, Carrie Cuinn. At this time she would be the person who would make a decision on your novel, novella, or short story collection, so please put your cover letters to her attention.

Q. What about Don Pizarro or K. V. Taylor?

A. K.V. Taylor is a frequent contributor and the co-editor of FISH, but is not an employee of Dagan Books. Don Pizarro is an editor on multiple projects, but is not currently reading novel submissions.

Q. If you turn down my novel, can I rewrite my query letter and try again?

A. Unless your novel has drastically changed from our first rejection, please don’t resubmit it. We do keep track of the queries we receive, and while multiple queries makes you memorable, it isn’t for a good reason.

Q. Why don’t you accept romance novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy novels, works with religious themes or [insert other genre here]?

A. Because we don’t want to publish those things. Partially it’s because they’re not genres that we read much of, for fun, and partially because by limiting our books to the genres we truly love, we can make better decisions. We’ll be comparing your work to a wider range of books, because we’ll have read more in that genre, and we’ll know what’s selling, what’s lacking in the market, and so on. There are plenty of other publishers who would be interested in your manuscript about the power of Angels to bring you romance, for example, but that’s not what we’re looking for.

Q. Are you planning to do a GLBT-themed or women-only anthology in the future?

A. Absolutely not. As far as we’re concerned, being gay or being a woman isn’t a genre. We have an inclusion policy on all of our submissions – no story or novel will ever be turned down because it featured GLBT characters, or characters with disabilities, or characters born outside of the United States, or was written by a woman. Or a man. Or a squid. We have been fortunate enough to be able to publish work by people of color, and people of different genders or sexualities, just as we publish fiction with characters across the range of human expression. We don’t do it by specifically looking for women authors or writers from Africa or anything else… we accomplish this diversity by advertising our open anthologies as widely as possible so that we get submissions from as broad of a spectrum of authors as possible, so that when we choose the best stories, they also fall across that broad spectrum. We also have a staff which is made up of a diverse group of people, who have a vastly different set of reading experiences. That helps us be more open to new viewpoints in fiction.

We do aspire to be part of the evolution in fiction away from the history of white-male dominated publishing. However, we feel that publishing a collection of work by only one segment of the population – for example, only work by Mexican-Americans born in the 1970s – implies that these authors could only get published in that sort of collection. We want to show that in any genre, in any story length, there are great writers who also happen to be men, or women, or GLBT persons, or of various ethnicities or cultures, and that’s who we publish. If we were to select stories which did not reflect this, we feel that it wouldn’t be representative of the world as we know it. (It would also mean that our submissions call didn’t go out far enough, and we’d have to try harder to reach potential authors.)

Q. My novel/story collection is complete with cover, illustrations, introduction, author blurbs, and so on. Will you publish it?

A. Probably not. We aren’t a vanity press and we’re not interested in a book as a package; we want to be part of the process of creating it.

Q. Why don’t you accept simultaneous submissions on short stories?

A. When you’re sending us a query for a novel or story collection, it’s understood that you’re also querying other publishers. We accept that. The novel submission process can take months, and by sending your work out as often as possible, you’re not limiting yourself in your choice of publisher. However, when we place an open call for an anthology, we give you a specific deadline for when we stop taking submissions and when you’ll get a reply from us. Anthologies are built around the stories that they contain, and often a story which compliments the rest of a collection no longer fits if we lose one of our other submissions. There’s a process to building an anthology. It’s very frustrating to read several hundred submissions, choose your favorites, narrow down the field, and put together a Table of Contents, only to find out one of your stories has been sold to another publication. Again, this makes you someone we’ll remember – and not in a good way.

Q. Why don’t you buy reprints?

A. As a (very) small press, we have to be able to offer our readers something that no one else can. By only publishing original stories, no reprints, we can give our audience something new.

Q. You have mostly anthologies in your catalog. How many novels do you plan to publish each year?

A. We’re a new publisher, and we are expanding, but right now we don’t want to expand more quickly than we can support. We did one book at the end of 2010, we’re doing another at the end of 2011 as well as revision of the first book, and in 2012 we’re publishing three anthologies and a novel. Anthologies are wonderful for getting new fiction out into the world and meeting new authors, but financially … they’re not profitable. In order to keep growing, we’ll need to publish novels as well as look into other projects, but we also don’t want to give up our anthologies all together. We hope to grow into doing 6 or 8 books a year, including a few anthologies, but it will take a couple more years to get to that point. Right now we’re focusing on publishing the projects we have and looking for novels so amazing we can’t help but to take a chance on them.

Keep sending us your queries! The next novel we publish may be yours.

Bibliotheca Fantastica

What we want: Stories having to do with lost, rare, weird, or imaginary books, or any aspect of book history or book culture, past, present, future, or uchronic. Any genre. Although the fantastical is not essential per se, stories should evoke a sense of the fantastic, the unknown, the weird, wonder, terror, mystery, pulp, and/or adventure, etc.

Originals only, no reprints. No simultaneous submissions. Accepting stories of up to 10,000 words in length. We will accept two submissions per author. Please format italics in italics (no underline).

We will accept submissions from December 15, 2011, at noon EST, to midnight EST on March 31, 2012. We are taking submissions through an automated system that will not allow you to submit before December 15, but the link to do so will appear here: http://daganbooks.submishmash.com/submit

Dagan Books is paying 2 cents per word for each accepted story, plus contributor copies. Bibliotheca Fantastica will be available in both print and ebook, and is scheduled to be published Fall 2012.

About the editors:

Claude Lalumière is the author of two books – the collection Objects of Worship and the novella The Door to Lost Pages – as well as the co-creator of Lost Myths, and is the Fantastic Fiction columnist for The Montreal Gazette. Bibliotheca Fantastica is his tenth
anthology as editor.

Don Pizarro is an author of short fiction, and editor for Dagan Books. In addition to this anthology he is also editing Cthulhurotica 2 in 2012.

Polenth Blake, “Thwarting the Fiends”

M. Bernardo, “The Fish-Wife’s Tale”

Camille Alexa, “The Skin of Her Skin”

Megan Englehardt, “Anansi and the New Thing”

Paul Dixon, “One Let Go”

Jennifer R. Povey, “Water Demons”

Zachary George, “You, Fish”

Sam Fleming, “What the Water Gave Her”

Shay Darrach, “I Know a Secret”

H.L. Fullerton, “The Fish Are There On Land”

Alex Shvartsman, “Life at the Lake’s Shore”

Cate Gardner, “Too Delicate for Human Form”

Andreea Zup, “Maria and the Fish”

Cat Rambo, “The Fisher Queen”

Amanda C. Davis, “O How the Wet Folk Sing”

Timothy Nakayama, “Fallen Dragons”

Sarah Hendrix, “Never to Return”

Tim Kane, “Vanity Mirror”

R.L. Naquin, “Kisses In the Snow”

Maria Romasco-Moore, “Fisheye”

Jacob Ruby, “The Talking Fish of Shangri-La”

Tracie McBride, “The Touch of Taniwha”

Corinne Duyvis, “The Applause of Others”

T.J. McIntyre, “How Did the Catfish Get a Flat Head, You Wonder?”

April L’Orange, “Quick Karma”

Vivian Unger, “A Fish Tail”

Mel Obedoza, “The Fisherman and Golden Fish”

Andrea Kneeland, “Becoming Human”

Jessie Kwak, “Needlepoint Fish of Azure City”

Claude Lalumière, “Xandra’s Brine”

Andrew Fuller, “A Salmon Tale, 2072”

Suzanne Palmer, “Lanternfish In the Overworld”

Mike Wood,“The Last Fisherman of Habitat 37”

Ariyana Spencer, “Fish Tears”

Ken Liu, “How Do You Know If a Fish Is Happy?”

The book comes in at about 80,000 words, and our like previous anthologies, will be illustrated. The book will be available on February 8, 2012.