There are some excellent points in ten things I have learned from writing popular fiction. A few favorites are: 2. It helps if you honestly like to blow stuff up. Or at least write about blowing stuff up. 3. All books are broken. Some are less broken than others. Some are broken in ways that a particular set of readers do not mind in the least. If you can find out the group of people who do not mind the ways in which your books are broken, you have identified your target audience. Unfortunately, this fact does not excuse you …
Category: WRITING
Clarion Call, and Big News
Well, I made it. (edit: I made the application deadline, I mean. I won’t hear about whether I’ve been invited to the Workshop until sometime in late April or May.) When I thought I’d be doing a summer class, I put off the idea of applying at one of the Clarion workshops — Clarion or Clarion West — because I figured I could wait a year. I have been thinking about trying to attend a Clarion workshop for a long time, and for those of you who don’t know what it is, the best way I can sum it up …
For Those Reading By RSS
A couple of private posts, including a new (very) short story, are up which might interest you. Private posts never show up on RSS, so I’m mentioning it on the open feed. Which reminds me, I may try to find a way of having WordPress note when a private post has been made, without it showing the content, just so that RSS subscribers can know that there is something new, even if they can’t see it on the feed. It would seem to be a very useful function, and I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t thought of it yet. Though …
First of the Wave
Outgoing submissions have just begun. I just sent a very unlikely submission to a very unlikely magazine, but hey, why not take a shot in the dark here and there? It’s dark, it’s off-color, more brutal than most things I’ve written to date, and viciously political and, I think, effective as satire. But still, the only reason I went ahead and sent it to this particular magazine was because they accept submissions by email (as my friend John informed me of that a long time ago) and I figured it was worth the random long shot, as this is the …
Wish Me, Well, Not Good Luck, But Maybe a Broken Leg or Something
I thought I would miss the deadline for the Canadian Speculative Fiction Anthology Tesseracts10, but it turns out they accept electronic submissions and that the deadline is today, so I spent the morning preparing my electronic submissions in PDF format. Now, if you follow the link, you’ll see that the deadline is March 1st… 2005. Argh. Anyway, it was a good learning experience for me: I figured out how to export PDFs with all the proper formatting in Open Office, and I chose some stories and poems that I think are publishable. I’ve emailed someone at Edge, the publisher of …
Oddunout: On the pain and pleasure of creating
In Laura’s post Oddunout: On the pain and pleasure of creating, I found something quite interesting. She discussed the offensiveness to her of sneakily using others’ creative works within her own works: So I had this conversation with the Dutch about the picture I was/am working on, and I was saying how I’d already spent like 20 hours on it, and I still didn’t have the map the way I wanted it to be. Being a programmer (or whatever it is he does, exactly), he suggested I could find a map I liked and just steal it for my own …
For members of the site…
I don’t usually make announcements like this, but members of my site who are reading by RSS may miss the notice that my most recently drafted short story is now available for preview download. I’d like feedback on it, so I’m mentioning it. And camp is now in full swing, which means this is all the time I have for today. Whee. Anyway, login and download my story if you like. PS: More good news, and a nice big piece or two of it, in a day or two.
Soul Competency
UPDATE (30 Oct. 2013): Cleaning up my database, deleting the tables for the plugin used to host this file, so, no more link. The story, incidentally, has been trunked, though I may try revise it eventually. UPDATE (2 January 2006, 12:30pm): The story is now attached. You may download it here! Writing Jesus of Nazareth as a character in one’s own story is, well, as you might imagine it’s ridiculously difficult. So of course, when drafting my most recent short story, “Soul Competency”, I found myself blocked at the point where the protagonist was about to meet Him. Yes, capital-H …
Scary Christmas To All…
For those up for something on the harsh side of Christmas, why not login or sign up and then follow this link to download my Xmas story? But please do let me know what you think, and please don’t distribute it without my approval. By the way, the link does work, but only if you are logged in. Otherwise it looks like a dead link within the site. The power of privacy… which, if I upgrade to WordPress 2.0, I may have to give up (temporarily, anyway).
What is this thing called… SF?
Kat has written a wonderful post about the question of the difference between fantasy and SF, and why some people like one and not the other. I’ll throw in my own two cents: I think these kinds of fiction speak to different areas of the imagination. I started out as a reader and writer of fantasy, simply because I loved imagined worlds; the more complete an imagined world, the more I loved it. (I’m sure this was at least in part fueled by my fascination with the Forgotten Realms line of products from TSR. I regard it now as a …