Last week, I received an email telling me that my short story “Nary a Ghost of a Chance” was accepted for publication in the next issue of JOURN-E: The Journal of Imaginative Literature. It was a whirlwind romance: the next day I received the contract; the day after that I signed and returned it to the publisher; the day after that, I received payment. The issue will be available at the end of the month. This month.
Their covers are amazing – I cannot wait to see the whole issue! (The cover illustrating this post is from a previous issue; the one for the issue I have a story in isn’t available yet. Still, gorg – am I right?)
“Nary a Ghost of a Chance” is, hard as it is for me to believe, the third Schlomo Schwartz, Kosher Detective story to be published. The series is set on an Earth which has a symbiotic relationship with the Earth in a second universe; characters in the first universe existed as fictional characters in the other universe who are featured in works that never had an audience. This is the sort of weird premise that I love, but isn’t necessarily conducive to easy sales.
The first story, “The Writer Did It!”, was written for an anthology put out by my novel publisher, Elsewhen Press, called Existence is Elsewhen. (Hi, Pete and Al.) Since they invited all of their writers to submit something, they were stuck with it. The second story, “Death By Bandersnatch,” about a murder at the Wonderland Circus that somebody is trying to pin on an audience member named Alice, was published in Mystery Magazine. Okay, bit of a stretch, but maybe they were just as nostalgic about the works of Lewis Carroll as I was. In “Nary a Ghost of a Chance,” Schwartz is asked by a dead woman to find out why her equally dead husband disappeared on her; his investigation brings him to a seedy bar with a wide variety of horrific characters.
One of the things I realized early on was that the premise of the series allowed me to explore different literary (and cinematic) tropes. I have, for instance, written a fourth Kosher Detective story, “Gone, Gone Kitty,” in which Schwartz investigates a catnapping among characters who could have been out of an Our Gang movie from the thirties and forties. I had plenty of ideas for other stories, but because I thought there wasn’t much of a market for them, I haven’t really pursued them.
Perhaps it’s time to reconsider.