If you’re just here to read stories, skip to the next entry! This is about who I am and my goals for the Substack.
Hi, I’m Shannon. I published my first short story in Dragon magazine in 1994.
I remember how proud I was of that first paycheck. I’d read a Stephen King quote that said: “If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.” So selling that story made me a real writer, I thought. I was just about to start my first year of college.
And then I went on to write not a lot of fiction for the next couple decades.
I was pursuing a career in tech journalism, so I wrote nearly every day: but all news-y stuff. I worked at some great publications. For a brief while I was Jerry Pournelle’s editor at BYTE.
But I’d stalled out on my first attempt at a fantasy novel. It was supposed to involve an enemies-to-lovers plot between a dragon and a dragon-slayer, but I wrote about thirty thousand words and then couldn’t make the pivot. Those two were actually going to murder each other. So there they’ve stayed, all this time. Maybe I’ll go back to it someday and let them fight.
I always knew I wanted to write fantasy and science fiction. I grew up reading it constantly. Authors like Ursula K. Le Guin, Robin McKinley, C.J. Cherryh and Patricia A. McKillup were my closest friends, and the time I spent in places like Middle Earth or The World of Two Moons felt every bit as important as “real life.” As I grew up and branched out I discovered Michael Chabon, Zen Cho, Frances Hardinge, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Neal Stephenson, Maggie Stiefvater, Ursula Vernon. Some of these writers are lyrical and myth-haunted; some are knife-sharp and wicked. Some do both. I want to do both.
I took what I thought was a short break from the world of magazine publishing to have a baby. Then the world of magazine publishing imploded, one baby became three, and now none of the titles I’ve worked for still exist. Neither do most of what were our competitors.
I started another novel—and finished it, this time. The Millennial Sword. Arthuriana in modern-day San Francisco. I wrapped that one up in 2010 and ended up self-pubbing it a few years later, after a bad experience trying to work with an agent (I did exactly what they tell you not to do, and signed with the first agent to offer representation, despite some red flags that were glaring in retrospect. Kids, don’t do this.)
The Millennial Sword ended up winning the 2014 IndieReader Discovery Award in the Fantasy category, so that was nice. It was also chosen for the Indie Author Project, which still sends royalties my way every so often. Still, for the most part, my experience putting out that book matched that of P.G. Wodehouse: “It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.”
I’ve also published a few more short stories in small press anthologies—my personal site at joshannonphillips.com has links to them all. But I’ve stopped waiting for a big break into traditional publishing. Traditional publishing is struggling. I have a new sci-fi novel to shop around (space pirates!) and there haven’t been a lot of nibbles.
I still believe in the indie model where writers connect directly with readers. And lately I’m thinking about the potential of serialized fiction, with Re: Dracula and other newsletters popularizing a resurgence of interest in classic genre works. I’m thinking about the backlist of my own material, and how to make it more accessible.
If nothing else, by sending out my short fiction and my first novel in weekly installments, I’ll have it all nicely archived in a share-able place where new readers can easily discover the rest of my catalog. So that’s the plan: I’m going to start with my short stories and move on to serializing The Millennial Sword, and potentially the space pirate novel after that, or any new work I’ve managed in the interim. I’ll publish a story or a chapter here on Substack every Monday.
I’m launching with that first story I ever sold, to Dragon. The entry for “The Lady of Roch Shan” should go up at the same time as this one, and I’ll talk more about that story in the intro: so skip ahead to read about a wise-woman in a Celtic fantasy landscape, forced to pit her craft against the schemes of a wayward noblewoman and her fairy lover.
All of these entries are going to be free. But if you want to support me and encourage my work, you can subscribe. I can’t set prices lower than $5 a month, which honestly seems high to me, but for annual subscriptions I’m allowed to go as low as $30, which is a little more reasonable.
And for $2.99, you could buy a book! Or it’s free to leave an Amazon review, to forward a story you liked to a friend, or to post about it on social media. Word of mouth is absolutely invaluable to writers; sharing my work is the best possible way to support it.
Substack says entries that have pictures and “subscribe now” buttons do better in their algorithms. So there is a button. And here is a picture of me, with our cat Stella. I was actually trying to take a picture of the other cat, Luna, but when I got down on the floor to take it, Stella flopped down beside me and starting purring, so I snapped her too.
Bonus cat pic: Luna. They are sisters, but Stella is tabby-pointed, so stripier. Luna on the other hand has a more majestic ruff.
