Fiction so far…
Here’s where you tell us what you think of the fiction we’re publishing. As this is a brand new page, we’ll wrap the last few weeks’ worth of fiction up in this one post.So, what did you think of:
“New York Games” by Eric Brown (issue 3)
“A Hint of Mystery” by Ian Whates (issue 4)
“Lenny and the Travel Ninja” by Alasdair Stuart (issue 5)
“Career Change” by John H Stevens (issue 6)
“Wings of Night” by Allyson Bird (issue 7)
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Hello
Firstly, thanks for adding me to your list. No. 7 is the first HUB I’ve seen and I certainly enjoyed Ms. Bird’s story which had a kind of Helen Zahavi’s ‘Dirty Weekend’-meets-the-’Pan Horror’ stories feel to it, or so it seemed to me. I liked that the author managed to condense plenty of story into just the four pages.
A non-fiction query: Not having had the chance of running through 1-6 yet, I’m wondering if you’re concentrating exclusively on movie reviews or are horror books fair game too?
Thanks again, and congratulations on putting together such a slick and snappy publication.
Hi demonikatvault,
Thanks for the comments, and the question. We’re interested in all things genre – film, tv, books, comics, audio, other magazines – and will comment on them all as time (and budget) allows.
Welcome aboard.
It’s going to be interesting to see what kind of comments finally appear at Hub. It strikes me that the kind of interaction that we have now is very different to that which used to appear (sometimes still does) in the letters pages of magazines. This more immediate communication doesn’t have the cushioning effect of time which resulted in sharper comments appearing in magazines and fanzines, raising the question “Are we more careful what we write on the net?”
But I need to look at the earlier issues of Hub and their feedback yet.
I liked Allyson’s story. Her psychotic Elena has many endearing qualities, not least her liking for Ray Milland and Fred Astaire movies and her talent for making paper-doll cut-outs of her boyfriends. My type of girl. I felt that the story could have done with some tidying up; I had to re-read a few lines on the last page which just didn’t seem to scan. I was surprised when I tried typing that upper-case “IMPAILED” into Word and it didn’t pick up the spelling mistake (someone here should have). But if you’re aiming for an issue a week, I suppose those sort of comments are nitpicking and churlish. Like I said, I liked the story and Hub will be a welcome caller at my mailbox each week.
I also enjoyed Paul Kane’s reviews. I’ll definitely be watching for The Witches Dungeon as my tastes are very old school pulp. Some photos of the Dungeon would have been good – PDFs cost nothing to make and an extra page wouldn’t have made the file too big. For one thing I’d have been interested to know what colour the Creature From the Black Lagoon was in the poster Paul saw, if it wasn’t green. I’ll lose sleep wondering now.
Anyway, great stuff and I look forward to the next one.
Hi Lee
Of the five stories Hub has published electronically to date, I particularly enjoyed “A Hint of Mystery” and “Lenny and the Travel Ninja”. Interesting and diverting, both of them. “Career Change” delivered a certain resonance, too, though I fear I’d better not go into details as I have a mortgage to pay
Cheers
Vaughan
Sorry this one’s a bit late, so comments here on Hub 8 and 9.
In Hub 8, One in a Million by Kate Kelly was an extremely well-written piece which I enjoyed right up to its sting-in-the-tail ending. That type of story really died out in the ’80s, with Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected. And the truth is that with that type of story of course the end is actually pretty predictable, the reader gets a kick from seeing his expectations realised. I was guessing that Kate’s story would end with the ‘one in a million’ turning out to have scales instead of tentacles. Of course, she was a little more subtle.
I understand that you accept only shorter length stories as your editorial readers wouldn’t have time to assess longer works for publication. But it would be interesting to see your writers work to a greater word-length. 3000 or 4000 words allows much greater plot and character development. To work at less than that, a story needs to be very strong.
The editing of issue 8 seemed an improvement.
In Hub 9, The Boy at the Gate by Barry J House comes devilishly close to working best of the three I’ve read so far. It would have worked even better if we’d had just a few lines telling us that members of the Kelly gang were being picked – off rather than the narrator just telling us at the end that he’d been left to last; and although the police didn’t see the ghost of Jake, they still dug up the spot which the ghost was pointing at. But the pacing was excellent and the flashback handled well, as was the theme of repressed adolescent sexuality and guilt.
Paul Kane’s review of Development Hell by Mick Garris (Hub
is tempting: a reanimated corpse of Jean Harlow with stitches in her neck is something that should have made its way into Masters of Horror. Nice to see Lee Harris reviewing some SF. My knowledge of that and the comics field is way out of date.
Hi Rog,
Thanks for the post (it’s gratifying when people take time out of their day to comment).
I enjoyed Kate’s tale, and included it largely because I wanted to have a happy story every now and then – yes, it’s apocalyptic, but it ends on a note of hope. Believe me, when I say we have some extremely dark tales coming up over the next few months…
We don’t give our writers a firm wordcount to work to (although we’d start thinking about serialisation after 12 or 13,000 words). In fact, over the last few weeks the wordcount has been 3,300 (issue 9), 2500 (issue 8), 3,500 (issue 7), 1,700 (issue 6) and 7,000 (issue 5).
Actually, other than issue 6 (Career Change – a deliberate choice to have a piece of flash fiction), it’s a complete coincidence that our tales to date have largely been around the 3-3,500 count. Next week’s is 4,500. It’s interesting – until I started writing this post I didn’t realise how similar in length they’ve been! (Issue 3’s was about 6,000 words, but nothing that length since). I’ll definitely look into this.
As for the length putting off our slush readers, I’m about to put something into practice that’ll help them get through the pile a lot quicker (I’m concerned that we’ve kept too many people waiting for too long).
Don’t forget you can download all the backissues (back to issue 3) from the website at http://www.hub-mag.co.uk, so if you’ve missed any you can easily catch up.
These word-lengths are very deceptive. I had thought that 5000 words was 15 to 20 pages in a book. I can see that that comes from a mistake I made years ago when using a typewriter (no word counters then).
The other reason I thought these three stories very short was this information which I’ve just copy and pasted from your submissions page:
“Our full-length fiction reading list is full. We are currently only accepting flash fiction submissions of between 800 and 1,500 words. These figures are set and should not be treated as general guidelines.
“We are currently not accepting longer work as our reading lists are full and we don’t want to keep writers waiting for a response longer than is absolutely necessary. If you have submitted a story prior to March 20th 2007 it will be considered for publication.”
God knows how I end up commenting on other people’s stories like this; it’ll hardly be improving my own chances of publication. But I get so damned irritated when people don’t even write “Hey, nice one!” or “Yes, I didn’t like this so much…”
Since writing my post above it struck me that saying one story is better than another is really an unfair value judgement. Three different types of story have been presented by Hub in three weeks – horror, SF and supernatural – and it’s unlikely that they’d have been submitted to the same anthology. There are some criteria than can be applied to all stories, though. Anyway, maybe I should try submitting something myself, so that others can take a poke at my work.
P.S. Test your link above.
I was wondering if writers are wary about posting comments because they think criticising stories might put them on some of a blacklist with other writers or harm their chances of getting published.
If this comment gets posted, possibly it might suggest an answer to that. Of course whether this site registers computer’s IP numbers, I wouldn’t know.
But I would have thought the number of comments would probably be noted by Orbit – and writers should consider that, too.
Hi, FN
Thanks for your post.
I don’t think that’s a real concern. I’m not aware of any “blacklist”, and I don’t see how voicing an opinion would harm their chances of getting published – it’s how reviewers make their money every day, and without constructive criticism writers are unable tohone their craft.
I wouldn’t allow any posts to stay if they seemed like a personal attack on the authors (or on anyone else), but all feedback is good feedback if it’s constructive and well-intentioned.
I don’t know if Orbit read this little section of the site. Perhaps they do. I sincerely doubt they would take any notice of posters’ comments should a poster say something negative about one of the books that they publish – they’re in the business of publishing the best books they can, and they’re unlikely to turn down an excellent book because their author once voiced a negative opinion about a piece of work that one of their other authors created.
This site does register IP addresses, but we believe that everyone that posts here does so with good intentions (unless we discover otherwise).
It’s a quiet page at the moment, but we’ve only just launched it, and the main interest for our readers is the tales that we publish.
If a poster is genuinely worried about reaction to their posts (and I truly believe there is no reason to), they’re more than welcome to use a pseudonym. I’ll only worry about pseudonyms if the same IP address is being used for multiple names.
Of course, I could be wrong. If anyone else is following this post, what do you think?
I got Hub 10 last night and read it this morning over my morning cuppa. I think it’s the most satisfying issue yet, and if I could pick it up at the newsagents, I’d do so.
If Brian Rix had scripted one of Poul Anderson’s time paradox stories, it might read a little like Mur Lafferty’s I Remember You. Not quite, maybe. To be honest I was surprised that there was any life left in the time paradox story, but Mur makes it work by creating believable characters that we can care about.
Alasdair Stuart’s review of Asylum by Rod Williams and Boo Cook is interesting and knowledgeable and made me wonder why my old copies of 2000 AD are still in a box in the attic (I ran out of bookcases – I’ll build more).
Ellen Phillips’ piece on the Stardust-On-Wye festival gave a nice insight into the lakeable and brilliant Neil Gaiman, particularly through a fan’s question “Do you wish you were more widely read or would you rather have fewer, more devoted fans?” and her observation that most Gaiman fans think they’re the only ones to have ‘discovered’ him. I have friends in Spain and Holland who love his writing and follow his blog. I’ve read Neverwhen, but never seen the TV series based on it. I don’t know anyone else who has, either. I hope Stardust is as good as it sounds. But I hope Sandman never gets filmed – I just don’t think it’s possible to do well. I suppose if Del Toro did it there’d be a chance of success…?
Letting Austin Grossman (author of Soon I Will Be Invincible) speak for himself suggests that the novel could be more intriguing than indicated by the brief account in Hub 9.
Re: the Fake Name post above, I’d say that the term “blacklist” was unfortunate. I just get weary of the attitude “say something nice or say nothing at all” which seems to prevail among writers on the net, and maybe it’s making me feel a little paranoid of my endless scribblings about other people’s work. Unfortunately, after more than 30 years of doing this (and having just a few short stories published by Fontana, Marks & Sparks, Far Point magazine, a British Horror Film fiction anthology and small press stuff like Filthy Creations and Terry Jeeves’ Erg, plus running one writers’ workshop and participating in another) well, there’s obviously not much hope for me now.
Thanks to you and the other staffers for your patience and hard work, Lee. This is the best issue I’ve seen yet.