Please let Ivan know that I would love to publish his story in a future issue of Sci Phi.
There are a lot of good stories received so far, so it might be a few issues before it can run. I normally pay 2 weeks out from the issue a story will appear in and will confirm the issue about a month out from its publication. Is this acceptable?
Thank you for allowing us to consider "The Dragon and the Orange Juice," but with regret, I'm going to pass on this one. Longer stories are a tough sell, and although I enjoyed reading (parts of it made me laugh out loud), the story didn't quite cover enough new ground to be a good fit for Shimmer. Although we won't be taking this one, I wish you the very best placing the story elsewhere, and I do hope that Ms. Detelinova will try us again.
Имаме удоволствието да съобщим резултатите от конкурса на фондация "Елизабет Костова" и американското литературно списание "Words Without Borders" за превод на разкази от български автори, които ще бъдат включени в тематична българска рубрика на "Words Without Borders" през май 2015 г. "Words Without Borders" селектираха за публикация 4 превода от общо 24 разказа, изпратени от 15 преводачи:
"Just the Two" от Агоп Мелконян, преведен от Калин Ненов;
"Old Proud Mountain" от Георги Тенев, преведен от Анджела Родел;
"The Barrister from the Bar Doli" от Владо Трифонов, преведен от Питър Скип;
"What Wolves Dream" от Оля Стоянова, преведен от Анджела Родел;
Поздравления за наградените преводачи и за авторите на селектираните разкази.
Уиииии!
И уииии 2 – за звездната преводаческа компания, в която се озовах!
Television viruses are the subject of Ivan Popov’s “The Keresztury TVirs.” Presented as a review of the fictitious book, World TVir History, 4th edition, the story tells of the book’s author, Andrew Keresztury, an expert in the field of TVirology—the insertion of viral code into television programming, with the results ranging from annoyance to political propaganda. The review comes across as a history of Keresztury himself. However, some of it could just as easily be do-it-yourself instructions for wannabe TVirologists. This is well enough documented that it makes one wonder whether or not something like TVirology could really happen.
Thanks for allowing us to consider this piece by Mrs. Nastradinova, but I'm going to pass.
I liked a lot of the writing here, but I felt the story was somewhat slow to begin for us, and in the end, just a little too traditionally told. Shimmer leans toward more contemporary voices.
I’m sorry to say we’re going to pass on Loving Loney Lone. Thank you for the well written and well edited submission. Please keep us in mind for future translated works. We are quite interested in reaching an international audience and we want to know what is in store for the future of eastern Europe.
We wish you the best of luck finding a market for your story.
Thanks for submitting XXXXX to us here at Orthogonal. I enjoyed the rationality mixed with religion in this piece but unfortunately this doesn't quite fit with the stories we're assembling at this time.
I do wish you the best of luck with it and your future writing and thanks again for giving us a chance to read your work. It's very much appreciated.
Thank you for submitting "Rondo for Death and a Hitman, Wannabe" to us during our first reading period here at Orthogonal. It's a fun idea and the writing is solid but unfortunately we couldn't make it fit with the stories we're assembling at this time.
I do wish you the best of luck with it and your future writing and thank you again for giving us a chance to read your work. It's very much appreciated.
We are pleased to notify you that your story, Scenarios, has advanced to the second round of consideration. We will be making our final selections in November and will be in touch then.
Thank you for submitting your work to See the Elephant Magazine.
Regards,
Nicholas Shipman
Metaphysical Circus Press
Congratulations, your story has advanced to the third round of consideration for our 2016 issues. We will be in touch as soon as we've made our final selections. Thank you for your fine submission.
See the Elephant, semi-form (but joyful still) rejection:
Dear Kalin,
See the Elephant received a number of entertaining and well-written submissions this reading period—and while your story Scenarios is one of them, it wasn't chosen for our upcoming issues.
Rejections are never easy, but please know this isn't a reflection on your work or on your worth as a writer. We hope you will consider submitting your work again.
We also hope you will continue to follow Metaphysical Circus Press via social media and our mailing list, so that you can see what we are publishing, be part of our growing community, and be notified of future open submission periods. If you haven’t already, we invite you to follow the circus here http://www.metaphysicalcircus.com/mailinglist/
Again, thank you so much for taking the time to send us your work.
Thank you for giving me a chance to read "Elven Song." I'm definitely interested in seeing more speculative fiction from outside the United States, so I'm happy that you submitted this story to F&SF. I like the voice of it, and the character details, and the translation reads very smoothly with good flow. But overall the story itself didn't connect strongly with me and I'm going to pass on it. I wish you best of luck finding the right English language market for it and I hope that you will try us again with other stories.
Best regards,
Charlie
--
C.C. Finlay
Editor
Fantasy & Science Fiction
fandsf.com
@fandsf
Разказът „История на телевизионните вируси“ от Иван Попов влезе в международната антология Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors, заедно с още 240 текста от 120 автори, които са дебютирали в професионални англоезични издания през 2014 или 2015 година. Това му дава право да се състезава за наградата John W. Campbell за най-силен дебют във фантастичната литература. Наградата „Джон Кембъл“ се връчва заедно с наградите „Хюго“ на ежегодния световен фестивал на фантастиката Уърлдкон, който тази година ще се проведе през август в Канзас Сити, САЩ.
Антологията Up and Coming излиза в електронна форма и може да бъде безплатно свалена до края на март от сайта на съставителите ѝ.
„История на телевизионните вируси“, преведен от Владимир Полеганов, Иван Попов и Калин М. Ненов като The Keresztury TVirs, беше първоначално публикуван през май 2015 г. в списанието за фантастика и философия Sci Phi Journal, като част от кампанията на фондация „Човешката библиотека“ за популяризиране на българската литература по света. Може да прочетете оригиналната му версия тук.
Thank you for giving me a chance to read "The Glow of the River" by Atanas P. Slavov and Georgi Arnaudov, and for being patient while I've taken some extra time to consider it. I can see what the Writers of the Future judges liked in this story, but the pacing didn't work for me in places, especially at the beginning. I'm going to pass on this one, but I wish you best of luck finding the right English language market for it. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss some of the writers and stories you are considering for translation -- perhaps we can work together to find something that would be a good fit.
Best regards,
Charlie
--
C.C. Finlay
Editor
Fantasy & Science Fiction
fandsf.com
@fandsf
Антологията Up and Coming излиза в електронна форма и можете да я получите безплатно, ако пишете на електронния адрес на фондация „Човешката библиотека“.
Thank you for sending us "Less than Two". We appreciate the chance to read it.
Unfortunately, the piece is not for us. Our readers felt the story was missing the developed sense of wonder or fantastic element that we consider the hallmark of Cast of Wonders stories.
One quick comment from Marguerite - full marks for the beautiful aikido descriptions! There's definitely the spark of a story in here, it just needs focusing.
If you are still searching for a podcast or magazine to publish this story, you can find a list of recommend venues on our website under Markets. And say hello for us!
Thank you again for sending us the story. We wish you the best of luck, and please consider submitting again.
Thank you for giving me a chance to read Grigor Gatchev's "Outside the Picture."
This has an interesting premise, and I like the quality of the writing (so praise to the translators and editor), and the details about painting and the way painting is used to tell the story is really good. These are all the reasons why I've been holding on to the story and considering it for so long.
At the same time, there are some problems for me. I thought that there wasn't enough sense of time and place, even if it's an imaginary time and place, for me with the setting, so sometimes I didn't feel grounded in the story. More importantly, I didn't love the pacing -- the story lost narrative momentum for me in several places in the middle, and I thought overall it needed to be much tighter. Finally, I thought the ending was abrupt and didn't follow through enough on what I thought were the themes of the story.
In the end, this one doesn't quite win me over and I'm going to pass. I wish you best of luck finding the right English language market for it. I appreciate your interest in F&SF and I remain open to discussing possible stories you want to send me so that we can find something that's a good fit.
Best regards,
Charlie
--
C.C. Finlay, Editor
Fantasy & Science Fiction
fandsf.com | @fandsf
Great American Sentence Contest, semi-personal rejection:
Thank you for entering our 2nd Annual Great American Sentence Contest. here at Easy Street. We've read through thousands of sentences since the contest closed and you've all made it very difficult to choose.
Despite the fierce competition, your sentence(s) were a cut above the rest and did reach our second round of judging. However, they did not make the final round this year.
We want to thank you for taking the time to send your work and encourage you to send us more work in the future.
Keep at it. We believe in you.
All the best,
Cami, Angela, and Izzy
Editors, Easy Street
Thank you for submitting XXXXX for our consideration. We appreciate the chance to read it. I am a BIG fan of this piece and its strangeness and inquisitiveness and the way it searches for answers and meaning. Unfortunately, the piece doesn't fall within our vision for Sunvault, but I think it may find another home in the SF market soon. Clarkesworld and Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine in particular are venues looking for translation. You may want to send this there if you haven't already.
Your translation of XXXXX has passed the first round of reviews and is currently on our shortlist (the top 3% of submissions). This notification is not a guarantee or a promise of publication, but rather just to let you know that the reason you have not received a rejection slip is because you haven't been rejected. Due to the incredible number of submissions we received, we've decided to buy out volumes 1 and 2 in their entirety. As you might imagine, this is slowing us down a tad. In the next few weeks we should have final decisions sorted out. All of the pieces at this stage in are strong works that deserve praise. We wish we could publish them all, but we anticipate having the budget and page space to publish a quarter of them.
Thank you for your patience, but we especially thank you for the story. We do this because we love it, and you really help us to love it more.
Please pardon the lack of personalization, we hope this slightly laudatory note can stand on its own.
Thank you for giving me a chance to read XXXXX and for being patient while I waited until I could read this one again with fresh eyes.
I enjoyed reading this one. I liked the premise of an alien planet where abandoned earthlings have bio-engineered human stock to fill all the ecological niches, and I liked the conflict where Joshua must decide whether to return to earth when he has the chance or stay and help the planet. That's a good big idea, and the story has a lot of charm, which are things that I look for in stories.
However, at the same time, I thought the story was long for the effect that it achieves at the end. I would be more excited about it if it were a couple thousand words shorter. Part of that is that I think the writing would be stronger if it was much tighter at the sentence and paragraph level throughout. Specifically, I think it needs to eliminate excess helping verbs, reduce repetitions, and cut padding phrases to generally improve the flow.
For example, here is the first paragraph and a half:
EXAMPLE
And here is how I would edit it:
EXAMPLE
It's conveying the same information in the story, but much more efficiently. Even if these aren't the precise edits to communicate the intent of the author and the mood he's striving to create, the story needs to go farther in this direction to work for me and to be a good fit for F&SF.
As a result, I'm going to pass on this version of the story.
As I've mentioned with past submissions, I hope we can connect on something. I would love to feature more translations in the magazine and I appreciate the work you're doing to create translations for the English language market. If you're going to submit something new when the submissions form reopens on Tuesday, please keep in mind that I am currently looking for more tightly written short stories (under 7,500 words).
Thanks again for giving me a chance to read XXXXX. I wish you best of luck finding the right market for it. I appreciate your interest in F&SF and hope that you'll try me again with more stories in the future.
Best regards,
Charlie
--
C.C. Finlay, Editor
Fantasy & Science Fiction
fandsf.com | @fandsf
Thanks for submitting XXXXX, but I'm going to pass on it. It's nicely written and I enjoyed reading it, but overall it didn't quite win me over, I'm afraid. Best of luck to you placing this one elsewhere, and thanks again for sending it my way. I look forward to seeing your next submission.
Thank you for giving me a chance to read "Uprising" by Valentina Dimova. I liked the pacing and translation of this one, but overall this story didn't connect strongly with me. I'm going to pass on this one, but I wish you best of luck finding the right English language market for it. I hope that you'll try me again with another story. If you have a number of stories you're thinking about translating, I would be happy to discuss which ones might be a better fit for F&SF in the near future. Feel free to email me.
Best regards,
Charlie
--
C.C. Finlay, Editor
Fantasy & Science Fiction
fandsf.com | @fandsf
Thank you for sending "Loving Loney Lone" to Liminal. While we appreciate the opportunity to review your work, we will have to pass on this submission. The story is well written, but it's not quite right for us.
We hope you find a good home for this story, and we look forward to your next submission. Thanks for the read, and best of luck with your writing.
Thank you for giving me a chance to read "The Last Story." This has exactly the quality I look for in translations: the language was vivid and evocative, and contained pleasant layers to it that reward rereading. One feels that the voice of the original author, and not just the plot, is reflected in the text. So that was great. I also have to admit that I very much liked the length of this -- I have a lot of inventory at novelet (7,501 words and longer) lengths right now, which means delays in getting things into publication, but I don't have enough stories in the 4500-7000 word range to help balance out the next few issues. So this hit a sweet spot for me there too.
At the same time, the story itself was mixed for me. I admired the historical and biographical elements of the story, and I liked the critical way that Poe was linked to the larger world (and not just the U.S.) tradition of speculative fiction. That was very readable. But I also felt that the speculative element in the story was slight, and functioned as an interlude or counterpoint -- it didn't feel to me that it arose out of either the beginning of the story or impacted the ending. In the end, I thought this was a very literary piece of fiction -- one that is about the genre's history much more than it is a genre story. Sometimes I buy those kinds of stories for F&SF, so I like to see them, but at the moment I'm looking for more stories with big ideas that fit solidly in the genre.
I'm going to pass on this story, but I wish you best of luck finding the right English language market for it. (You might try markets like Gamut, Shimmer, or other magazines with literary bents.) In the meantime, I feel that you and I are very close to connecting on something. The last couple stories that you've sent me have been very, very close. I hope that you will try me again with more work soon.
As always, please let me know if you have any questions.
Best regards,
Charlie
--
C.C. Finlay, Editor
Fantasy & Science Fiction
fandsf.com | @fandsf
(Charles Finlay may well be the nicest editor I've ever contacted. Just note his recommendations for other markets. )
Thank you for giving me a chance to read "Loving Loney Lone." I really liked the prose in this -- it was vivid, rich, and evocative -- all qualities that I like to see in F&SF.
At the same time, I had concerns about the pacing and sometimes had difficulty following the thread of the story. For me, the story didn't start moving forward and developing narrative momentum until p. 3, the scene beginning with: "Desire," the old Tec told her, "is the reason for our world’s existence." Even there, while I liked what the scene revealed about the characters, I didn't feel that it did enough to move the plot forward. This felt true to me in several scenes. It's also possible I was distracted by the numbering/letting system for scenes, trying to figure out if they constructed an argument or some other structure -- I never did figure that out.
Overall, while there is a lot here that I like, and while it's getting closer to the kind of story I'm looking for, this story didn't win me over and I'm going to pass on it for F&SF. I wish you best of luck finding the right market and an editor who really connects with what the story is doing. In the meantime, I appreciate your continued interest in F&SF and hope that you'll keep us in mind in the future.
Best regards,
Charlie
--
C.C. Finlay, Editor
Fantasy & Science Fiction
fandsf.com | @fandsf
