Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #23

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Editors, Writers and Money: in Defence of Amateurs

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

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Contents

Editorial

• Editors, Writers and Money: in Defence of Amateurs by Stephen Theaker
• Contributors

Science Fiction

• The Orphans of Time by Wayne Summers
• Newton Braddell and His Inconclusive Researches into the Unknown: At the Mountains of Madness by John Greenwood

Fantasy

• Devil on My Stomach: a Tale of Tiana’s World by Richard K Lyon & Andrew J Offutt

Horror

• When a Baby Laughs by Anna M Lowther
• Shaggai by John Hall

The Quarterly Review

Book Reviews

• Ælnäthän
• Bug-Eyed Monsters
• Hive
• Odd and the Frost Giants
• World War Z

Comics Reviews

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Long Way Home
• Clubbing
• Doctor Who: Voyager
• Essential Godzilla
• Green Lantern: Revenge of the Green Lanterns
• Heroes
• JLA: Ultramarine Corps
• Showcase Presents Superman Family: Volume 2
• The Terminator Omnibus: Volume 1
• Tom Strong: Book 5

Magazine Reviews

• Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest #12
• GUD #2 (Greatest Uncommon Denominator)

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Contributors

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.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #21

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Theaker's House of Horror!

Issue 21! It seems funny to think now that being 21 used to be a big deal in Britain. When I was a youngster, everyone talked about their 21st birthday as the big one, the one for which a massive party would be planned. Now it seems to be barely worthy of note. It’s easy to see why – laws have changed, and reaching 21 is no longer the last barrier to adulthood. You can do mostly anything at 18 nowadays, and a good few things at 16 besides. In the US, it’s quite different – you still have to be 21 to drink, which always seems funny to us, as university studients played by actors in their thirties perpetually struggle to buy beer in the movies, even if it probably makes sense in a country in which so many teenagers drive.

I didn’t expect to get all political in this editorial, but while we’re here let me expound one of the ridiculous ideas I once came up with: the minimum legal age for smoking should go up by one year, every year. That done, everyone who can legally smoke now could continue up until their doubtlessly painful demises, while those who can’t legally smoke now would never be able to start. Okay, so like most of my ideas maybe it's a bit impractical!

My other, more practical, idea with regard to smoking is this: if someone stands near you at a bus stop, or sits on a bench beside you, and starts to smoke, you should feel free to trump as much as you like. This should be a general policy, endorsed by government, perhaps even given its own advertising campaign. I think it’s only fair that if your air is being polluted that you should respond in turn. The only foreseeable problem with this is the risk of blowing yourself up once your post-digestive fumes make contact with the cigarette’s lit end.

Where on Earth am I going with this editorial? That’s the problem with setting aside space for one of these things – you get to the end of the production process and there the space is, waiting to be filled. In an issue like TQF#19, that isn’t a problem, because that one had lots of different stories, and so I only had to write a little bit about each of them to fill the space up.

This time, I’ve only got two stories to talk about, and so there I go, wandering into areas that would be embarrassing if I talked about them in the pub, let alone in the pages of an august and serious journal like the one in your hands (or on your screen, if you are reading this online). And now, what’s worse, I realise I’ve used up almost all the space available without even getting onto the stories! Never mind, this may be the worst editorial of all time, but this issue contents two superb stories that more than make up for it! So, onward you go, to read the thrilling horrors!

First there’s "The Exile From Naktah", by Wayne Summers, by whom we previously published "The Walled Garden" in the aforementioned TQF#19. When reading this story I imagined it as being filmed by Hammer.

Then there’s "The Hatchling: Ante-Natal Anxiety" by my pal John Greenwood, following on from "Post-Natal Paranoia" in TQF#20. I like to think of this as Tintin scripted by Lovecraft and filmed by Guillermo del Toro. I hope you enjoy them both.

By the way, sorry for the cover painting! It may be rubbish, but I had fun painting it! – SWT

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Editorial

Theaker’s House of Horror!

The Exile From Naktah

Wayne Summers

Lily * Klune

The Hatchling: Ante-Natal Anxiety

John Greenwood

The Ancient Mariner * Escaping Naseby * Reliving the Past * The Life of Scherlasky * Visiting Family * Old Haunts * Emergence * A Homing Instinct

The Quarterly Review

Mass Effect * Back to You

Helen and Her Magic Cat

Steven Gilligan

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #20

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The Big Two-Oh: Celebrations and Apologies!

So this is it for another year – our fourth year of issues (even if it’s only been three and a bit years since the first came out). I’d love to say that this has been a great year for Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, because in many ways it has. Our downloads have increased immensely and even our print sales have gone up a bit. People are starting to hear about what we’re doing. Listings on places like www.duotrope.com, www.ralan.com and the AA Independent Press Guide have brought dozens of submissions to our inbox, and the stories which we have accepted have enriched the magazine in every way. But I can’t bring myself to say it’s been a great year when it was the year our best friend died, leaving us utterly shaken. He’d spent Christmas with my family for something like the last six years, and while that sadly reflects the fact that he never managed to find someone special to create his own Christmases with, they were always good times, and it’s hard to face this one without him around. Apart from anything else, he nearly always bought superb presents for me. (Last year it was The Lurker in the Lobby, a fascinating overview of Lovecraftian cinema.)

I won’t spend the whole editorial being sad, though. It is Christmas, after all, and however much I miss my friend, I’m in ecstatic anticipation of the new Doctor Who Christmas special, and the Marks & Spencers pre-cooked turkey crown in the fridge looks as delicious as it does every year!

In this issue we have the first portion of a new novel by my co-editor, John Greenwood. I made him co-editor in recognition of the fact that he was writing half the magazine at the time – it would be unfair to reject his work now to avoid accusations of bias! And why avoid those accusations? I am biased, no doubt about it. I have a sneaking suspicion that with this novel, as perhaps with his Newton Braddell series, John is pandering to me somewhat, since he packs into each of them everything I want to read whenever I pick up a book (rare as that tends to be nowadays). It’s as if he has made a careful study of my literary tastes and preferences and custom-written a novel to entertain me. The Hatchling is his paciest, most thrilling and most atmospheric piece of writing to date, and if I could get away with reprinting it in every issue from now to eternity I would.

Next, Bruce Hesselbach regales us with a Tale of Yxning, "Contrarieties". Like The Hatchling, this is a story that hits the nail of my tastes so squarely on the head that it is almost uncanny. And the last story of the issue is the concluding part of Michael Wyndham Thomas’s serial, After All, "A River. It Had to Be." It’s been a privilege to publish this fine serial in these unworthy pages.

To both authors I owe an apology (in addition to the one I owe Bruce for the appalling illustration of a plant pot falling on Yren Higbe’s head that marred the publication of his story in TQF#19). Michael Thomas’s serial appeared in all six issues this year, while Bruce Hesselbach’s Tales of Yxning appeared in three, and yet neither author has had the cover devoted to them. The first cover was a portmanteau covering all the stories in the issue (just one postage stamp-sized illustration related to After All), and the next two were devoted to Howard Phillips’ The Doom That Came to Sea Base Delta. The fourth cover of the year featured a creature from the fabulous "Ananke" by Jeff Crook, and the fifth concerned "The Walled Garden", by Wayne Summers, not that anyone would have been able to tell, thanks to my lack of drawing ability. Then this sixth issue has a cover relating to The Hatchling. So that’s four out of six covers given over to our in-house writers, and that’s not at all fair.

The reason is that we knew way in advance what in-house material we had in hand, and once draft covers were drawn up, even though other material came in, I didn’t want to start over on the covers, out of sheer laziness!

In 2008 I’ll make much more of an effort in this regard: I’ve made a vow that none of the covers will be devoted to anything written by myself, John Greenwood or Howard Phillips (unless there is nothing else in the issue).

That brings me to something else that I don’t feel we’ve done particularly well this year: reviews of the books people have sent us. If you look at page 72 of this issue you’ll see my review of Test Drive by DJ Burnham, a book I did not finish reading. As a one-off that wouldn’t be too bad, but it follows similar non-reviews of DF Lewis’s Weirdmonger and Nemonymous #7 (aka Zencore!) in previous issues. For that matter I didn’t get very far through Apex #10 before writing a short review, and Apex #11 stands on my desk now, just as an interesting book by the name of Triangulations stands on my co-editor’s desk. It’s a bit of an embarrassing pattern. We just don’t get around to reading them. In the case of some books that are sent to us on spec, or that we’ve bought ourselves, I don’t feel too guilty, but in the case of something like Apex or Nemonymous where the author has offered review copies and we have specifically requested them, it’s very poor of us.

I can’t promise that we’ll do better next year. For one thing, what really interests me about other small press publications is their methods, philosophies and goals, rather than the stories within. I’m fascinated to see what people are doing, and love to think about the reasons they are doing it. But (and I doubt anyone will disagree) a reviewer should really read the book too! Another issue is that reading an entire book for review takes about as much work as proofreading an entire issue of TQF, and for me it often comes down to doing one or the other.

So while I can’t promise to write better reviews, I won’t ask people specifically to send us review copies, and I apologise to anyone I’ve asked to send us a review copy in the past. If you do send us review copies of your work, I think you’ve had fair warning of the poor quality reviewing you can expect! (For really good reviewing, visit the website of the excellent Whispers of Wickedness.)

So here’s to the end of a very exciting year for this flawed but good-hearted and tenacious magazine! Twenty issues down, but the next will be the best yet – because every issue is! – SWT

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Editorial

The Big Two-Oh: Celebrations and Apologies!

The Hatchling: Post-Natal Paranoia

John Greenwood

An Inconvenient Inheritance * Tangling with Grunewald * The Subterranean Ministry * Abroad, Unarmed and Incommunicado * Another Road to Juliaca * An Audience with El Alcalde * The Prison Under the Lake * Night of the Lakemother

Tales of Yxning

Contrarieties

Bruce Hesselbach

After All

A River. It Had to Be.

Michael Wyndham Thomas

The Quarterly Review

Halo 3 * Test Drive

Helen and Her Magic Cat

Steven Gilligan

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #19

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Welcome to Halloween!

es a year should be specials of some kind, so that we can still justify calling the magazine a quarterly. This year, we’ve decided to have a Halloween special. Luckily, we had some suitably scary submissions! “Pumpkin Jack” is the most appropriate, for obvious reasons, and so that’s where we begin the issue. It’s a story by Laura Bickle, about the discoveries a pair of bored teenagers make in and around their grandma’s isolated home. I’m not totally familiar with the way that pumpkins grow in real life, but there’s definitely something strange about these ones!

Next, Wayne Summers asks us to climb into “The Walled Garden”, if we dare. I don’t want to spoil his surprises, so I won’t say much more than that, other than to note how good it is to read that Henrick’s is still a going concern after that terrible incident with the shop window dummies a few years ago.

Something we’ve done differently in this issue is to divide the stories up – very roughly (some may even have been bruised in the process) – into sections. In the past it wasn’t really necessary, with most issues just being one long chunk of nonsense from me, but with more and more stories appearing in each issue, it started to seem like we’d be doing readers a favour if we made them a bit easier to navigate. So after the calendar-friendly fright section we segue into our series of fantasy stories!

I’ll note up front that our first fantasy story, “Rural Legend”, by Eric R Lowther, features horses and wolves, just like “Winter’s Warm Blood” in TQF18. It’s an unfortunate coincidence, but both stories were too good to reject on that account alone, and in any case I think we’re on a run of something like nineteen issues in a row featuring robot stories – a mere two sets of wolves and horses seems half-hearted in comparison! This is a great story that takes its time to draw you in, and is as much of a gentle giant as its protagonist. It’s a story that pats you on the back and says, “You ain’t doing so bad. Just keep on trying your best, and keep on trying to make your best better.”

“The Iron Mercenary” is a piece of heroic fantasy in the classic mould by Richard K Lyon and Andrew J Offutt. It is a continuation of their Tiana series, which saw publication as a series of three paperbacks in the late seventies and early eighties. I think this is this story’s first publication, but it dates from that period, a time before fantasy became a sub-set of the airport novel and Tolkein’s influence pushed Howard’s into the toilets and gave it a solid thrashing.

Andrew J Offutt of course has had a long career in writing, but when I hear his name it means one thing to me: My Lord Barbarian, the cover of which earned me much kudos at middle school by virtue of its buxom heroine, her virtues bare save for some tasteful bits of tin over her nipples. (Sadly I can only find the US cover on the internet, which while nice enough in itself lacks that important nostalgia factor!) I can only imagine what I would have made of Andrew’s Spaceways series at that age, and look forward to discovering what I'll make of it at my current age!

“When the Sun and the Moon Did Not Shine” is from Sam Leng. Saying anything more would give it all away, because it is only a slip of a thing! In the interests of driving readers to our competition, I should mention that Sam has a literary undertaking of her own (her webzine can be read at www.neonbeam.org.

Rounding out this impressive fantasy section is the second of the Tales of Yxning from Bruce Hesselbach. This one details “The Remarkable Life of Yren Higbe”, a character who made a brief but intriguing appearance in the first story, “The Tragical History of Weebly Pumrod, Witch Hunter”. The stories intersect, but stand alone, so if you have yet to acquire your copy of TQF#18, don’t be put off!

Our inaugural science fiction section contains “The Broadest Divide”, by David McGillveray. It’s an interesting story, in that your view of it – as to whether it is depressing or uplifting – will probably depend on whose side you would take. David doesn’t tell you who is right or who is wrong. The chances are even.

I noticed a David McGillveray among the credits in the film section of the Radio Times. Could it be the same man? His biography makes no mention of the fact, and being somewhat star-struck I dared not ask about it! Also, if I knew one way or the other would I feel honour-bound to berate him each time I felt a reviewer had completely missed the point of the latest Adam Sandler/Happy Madison movie, as is so often the case (though to be fair the Sandler reviews in RT have been moving in the right direction in recent years)?

“Who Picked the Pope’s Nose?” by Dan Kopcow doesn’t strictly fit our remit – there is no fantasy element (so my embarrassed apologies to anyone whose stories I have rejected solely on that account), and it isn’t all that adventuresome. But he was kind enough to let us publish one of his previous stories, “The Bearded Avenger”, and this one too tickled my fancy, so I indulged myself. Not knowing which pigeonhole to shove it into, I remembered hearing about some new-fangled type of writing called Bizarro.

Wow, longest editorial ever! There’s no room left to talk about the way this issue has a green cover, just like the previous one!

As usual, I’m going to end up giving unfairly short shrift to our returning features, “After All”, by “Magnificent” Mike Thomas, and “Newton Braddell And His Inconclusive Researches Into The Unknown”, by John “Jackanory” Greenwood, and that’s unfair, because they’re the rock upon which year four of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction has been built. They deserve all the gratitude I have to give, and they have it! – SWT

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Editorial

Welcome to Halloween!

News

Birmingham Town Hall

Horror

Pumpkin Jack

Laura Bickle

The Walled Garden

Wayne Summers

Fantasy

Rural Legend

Eric R Lowther

The Iron Mercenary: A Tale of Tiana

Richard K Lyon & Andrew J Offutt

When the Sun and the Moon Did Not Shine

Sam Leng

The Remarkable Life of Yren Higbe

Bruce Hesselbach

Science Fiction

The Broadest Divide

David McGillveray

Bizarro

Who Picked the Pope’s Nose?

Dan Kopcow

After All

An Old Trick… a Brief, Derisive Snort

Michael Wyndham Thomas

Newton Braddell And His Inconclusive Researches Into The Unknown

A Detour

John Greenwood

The Quarterly Review

Zencore!

Helen and Her Magic Cat

Steven Gilligan