New Story: "Fylgia in the City" at Plasma Frequency
After a pretty tepid 2015, in publishing terms, the new year starts pretty well for me, with two stories coming out in January. The first, which launched on New Years Day itself, is called "Fylgia in the City", a fairy tale (ish) that I wrote quite a long time ago. This is the rare story of mine that has a path to publication story I actually think is worth telling.
I'm a spreadsheet geek. With a few exceptions, if it's worth doing, it's worth collating into rows and columns. I've kept a record of my story submissions since day 1, now four years back, and it's grown into a list of hundreds. One of the benefits of this is that I can look back and see how many submissions it generally takes for me to find a good home for one of my stories.
In Fylgia's case, it was 7. Six markets passed on it before Plasma Frequency, a magazine I've worked with before, said yes. Unfortunately, for everyone involved, things were about to get quite bumpy for PM. Running a fiction market is never exactly a fountain of profit, and it's the kind of business where even a small problem can derail things pretty seriously. What happened to PM was not a small problem. A case of bank fraud sent the magazine into an impossible financial situation, and they were forced to shut down. I was sad, not only because I lost a good home for Fylgia, but mostly because good fiction markets are hard to come by, and it's a genuine tragedy when one disappears. I think in the back of my head, I always knew PM would be back at some point, or at least I'd like to think that, to excuse my laziness in not sending the story back out anywhere else.
Anyway, long story slightly shorter, Plasma Frequency ran a successful crowdfunding campaign to get back on it feet, and relaunched on January 1st as a quarterly science fiction and fantasy magazine. The first issue of the renewed Plasma Frequency is out, and to my great relief and pleasure, Fylgia in the City is still a part of it. Each story is free to read online for one week, while the whole issue is available either in Kindle or print form at Amazon.
This story wouldn't exist without a fantastic book that inspired and informed it - Nancy Arrowsmith's Field Guide to the Little People, which introduced me to the Fylgia, a fae species I hadn't heard of before and one that I immediately knew I wanted to write about.