Ketchup

It's been another crazy week, and, man, the writing life continues to be a rollercoaster ride of excitement, anxiety, gratification and despair. Of course it helps that I'm melodramatic as hell. ;)

Eight days ago I received contributor copies of Ennea #484, a Greek magazine which pays nicely in euros and recently published "Meme," my third story for them.

Five days ago I sold "Long Eyes" to Galaktika Magazine in Hungary, a new language for me, which is great fun. Heck, they also pay real money, which isn't always the case with overseas short fiction markets. (Often if there's a few bucks involved, it goes to the translator of the story, not the writer, who presumably has already sold it in his native country and is compensated for this new "sale" in contributor's copies and the additional exposure for novel sales.) Galaktika has been in circulation since 1972 and has twice been voted Europe's best SF magazine. Awesome!

In the meantime, though, I've been a sick puppy -- severe congestion, fatigue, headache. Two days ago I was coughing up blood. Not awesome! In fact, the word we're looking for is 'unnerving.' I've never done hacked up red stuff before. It's like something from the machine plague. :(

Fortunately, it was just a few specks of red and it's coming from back of my ragged throat, not my lungs, but holey moley. I like my blood inside me.

So I haven't been writing. I've been sleeping. Bleh. Anxiety!

But this same week the rollercoaster gave us another, larger upward twist with the sale of Plague Year in France. The publisher is Bibliotheque Interdite, described to me as "a young but dynamic publishing house that works with Games Workshop, but they are growing and becoming more and more important on the fiction market." If you jump on their web site, what you'll see is Warhammer Warhammer Warhammer. These guys run game tie-ins, which are insanely popular and also provide them with a nice, built-in audience for their new Eclipse line, which will soon debut with the likes of the Deathstalker books by Frank Frazetta, Steve Savile's Silver, R.E. Howard's Conan and some book by some guy about the nanopocalypse.

Am I enthused to be included with this media-friendly line-up? Hell, yes. I do sex and violence very well, and I have high hopes for that built-in audience. Ideally Plague Year will perform with solid numbers and they'll run the rest of the trilogy.

Savile and I go back a ways. He's on the back jacket of Plague Zone, remember, saying sweet things like "A high-octane thriller," and he tells me the publisher is a king. Fantastic.

Labels: Ennea, French rights for Plague Year, Galaktika, Long Eyes, Meme, novel sales, short fiction sales