On discovering a "first sale" I somehow never knew about

For years I've had dreams in which I discover a cache of stories I've written and completely forgotten about, only to discover them with amazement and delight. What's just happened to me shares something of the feel of those dreams-- only with an unpleasant affect.

Thanks to Google Scholar, I just this afternoon learned-- 24 years after the fact-- that a story of mine was published without my permission or even knowledge in the minnesota review. Though this is not exactly catastrophic news, it's turned my stomach inside-out and is making my brain buzz with so much noise that I'm finding it difficult to concentrate on anything else. Perhaps the best way of putting it is to say that my sense of reality feels threatened. (I'm expecting that this rocky feeling will vanish soon, when I've processed this revision of my personal history.) What adds an extra little force to the punch is that this would have been my first sale (had my permission for publication been solicited by the journal).

 One part of me is trying to imagine the difference this sale would have made to me in 1989 (the year I made my first sale, "O's Story," to Susana Sturgis for her Crossing Press anthology Memories and Visions: Women's Fantasy and Science Fiction), when I had given up on marketing the Marq'ssan Cycle or indeed any of my novels and was trying to break into the short fiction market. When I didn't hear back from the minnesota review after ten months, I assumed they'd rejected the story, "Ms. Peach Makes a Run for Coffee," and next tried Interzone-- around the time the minnesota review published it. The story then received 19 rejections from a mix of literary and genre magazine, until Terra Incognita bought first serial rights to its publication in 1996. Some of the rejections were brutal, because the story was overtly political. It went through numerous line-edits over those years. So the version published by the minnesota review is slightly different from the one published in Terra Incognita. I have no idea why the editors published it without contacting me. But I do note that the contributors page omits my name-- presumably because they did not solicit a bio from me.

Another part of me is wondering whether I've been naive about this. I always tell writing students that reputable publications do not publish submissions without permission-- that they have little to fear from publications with an established reputation. I'd probably say that still--and yet, I wonder whether I ought to. This strangely improbable thing happened to me-- something I wouldn't have known about if Project MUSE hadn't archived old pre-internet issues and Google hadn't included that issue in its search. One part of me is sure there must be some benign explanation. Some mix up in paper work. An overworked assistant dropping the ball. Is that naive? I don't think so. As a publisher myself, I know enough about the nuts and bolts of publishing to imagine such a thing happening even with the best intentions.

 A third part of me worries about a question I can't answer and might need an attorney to instruct me on: did minnesota review's appropriation of my work rob me of my rights? Did I lose the rights to that story after they pirated it? I fervently hope not. I've had it posted on my website for free download for several years now-- not knowing that someone else had published it first. And it would seem the height of injustice that their violation of my copyright would result in my loss of ownership. (Which is not to say that even more egregious injustices don't often happen.) Ought I to remove "Ms. Peach" from my website?

And yet another part of me-- the part that is always producing sfnal thoughts-- is yearning to imagine an alternate history, in which I received an acceptance letter informing me of my first sale (likely prior to my sale of "O's Story"). Would it have made any difference to me? After all, I'd already written "The Forbidden Words of Margaret A." and "Sadness Ineffable, Desire Ineluctable" and was at the peak of my political activism and about to go on to write The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding)." Probably it wouldn't have substantially affected my writing or my self-confidence (except to make me interested in submitting to that journal again-- which I never did, simply because they couldn't be bothered to send me even a form rejection). So, no significantly divergent alternate history. But in a way, it feels as though two splits in the historical thread have suddenly converged. I suppose this is because something involving myself happened that I've only now become conscious of. As though where my own words have been can't have happened in real time unless I know about those places... which is just wrong, of course. People usually have to learn the hard way that once something's been out on the internet--say, posted to an obscure list-serv, it's to all intents and purposes there for good. And now it seems unaccepted submissions to pre-internet print publications may fall into the same category, too. (God knows I've learned that pre-internet letters to the editor, invidiously doctored by the editors, are now out and accessible on the internet.)  

(The image shown, by the way, is W. Gregory Stewart's illustration to "Ms. Peach Makes a Run for Copy" published in the first issue of Terra Incognita.)

Complete and unlimited corporate control over texts

Most of the nonfiction I've had published has been with independent venues (like NYRSF and Strange Horizons), and most of it is not academic. But I do occasionally publish pieces in academic journals or anthologies.  I've noted With some grimness that conditions for publishing academic nonfiction in such places have been steadily worsening. I know of terrible experiences my academic friends have had, some of it truly shocking. Steven Shaviro now reports an intolerable situation with Oxford University press: they are demanding of their authors total, unlimited rights over the work they publish-- including permanent legal ownership of the copyright--reducing authors' work to "work-for-hire":

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned on this blog a situation I was in: that I was unwilling to sign a contract for an essay I had written in contribution an anthology of critical essays from Oxford University Press (OUP), because the contract stipulated that the essay would be regarded as “work for hire.” This would mean that I would have absolutely no rights as the author of the work. Whereas most academic press contracts ask you to sign away certain of your rights, by transferring copyright from yourself to the press, this contract from OUP meant that I would have no rights at all — if I signed, I would be agreeing that (as Gordon Hull put it — see the comments to the previous blog entry) “copyright was never [mine] in the first place — it belonged to OUP from the start.” It is obvious that, were this to become the norm in academic publishing, then intellectual enquiry and academic freedom, as we now know them, would cease to exist. Writers would become “knowledge workers” whose output belonged to the press that published them (or to the university at which they worked, in another variant of the scenario) in the same way that code written on the job at Microsoft, Apple, or Google belongs to those companies, and not to the writers themselves.

Well, the academics who are putting together the volume to which I was supposed to be contributing graciously asked OUP on my behalf about the work for hire provision. The response they got back was that the Press wouldn’t budge on work for hire. I don’t think I have permission to actually reproduce the words of the editor from OUP, so I will paraphrase. What he basically said was that traditional publication agreements are insufficient because they only give presses “limited sets of rights.” In other words, he was openly confessing that OUP seeks complete and unlimited control over the material that they publish.

Unlimited and complete control over one's work: the very idea is enough to strike terror into any fiction writer's heart. About ten years ago, I contributed to an anthology composed of work by both fiction writers and academics. The publisher in that case did not demand "complete and unlimited control" over our work, but they did ask for what I thought were unusual and unwarranted control. The other fiction writers felt the same, but the academics were surprised--they hadn't much thought about this practice, and as academics feel so without leverage (given that publications on their CVs are prerequisites for professional survival). In the end, most of us amended the contract to preserve a reasonable degree of control over our contributions in the future. A couple of years ago, I had a less reasonable experience. The "contract" in that case was only one-way-- viz., the author agreeing to sign over all rights forever to the work. When I objected, the publisher comprised by allowing me some rights after five years. That experience made me realize that writing for academic publication may end up being too costly (and a virtual waste of my time). Of course the corporations that own these academic presses don't care about that: academic workers are cheap labor, in their minds--and apparently interchangeable. Product is product, right? One block of 5000 words can't be much different from another block, apart from those that have a brand name everyone knows...

I know that some people think the copyright battles currently underway are about preserving authors' rights: but actually, these battles are about allowing corporations wishing to own and control all cultural products in perpetuity. Sometimes these battles might indirectly benefit authors, but such benefits are never the point.