Advice on submitting and rejections from the Editor of DreamForge Magazine. He rejected one of my short story submissions, but told me he enjoyed the story and I should keep it in circulation. In the publishing world time is precious, and any kind of personal note means I got THIS close.
So, here's why I haven't read many books so far this year: Because I've read fifteen volumes of Schlock Mercenary, a web comic turned graphic novel. Did I like it? Well, I'm on my fifteenth volume, so there you go.
In the very first strip Schlock joins, as you might expect, a group of space mercenaries called Tagon's Toughs. To paraphrase the old A-Team opening, if you've got the money--and if you can find them--you can hire Captain Kaff Tagon's army-for profit. But you won't have any trouble finding them, because they leave disaster in their wake.
Meanwhile, the rest of Tagon's Toughs range from humans, to aliens of every type, to Earth animals who gained sentience. The company's biggest antagonists are also its biggest allies: Artificial Intelligences running ships and worlds, which communicate through avatars that mostly look like humans (although one resembles a super-cute koala).
Writer and artist Howard Taylor covers modern problems ranging from politicians to nanobots, using parody, satire, and just plain laugh-out-loud humor to deal with a violent universe that's always on the edge of blowing up--sometimes literally.
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Taylor himself admits to being weak on the artistic side when he first started out. But the art gets better, and the writing is on the money right from the get-go. He happily tackles just about every science fiction concept ever invented, hard and soft, and as the series goes on the challenges and players get bigger and bigger. Taylor's not afraid to kill off characters, and those that eventually come back do so in a convincing way--or at least, a way that may be possible in the future. It's clear the author has a good grasp on technology, even if he happily strays from known science for a story or a laugh.
Meanwhile--and this might be the most surprising part of Schlock Mercenary--Taylor gives us relatable, engaging characters along with the well-plotted stories. As the scale gets bigger and bigger, the characters change and grow and, as mentioned earlier, the art gets better.
Check out the strip or order the books here:
https://www.schlockmercenary.com/
You can click on "Schlock Mercenary Begins", which will take you to a redone version of the first strip, and below that is a link to the original strip. Did I mention the art gets better? It does.
And my stuff is here:
Remember: Reading keeps you from turning into a big pile of poo.
Okay, so check this out: As I'm sure all of you remember, back in 2021 I had a short story, "Everybody Knows Your Name", published in East Of the Web, an online fiction magazine. The original short story is here:
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/EverKnow1183.shtml
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And the post I made about it is here:
https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/2021/01/new-short-story-everybody-knows-your.html
Not that you need to read the blog post, but I try to be thorough. Anyway, the story has been translated and republished ... in Romanian.
It has TOO. I have proof:
https://fictiuni.ro/toti-iti-stiu-numele-mark-r-hunter/
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| Amazingly, my name in Romanian is the same as my name in English. |
"Everyone Knows Your Name" is the story of a time traveler whose first trip--as tends to happen with time travelers--doesn't go at all the way he planned. I love time travel stories, and I tried to make this one original, and ... maybe I succeeded. If not, I'll just go back to 1955 and try again.
So you people taking Romanian to get that language minor, here you go--enjoy! Of course, the story won't be a true classic until it's translated into Klingon.
Remember, if you ever go time traveling, take a good translation book with you.
Five teens who otherwise have little in common bond over a shared tragedy: Five years earlier a steel mill exploded in Splendor, Ohio, leaving the surviving townspeople grieving.
Now Franny and her brother Arthur join Sofia, Remy, Levi, and Nick in filming a mockumentary web series they call "Ghost Hunters". It's all for fun and distraction--until they witness the crash of a disk-shaped object that engulfs them in light ... and gives them supernatural powers.
Soon
they're being chased by the government, threatened by the recluse
accused of causing the steel mill accident, and discovering their
unusual abilities are anything but a gift. Their attempts to solve the
mystery and escape detection make up the plot, but the heart of the
story is with the teens, as they try to deal with their grief and sense
of loss from an all too natural tragedy.
Emily Henry's 2019
novel manages to balance the two, giving us real characters adjusting to
an unreal situation that may include Franny being possessed by an
alien. There's plenty of action and some twists I didn't see coming, but
I was most impressed with Henry's ability to portray her damaged
teenage characters. I noticed there was a high school activity book
related to the novel, so it appears I wasn't the only one struck by her
grasp of story and characters.
It's certainly worth giving Emily Henry's other books a look.
Remember, authors who don't get enough reviews often get abducted by published aliens.
