Introducing John O'Neill
For John O'Neill, reading, writing, and publishing speculative fiction isn't some hobby or leisure activity. It's his greatest passion, and his quarterly magazine, Black Gate, reflects that. By publishing top-notch Adventure Fantasy written in high-quality prose, O'Neill sets out to win over new audiences while still satisfying steadfast lovers of the genre. As the industry evolves and goes digital, O'Neill believes fantasy writing can evolve right along with it, forging ahead with new and fresh approaches, while at the same time staying true to the classic storytelling roots that fans have come to love over the years. O'Neill's passion is unmistakable both within the pages of Black Gate and whenever he discusses writing. Speaking about the magazine, O'Neill says, "That's how we retain our readership, by letting them know that we are the place where new and imaginative fiction can be found, something they have never read before, something that's really going to excite them." Visit John at www.blackgate.com to join him in his quest for innovative fantasy and just plain good writing.
Check for John in Late Summer at: www.colum.edu/Academics/Fiction_Writing/Publishing_Lab/Movie_Clips.php
In His Own Words:
On Discovering SF:
My love of SF dates back to the Science Fiction Book Club, which my friend John MacMaster enrolled me in at age 11, and the early works of Isaac Asimov I discovered as a result.
On the Creation of Black Gate:
Black Gate was created when I left the SF Site, the Hugo Award-nominated SF website I created in 1996. After spending three years launching a successful webzine, I wanted to try my hand at a print pub. I really wasn't interested in publishing another magazine, trying to have the most "cutting edge SF" or horror - what I really wanted was a magazine that was friendly to new readers, and which would entice new readers into the genre, the way I had been as a teen.
On What Black Gate Publishes:
The truth is the magazine publishes all kinds of fantasy. And I don't think anybody wants to open up a magazine, especially a big magazine like Black Gate at 224 pages, and read only one kind of fantasy, so we try to cover everything. Do we have a focus? Yes, you have to have a focus to interest your audience, and our focus is adventure fantasy. So primarily that means that about 70% of what we publish is adventure-oriented fantasy. Does that mean a lot of sword fights in fantasy? No. That means that we're looking for stories with a lot of dramatic tension. A good, rousing climax. Something based on the basic rules set down by Aristotle two thousand years ago, the three acts of drama. You've got to have an introduction, introduce your characters. You've got to get your characters to a point where your audience is convinced they cannot succeed. And then they have to succeed. And that's what we're looking for.
On What He'd Like to See More of:
The kind of story we want to get more of is something with a more exotic setting. I don't know why, but most of the fiction we get is set in settings that are very familiar. Generic Middle Ages. It starts off in a tavern with a ranger and a bard and a half-orc having a conversation. I want more originality than that. You need to grab the reader on the very first page. And it's tough to do that with character, because character needs to be developed. It's tough to do that with plot, because any plot that's simple enough to grab me on the first page probably isn't complex enough to maintain my attention. It's easy to with the setting. If you've got an innovative, dynamic setting, then you've got my attention on the first page. You've got my reader's attention, and that works. I had somebody submit me a story that takes place on a pizza, and it's a terrible story, awful story, but I read the entire thing. I was so entranced. Nobody's ever done that before. And I think very few writers make the effort to innovate with setting, and I would love to see more of that.
On Cross Genre and/or Adult Themes:
Absolutely, we are absolutely open to cross-genre. Again, I need to make my magazine interesting, I need to make it appealing to people, and you don't appeal to people by offering them the same thing over and over all the time, even more and more adventure fantasy all the time. As much as we love it, we know that it's not going to help us. Cross-genre, the way we look at it, it's injecting some of the successes of other genres into the work we like to read. I would love to see more of it.
We are open to sensitive and adult themes, but we are not trying to be more cutting edge horror than other people. There are plenty of magazines out there that that's their market, they want to be innovative in that way, they want to be more cutting edge, they want to build on the established science-fiction and publish only hard science fiction. That's not us. We are trying to bring new readers into the genre. When I read science fiction as a kid, it was easy to pick up a magazine and get excited by it and go. That's not so easy today, because there's much more of an established history in the genre. There are more things taken for granted. So Black Gate is really all about being a gateway into the genre that we love so much, modern fantasy. So that means that if you're publishing a work that addresses very specifically and builds upon Ursula K. Le Guin, if my readers can't recognize that, even if they've never experienced the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, that doesn't help me much. Your work has to be accessible. So yes, modern themes, delicate themes, we're very open to that, but it has to be suitable for a fairly young audience, and it has to be accessible.
On Unpublished Writers:
Wow, we are completely open to new and unpublished writers. That is our bread and butter. Magazines don't get to be successful by taking already established writers and showcasing their work. Those writers have moved on to bigger and better things. Yes we do get a few of those, but not enough to fill the magazine. Magazines become successful by finding new talent, growing that talent inside our pages, making them famous, and watching them graduate. That's how we retain our readership, by letting them know that we are the place where new and imaginative fiction can be found, something they have never read before, something that's really going to excite them. That's what we're all about. About half the fiction we publish is from either a new author or someone who's only been published one or two times before. On average over the last 3 or 4 issues, there's been two stories an issue from first time authors. And the bulk of our fiction is really from people who are just getting started in their career. It keeps the magazine fresh. It keeps it innovative. It keeps the fiction new.
On the Submission Process:
Submissions are tough to measure because primarily, we have two channels in the way they come in. They come in by physical submission in the mail, and they come in through email. We started up with all ambitions and we opened up, and we were getting about 145-200 physical submissions per month, which we were able to handle quite well. We then invited electronic submissions, and that crushed us, it really did. I think we opened up a little bit before we were ready to handle it, and once we opened those gates it was tough to close them again. I find it easier to read on the screen; it saves paper; it's not wasteful; it's less expensive for everyone involved; it's easy to get communication back and forth if you send a response to the writer and they can send you some questions. All that is good.
Unfortunately it's opened the doors to a lot of global writers all around the world who are submitting us, and unfortunately it's very easy for someone to just check down through the list and say, "Well, I've got a crime novel here. I'm just going to send the first chapter of my crime novel off to Black Gate, and then go through the other Bs, Black October, Black Static." So we get people who are just running through a checklist and don't bother to check our guidelines. We were literally getting hundreds of submissions a month that were completely inappropriate for us, and unfortunately you can't tell a story is inappropriate for you until you've read a good portion of it. So it was a time waster for us, and it wasn't doing any good for these authors either. So we closed the submissions for quite some time until we cleared out all our backlog. We worked very hard to clarify our guidelines. You can't completely block it, but we've gotten quite a bit better at applying our own filters. So how many submissions do we get when we are wide open? It's several hundred a month.
On Mistakes Many Writers Make:
Writers can be pretty innovative in the kind of mistakes that they make. They make a lot of different mistakes. Some of them are quite entertaining. Unfortunately the more common ones aren't all that entertaining; they're dreary. People send us the wrong kind of story. They don't know what we're looking for. That's very very common. People send us stories that don't fit with our guidelines. They're too adult; they're not really adventure fantasy oriented; they're not fantasy at all. Those are fairly routine mistakes. Even when you've got a story that works for us, that should work for us, and is well written, and captures our attention, if it's something we've seen over and over again, it's not going to work. Out of the hundreds of submissions I'm used to getting every month, I would average 20 to 30 Arthurian tales, one more tale about King Arthur and his knights. And in my entire history at Black Gate, I've published precisely one Arthurian story. And that's not even the most common, the most common story I get is dragon slaying tales. I've read every conceivable version of a dragon slaying tale over the last ten years. Some of them have been marvelous. But my readers don't really want to read one more dragon slaying tale. So as innovative as you might think you are in submitting your deal-with-the-devil story, your dragon slaying, your tale of Zeus on Mount Olympus, it's been done, and I've seen it many many times. So the most common mistake, is not putting a little more effort into originality, not trying to grab your attention right up front with something new. I'm selling fiction. I'm selling stories. And if I don't grab my reader's attention in the first two paragraphs, they flip on and move to the next story.
On the Changing Fantasy Market:
The fantasy market today, I think is really vibrant. There's bad news. There are a lot of print fantasy magazines that are either dying or evolving, going online. There are problems with online markets; a lot of the barriers have been dropped. Which means that a very talented individual who might not have had the resources to put a magazine together and the capital to start it off and get it up and going, doesn't have those barriers anymore. That's good. But six months eight months down the line, your online review with all of the best intentions in the world, can collapse. And when that happens it takes all of your material and your back-story is out of print, it's gone. Once your online magazine folds, traditionally, it's taken off the web. When I publish a story, it's there and it's there for good. It's there for the hundreds of years that fiction and paper are going to survive. Some of our fiction has been reprinted.
With online fiction, a lot of the people who have been getting out there don't have the contracts nailed down. Many people who have brought me stories, offered me stories, fabulous stories, and the only hiccup with them is that "I sold it to an online review that died sometime ago, the rights are in limbo, and I don't know if I have the right to reprint, I don't know," and I can't touch a story like that until it's sorted out. The state of fantasy right now is in transition. We're getting a lot more exciting markets opening up, those markets aren't fully mature yet, they haven't thought through all of these issues yet. They will. There's some great societies, The Science Fiction Writers of America, there are other organizations and groups, that are helping people understand, "Make sure your rights are tied up. Make sure you as a beginning writer know what you're doing in terms of when you sell something and how long that publication has rights to it, and what happens if that story dies before its printed, if that venue dies, what rights you have and what rights you can take back." That's all getting sorted out, and will get sorted over the next few years, so we're in a bit of a transition as a lot more activity moves online. It's exciting, the online communities are thriving; they're good; they're solid. I've been very impressed with some of them, a few wrinkles to work out.
On Online Publishing:
You can't fight it. We'll keep BG in print, but we'll definitely embrace an online version as well, probably as a PDF. Online publishing is a fabulous way to find new readers, and publishers ignore it at their peril.
On Space Opera:
Yes, we buy space opera. Which may be a funny thing to talk about if you're publishing a fantasy magazine, especially an adventure fantasy magazine, so a lot of people don't understand what space opera is. Opera, pure opera, is a genre that deals with the great themes of humanity. War, love, passion, conflict, opera is very colorful, it's very traditional, it's grand in scope, that's an opera. Space opera was a term coined to describe very early science fiction that dealt with planets in conflict, huge interstellar fleets clashing together, this was the rousing kind of stuff by E.E. "Doc" Smith and Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, the early innovators of the genre, that brought all of the great clashes of opera and those themes into science fiction for the first time. And it did it very very successfully. If you read Foundation Story, it's really a retelling of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire set into the far future. Great idea and innovative at the time. So space opera kind of fell out of favor as much more adult and mature themes are developed, and this was a logical evolution in the industry.
What's a famous space opera? Buck Rogers was one of the early famous space opera. Star Wars is one of the most classic emblems of a space opera dealing with a vast empire in decline and rising and the passions of the people behind it. Why is that suitable for Black Gate? Because it speaks to some of the old themes that we love so much. Black Gate is rooted in the pulps, it's rooted in the old magazines, the old fantasy magazines, that thrived on adventure fiction, the Robert E. Howard's of the world, the people that took exotic settings and exotic people and told fast-paced action stories that really still speak to us today. So space opera was a neglected genre and the people who wrote it, Leigh Brackett, the woman who wrote The Empire Strikes Back, the second Star Wars installment, these are people who took that genre, when Venus was a world masked by clouds and you could have all kinds of things going on underneath those clouds, Mars was a place where John Carter could strive around and explore old canals. Once we found out the truth about those planets, a lot of that fiction fell out of favor, but the ideas of space opera, the idea that you can have a grand passion play set amongst the stars, that's something that's not published much anymore, and we would love to bring it back.
On a Few Resources for Emerging Writers:
The best resource for aspiring writers, I think, is one that will publish them - or failing that, will offer genuine feedback on why they didn't make the cut. With that in mind, I usually only recommend "open markets" - those that will consider unsolicited manuscripts. The editors and publishers of those brave 'zines' don't get the credit they deserve - reading slush is a thankless task, but absolutely vital to the discovery and nurture of new talent.
For buying markets, my top online suggestions are usually Flashing Swords e-zine, Clarkesworld, and Jim Baen's Universe. In terms of resource zines, I suggest Locus Online and Tangent Online.
John Online:
Black Gate Submission Guidelines
http://www.blackgate.com/bg/submission_guidelines.htm
Text Interview From Twilight Tales
http://twilighttales.com/2006/08/06/an-interview-with-john-oneill/
Text Interview from SF Reader
http://www.sfreader.com/interview005.asp
Researched by James Lower
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