Presenting Issue #1 of Arkham Tales! 100 pages of the best weird fiction on the market right now, and all free for your reading pleasure!

This issue bears cover artwork by Ivan Green, and contains fiction by Mike W. Barr, Scott Bastedo, Steve Calvert, Robert Masterson, Benjamin W. Olson, Derek Rutherford, Jenny Schwartz, and Jeffery Scott Sims.

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Nathan Shumate
Editor & Publisher

Plans are still going forward to have the first issue available for free download this weekend.  Here’s a gander at the cover, with illustration by Ivan Green.

Nathan Shumate
Editor & Publisher

We’re approaching the home stretch for the first issue; I’ve sent out the first batch of galley proofs for authors to review and correct. Expect Issue #1 to be available for download by next weekend.

Nathan Shumate
Editor & Publisher

If you want to be sure to get the first issue of Arkham Tales when it rolls off the virtual presses (and you haven’t subscribed to our RSS feed), then allow me to present the announcement mailing list.  This will be used ONLY on the release of a new issue four times a year, so rest assured that your inbox won’t be filled with useless spam and blather.

To subscribe, simply add your email address here and the rest will be taken care of by internet magic.

(If you’ve previously submitted a story or otherwise inquired about Arkham Tales, I’ve taken the liberty of adding your address to the list.  If even that minimal contact offends you, you can unsubscribe preemptively here.)

Nathan Shumate
Editor & Publisher

If you picked up one of my fliers at MountainCon this weekend, you’ve come to the right place. Please check out the contributor guidelines and the previous posts to get up to speed. Your submission are welcome!

Nathan Shumate
Editor & Publisher

It’s been a month to the day since we launched this Arkham Tales website and made our first announcements looking for submissions.  I worried a little that there wouldn’t be sufficient submissions for us to put together our first issue in November; after all, it’s an untried magazine; would writers want to send their slaved-over words to a publication which had no track record and , for all they knew, would never actually come out?  I remembered the factoid in the back of my head that Asimov’s Science Fiction, probably the most prestigious science fiction magazine in operation, receives an average of 850 submission per month.  I thought we’d be lucky to get twenty or thirty.

In the last month, we’ve gotten 182 submissions.

One hundred and eighty-two. And that’s not counting the ones that were rejected at first glance because of improper manuscript formatting.

Of that number, 95 have been rejected, and 47 have been accepted.  Mixed into that number are eleven stories which were sent back with suggestions for revisions; some have subsequently been accepted, while others still didn’t make the cut.

(The rest haven’t been decided on yet.)

That tells me there are writers out there who have been waiting for a market for the kind of stories they write: unsettling, macabre, and entertaining.  And I can’t wait to put that first issue in front of you.

Nathan Shumate
Editor & Publisher

It doesn’t matter how many pages your story fills. Do you know how many pages you have to hook your editor?

One. Exactly one.

And that only sells the editor on reading the next page. That second page has to sell the page after that, and so on.

Even with a teeny-tiny publication like Arkham Tales, we get more submissions than we could possibly publish (over 130 in the last three weeks). And with most of them asking me to stick with them for twenty or twenty-five pages… well, I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’m looking for reasons to stop reading and reject a story. I’ve got to cull the herd somehow. And many writers make this easy for me by putting their weakest writing up front. That guarantees that I’ll never read the socko-boffo ending that compelled them to write the story. I’ve already rejected it.

It’s different when you read a published story in a magazine; you assume that the editor has already vetted what he’s presenting to you as worthwhile material. But when I tackle submissions out of the slushpile, I don’t go into it assuming that each story will be good enough for publication. A bad beginning has, often enough, heralded a bad story right to the end. So I read the first page or two or three, and ask myself, “If the rest of the story is like this, will I want to publish it? Heck, will I be happy to have spent the time to read it?” And if the answer is anything less than a hearty “yes,” I reject it. (With the best stories, I never ask that question. I’m too captivated to notice the turning of pages.)

Now, that may leave some otherwise good stories on the curb. I acknowledge that, but I don’t apologize. An editor’s not a captive audience, and I don’t owe any submission more than an unprejudiced read of the first page. After that, any prejudice I hold comes from what you, the writer, have put in front of me.

So how do you rescue your stories from the rejection bin? How do you construct and polish the opening of your story so that it draws me in with enough momentum that I’m predisposed to liking the rest of what I read?

If it were easy enough to give you the secret in a single blog post, everyone would be a terrific writer. Here are a few suggestions of what to do and what not to do:

- Don’t dump background info on me. You may have a a meticulously-realized setting detailed backstories for each of your character, but that doesn’t mean that I need to see all of it. Here are two questions to ask of all information you include in your story: Does the reader need to know this? And, Does the reader need to know this right now? (And yes, I know that Uncle Lovecraft began plenty of his stories with expository essays. But his best work relied deeply on setting and a sense of place; does yours?)

- Don’t write generic opening scenes. You need to get to the good stuff right away, not lead slowly up to it. No “main character wakes up,” no “main character stubs his toe and curses.” You’ve got to give me a hook. And that doesn’t just mean give me sex, violence, or blasphemy in the opening line, either. “Frank tried to calm his gasping breath as he looked around wildly” isn’t gripping if I don’t have a reason to care yet.

- Write with a voice. Good writers craft their prose so that the journey is as captivating as the destination. Even third-person prose should have some personality to it, not just a bald recitation of the events of the story.  Your word choice and rhythm should be unique and engaging.

- For the love of all that’s holy, proofread. The English language is a deft rapier, not a blunt club. I can understand and forgive a few missed commas and an its/it’s confusion or two in the course of a manuscript, but your opening pages should demonstrate to me that you know how to use words, punctuation, and grammar with expertise and precision.

These hints don’t lend themselves to a to-do list approach (except maybe the last one).  They are considerations which should inform your approach to getting your story down on the page.  Write me an opening that fulfills these conditions, and you’ll at least get me to read past the opening page… and then another… and then another…

Nathan Shumate
Editor & Publisher

Above and beyond adhering to standard manuscript format as referenced in our guidelines (and believe me, I’m getting more and more stringent on observance of format), here are some pointers to stay on this editor’s good side:

• The comma is your best friend or your worst enemy.  Learn how to use it, or it will destroy the rhythm of your slaved-over sentences.
• I had not thought tense problems would be very prevalent, but guess what?  They’re more common than I had expected.  Re-read your story with an eye toward consistency in tense; unless it’s supposed to be a first-personal narrative with a very conversational tone, in which inconsistent tenses are a mark of verisimilitude, your story should probably all be told either in past tense or present tense.
• Pay attention to tone and diction.  Your writing shouldn’t sound like Maya Angelou on one page and then be thick with Lovecraftian adjectives like “eldritch” on the next.
• Pay attention to character voice.  Even more so than your authorial tone, each character’s choice of diction and vocabulary should be consistent.  Dialog should also bear at least a passing resemblance to things which one might actually say.  Here’s a hint: read your dialog out loud.  That will help you find awkward constructions, such as parentheticals, which you would use in written text but which would never come out of anyone’s mouth.
• Don’t load the first part of your story with exposition.  Before you rattle off a character’s entire life history which has brought him to the point at which the story starts; look closely at whether the readers need this information at all, and if so, whether they need it immediately in order to understand what comes next.  Is there a better way to bring the reader up to speed than a dump of background info in the first two pages?
• Don’t change the viewpoint character in the middle of a scene.  This is frowned upon by any standards, but it also happens to really rub me the wrong way.  Every scene should be told from the viewpoint of, at most, one character; if you need to change your viewpoint character, do it with a scene break.

More so than the two members of the editorial board (at least, judging from our differing responses to several submissions), I react to stories on a sentence level.  The overall concept may be sound, but if the prose doesn’t pull me in, I’ll be indifferent (or worse, downright hostile) to your submission.  Unfortunately, I know that we as writers sometimes get too familiar with our words as we write them and read them back; we can’t see the weaknesses that others might.  Read your work aloud.  Read it in a different font (you’ll be surprised how much difference this makes).  Hand a paper copy of the manuscript and a highlighter to someone reasonably intelligent and have them simply make marks wherever the prose sounds off to them, or where they didn’t understand how they got to this sentence from the previous one, or where they felt the narrative was being sidetracked by exposition or description, or where they had to backtrack and re-read a sentence to make sense of it.

And once you’ve tightened the bolts that need tightening, then send it to us.

Nathan Shumate
Editor & Publisher

We can’t publish this in Arkham Tales, so we’re going the next best thing: linking to it.

Selections from H.P. Lovecraft’s brief tenure as a Whitman’s Sampler copywriter.

The best one has to be the chocolate cherry cordial, mainly because those things are fully as horrifying as anything Lovecraft ever imagined.

Nathan Shumate
Editor & Publisher

It’s only been a week (and a day) since we made the first public announcement of Arkham Tales, but already the response has been astonishing; over twenty-five short story submissions, several of which we’re very excited to publish in our first issue.

I would like to point out, though, a common problem among submissions: format.  As referenced in our guidelines, you should adhere to standard manuscript format — double-space the text, indent paragraphs with no extra space between them, leave the right edge ragged instead of justified — as can be found demonstrated here.

Remember, the presentation of your manuscript determines the first impression it makes on the editor, before he has (that is to say, I have) a chance to start sampling what you’ve written.  Do yourself a favor and send a manuscript that is professional-looking.

Keep those submissions coming, and feel free to let others know about Arkham Tales!

Nathan Shumate
Editor & Publisher