You are here: Home / Archives for k. v. taylor

Answers to Some Questions About Our Submissions Process

December 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

We’ve recently gotten some questions about our submissions process and have put together a few answers for you. If you’re thinking about submitting a novel to us, or a short story to one of our open anthologies, please read on.

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.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Stats and Facts, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Official Table of Contents for FISH

October 1, 2011 By 5 Comments

Table of Contents, FISH (due out February 8, 2012)

  1. Alexa, Camille “The Skin of Her Skin”
  2. Bennardo, Matthew “The Fish-Wife’s Tale”
  3. Blake, Polenth “Thwarting the Fiends”
  4. Darrach, Shay “I Know a Secret”
  5. Davis, Amanda C. “O How the Wet Folk Sing”
  6. Dixon, Paul A. “One Let Go”
  7. Duyvis, Corinne “The Applause of Others”
  8. Englehardt, Megan “Anansi and the New Thing”
  9. Fleming, Sam “What the Water Gave Her”
  10. Fuller, Andrew “A Salmon Tale, 2072”
  11. Fullerton, H.L. “The Fish Are There On Land”
  12. Gardner, Cate “Too Delicate for Human Form”
  13. George, Zachary “You, Fish”
  14. Hendrix, Sarah “Never to Return”
  15. Kane, Tim “Vanity Mirror”
  16. Kneeland, Andrea “Becoming Human”
  17. Kwak, Jessie “Needlepoint Fish of Azure City”
  18. L’Orange, April “Quick Karma”
  19. Lalumière, Claude “Xandra’s Brine”
  20. Liu, Ken “How Do You Know If a Fish Is Happy?”
  21. McBride, Tracie “The Touch of Taniwha”
  22. McIntyre, T.J. “How Did the Catfish Get a Flat Head, You Wonder?”
  23. Nakayama, Timothy “Fallen Dragon”
  24. Naquin, R.L. “Kisses In the Snow”
  25. Obedoza, Mel “The Fisherman and Golden Fish”
  26. Palmer, Suzanne “Lanternfish In the Overworld”
  27. Povey, Jennifer R. “Water Demons”
  28. Rambo, Cat “The Fisher Queen”
  29. Romasco-Moore, Maria “Fisheye”
  30. Ruby, Jacob “The Talking Fish of Shangri-La”
  31. Shvartsman, Alex “Life at the Lake’s Shore”
  32. Spencer, A. D. “Fish Tears”
  33. Unger, Vivian “A Fish Tail”
  34. Wood, Mjke “The Last Fisherman of Habitat 37”
  35. Zup, Andreea “Maria and the Fish”

Please note the Table of Contents is currently listed alphabetically by author’s last name, and does not reflect the final order of stories.

Filed Under: Announcements, Featured News Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Interview: K. V. Taylor

May 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Name: K.V. Taylor

Age: 30

Author of: “Chennai 5”

Current Geographic Location: DC Metro Area

Original Hometown, if different: Wellsburg, WV

Twitter: @taylorkv

Website: http://kvtaylor.com

Recent publications: I’ve had some short fiction sprinkled around here and there–most recently work in Belfire Press’s Ante Mortem and Dagan Books’ Cthulhurotica. My first novel, Scripped, comes out in June from Belfire.

Do you think alien life exists in the Universe? I think there are a lot of things I don’t know, and very few things I do. This one is in the former category.

If you could travel off Earth, would you? What if it meant you could never come back? I would, but not if it meant I could never come back. I love travelling, but I love coming home after just as much. Which is actually relevant to “Chennai 5″, come to think of it…

What inspired your essay? A couple of things, the most obvious being my husband’s hometown, Chennai– the city formerly known as Madras. I adore it. It’s huge, tropical, welcoming, and a more than a little mad in every possible way. Also a great place to indulge my academic interest in South Asian art. When I asked him to name my main character, he named her after Kannagi and told me her part of the story from Silappadikaram. I went and looked her up, and it exploded from there.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit that I also wanted an excuse to use some of my favorite Tamil expressions–my absolute favorite being “Why are you like this?” Which is a great way of saying, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

What music or movies helped you to write this essay? Talvin Singh’s OK, which is an old favorite, and Franz Schubert. Yeah, I don’t know either.

How many rewrites did you do before submitting? Three, I think. I wrote it quickly because I’d been discussing it with my husband for months beforehand. Usually fast means bad, but I had a really good beta that cut down on the stress for me big time. Thanks Meghan!

What is your favorite bit?

“It doesn’t mean anything.” Nagesvaran held up a palm-sized chunk of stone decorated in stylized banyan motifs, running his finger along one elegant line. “But it’s interesting. Like those spears the UAF found on Raleigh, just like the kind they used in ancient Scandinavia. The carving’s nothing like anything we’d see on Earth, let alone in Baaradham–but we’re definitely dealing with hands very like human ones.”

“It’s beautiful,” she said, around a maddening lump in her throat and that flaming itch in her brain. She could only ignore it when she slept, any more–and even then, she dreamt of humidity and sand.

Filed Under: Contributor Interviews Tagged With: , , ,

10 Questions about FISH, answered

May 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment

We sat down with Carrie Cuinn – our Publisher, and co-editor of our upcoming anthology FISH – to get a few answers to questions sent in by our readers.

1. The last two anthologies were edited by you alone, but FISH is also being edited by K. V. Taylor. Why did you decide to work with someone else on this project, and why her?

Putting out an anthology is a huge amount of work, especially considering that I handle most of the other aspects of Dagan Book’s business as well. But it’s tempting to keep all of the work, and control, to myself to make sure that I’m only putting out books I believe in. I knew that FISH would have a broader scope than our first two books, and therefore get a lot more interest and submissions from artists and writers so realistically I needed to find someone to help shoulder some of the responsibilities. Finding just the right person, I thought, would be difficult, because it would have to be someone who would understand my concepts and ideas, be someone who was themselves a great writer, and someone with a strong work ethic. K. V. Taylor was the first and only person that I thought of for this project, and luckily for me she was excited to come on board. She has written for both Cthulhurotica and IN SITU, has another project with us coming out later in the year, runs a penny dreadful-style webzine, and has two novels of her own coming out this year too. She can write well, and she’s prolific. Plus, she’s consistently delightful, so I know working with her on FISH will be wonderful.

2. What kind of stories are you looking for? What should writers avoid?

The best place to start would be our submission guidelines, followed by the interview I did over at Duotrope. We’re not afraid of dark, sad, or creepy stories, but they have to be beautiful. There has to be a lovely quality to the words or the characters, there has to be a fluid motion to the story. Of course, the stories must feature fish in a pivotal role. We’re not looking for twist endings that only serve to make the title funny. Don’t submit anything you haven’t read out loud and that hasn’t been revised at least twice.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Stats and Facts Tagged With: , , ,
« Older Posts