Aurealis #71

By Michael Pryor (Editor)

Aurealis #71 features 'Ascension', an unsettling tale of otherness from Michael Grey, and Emma Osborne's 'Clean Hands, Dirty Hands' - Australian Gothic writ large. Shane M Brown offers sage advice in 'The Six Critical Elements When Publishing Your First eBook' and our reviews section is bigger and better than ever. Aurealis #71, good to the last drop.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chimaera Publications
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781922031273

Book preview

AUREALIS #71

Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction

Edited by Michael Pryor

Published by Chimaera Publications at Smashwords

Copyright of this compilation Chimaera Publications 2014

Copyright on each story remains with the contributor.

EPUB version ISBN 978-1-922031-27-3

ISSN 2200-307X (electronic)

CHIMAERA PUBLICATIONS

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the authors, editors and artists.

Hard copy back issues of Aurealis can be obtained from the Aurealis website:

www.aurealis.com.au

Contents

From the Cloud—Michael Pryor

Ascension—Michael Grey

Clean Hands, Dirty Hands—Emma Osborne

The Six Critical Elements When Publishing Your First eBook—Shane M Brown

Reviews

Next Issue

Credits

From the Cloud

Michael Pryor

Aurealis has a proud history of publishing fiction in Australia. Since our first issue, we have introduced new authors to the reading public and given established authors a means to continue their relationship with their audience.

These are some of the things we’ve learned over nearly twenty-five years of selecting stories for publication.

• If you don’t read in the genre, you’re unlikely to create an original, refreshing genre story.

• One idea is rarely enough to sustain a story.

• Many stories would be far better off if they were a third shorter.

• If you use genre trappings, then your story will end up in the reject pile. ‘Trappings’ implies something added after the event, mere decoration. Respect the genre.

• Short stories are short. Don’t waste time—get into the story.

• If you can’t handle dialogue, your story will suffer badly.

• If nothing happens in your story, you don’t have a story. You might have a vignette, or a mood piece, but we don’t publish vignettes or mood pieces.

• Stories that only have one character can struggle. So much talking to her/himself…

• Don’t submit a first draft. Submit a story that you’ve polished until it glows.

• Clichés are clichés are clichés—and we’re not interested. Whether it’s a clichéd story idea or a clichéd character or a clichéd resolution, we’re really not interested.

• Solid, well-crafted writing beats pretentiousness every time.

• We are well over monospaced fonts. Courier is hard to read.

• If you’re not spelling and punctuating properly, you’re not using the fundamental building blocks of writing. Very few stories show a finely structured, well-nuanced, carefully textured narrative with poor spelling and grammar.

• Genre cred isn’t enough. You must write well on top of that.

• Subtly integrating background detail about the different places and times your story is set in is a major and impressive skill, likely to get our attention.

• Character diversity is a good thing and tends to suggest a thoughtfulness that bodes well for the rest of your story.

• If you jump on a trend from TV or the movies, it’s likely to be too late. We will have seen it a million times by the time your story gets to us—and we’ve probably rejected all of them.

• Surprise endings and shock plot twists rarely are.

• Humour is hard.

• If you don’t read our guidelines, you’re not likely to get published in Aurealis.

Back to Contents

Ascension

Michael Grey

They come at night.

That was the way the tale always began. ‘They come at night,’ nan would tell them as they huddled beneath the furs, their three bodies, pressed tight against each other, compensating for the cold outside. They would pull together as close as humanly possible and stare at nan over their knuckles.

Sometimes her eyes crinkled, giving away the enjoyment she gained from frightening the family’s smallest.

‘They come at night,’ she said. ‘In the deep winter, when the sun has shrunk to its smallest point and then sets for the