It felt good to return to the project after nearly a months absence. I felt it hard to keep up my spirits for the whole thing in the face of the total lack of response from Aurealis. Looking at their website, it's beginning to look to me as though they may be going (or gone) out of business. The current issue (according to the site) is from August 2009. So, unless they're now an annual publication, things look grim. Oh... I just checked their back catalogue. To say they're an annual publication would be to imply a sense of order in publication dates. They seem to put out an issue about every 8 to 11 months on no discernible schedule apparent to casual perusal. While this doesn't help my feeling of impatience, it does make me feel a bit better about the potential for acceptance of my work. It looks as though they wait till they have sufficient material of high enough standard to publish. Given the infrequency of publication, I may not have all that much competition in this country. Question is... is that a good thing? It may mean that my work has a better chance of being published due to the scarcity of talent in this country. On the other hand, it may mean that the standards of acceptance are so high that the work of a starting out scribbler such as myself has no chance whatsoever of seeing the light of day. Guess I'll just have to wait the three months from submission time to find out... sigh.
I submitted the work in progress of my current Belt wars story to my favourite pre-editor today. Something I've avoided in the past as it never seemed right to show incomplete stories. It felt important to do it though to help me re-introduce a sense of urgency into the project. Seems I only work well when I have deadlines.
Speaking of deadlines... if I do manage to get this current story up to scratch before I hear back from Aurealis, seems I'm going to have to submit it to either an American or UK based mag as there's not much else here in Oz. I think it has the feeling more of an American kind of story really. Kind of like the difference between original Star Trek and early Doctor Who, the two markets just feel different to me in flavour and or essence. Australian Sci Fi (what little I've managed to find of it) has a distinctly different taste to either, especially American. Somehow the American product always seems more finished or do I mean processed? Big budget perhaps. While the British stuff always feels more backyard, knocked up in the potting shed or shot on site in an abandoned quarry sort of thing. The Australian authors that I've read and enjoyed always seem a little wilder somehow.
All these descriptions are of course generalisations and don't really make any sense in the context of written word, but do compare for example the work of Isaac Asimov with say Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Asimov's stories are all very well polished extremely well researched and with a rich unwritten back story that just oozes out between the lines. They do however all involve a certain required suspension of disbelief, of accepting new and previously unthought of possibilities, even almost "magical" technology such as "positronic brains". Asimov never even attempts to explain to the reader any of this wonder tech, it's just there as a background fact of his story. Clarke's on the other hand are written by a man with obvious talent and a wealth of scientific knowledge behind them but have more the feel about them of invention on the fly, a very British way of doing things, and of gritty realism, everything in his stories is a plausible extension of principles we know or can guess at now.
Now... having read two of the greatest America and Britain have to offer, read some Sean Williams or Shane Dix. The thought processes behind these two are so intensely different from anything you'll find elsewhere in the English speaking world. They're raw and wild. I can see why Sean and Shane changed their book "The Unknown Soldier" so radically from the original Australian version for the American version "The Prodigal Sun". I have both. Reading them one after the other is perhaps an important lesson to would be Australian authors wanting to sell to the USA.
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