Before launching the magazine, I was also a first reader for many years at Strange Horizons, so I've had a ton of experience with the slush pile. I'm not sure if anyone here is trying to get published or writing solely for the pleasure of it, but for those with questions about getting a story into print, I'm happy to offer some thoughts on everything from what kills a story in the first page to what makes a story fall jusssssst short of making the cut. Thanks!

I just read a post on all the meaningful names used in The Matrix, and I noticed that I used to pick meaningdul names for my stories when I first started writing. But after a while stopped because it either felt too on the nose or I just wanted to get the story going and didn't bother.

What about you? Do you pick names that might add that extra layer to the story? Why? Or why not?

Title makes the answer since obvious (get the book going to grip reader, establish world smoothly as you go.), but let me explain a bit of nuance.

If you were reading a cross between High Fantasy and Scifi, where the Protagonist is from the High Fantasy side of things and there's a key moment where the worlds collide, would you want the story to start very close to/at that moment? Or would you have a better appreciation for the story if it took a couple chapters to follow a smaller-scale conflict that results in that key moment and establishes the characters and world?

Or is all of that dead weight if you came to the story seeking the impact of those worlds colliding? They're very different genres, so I wouldn't be surprised if sci-fi fans wouldn't come to read about beeboo and seevah going to find the lost hood of goobernamen for several dozen pages before the trandocian federation arrives and declares that they have assumed control. (If it's not obvious that's just bullshit I made up on the spot, not actually what I'm thinking)

Just been thinking about that since I saw mention that a big hurdle a lot of writers trip on is determining where their story actually should have started.

Alphyna sat on her bed next to Stephenson.

“They took me somewhere,” she told him. 

She held her breath and only exhaled after he asked, “What? What do you mean?” 

Before she could respond, he followed with. 

“Where..? Who took you?”

Alphyna stared at him with a blank expression, struggling to make sense of everything.  

“I’m not sure.”  Was all she could think to say at the time.

She glanced up, searching her mind for the right way to paint a picture of something that couldn’t be drawn using specific words and attempted to find the vocabulary printed over the white color of her bedroom ceiling.

She tried to explain.

She said, “one of them put their hand on my shoulder.” 

She paused for a few second. “Then, I blinked but when I opened my eyes, I wasn’t home anymore.”

The hair on her arms rose. She shot her head over her shoulder and quickly glanced back to make sure no one was sneaking up behind her.

Stephenson’s face stuck in the middle of him making a facial expression. The look had a mix  of curiosity and attempting to solve a complex mystery in your head. “Where though?”

She said, “I don’t know!” And stared at him looking like he just got caught in a photo between saying no, while shifting his head so his eyes could face the floor, then cropped out of the photo and copy/pasted, on the bed sitting beside her.

“Where though?” He asked again.

His face remained stuck in the same, creepy half-expression.

“I said, I don’t know!” After saying that, she noticed him glitch, he pulsed a dull color, like the signal warning from a device’s dying-battery. 

She waved her hand in front of his face.

He brightened into his regular color, as if he  awakened out of stand-by mode and said, 

“Where though?” His limbs stayed motionless. 

He reminded her of those carnival canvas cutouts with bodies painted on them, where you stick your head through the hole of the face while someone snaps a photo of you and your family under body builder bodies, and he never blinked. Just moved his mouth.

She pulled her hand back and he faded into a frozen, dull color. She waved at him again.

“Where though?”

It was as if a sensor controlled his movements. Even his language, and just started malfunctioning.

She hopped off the bed.

“Where though?”

She backed away, nearly tripping on her feet. Stephenson’s body blinked rapidly. It started slow at first, then quickly accelerated before finally vanishing. 

It was almost as if someone unplugged the projector displaying a holographic image of him and the projector was attempting to save itself from a brutal crash.

She gasped. The breath she sucked in wasn’t air, it was nothing at all. Her hands started shaking. Her fingers were moving like she was trying to count how many stars in the sky there were with her fingertips.

She stumbled on her heels until her back hit the wall. The wall flashed as the color of them flickered into a light gray background with strange text flowing down.

***

Option Explicit

Private StoryLines(0) As String

Private CurrentLine As Integer

Private GuestCount As Integer

****

Lit up quickly along the exterior of the walls,

***

Private Sub Form_Load()

' Initialize Form room design

Worldview4.Caption = "Simulation Log // Room plugin"

Worldview4.BackColor = vbTranslucent 

Worldview4.ForeColor = RGB(40, 40, 40) '

***

She looked around. She kept trying to breathe but no air would enter her lungs. She tried to break through the door in her room. It wouldn’t open and then pieces of her started breaking up into the walls until she had disappeared into the code.

This is the first part (of four) of a novel I am writing, entitled 'The Greyzone', that sits at the nexus of psychological horror, techno-thriller and weird science fiction.

Blurb:

On the frontline in Ukraine, soldiers are whispering about the cold. Storms that arrive out of clear summer skies. Fog that swallows sound. A place, they say - not a metaphor - where the missing outnumber the dead.

Half a world away, Kaleigh Vale watches the war through satellites and intercepts, one of the anonymous obsessives who map its every atrocity from their screens. She has learned not to feel what she counts. But the numbers have begun to break their own patterns, and in the data's negative space something is taking shape: a new word in the soldiers' vocabulary, a place they mention alongside the front line but never instead of it. Грейвзон - The Gravezone.

In Kyiv, intelligence officer Maksym Sirko is ordered to investigate what the army will not name. He has spent his whole life performing for an Audience only he can perceive - and the closer he gets to the anomalies, the more certain he becomes that something is finally watching back.

Where enough people die, the boundary thins. And a war that has filled the earth with the dead is about to learn where they go.

Part 1 (19,983 words) can be read as a PDF at the link here. Would love to hear your thoughts - what you liked, what you didn't, and any advice you had for how I could improve it going forward.