Asimov's, Analog, and circus factions
O perspicacious newsletter subscribers,
This week I signed contracts for two different poems: "Hexavalent" will be my first publication in Analog, and "Olympia" will appear in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. The contracts showed up together because Analog and Asimov's share a poetry editor, Emily Hockaday. The first poem she bought from me was rejected by one magazine and published by the other! The secret is that Analog buys poems that are all science and not necessarily fiction, while Asimov's prefers an element of impossibility. ("Hexavalent" is about a real-world chemical spill; "Olympia" is muddled in time.)
These are old-school paper magazines with long publishing lead times, so the poems will probably appear later in 2023. I'll tell you more details when I know them.
I've been reading Alan Cameron's book Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium for a potential project where I'm in the mulling and collecting background detail stage. Cameron is the sort of classicist given to flights of sarcasm and untranslated quotations in multiple languages. I'm grateful that he quotes more scholarly literature in French, which I studied in school, than in German, where I can pick out odd nouns courtesy of Duolingo. The protest where angry citizens of Constantinople dressed a donkey as the emperor Maurice struck me as particularly memorable.
Kosmas the cat has been keeping me company in my researches, though this has more to do with the seductions of an electric blanket than the emperor Maurice.
Very sincerely yours,
Ursula.
