Possibly the UK's second longest-running sf/f fiction zine.
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So here is TQF29, seven stories high. Douglas Thompson takes the lead, with the eerie and poetic "Madame Mortadore & the Clouds". "Foundling" by Nick Sansone follows a painter through a troubled life. "Imaginary Prisons" by David Tallerman has a good deal to say on the subject of prophecies. John Hall delivers the last of his forgotten stories to our horror section, "The Feaster from the Stars". Its final image is unforgettable. John Greenwood then lets us have it three times in the third eye, as Newton Braddell wends his hopeless way across the world. The review section contains the usual batch from me, as well as ones by John Greenwood, Rafe McGregor and Steve Redwood, who consider Morpheus Tales #3, a Hound of the Baskervilles graphic novel, and Midnight Street #12 respectively.
There’s only room for the tiniest of editorials [or at least there was on the page this editorial originally appeared on!] – we’re trying to keep each issue down to eighty pages for the rest of the year and we’ve got seven fantastic stories and lots of reviews to fit in. Have a great time in here!
Here are the people who made it all worthwhile…
John Hall’s collection of Lovecraftian tales, probably to be called Five Forgotten Stories, will be published by Theaker’s Paperback Library later this year. He is best known as a Sherlockian scholar, and a member of the International Pipe Smokers’ Hall of Fame. His numerous literary interests include Raffles, Sexton Blake, H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James. He is the author of Special Commission, a medieval murder mystery. Previous stories by John appeared in TQF23 (TQF#23) (“Shaggai”), TQF25 (TQF#25) (“In the Vale of Pnath”), TQF26 (TQF#26) (“The Burrower Beneath”) and TQF28 ("The Stairs in the Crypt").
Steve Redwood’s short story collection, Broken Symmetries, will be published in August by Doghorn Press. His review of Midnight Street 12 appears in this issue.
Nick Sansone has worked as a wildland firefighter and environmental do-gooder in the National Forests of the western United States. He typically spends his summers in the UK, working as an academic administrator for a theater program at Oxford College.
John Singer Sargent was the painter of Madame X, a detail from which appears on this issue’s cover.
David Tallerman can be found online at http://davidtallerman.net. His fiction has appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Pseudopod, Hub and Dark Horizons.
Douglas Thompson’s stories have previously appeared in TQF28 and Dark Horizons 54, with another to appear in Dark Horizons 55. He won the Grolsch/Herald New Writing Award in 1989, and second prize in the Neil Gunn Writing Competition in 2007. His stories have been widely published in magazines and anthologies, most recently Ambit, New Writing Scotland, Subtle Edens and Dark Horizons. “Madame Mortadore & the Clouds” is from his first novel/collection Ultrameta which will be published in August 2009 by Eibonvale.
Rafe McGregor recently celebrated the publication of his historical thriller, The Architect of Murder. He contributes a fine review to this issue.
John Greenwood is everything you wish you were, and a tiny bit more!
Stephen Theaker is smaller than the garden of your uncle, but larger than the pen of your aunt. He wrote many of this issue’s reviews.
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This is one of our most interesting and varied issues yet. It starts in the best possible way with "Quadrant Five" – a bunch of people on a spaceship going who knows where. That's followed by the next riveting instalment of Newton Braddell and a short-short from Josie Gowler, "Soldier", before things get rather literary with the double-barrelled strangeness of "Breaking Out of Sleep" and "Anatomy of a Wounded House", from Barry Pomeroy and Douglas Thompson respectively. Then John Hall wonders whether you dare descend "The Stairs in the Crypt", and Jason Hinchcliffe tells the saga of the "Bloodbegotten". I round out the issue with a bunch of my famously perspicacious reviews – what have I decreed to be "well-written", "brilliant" and "superb" this time around?
When I first saw the Sony Reader in Waterstones I was really impressed by the e-paper screen, the way the text looked as if it was printed on the surface – it looked really easy to read. But I wasn’t impressed by how sluggish it was – it took ages to move from one option to another. And I made myself look a bit stupid by trying to choose options by touching them with my finger (the Rocket eBook has a touchscreen).
I decided to wait for the Kindle. And wait… And wait…
Eventually my patience ran out and I spent some money I don’t really have on a Sony Reader. It’s turned out to be the best money I shouldn’t have spent since I got a TiVo!
I absolutely love it. What makes all the difference is that where the Rocket eBook was heavier and more cumbersome than most books, the Sony Reader is lighter and less cumbersome than most of them.
The bundled software from Sony is pretty much unusable, and gave me a few early jitters of buyer’s remorse, but once I downloaded Calibre the love affair was on. It’s now stuffed to the gills with classics from the free CD from Sony, creative commons and out-of-copyright sf from Feedbooks, newspapers created from The Guardian and BBC websites via Feedbooks, epub files from Project Gutenberg, submissions and proofs for TQF and Dark Horizons, pdf review copies from PS Publishing and Eibonvale, ebooks from Fictionwise, not to mention a bunch of music and photos.
I’m stunned at how brilliantly it handles pdf files – I wouldn’t have thought it possible. At the smallest magnification setting it shows the pdf as is, and then at medium and large it blows up the main text, doing a marvellous job of ignoring white space and page numbers. It even manages to deal pretty well with a multi-column layout like the one in Dark Horizons.
One of the other brilliant features is the ability to have collections, dividing up the files by keywords so you can quickly find any of them. The Sony software doesn’t work well with them, but with Calibre you can just edit the keywords of the files on the Reader itself to sort them out directly.
Very happy with it indeed…
And then I found the Baen Books free library! Well over a hundred books (many of them omnibuses and gigantic collections) for free download. It left me in tears of joy. I ended up downloading half a dozen books I already own, just because it’ll be so much easier reading them this way.
If I’d found those same books going cheap in a bookshop, I admit that I would still have bought them. But I would have had a problem finding somewhere for them to go. I long ago reached the point where I had no more room for books in the house. I’ve got (checks Goodreads) 1,131 paper books to read, and another thousand or two that I’ve already read. There’s nowhere to put any new books, and any time I do put a book down, chances are I’ll lose it. For example, I’ve got a review copy of Conrad Williams’ One to read, but I’ve lost it half a dozen times already… On the other hand, I can find any ebooks on the Sony Reader in about ten seconds, and store unlimited numbers of books on the computer.
I’m now free to buy and collect books again without worrying about where to put them. I can donate a lot of the classics I own to charity shops, since they’re all on Gutenberg. It’s really nice, too, to be able to request review copies and not worry about what it costs someone.
I wrote a bit about this in my editorial for the new Dark Horizons – before I got my Reader – and I do still agree with what I said there, that for most people this’ll be a solution to a problem they don’t have. But for me personally, it’s a huge improvement in my life – a lifehack as big as getting TiVo or buying my first PC.
The other day I went over to my wife’s parents’ house with it, and started reading a book. Then two kids jumped in my lap and I switched to Little Wizard Tales of Oz from Gutenberg and read that to them. Then my father-in-law came in, so I let him read the BBC news on it. Eventually the room was empty apart from me so I could concentrate properly and I got started on reading some submissions. It’s every book I need it to be…
I’ve even got the perfect bag to put it in – the Bagbase mini reporter. It’s like I’m wearing a tricorder…
Some people talk about the feel and smell of paper books. I can understand that to some extent, but that isn’t a love of the literature within those pages: it’s fetishism for the way they are presented. The story counts more than the format. The question about the format is how much of a barrier it puts between me and the story, how much it gets in the way, how it holds up my reading. We’re used to the inconveniences associated with paper books, but, really, they are anything but comfortable and relaxing. Think of all that bother holding the thing open, for starters, especially when reading in bed… Trying to find the right angle to catch the light properly… Keeping your place in the book… Peering at the words sinking into the spine…
After using ebooks for a while even turning the page seems like a time-consuming chore! Reading an ebook (on the right device) can be much more immersive and quite a bit quicker than reading it on paper – it’s just you and the story, with no hassle. I’ve found I read things about 20% faster on the Sony Reader, and it’s not because I’m rushing, it’s because there are fewer distractions from the actual reading.
I doubt anyone would really find reading a 500pp+ paperback, let alone hardback, more comfortable than reading the same thing on a Sony Reader. Look at it this way: anytime you find yourself needing two hands to read a book, that’s a hand more than you need for the Sony Reader!
Another point is that books, just like music, tv, films and photographs, are so much more accessible as files. Then think about the ease of actually buying the books that you want to read. Within a year or two buying any book ever published could take just minutes, instead of years spending trawling second-hand bookshops and eBay.
As far as cost goes, taking into account things like Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg and Google Books – plus initiatives like the Baen Books free library – the average cost of an ebook is much lower than paper books, since anything published more than a hundred years ago is totally free.
The one thing I miss is being able to add notes to what I’m reading (which I could do on the Rocket eBook), but apparently you can get some special accessories for the Sony Reader – a “pen” and “paper”. I’ll report back on these novelties in a future editorial, though at first glance they seem much more awkward than using a keyboard…
Here are the people who made this issue so enjoyable to put together…
Anne Marie Gomez owns a business that designs custom gardens for people’s homes. She also raises a variety of flowers from seed and enjoys sharing the seedlings with other home gardeners. Her free time is devoted to writing, writing, and then more writing.
Josie Gowler has had short stories published in Delivered and Linkway
magazines. Her specialties are weird tales set in the East Anglian Fens and
science fiction short stories; sometimes the two overlap.
She’s currently working on a trashy coming-of-age space opera. To pay the
bills, Josie works as an accountant in the Civil Service, but please don’t
hold that against her, she asks.
John Greenwood propped TQF up for many years, keeping the magazine going with his generous contributions until it was ready to take its first steps into wider world. His stories can be found in most previous issues.
John Hall is best known as a Sherlockian scholar, and a member of the International Pipe Smokers’ Hall of Fame. His numerous literary interests include Raffles, Sexton Blake, H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James. He is the author of Special Commission, a medieval murder mystery. Previous stories by John appeared in TQF23 (TQF#23) (“Shaggai”), TQF25 (TQF#25)(“In the Vale of Pnath”) and TQF26 (TQF#26) (“The Burrower Beneath”).
Ever since Jason Hinchcliffe was a kid growing up in the middle of a forest in Cayuga, Ontario, he’s had dreams of becoming a writer. Not much has changed since then, except instead of being a geeky and funny-looking child, he’s blossomed into a geeky and funny-looking adult. To support himself, Jason works as an editor at a legal publisher in Markham. If it wasn’t for the Bank and all their pesky rules (pay the loans, pay the mortgage), he’d spend his time reading Dickens novels, writing, and watching all the movies that having a job tends to prevent a person from watching. This year has been an incredible writing-year so far – stories are forthcoming in Kaleidotrope, 580 Split, the Nashwaak Review, and also Candlelight, a Dark Anthology of Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy. Jason owns two cats that sleep way too much.
Barry Pomeroy is an itinerant English professor, boat designer and builder, traveller, carver, sometime mechanic, carpenter, and web designer. As a writer he is responsible for Multiple Personality Disorder, a long poem in dialogue, and the novel Naked in the Road, and his shorter work has been or will be published in magazines such as Cosmetica, Bards and Sages, Insolent Rudder, Tart, Tiny Globule, Writing Shift, Ulterior, Oddville Press and Word Catalyst. “Breaking out of Sleep” is from the short story collection Isolates and Survivors.
Douglas Thompson won the Grolsch/Herald New Writing Award in 1989, and second prize in the Neil Gunn Writing Competition in 2007. His stories have been widely published in magazines and anthologies, most recently Ambit, New Writing Scotland, Subtle Edens and Dark Horizons. “Anatomy of a Wounded House” is from his first novel/collection Ultrameta which will be published in August 2009 by Eibonvale (see www.glasgowsurrealist.com/douglas).
Stephen Theaker is the eponymous editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. He wrote all of this issue’s reviews, which explains their reliance on words such as superb, exciting and well-written. He is also the editor of Dark Horizons, the journal of the British Fantasy Society.
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This issue of Theaker's Quarterly Fiction has one of our best ever covers, courtesy of the marvellous John Shanks. It shows the three kings doing battle with a demon on their way to Bethlehem. Eric R. Lowther tells the story in "We Three Kings". In the last of our series of stories by Richard K. Lyon & Andrew J. Offutt, Tiana pays a visit to the "Inn of the White Cat". In John Greenwood's series that never ends, Newton Braddell experiences "The Cruellest Month". And then John Hall tells the chilling story of "The Burrower Beneath". In the last quarter of the issue we have reviews of the latest from PS Publishing, among others. It's a rather shorter issue than usual (we had to hold some material over to next time), but it's a very nice one. The editorial is a bit rubbish – I'm still working through my feelings about losing at NaNoWriMo, so you'll have to bear with me – but if you skip that bit you'll have a great time with TQF#26.
Gutted! I didn’t win NaNoWriMo this year, breaking a winning run that lasted four sweet years. I topped out at 23,000 words, just under half-way through. The only other time I’d failed was the year we had our first baby two weeks into the event.
After taking part for six years, now, I know all the kinds of things that losers always say. “This novel needs more than a month.” “I don’t want to rush it.” “Life got in the way.” “My social life is just too hectic.” The actual reason is generally that either they didn’t have time, or that they didn’t make time. For me, it was definitely the latter.
Knowing I had the last five days free to write left me too complacent, and I left myself with too much to do during them. 9,000 words a day from a standing start was just too much. I should have at least left myself with a target that was more easily achievable during a normal working day, so that I could recharge and plan in the evenings. And so I ended up making myself unhappy, really stupidly. I should have been celebrating writing 7,000 words in a day instead of going to bed disappointed that I’d fallen short.
I failed by about the same amount that I wrote at the write-ins last year, so missing most of the write-ins this year clearly had an effect as well. It was just that little bit harder to get away to them when I didn’t have the excuse that I was organising them! Plus, I’m still a bit traumatised from last year, when the café that hosted our write-ins got really sick of us on the last day. It made it hard for me to relax this time around; I was just waiting for someone to come up and start telling us off!
Another part of it was that I had a bit of a post-ML meltdown... Previously I felt I had to keep writing to set a good example – this year, not so much! I realise people probably didn’t notice what I was writing in the past; but it felt like part of the job was to show that it could be done.
Another mistake was that, because I knew I wouldn’t be ML-ing this year, I planned to write a novel with a slightly more ambitious plot and a larger cast of characters. But then, even though I didn’t do any planning at all, I still leapt into the same plot, quickly finding out that I had no idea what all those characters were supposed to be doing, or how they were supposed to relate to each other. One thing I’d like to think about next year is the idea of character arcs; I might even add an extra page to the novel-writing handout (which, amazingly, was downloaded over 9,000 times over the last couple of months).
For another excuse, take a look at this issue’s review section – there’s a lot of writing time in there that I should have been putting into my novel! Not to mention a few thousand words of reviews for the BFS, and an editorial for Dark Horizons.
I also spent loads of time reading submissions for Dark Horizons. Oh well. It might have been an avoidance strategy, but I’ve got an issue of Dark Horizons pretty much typeset now, so something good came out of it!
In short, I made a lot of mistakes. I’ve got lots of excuses, but they all amount to one thing: I didn’t sit down and do enough writing. I’ve learnt my lesson: next year it’s back to a sensible 1,666 words a day for me!
Once it became obvious that I wouldn’t make it, the temptation to stop altogether was huge, but I at least pushed myself to do 1,666 words the next day, and and sorted the novel out so that at least I can pick it up again without too much trouble.
All of this will seem awfully silly to “real” writers. And every so often I do think it would be nice to try and do a bit of “real” writing. But then I remember that I didn’t do any writing at all in the years before I started to take part in NaNoWriMo, and even now I rarely write any fiction from December to October. NaNoWriMo is a great way for me to get the writing bug out of my system, leaving me to concentrate on editing the rest of the year round. And anyway, 1667 words a day is very, very little. If I wanted to take my writing that little bit more seriously, I could always take two hours to write them instead of one-and-a-quarter!
The more book reviews I write, the more I become awkwardly aware of how narrow my frame of literary reference is, but I’m trying to improve. From this issue I’ve begun to include ratings out of ten at the end of my reviews. It’s a reflection of my current limitations as a reviewer… My reviews tend to be quite nitpicky: they could easily give the impression that I didn’t like something, whereas in fact I just found I had more to say about its faults or oddities… Until I develop the vocabulary to intelligently say why I liked books, ratings will help out by showing how I really felt about them. – SWT
Allow us to introduce those kind souls who have given our Tiny Tim of a magazine so many Christmas gifts…
Eric R. Lowther has made many appearances in the small press since contributing "Rural Legend" to TQF#19 (still one of my favourite stories to have appeared in the magazine). See: Blood Blade & Thruster #3; anthologies from Scotopia (Dark Distortions I, available now) and Magazine of the Dead; Night to Dawn #13, Drollerie Press, Necrotic Tissue, 7th Dimension and All Hallows. He contributes a weekly column written in-character as "Arthur Helms" titled Dead Center for the alternative-present website Zombie World News. He is currently shopping his first completed novel to the industry.
John Shanks is the cover artist of this issue. John previously produced the spectacular cover of TQF#16, depicting a diver pursued by a giant sea creature, a scene drawn from the adventures of Howard Phillips. He has his own website – Homegrown Goodness – from which you can request bespoke cartooning, or purchase his hilarious animal encyclopedias.
John Greenwood has made contributions to most issues of TQF following his return from a round-the-world trip, and was ultimately made co-editor in recognition of his efforts. To this issue he contributes an astonishing twenty-third episode in the life of Newton Braddell!
John Hall is best known as a Sherlockian scholar, and a member of the International Pipe Smokers’ Hall of Fame. His numerous literary interests include Raffles (this one, not this one) and Sexton Blake, and he shares with his friend Rafe McGregor a keen interest in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James. He is the author of Special Commission, a medieval murder mystery. Two previous stories by John have appeared in this magazine: "Shaggai" (TQF#23) and "In the Vale of Pnath" (TQF#25).
Richard K Lyon is a semi-retired research scientist/inventor whose hobbies include collecting pulp SF magazines and writing. He has also published numerous short stories and novelettes. A collection of the latter, Tales From The Lyonheart, is available from Barnes and Noble, etc. In collaboration with Andrew J Offutt, famed author of My Lord Barbarian, he wrote the Tiana trilogy (Demon in the Mirror, The Eyes of Sarsis and Web of the Spider), and Rails Across the Galaxy for Analog. To our magazine they have contributed "The Iron Mercenary" (TQF#19), "Arachnis" (TQF#22), "Devil on My Stomach" (TQF#23), "The Hungry Apples" (TQF#24) "Naked Before Mine Enemies" (TQF#25), and, this issue, "Inn of the White Cat", the last in the series.
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"Stephen, you’re absolutely correct. Reading any part of your work is indeed an embarrassment."
When someone said that to me recently, it happened to be a case of mistaken identity, but anyone who has read past issues of TQF will know that the comments are, by some strange cosmic coincidence, entirely accurate!
That’s one of the things that makes this issue so great – there is less Theaker than ever! In fact, looking back, only one issue of TQF out of the previous seven has had any of my fiction in. Bad for me, but good for the magazine, I think, even if it means it is straying distressingly far from its original purpose.
My goal here was always to put together a makeshift magazine, one in which I would do every job until someone better came along to do it instead. And so it began with my fiction, my illustrations, my reviews and so on. The first thing to be replaced was my fiction, as my ramshackle efforts were replaced by real live contributors. In recent issues we’ve seen what proper reviews look like, thanks to the pen of Rafe McGregor. Now we’re just waiting for someone to relieve us all from the agony of seeing my illustrations in most issues! This issue I’ve dug into my box of Corel clipart to find lots of lovely photos, but I'm going to run out of avoidance tactics soon.
My ultimate dream is to be displaced as editor. Nothing would make me happier than to see Theaker’s Quarterly continued by other hands while I enjoy my dotage!
Coming up soon is National Novel Writing Month – or NaNoWriMo. I think I’ll probably be writing novels in November as long as I live, regardless of whether the actual event is still going on. It's such a wonderful idea, and one that suits my approach to (and reasons for) writing perfectly. This magazine wouldn't exist without it. But I’m not an ML (a local organiser) this year: I stepped down last December. It’s been many years since I’ve taken part without being an ML, and I’m looking forward to it a lot. Let someone else worry about where to hold events; I’ll just worry about where to put my characters!
This year’s ML’s Guide to Life says: “MLs are ambassadors for the Office of Letters and Light in the forums. … We’ve had a few instances, however, where MLs have used the forums as a battleground, squabbling with participants or belittling other MLs and decisions made by staff.”
I couldn’t help wondering if they meant me (though for all I know that comment might have been in there for years), and I was a tiny bit hurt by the thought – most particularly because I thought such criticism would probably be fair! I got into a couple of fairly frisky arguments when moderating the Rules & Regulations forum for a couple of years, and I might even have described it as a battleground at one point: it certainly felt like one.
It takes a lot of patience to deal with the type of person who turns up in the rules forum of a novel-writing event to ask if it’s okay to knit a scarf or learn to juggle instead of writing a novel, and I wasn't too bad at that. What I wasn’t really prepared for, in my first spell as a moderator on a forum, was the astonishing anger of some people when someone says something is against the rules. What really baffled me was that they were never happy to just do their own thing and ignore the rules: they really needed someone to say, “You’re eating a pie a day instead of writing a novel? Well, of course that’s okay.” What kind of rebel asks for permission?
This year there’s a NaNo Rebels section of the NaNoWriMo forum, which is a great idea. But of course it’s full to bursting of people saying things like, “I’m glad they’ve changed the rules” or “I’m hula hooping this November, but that’s not against the rules” or, even more annoyingly, “I’m writing a novel about cats, which breaks all the rules ‘cos I’m crazy”. My favourite post so far was by someone who said something along the lines of, “I’m glad they opened this forum, because I wanted to sign up for this event but I hate writing fiction.” If you hate writing fiction, what attracted you to a novel-writing challenge? Jeepers.
I wonder if the 24 hour comics challenge is besieged by people who want to make films, darn socks and train monkeys…
I’ve just returned from Fantasycon 2008, organised by the British Fantasy Society, which was great fun. I wish I hadn’t had to go on my own, but it’s hard to find babysitters for an entire weekend. Still, everyone was very, very friendly. Going to an editorial panel involving the likes of Jo Fletcher from Victor Gollancz and Pete Crowther from PS Publishing was both an education and a sheer pleasure, while listening to people like Ian Watson and Dave McKean talk was marvellous. Plans are already afoot to make next year’s event even bigger and better, and I’d thoroughly recommend it to anyone.
Allow us to introduce this issue's willing victims…
Ralph Robert Moore’s fiction has been published in America, England, Ireland and Australia, and translated into Lithuanian. He has been anthologised in the nineteenth edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow; Ten Years of the Best of Sign O’ the Times; Darkness Rising; Revelation III; Dark Distortions; and Read By Dawn (edited by Ramsey Campbell). An interview with him, as well as a bibliography and new story, is in the seventh issue of Midnight Street (edited by Trevor Denyer, famous – of course! – for his contributions to our own New Words). His story "The Machine of a Religious Man" was nominated as Best Story of the Year in the 2006 British Fantasy Society Awards. Other magazines that have published his fiction include Albedo One, Collages and Bricolages, ChiZine, fugue, Lullaby Hearse, Lunatic Chameleon, Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine, Redsine, Revelation, Roadworks, Sein Und Werden, Sign O’ the Times, Songs of Innocence (and Experience), Space and Time, The Los Angeles Times Calendar Magazine and Thirteen. His novel Father Figure was published in 2003. He recently completed his first play, Duck Eggs. His website SENTENCE features a wide selection of his writings.
J.R. Parks is a professional writer of children’s graphic novels. His works of fiction and poetry have been published in such anthologies as The Northridge Review, I Am This Meat, The Bandersnatch Vol. II, Centres of Expression, Parade of Phantoms, San Jose Zine, and others. He is also the author of Machine Town: Flight of the Sky Captain, as well as a graphic novel adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. Two of his pieces have been professionally recorded into audio editions, and can be heard on his website (www.jrparks.com).
John Greenwood has made contributions to most issues of TQF following his return from a round-the-world trip, and was ultimately made co-editor in recognition of his efforts. To this issue he contributes an astonishing three episodes in the life of the Newton Braddell!
Rafe McGregor is a crime fiction author who spends far too much of his time rereading the work of H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James. He lives with his wife in a village near York. More details can be found on his website (www.rafemcgregor.co.uk). To this issue he has contributed both a short story, "Murder in the Minster", and a number of reviews.
John Hall is best known as a Sherlockian scholar, and a member of the International Pipe Smokers’ Hall of Fame. His numerous literary interests include Raffles (this one, not this one) and Sexton Blake, and he shares with his friend Rafe McGregor a keen interest in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James. He is the author of Special Commission, a medieval murder mystery. A previous story by John, "Shaggai", appeared in TQF#23.
Bob Lock is a Welsh writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror, whose debut novel Flames of Herakleitos was published in March 2007 by Screaming Dreams. His work has also appeared in Cold Cuts 1 & 2, and Cone Zero, edited by D.F. Lewis, and online at Whispers of Wickedness, Sfcrowsnest, Scifi UK Review, Alienskin, Sams Dot Publishing, Fiction Online, Sffworld and his very own Bob Lock blog. To this issue he contributed a short Halloween tale by the name of "Jack".
Richard K Lyon is a semi-retired research scientist/inventor whose hobbies include collecting pulp SF magazines and writing. He has also published numerous short stories and novelettes. A collection of the latter, Tales From The Lyonheart, is available from Barnes and Noble, etc. In collaboration with Andrew J Offutt, famed author of My Lord Barbarian, he wrote the Tiana trilogy (Demon in the Mirror, The Eyes of Sarsis and Web of the Spider), and Rails Across the Galaxy for Analog. To our magazine they have contributed "The Iron Mercenary" (TQF#19), "Arachnis" (TQF#22), "Devil on My Stomach" (TQF#23), "The Hungry Apples" (TQF#24) and, this issue, "Naked Before Mine Enemies".
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I recently read a thoughtful blog entry, 4theLuv Markets and the Reader, by the editor of Horror Literature Quarterly, Paul Puglisi.
HLQ is free to read online, and it’s short enough (16pp) to make reading it a nice way to spend a lunchtime. The first three issues of the magazine were published during 2007, with the fourth slipping to 2008. It publishes professional writers and pays professional rates of at least five cents per word.
I doubt if the editor has ever heard of TQF, but the blog entry skewers us pretty well. Poor choice of colours on the website, non-paying, free to read and hosted on a free web hosting platform – that’s TQF through and through! Our copy-editing and proofreading aren’t too bad (rather better than HLQ’s in fact, going on the state of issue four’s editorial at the time of writing) but in all other respects his argument felt very much like an accidental shot across the virtual bows of the good ship Theaker’s.
The main thrust of his argument is that readers shouldn’t read stories in non-paying magazines when instead they can read the much better stories for which he has paid the writers good money. Non-paying magazines, he argues, are bad for writers, bad for readers, and bad for themselves.
It’s good to have your ideas challenged, and, as longtime readers know, I’m always ready, at the drop of a hat, to examine and reconsider and bluster about the philosophy behind our mag. I want to believe that we’re doing this for good reasons, and that no one is getting exploited or hustled by us.
As I’ve said lots of times, TQF doesn’t pay because I want it to keep going for a long time. If I did pay our contributors, the money would have to come out of my own pocket, and I’d be extremely unlikely to ever see any of it back. How long would the magazine last if it cost me loads of money to publish? There’s always going to be something else that I need to spend my money on, whether it’s the children, the house or most importantly the Xbox 360 (the PS3, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to demand much in the way of financial attention, being mostly happy with a supply of DVDs and Blu-rays from Lovefilm).
I know myself, and I know that the magazine wouldn’t last long if I had to make a choice between TQF#24 and Fallout 3…
See inside this issue for the rest of what I had to say on this subject. I really got my knickers in a twist about this one!! – SWT
Let’s see who has been hoodwinked by our evil elves into submitting stories for publication in this issue…
Wayne Summers, this issue’s cover artist, first appeared in TQF thanks to his story of a mysterious garden surrounded by a wall, “The Walled Garden”, which appeared in TQF#19. At that time he was about to be published in On The Night Highways, Art&Prose Magazine and Creative Island. He grew up in rural Kojonup, Western Australia, where his writing career began. While in high school he’d write small articles and stories for the local newspaper. He now lives in Perth, Western Australia. Wayne is an English language teacher and is studying to be a counsellor. His focus remains writing and during 2007 he had more than 17 horror and fantasy stories accepted for publication. A second story by Wayne, “The Exile from Naktah”, an epic horror fantasy, appeared in TQF#21.
Richard K Lyon is a semi-retired research scientist/inventor whose hobbies include collecting pulp SF magazines and writing. He has also published numerous short stories and novelettes. A collection of the latter, Tales From The Lyonheart, is available from Barnes and Noble, etc. In collaboration with Andrew J Offutt, famed author of My Lord Barbarian, he wrote the Tiana trilogy (Demon in the Mirror, The Eyes of Sarsis and Web of the Spider), and Rails Across the Galaxy for Analog. To our magazine they have contributed “The Iron Mercenary” (TQF#19), “Arachnis” (TQF#22), and, in this issue, “Devil on My Stomach”, in which we meet a new player in Tiana’s world. This story was originally published in Dragonfields (Summer 1980), and was reprinted more recently in Flashing Swords #2.
Anna M Lowther provides “When a Baby Laughs” for this issue. If this unsettling (especially for anyone who has been present at a child’s birth) little story makes you want to search out more of Anna’s work, a short story of hers, “Miss Magnolia’s Secret”, opens the horror anthology Damned in Dixie. Also, her voodoo tale “Gris Gris” appeared in the special Halloween 2007 issue of Sinister Tales Magazine. And her short pirate story “The Black Butcher” will appear in the anthology Black Dragon, White Dragon, currently in production at Ricasso Press.
John Hall is best known as a Sherlockian scholar, and a member of the International Pipe Smokers’ Hall of Fame. His numerous literary interests include Raffles, Sexton Blake, and the stories of HP Lovecraft and MR James. He is the author of Special Commission, a medieval murder mystery.
John Greenwood has made contributions to most issues of TQF following his return from a round-the-world trip, and was ultimately made co-editor in recognition of his efforts. (It was either that or rename the publication Greenwood's Quarterly Fiction!) To this issue he contributes a further episode in the life of the universe’s least favourite peripathetic astronaut, Newton Braddell.
Stephen Theaker is the eponymous editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. The earliest dream he can remember is of eating Weetabix, only to find it full of worms and woodlice, all because he had applied sugar and milk in the wrong order. A month or so ago he had an equally nasty dream about a Terminator (see this issue’s huge review section, swollen due to the editor’s bout of Goodreads fever, for the details). His most recent dream was rather nicer: his baby had learned to crawl and was following him around. [By the time this issue went to press this dream had actually come true.] He has written six novels to date, but spent no more than a month on any of them (and it showed). He was recently made editor of Dark Horizons, the journal of the British Fantasy Society.
