Short Fiction In A Fast Market

by Celina Summers

Over at our parent company, Musa Publishing, we've been working with the family of American science fiction pioneer Homer Eon Flint. Flint is one of the original sci fi writers, a hack writer for the pulp magazines of the nineteen-teens through the mid nineteen-twenties. He's best known for his series of pulp novels about Dr. Kinney—forays into planetary exploration from the imagination of a turn of the century imagination: The Emancipatrix, The Devolutionist, The Queen of Life and The Lord of Death. But Homer Eon Flint also had a healthy string of short stories published—and what was, to us, a treasure trove of unpublished short stories as well.

Working through Flint's entire body of work has been professionally fulfilling for me, but it's also called to mind an era most of us can't imagine—a time where submissions were all snail mail, no ifs, ands, or buts. For generations, authors typed and retyped their stories, getting each page picture perfect, then slipped it into an envelope, went to the post office, and mailed it to an editor. That's why Vella Munn, Flint's granddaughter and multi-published author, was able to bring us all these stories that never saw the light of day. Because back then, when an editor rejected a story, he sent it back to the writer.

Some of my favorite childhood books were semi-autobiographical novels about young women who write—Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy stories, L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. All three of these classic tales occur within forty years of each other—from the Civil War of Alcott's impetuous heroine Jo, to the American world of Lovelace's charmer Betsy and the Canadian Prince Edward Island of Betsy's contemporary, Montgomery's adopted redhead Anne. All three girls began writing at an early age. All three girls began to send out their stories while still high school aged. Their descriptions of their maiden efforts were very similar.

'When she finished a story she copied it neatly and sent it away with return postage enclosed to The Ladies' Home Journal or The Delineator, The Youth's Companion or St. Nicholas. As regularly as she sent them out, they were returned. But Betsy was stubborn. If a story came back in the morning from one magazine, it went out in the afternoon to another. She kept a record in a little notebook of how much postage each manuscript required, when it went out, and when it came back.'(Betsy and Joe, Maud Hart Lovelace, 1948)

Anne's experience was similar.

'One day Anne took to the Post Office a long bulky envelope, addressed, with the delightful confidence of youth and inexperience, to the very biggest of the "big" magazines...A week of delightful dreaming followed, and then came a bitter awakening. One evening, Diana found Anne in the porch gable, with suspicious-looking eyes. On the table lay a long envelope and a crumpled manuscript.
"Anne, your story hasn't come back?" cried Diana incredulously.
"Yes it has," said Anne shortly.
"Well, that editor must be crazy. What reason did he give?"
"No reason at all. There is just a printed slip saying that it wasn't found acceptable."' (Anne of The Island, Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1915)

See? The form rejection has a long and storied history, and it hasn't changed much since the days of Homer Eon Flint. If anything, the only change is that getting those form rejections is much quicker. The fastest rejection I ever received was ten minutes.

That one stung.

But within a few minutes of that ten minute rejection, that story was on its way to the next magazine on my list. The turnover time was less than half an hour, from writing the query letter and sending the submission, to rejection, to sending the sub to another publication.

Sometimes, I don't think people realize exactly how substantially the publishing industry has changed. A hundred years is an amazingly short time historically. Heck, the last ten years have seen probably the biggest changes. When I was shopping my first novel, the majority of publishers still wanted paper submissions and queries. Now very few do. Home Eon Flint, whose stories foretold space travel and genetic testing—what would he think of publishing now? Of the immediacy of results? Of devices that could carry hundreds of stories at the same time and take up about the same amount of space in your briefcase as a notepad?

I wonder.

With the market faster and the reader demanding more top quality fiction at a greater rate, the speculative fiction market is alive and well and going strong. There's a lot more variety now. Magazines are dedicated to sub-genres now—the market has so many niches in it that every new year narrows the focus of periodicals even more. For the spec fic writer, this is a great thing. Instead of one or two playgrounds, we're now standing in an amusement park of themes—with something for everyone.

So maybe next time you get a form rejection, you can thank your lucky stars that it's 2012 and not 1912. A ten minute rejection is no fun, but at least you can move on quickly.

A ten month rejection? Not so much.