Oct 04 2010
A very happy Sputnik day
Today, October 4, marks the 53rd birthday of the space age, assuming it started with the launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, back in 1957.
For me it’s a very happy day, despite getting off to a bad start. (I had to repair the clothes dryer, which needed the drum seal replaced. The first one I got from the Sears parts center wasn’t adequately stitched, so I had to go back and get another.) I sold not one, but two stories to Analog Science Fiction magazine. A short short, “Small Penalties,” will be a Probability Zero piece. The second, “Stone Age,” concerns some surprising challenges in extraterrestrial archeology. It’s a T-Space story. These will probably appear some time next spring, given lead times, and almost certainly in different issues.
My friend Brad Torgersen also got the paperwork today for his sale “The Chaplain’s Assistant” to Analog. It would be kind of fun if we’re both in the same issue.
I also received my author’s copy of Full Throttle Space Tales #4: Space Horrors now out from Flying Pen Press. It has some great stories!
Hope the rest of you are having a happy Sputnik day!
2 Responses to “A very happy Sputnik day”
I agree, it would be a wonderful trick of coincidence if we wound up sharing space in the same issue. I’m just glad that Stan wasn’t in a position of doing either/or: buy Mayer, and not buy Torgersen, or buy Torgersen, but not Mayer. Hopefully you and I can both keep selling to Dr. Schmidt without it becoming a true competition for slots. I kind of suspect that’s not how Stan works, but I haven’t had the chance to talk to him personally so I am guessing. Seems like Stan just respects good material — period — and if something comes across his desk, he’ll try very hard to find a way to fit it into his purchasing.
I don’t know how far out the Analog budget lets Stan Schmidt maintain an inventory for, but I’m sure he has some discretion to just buy a great story even if he doesn’t have an immediate opening for it. That’s one reason for the long delay between acceptance and print. Of course eventually that inventory fills up, so Brad you and I just have to keep writing better stories than all those other submitters. 😉
But yes, sometimes he’ll like a story that he can’t buy immediately because he has too much in inventory (same as with every other publication). Stan is one of the few editors I know who’ll say something like “I like it but I’m overstocked. I want to hold it for a while in case a slot opens up but feel free to sell it elsewhere, just let me know.” Then again, Stan has being at this for a very long time (32 years — two more and he’ll beat John Campbell’s time) and he’s an author himself (as was Campbell), so he clearly knows something about how to run a magazine, and how to treat authors