Pete Butler is the senior editor of the Triangulation series, which is published by the small press, PARSEC Ink. Following in the editorial footsteps of Diane Turnshek (2003) and Barb Carlson (2004, 2005), he took over with End of Time, the 2007 Edition of PARSEC Ink’s Annual Confluence of Speculative Fiction. His second issue is entitled Taking Flight, which was released July, 2008. Pete grew up in Iowa, went to school in Illinois, and has adopted Pittsburgh as his hometown. He kindly agreed to answer a few of my questions for The Fix.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Background, education, vocation, etc.

I’m a computer nerd by day, writer/editor by night (and by weekends, and by whatever other stray hours I can pry loose). I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with bachelor’s degrees in both writing and computer science. For the past several years I’ve been fortunate enough to work for employers who don’t require me to put in full 40-hour work weeks, which is how I can both feed myself and tackle projects like Triangulation without going insane. I’m a writer and have been actively trying to sell my own short fiction since 2003, with some success. I have a novel, but hey, who doesn’t? It was very much appreciated by the person I wrote it for, but it’s unlikely to see publication.

PARSEC came out of Pittsburgh’s Premiere Science Fiction Organization. Tell us about the organization and the SF scene in Pittsburgh, “The City of Bridges.”

I’m less involved in the SF scene than you might think, but it’s an active and lively one. PARSEC’s big project is the annual Confluence convention, which just took place a few weekends ago [July 25-27] here in Pittsburgh. It’s a small con, but a fun one, and we do manage to attract some notable guests. This year’s guest of honor was Joe Haldeman; next year’s will be John Scalzi.

What led to you becoming the editor of the Triangulation series?

It’s Diane Turnshek fault. You know the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game? In the Pittsburgh writing community, it’s Two Degrees of Diane Turnshek; either you know Diane personally or know somebody who does. She is Pittsburgh Science Fiction’s premier organizer and social butterfly.

Amongst her many projects: she founded and remains very active in Alpha, an annual science-fiction/fantasy/horror workshop for young writers. (Think “Clarion Lite for Teens.”) She founded and still attends the Write or Die (WorD) critique group, which I’ve been very active in for several years. (She founded it twelve years ago when she wanted feedback on a short story she’d written, which she then turned around and sold to Analog. Some of us pester her to write more, but when Diane says she doesn’t have the time, she really doesn’t have the time.) And she was Triangulation’s first editor back in 2003.

PARSEC Ink was looking for a new Triangulation editor in 2006, and based on some combination of my critiques and writing, Diane thought I’d be a good choice for the job. She worked it from both ends; she suggested I should throw my hat in the ring, and I’m pretty sure she recommended me to Ann Cecil (the driving force behind PARSEC Ink).

Ann approached me, and thanks to Diane I’d already been thinking about it and had an answer ready. I’d take the job, but on one condition: open submissions.

The first three editions of Triangulation were strictly regional affairs: in order to submit, you had to be a PARSEC member. And it was really only for sale at the annual Confluence convention; it was kinda-sorta available online, but wasn’t promoted much.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that. It was what it was, a fun little side project. I even contributed to the first edition; Diane was the first editor to buy a spec-fic story from me. But as I started shopping my work around to more markets, it lost its appeal. A buddy jokingly referred to it as a vanity press—and I realized he wasn’t that far wrong.

Now, contributors were not paying for the privilege of being published, which is the hallmark of a true vanity press. Yog’s Law, “Money flows toward the writer,” was indeed being observed. But…the writers were members of the same group that was publishing it, which in turn was pretty much the same group that was buying it. It was all a bit too incestuous for my liking.

So if I was going to spend time on it, I wanted to break that overwhelming regional affiliation. I didn’t think selling it to more people would be the least bit controversial, but opening it up to everybody who cared to submit? I knew that might ruffle some feathers.

I don’t know how much, if any, behind-the-scenes discussion this ultimately generated. But Ann said yes, and I’ve been running with it ever since.

How do you reach the readers you hope will purchase the series? What is your marketing strategy?

You’ve discovered my secret shame: not enough people are reading this thing.

My goal has always been to make Triangulation a market that contributors can brag about appearing in. Quality-wise, we’re there; we can do better, certainly, but we’re already publishing a very good product. Paul Di Filippo at Asimov’s said last year’s edition was “equal to any typical issue of your favorite prozine”—and that quote definitely went on this year’s cover! But in terms of readership, we have a ways to go. We’re still too dependent on Confluence for the majority of our sales.

As of last year we started publishing through Lulu, and I’m generally quite pleased with how that turned out. We’re available on Amazon.com and other such online markets without needing to manage our own inventory. I figure any sales strategy that minimizes our involvement in the whole distribution process is a Good Thing.

My marketing strategies haven’t been effective enough. I sent out somewhere in the realm of 30-40 review copies last year (and am in the midst of doing so again this year); we got a lot of favorable mentions, but that didn’t really translate into sales. Our foray into online advertising was halfhearted and not particularly effective.

This year we lucked into a new sales channel. In addition to two cents per word and a free copy, I also give contributors the option of buying additional copies at-cost. One of our contributors is a bookseller, and he took me up on that in grand fashion. By definition, any sales he makes won’t net us any profit, but they do put the book in the hands of new readers, so I’m placing that firmly in the “Win” column. We very obviously need to be cultivating relationships with other sellers as well.

We’re also going to refocus some of our efforts on online advertising this year; we can do much better. Can you sell a print/PDF anthology online in non-trivial quantities? Hell, I don’t know. Let’s find out.

It would no doubt help our cause if we could get organized enough to start spamming-out review copies before our release date. That’s my big goal for next year’s edition.

Gyah. This must make us sound like amateurs. It’s only fair, though; we are amateurs. We’re learning a lot of this stuff as we go.

And hey, Asimov’s did say we were “equal to any typical issue of your favorite prozine.” So we’re getting something right.

In your guidelines you say that you have eclectic taste. For those who haven’t read the anthologies yet, could you tell a little about what you chose when making your final selection of stories?

I chose speculative fiction that struck me as engaging and unique, and had at least a tenuous connection to our theme. I’m also a sucker for cool ideas, something that no doubt gets reflected in the pieces I buy. I always want the reader to put down the book feeling as though they’ve just seen a whole bunch of nifty stuff, not endless variations of the same thing.

This year we open with Reesa Brown’s story about a metaphysical repo man reclaiming flight from humanity, close with Eugie Foster’s tale of a balloon penguin pondering the meaning of his existence, and cover all kinds of ground in between. Some of the highlights include a story from Stephen V. Ramey about a small town in Indiana trying to send a rocket to Mars; I’m from the Midwest, so when I got to the bake sale helping fund the thing, I pretty much knew I had to run it. We published our first piece of erotica this year, Shanna Germain’s story about a sex worker/paramedic who gets a taste for something dangerous. Matt Betts gave us a story about an age-regressing tattoo messenger. (The previous sentence will make perfect sense if you’ve read the story.)

Seriously, I could go on forever about the stories in this year’s edition—or last year’s. Is there anything in particular you’d like to know?

Today, there seems to be something of a dichotomy over style versus story. Some believe that since all stories are old stories that style is the only thing that can make a story fresh. Others feel that storytelling is the primary requirement of successful fiction. What are you thoughts on this and your own personal preference?

There are just too many people doing too many wildly creative things for me to really buy the argument that there’s nothing new under the storytelling sun. I’ve run and rejected plenty of pieces with wonderfully inventive ideas at their core. If you can spruce-up a threadbare trope with a fresh style, then rock on; you can get some good stories that way. But the notion that’s the only way you can distinguish yourself is just silly.

For me, the story simply has to be there; I’m more interested in a good story than in whatever stylistic flourishes the author comes up with. I’ve read fiction where I got annoyed with the style for obfuscating the story; I can’t remember the reverse ever happening.

But it’s really a false dichotomy; why treat it as either/or? A well-chosen, well-executed style can make a good story great. And if there’s a particular unusual style that you happen to do very well, if you’ve cultivated an inimitable authorial voice, why would you want to waste it in the service of a mediocre story?

You’re also a fiction writer. Tell us a bit about that: styles, publication, etc.

Some highlights:

My most successful works to date have been the Squonk stories: “Squonk the Dragon” and “Squonk the Apprentice,” available over at Escape Pod. They’re about a dragon raised by a small blue bird and the trouble he gets into due to his neighbor, Wendel the Wizard. Squonk’s young, friendly, and generally means well—and is also freakin’ enormous. Wendel’s been the antagonist thus far, but his personality owes a lot more to Oscar the Grouch than Lord Voldemort.

They’re billed as “children’s stories,” and while I have no objection to that, it’s not how I think of them. I prefer to think of them as “kid-friendly.” When I was writing the original Squonk, I realized it had a certain innocence to it, one I did my best to preserve. By the time I was done I had a story that I thought would entertain my friends, but that kids could enjoy, too. But starting with “Squonk the Apprentice,” I’ve decided to release those stories under the name “P.M. Butler” instead of “Pete Butler,” just as a little signal that this story’s okay for your kids.

A lot of what I write tends to have more adult themes. Another story I’m proud of is “Rat Dogs of the Apocalypse,” which Horror Garage ran a few years back. It’s about dachshunds—how they’re terrifying, nigh-unstoppable engines of carnage. Like all my horror stories it’s written with tongue firmly in cheek. It’s gruesome, exciting, frightening—until you suddenly remember how goddamn stupid the whole thing is and can’t help laughing.

I had a fairly straightforward fantasy piece called “The Clouds Below” published in Cicada a few years back, about a soldier who rides a wyvern. My favorite description of it came from a friend who called it the anti-McCaffrey; the dragon-like creatures in this story do not bond lovingly with their riders. They are dumb, foul-tempered monsters who would just as soon eat the little hairless monkeys on their backs.

I have a novella called “The Hole in the Sky” that I’m very proud of, a science fiction story about how people in a very small world react to its imminent destruction. It was the one and only story published by TetragonSF, a market which folded much too quickly. I’m trying to find another home for this one.

I also tend to dabble in flash, almost entirely for humor. I have a few pieces published online here and there. I had a small series called “First Draft Theater Presents” over at Son and Foe; the premise was that the first drafts of movies you love had some really gawd-awful ideas in them. So, I rewrote the scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark to show the Nazis opening the Ark to find…bees! The Holy Bees of Jehovah! And they’re angry! And they don’t like Nazis! And remember that scene at the end of Pulp Fiction where Samuel L. Jackson is talking-down Tim Roth? I rewrote it so that instead of quoting a Tarantino-fabricated Bible verse all movie, Sam’s been quoting “Little Red Riding Hood.”

What are the future plans for Triangulation? Your own personal goals?

For Triangulation, next year’s edition will be my last. Ann and I agree that three years is long enough for any one person to run this particular project; I’ll step aside and let somebody else have a crack at it. Where it goes from there will depend on who steps forward to run the show and how much of their own time and money they’re willing to devote. (Yes, I’ve put no small amount of my own money into the project, with no expectation of seeing it again. Though I hope to leave my successor in a good place financially, if I can get my marketing-fu strong enough.) I hope whoever follows me will build on the work I’ve done getting Triangulation established as an international market, but that’s my ego talking; if they wind up taking it in another direction entirely, that’s their prerogative.

Personally, for the long term I’d like to try my hand at novel writing again, but for now I think I’ll stick with short fiction. I still have a lot to learn about writing, and the short form is a good way to learn it. Besides, I’m still having fun.

My short-term goals boil down to Squonk, Squonk, and more Squonk. There are some other short fiction pieces I’m working on or trying to sell, but the two existing Squonk stories have generated an overwhelmingly positive response. Now that my personal life has calmed down a bit, I need to follow up on that and write some more tales of a well-intentioned adopted dragon and his grumpy wizard buddy.

And owls.

Oh, yes. There will be owls.