Responding to Survivor's post of 12/17/06 18:58:

You've made some fair criticisms here.

First, I concede that I didn't pick the best example to examine the market with; I picked it because it highlighted a few points (first person present tense opener) and had a strange opening (the "word shapes" discussion). The strange opening perhaps obscured the person and tense issues I had noticed in my reading. A different example would have been better.

I also concede that I went too far down the "it isn't what you write, it's who you know" path. That wasn't my original point, but I certainly got sucked into it. You're right, it has no real place here, and I apologize for cluttering up the place. I certainly don't think that craft's unimportant; I wouldn't spend so much time commenting on it if I thought it were.

I will also pick some nits.

First, "Sergeant Chip" is an excellent story, which is much more than an excellent idea. Ideas may be a dime a dozen, but excellent stories clearly aren't.

Second, there are definitely different ways to read a story. Whether you engage in them is another question. I'll leave it at that unless you're interested in pursuing it further.

So let's move beyond all that, with my apologies for the distraction. I still think it's relevant to look at the market: (a) what it's buying, and (b) what it's calling "the best".

I said I'd provide statistics. I don't have a lot of data at my fingertips, but I'll give you what I've culled from _The Year's Best SF 10_ (where Sergeant Chip came from), _The Year's Best SF 6_ (Edited by Kramer, one of those who edited 10) and _Writers of the Future XXII_ (for 2005).

Let's look at SF10 first. It's the anthology that made me doubt the oft-repeated conventional wisdom that that stories are easier to sell if you write in the third person limited viewpoint, past tense.

The SF10 anthology included 23 stories, of which fully 61 percent (14) were written in the first person. Stranger still, 26% of the stories (5, plus "Glinky" which sandwiches past tense between significant chunks of present) were written in the present tense. Only one of the present tense stories was third person; the rest were first.

These aren't weird markets, either.

* Four stories came from three original anthologies. Half were first-person, none present.
* One story came was a bit of an exception: a first-time English translation that came from an anthology of the author's work.
* The rest (19) were from magazines, most of which I've heard of. I think one is a literary magazine -- The Denver Quarterly -- but interestingly, it was only first-person and not present tense.

** Of Asimov's four entries, three were in the first person, and one of those was present tense.
** Fantasy and Science Fiction had six entries, of which two were third-person limited past tense, two were first-person past, and two were first-person present.
** Strange Horizons and Island Dreams each had one first-person present-tense entry.
** Analog and The Denver Quarterly each had one first-person past-tense entry.
** SciFiction had one entry each of first-person past and third-person present.
** Interzone was the only one that had only third-person past tense. It had only one entry.

SF 6 contains 27 stories.

There were a variety of unique pieces because of a special issue of _Nature_: the stories it contained took the forms of one second-person story, two first-person present stories, three reports, and one press release. Most of them are very short. It's a five-year-old anomaly, and should probably be ignored.

That leaves 20 stories. 5 of these are from anthologies, and 15 from magazines.

Of these, nine (45%) are third-person past tense. seven (35%) are first-person past. Two (10%) are first-person present. One (5%) is third-person present. One is a diary, which is first person, but blends present and past.

Chopped differently, 80% are past tense, the rest are present, (or a blend of present and past). 55% are first-person, and 45% are third-person.

If we turn to Writer's of the Future, we see that there are no present tense stories, and only 25% (3 of 12) of the stories are written in the first person. This is interesting, and I wonder whether it is skewed or the other anthologies are. Perhaps WotF is more representative of the market as a whole; perhaps of the market for new writers; perhaps of the type of stories written by writers who enter contests.

What does all this tell us? Possibly much more about the editors of the anthology than about the market, I admit. It would be better to know how many stories were published overall of each type, but I don't have that data.

I have to go, so I'll leave it at that for now. I haven't touched on unnamed characters or other no-no's, but at least for first person -- and to some extent for present tense -- I have to re-evaluate my position. It may be harder to _write_ well in those modes, which is why fewer amateurs publish in them -- but editors seem willing to buy it.

I like well written first person, which for me automatically excludes use of the present tense. But it's a grand narrative form for "this really happened to me" stories, and a lot of SF can fall into this catagory. Present tense is one of the inroads made by the literary establishment on teaching writers, they pound it into everyone that takes any creative writing class that it's a)daring, b) more accessable and immediate c) the only way to be taken seriously as a writer. None of these are remotely true, but they start teaching this to grade-schoolers these days. It's not surprising that some people buy into it. It used to be a genuinely daring trick that was used to good effect in certain SF stories where the narrative is supposedly an on-the-fly record of some kind.

I'll mention here that I'm one of the few fans of Cherryh's "zeroth person super-tense" writing. I can read pages of that without a break, but most people seem to hate it. I don't recommend it for novice writers, but it you do it and pull it off, I'll definitely praise you for it.

As for the distinction between "story" and "idea", I don't care. Human concepts are generally not very appealing to me, at best I sometimes find them cute or amusing. I'm about the craft, as are many of the people who read for pleasure. If you want help coming up with a great story idea, I can do that but I generally don't like to go further than helping the author write.

Of course, this does make me somewhat unusual, since most people care about sharing narratives because of how that narrative defines and affects and even effects the community. But since the general purpose of this forum isn't do decide which ethos authors should promote but to help them get help with the actual craft of appealing to uncommitted readers, some people have said that my unique perspective is very valuable.

On another note, I hope you'll forgive my intemperate response to the other thread. The Fragments and Feedback forum is always on the verge of collapsing when experienced readers lose interest in volunteering comments there, far more so than it is ever in danger from not getting enough poorly written openings. It has been a while since we've had a case of someone posting plagerized material there, and to be honest I think that it would surprise you to realize that you are guilty of plagerism in this case, since you were always planning on coming clean eventually. I think that the Fragments and Feedback forum has been useful to a lot of writers, and I know that it sometimes causes KDW a bit of hassle to be constantly policing it. But getting heated doesn't really help matters.