Plus, they included the IN SITU cover (which is based on Liu’s story in that anthology, “You’ll Always Have the Burden With You“).

Read the interview here!

Age: 31

Author of: “The Fish-Wife’s Tale”

Current Geographic Location: Cleveland, Ohio

Twitter: @mbennardo

Website: http://www.mbennardo.com

Recent publications: “Honesty”, published November 2011 in The Spirit of Poe anthology from Literary Landmark Press (order book here: http://literarylandmarkpress.blogspot.com/); Various contributions, published September 2011 in The Time Traveler’s Pocket Guide from The Time Travel Bureau (order book here: http://timetravelbureau.com/); “Starvation”, published October 2010 in Machine of Death from Bearstache Books (order book here: http://machineofdeath.net/about/book)

Which zodiac sign where you born under? Taurus. Send gifts and well wishes in mid-May.

If a magic fish granted you one wish, what would it be? The ability to read, speak and understand any language, whether current or defunct. I’m mostly looking for human languages, but animal languages would be considered a welcome bonus unless — in true ironic wish fulfillment fashion — this involved hideous and painful deforming of my face and body to make possible the noises and signs that ducks, whales, elephants, and ants use to talk to each other.

What inspired your story? Given the subject of the anthology, I thought it would be fun to write a story that purported to be excerpts from a nature guide to fish and marine life. So naturally I turned to my own bookshelf of guides for inspiration and guidance.

In particular, I looked to older nature guides, which were often written by amateur naturalists. Because of that, you’re likely to find lyrical digressions and folkloric tidbits alongside sober scientific facts. Neltje Blanchan’s Wildflowers Worth Knowing (1917) and Harriet Louise Keeler’s Our Native Trees and How to Identify Them (1900) are two great examples that I had in mind while writing. But the book I turned to most was Nicholas Culpeper’s exhaustive (and somewhat insane) classic guide to the plants of England and their astrologically derived medicinal uses, The Compleat Herbal (1653).

Did you listen to music while writing it? I don’t often listen to music when I write since I usually end up too engrossed to hear it anyway.

How many rewrites did you do before submitting? Because I wanted the excerpts from the fictional nature guide both to paint a picture of a society that relies on the sea for all aspects of its livelihood and culture, and to tell a simple story about some of the people who live in that society, I fiddled extensively with this story in the outline stage. By the time I started writing, I knew exactly what I wanted to cover, but even so I had to shift and trim many of the details once they were on the page to get the pacing right.

While revising, I focused on making sure that the unusual structure of the story didn’t overwhelm the points of interest. Each excerpt needed to follow a particular format, but I also needed to make sure that descriptions of fish and their habits didn’t bog the story down. This took at least two careful revisions, and a lot of unnecessary bits were snipped out.

What is your favorite bit?

“This belief leads to small conspiracies in which the superstitious will endeavor trick each other into ‘catching’ an Eyeless Fish. If any islander should suspect his neighbor of having done him a wrong, he may hand his neighbor a small container–a wallet, a shoe, a bucket, even a plucked chicken–in which he has secreted an Eyeless Fish. For the purposes of superstition, picking up or even accepting one of these containers is considered sufficiently like ‘catching’ that the divination is believed to be effective. Even today, it is safe to say that the Eyeless Fish has unknowingly indicted many a person of crimes that he may never have committed…”

Photo courtesy of K. Sekelsky

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.