The Market List: A Resource for Writers of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror

The first issue of the magazine appeared in the Fall of 1994, and was inspired largely by the "many difficulties encountered by both Dale and Sally during the process of actually getting published". The two wished to create a market for cross-genre material, since very few magazines were open to that.

"Too many (well-respected) editors were getting away with making vague promises of publication - holding huge backlogs of stories for up to five years and never following through, etc. We would talk about how it could and should be done better and finally decided to show everybody how it's done," says the two.

Looking back, however, they admit to mistakes as well. Their first issue was in many ways a disaster with outrageous printing costs and a slew of format problems. Their print run was too high and they lost over $1,000 right off.

"On the good side, we had coaxed some fine stories and poems from well known contributors including Charles de Lint & Michael Coney...plus a couple of rising stars like David Nickle & Sean Stewart," says Dale. They also managed to receive some worthy reviews, with a number of the first issue's stories being recommended by Ellen Datlow in Year's Best Fantasy & Horror.

By their second issue Dale and Sally cut the print run and cost, and went for a colour cover. They featured fiction from Eileen Kernaghan and Steve Carper, and later ran stories from Nebula Winner Robert J. Sawyer, Robert Levy, Stepan Chapman and a novel excerpt from Sean Stewart. They've been on the final ballot for three Aurora Awards.

Both Sally and Dale have their own interesting biographies with a string of writing credits. It is a pleasure to be able to present them in this interview.

SHAUNA: Sally, let's start with you. Why don't you begin by telling a bit about your writing. I understand you've been published in Asimov's, F&SF, among others. How did you begin, and how long have you been at it?

SALLY: I've been at it, off and on, for about 15 years, which seems like an awfully long time. But I've spent way too long during those years waiting for the muse to strike. (Plus raising my kids - a son, 24, who is working on a doctoral degree in astronomy, and a daughter, 22, who is entering the world of business; plus all the usual stuff, like working, getting divorced, moving from Edmonton to Victoria, meeting my husband Dale, etc...) But I digress.

I began when my mother said something like, "I enjoy your letters so much, have you ever thought of trying to write stories or poems?" To please Mom, who is a poet, I tried writing in the style of Alice Munro, the quintessential "Canlit" (Canadian literary) writer, but failed badly when all my stories kept mutating into sf. My first "real" story was a 10,000 word effort in the Star Trek universe, and it was terrible. I did everything that beginners usually do to make the story dreadful--but I had loads of fun doing it!

Over the years since then, I've learned a lot. I joined a couple of workshops in Edmonton and Victoria, and read as much as I could, both fiction in and out of the genre and how-to-write books, and kept at it. My first sale was to the anthology Tesseracts, edited by the great Judith Merril. I was walking on air for days. Then I did a collaborative story with Alan Dean Foster, called "Dance on a Forgotten Shore" which appeared in F&SF when it was edited by Ed Ferman. This story made it to the Nebula Preliminary ballot, and got some Hugo votes as well. The Canadian magazine On Spec started up, and I sold them several stories. Matrix, a respected literary magazine in Canada, bought a fantasy piece, and a science fiction novelette, "The Fragrance of Orchids", went to Asimov's and got some Nebula nominations. That story won me Canada's Aurora award in 1995, and remains one of my favourites. Since then I've sold horror pieces to Dead of Night, Northern Frights, and others, and science fiction to Tesseracts 5, ComputorEdge magazine and others. I've also done some non-fiction writing (hey, it pays better) and some teaching at a local writing school.

SHAUNA: Dale, you've taught courses in writing for radio. That sounds interesting. What's that all about?

DALE: It's not as interesting as it sounds. I was a radio copywriter/creative director for 20 years - and for the most part, all I wrote was ads. I had two radio plays produced, one was broadcast, and I wrote some music trivia features. But in the course, what I taught was ad writing. I'd say it's had a long-term negative effect - by making me think in 30 second sound bites - a handicap when you're trying to write a novel, believe me! It's hard to wrap your head around a novel, but short stories give me little payoffs and satisfactions along the way. The first "novel" I will actually finish is actually a story cycle...a bunch of interconnected stories that come together to form a coherent storyline. I'm almost finished the fourth story, which is chronologically, the first story ( "Razorwings", which appeared in Terminal Fright #11 this past spring, will show up near the end of the book).

SHAUNA: Tell us about your illustrations, Dale!

DALE: Art has always played a part in my life. When I enrolled in university, creative writing and visual art were in different faculties, so I had to choose between them. I had better marks in creative writing (which is what I eventually got my degree in), so art got put on the back burner. When I first got involved in the small press, I found out that there was a bigger demand for artists than there was for writers, so I started doing a bit on the side. I did some work for a number of respected horror mags, including Noctulpa and New Blood, but most of my artwork simply wasn't very good. Around that time, I had a couple of 'breakthrough' (yeah, right) story sales, and because in the first throes of fatherhood, I decided once again to concentrate on writing.

The artwork never completely stopped, though. I did a fair amount of painting (in little bursts), to placate my visual side. But I probably didn't do another drawing or illustration (except studies for the paintings) until we started TransVersions. At first, there were very few responses to our call for artists...aside from the usual small press suspects - and one of the things I really wanted TransVersions to be, was visually different and striking. So, I found myself filling in the gaps, illustrating stories we couldn't find other artists for. That's when I discovered computer art. Using Programs like Photo-Shop and Corel Photo-Paint, I could do collages of my own work. If I wasn't happy with the face, I'd find a photograph, do some photo-manipulation and drop it in. The more I've done, the better I've become. I was very flattered when Charles de Lint (presumably on the basis of an illustration I had in TransVersions #1, where Charles had a poem), recommended me to John Pelan to do the frontispiece for the Darkside press re-issue of Mulengro. I've also recently had work in.bodlital Deathrealm, Terminal Fright, I've done a cover for TransVersions and have been asked by another author to illustrate his chapbook. It's been both gratifying and fun.

SHAUNA: Which comes easier for you, writing or illustrating? Which has been the most rewarding for you?

DALE: Illustrating is FAR easier. Which, I suppose, has something to do with why writing is more gratifying. They both come from completely different parts of the brain, even though I have been told many times that I write very visually. I wrote an entire novel last year and essentially had to throw out all 125,000 words and started again.

SHAUNA: As editors, what pet peeves (if any) do you have regarding submissions?

SALLY: Oh-oh, watch out, I'm about to dump all over you... but no, I'll try to be nice. I guess my peeves fall into two main categories. Number one, the picky grammatical stuff. Please, people! Learn to write correctly in your own language, for God's sake! Find out how to form a plural possessive, and learn what a misplaced modifier is! Discover the wonders of punctuation! I've been turned off more manuscripts because of silly errors of basic composition than almost anything else, because it indicates to me that the writer is an amateur.

Number two, a good idea crippled because of a lack of... how shall I say it? Ballsiness? Chutzpa? Breadth of imagination and spirit? Also, nice treatments of ideas that were good 'uns thirty years ago. Read up, folks; speculative fiction has come a long way since Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein. But I must say that the overall quality of submissions we get is high and getting higher.

DALE: Peeves? Lots of little things, like people who use a hundred miniature paperclips where one big one would do. While that does irritate me, it doesn't effect the possibility of a sale. One common mistake submittors make which might actually hurt their chance of selling us the story - is neglecting to put the word count on the ms. We know exactly how much room we have in each issue. If we were weighing two stories of equal merit - where one story has a word count and fits perfectly and the other one doesn't have a word count...we may not go to the trouble of doing your count for you. We'd just take the one we know will fit. Then there's the people who attach US postage to their SASEs. We are in another country. The Canadian Post Office will not accept letters mailed from here with "foreign" postage. So it either costs us money to send or sits in our files until the author inquires (this is where putting an e-mail address on your ms comes in handy-so we can contact you and let you know if we run into this sort of problem). Another thing that's been happening frequently is people sending their poetry to us in Victoria. Our poetry editor, Phyllis Gotlieb (poetry submission address: 19 Lower Village Gate, #706, Toronto, ON, CANADA M5P 3L9) is 2,000 miles away, in Toronto and it costs us money to forward poems to her.

SHAUNA: What is your second novel about, Sally?

SALLY: I hesitate to say it's an X-Files rip-off, because it's not. I like the X-Files TV show, but did not want to try to sell a tie-in novel based on the show. However, I loved the concept of two people (and their sexual tension) getting involved in weirdness of that sort of metaphysical, spooky kind. My tale is more science-fictional than horror, and is set in several locations in Canada. I intend to draw on the expertise of my astronomer son and physicist daughter-in-law for up-to-date realism, and my own interest in psychological twistiness for darkness and tension.

SHAUNA: How would you describe TransVersions to someone who has never seen it?

SALLY: I guess I'd call it weird literary, or slightly high-brow funkiness, or maybe just "Try it and you'll see what we mean." We aim for a mix of stories from fun to challenging, from horror to humour to brainy sf to gorgeous fantasy... plus world-class illustration, poetry selected by the great Phyllis Gotlieb, video reviews, thoughtful editorials and whatever other delights we can cook up. We love our magazine (Dale's brain-child), and more and more people are discovering it and loving it too.

DALE: It's a digest sized magazine filled with some really fine 'literature of the fantastic'--stories run the gamut from sweet and funny to brutal and scary. The Locus review of #4 said "frequently charming and elegant". Transversions has a unique look - expressionistic artwork that captures the mood of the story more than illustrating it in the classic sense, plus some jazzy colour covers. I'd also brag that we've had many rave reviews. My favourite related anecdote is when we were interviewed for a local arts magazine and the interviewer said, "I never read fantasy and science fiction, but if it's all like this, I'm going to start."

SHAUNA: How many submissions do you receive in an average month?

SALLY: Depends on the season, actually. I think people make New Year's resolutions to write, so we get more in the spring. An average would be about 80. We purchase about 2 or 3% of what we see.

SHAUNA: Most of our readers are aspiring writers. What advice can you give those starting out? Is there a formula for getting published?

DALE: There's certainly no formula with us. Although there are certain things we look for and other things that we have knee-jerk reactions against. For me, the thing I least like to see is lack of imagination. If your stories must deal with tropes like vampires and werewolves, at least find a new angle. Good writing can make even the most cliched idea work, but really stylish writing is one thing we don't see much (except from writers we've courted).

My advice: read lots of books - figure out what you like about other writers' styles, subject matter etc. Don't be afraid to imitate other writers - but don't focus on any one writer or any one genre, for that matter. Consult Anne Rice for setting and Dickens for character and Tim Powers for his audacious imagination and Harlan Ellison for his power and Hemingway for succinctness and William Gibson for his edgy, articulate voice etc. But don't lose sight of the fact that your final objective is to develop and hone your own voice. And the only way you can do that is by practising. Write at every opportunity, work hard to develop your own unique style. And don't be afraid to rewrite often and drastically. I'd much rather see an ambitious failure than a story which works, but has nothing special to recommend it.

SALLY: Well, as to formula, there's the old fave "Write, finish what you write, and send it out." I would add "Re-write and polish until you can honestly say you're proud of your story." Write what feels right to YOU, and let your own "voice" come through. It will, after you have got past trying to become a clone of your favourite author. (Go ahead and be inspired by the greats, but aim for a unique vision.) If you pay attention to story structure (all those things they teach you in how-to-write books and courses about plot, character, theme, mood, etc., etc.) you're off to a good start. Don't get carried away with the wonderful wittiness of your deathless prose and forget to take advice from sympathetic readers and editors who may see your work before it is ready. If feedback is offered, listen to it, weigh it, and try to be honest with yourself. Learning to self-edit is hard, but remember: you'll never use up all the words in the dictionary. More ideas and images will come if you let them, and they will come faster if you court them by observing, learning, listening and thinking.

SHAUNA: If there's anything else you'd like to say, please do so. The floor is yours.

DALE: If we were to rate every story we received on a scale of 1 to 10, there would be more 5s and 6s than anything else. We receive very few genuinely poor stories. But just because your story is well done doesn't mean that we or any other editor will buy it. It must stand out from all the other stories and demand to be bought.