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Hoist the Anchor!
Looks like Æon One will have an anchor story worthy of the name: certainly if its manuscript were printed out on waterproof paper it would be capable of anchoring at least a small boat. Curious? Well, while the Æon Editors can't reveal the complete contents of Æon One until after our official submission deadline of 31 August, we can't resist leaking this one tidbit. Walter Jon Williams' latest epic sf series is called Dread Empire's Fall. The first two books - The Praxis and The Sundering are already available, and those of us who have read them are eagerly (mild word, in my case...) awaiting the third.
Æon readers, it seems, will have less time to wait than others, at least for a preview. Walter has excerpted nearly 50,000 words (no, that's not a typo) of the third Dread Empire novel into a stand-alone short novel, "Logs," which will appear in its entirety in Æon One.
If Æon were a print publication we'd have had to kick out half our other content to run it and stay within page count. This is the root of the problem most writers (Walter not included, naturally) experience selling stories of even novella length (17,500 - 39,999 words): the more of the page percentage of a magazine a story will occupy, the more the author's name and reputation must justify giving him or her those pages. Walter's name and reputation are pretty far up there, and his ability as a writer is well known, but the rest of us often find a novella harder to place than a complete novel.
If we were publishing in the print media we'd still have choked a bit at the thought of that many pages being allocated to one piece, even to get a Walter Jon Williams story. We don't have a page limitation, but we do have a budget we like to stay within, which means not many writers are ever going to be able to sell us stories of novella or short novel length; the percentage of our per-issue budget is too high to justify it. In this case we happily went over budget. "Logs" is a terrific story and I'm pretty sure you're going to love it as much as we did.
-BMc
posted by æon editors 10:07 2 COMMENTS
