One of the hazards of being a science fiction writer is the worry that your story will become obsolete--an especial concern is that it will become obsolete even before it is finished. Well, that has happened to me recently.

Some months ago I began a short story about a mercenary character assassin who used internet tools to destroy his targets. Writing and life being what they are, the story was still in the works when, about a week ago now, the brown stuff hit the fan at 10 downing street. The problem, it seems, is that a certain member of the government was putting together a massive smear campaign using fictitious 'information' on members of the opposition. The intent was to distribute the fake information through the internet.

huh. sound familiar?

Instantly my story idea became worthless, as any speculative fiction publisher in the west will assume the idea came from these political events. And even if it didn't, the idea is no longer speculative fiction. Bummer. I rather liked the idea as a story framework. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

EHR

It's been a while since the last post, so I thought it was time to give an update.

The last six weeks have been quite good for me. October 28 Farspace 1 was finally ready and was released to the public via the Utility Fog Press storefront of Lulu.com. In addition to being the editor-in-chief, I had a short story Awaken from that Gentle Good Night published in the anthology.  Check out the anthology or download a free copy.

Next up, my short story The Last Time! was published online at Wanderings Magazine.

And most recently (today, actually), I've had an image titled Attack! published in the first issue (December 1) of the online/limited print magazine Crossed Genres.

Overall, not a bad month.  Now I just have to find some paying markets that will accept my stuff!

I've decided that, rather than fill up my browser bookmark list with links I'll rarely visit again (largely because they'll get lost among the mess), I will post in the Stellar Blog some of the markets I'm interested in. That will make the information available to readers, as well as keeping it a bit more organized for me.

So, without further ado, here are the first three markets I'm considering:

sub-TERRAIN
A Canadian literary magazine with themed issues: September15 deadline is 'religion'.

New Concepts Publishing
An e-book romance publisher dedicated to building their authors' careers. A variety of submission lengths.  Could be a perfect market for the "Do Supergirls Dream of Blue Spandex?' trilogy.

On The Premises
A series of quarterly contests form the basis for this magazine. The current one is 'Revelation': One or more characters discover that something believed to be true is actually false.  Deadline: September 30  Perhaps I can work a short story out of the plotline for Poisonous Garden...?

That's all for this time.

I was just in Abingdon (near Oxford) this weekend for a one-day course on 'how to get your books into the stores' (basically). The course, called <b>Shelf Secrets</b> was taught by Mark, the owner of <a href="http://www.mostly-books.co.uk">Mostly Books</a>. It was a very useful course, giving us authors access to a bookbuyer's viewpoint (shop owner, not customer) in addition to introducing us to some of the lingo and helping us with some of the tools and strategies that will be useful in our quest to sell our books. This will be immediately applicable to selling the Farspace Anthology 1 and I'm eager to get started with local bookstores once the book is ready.

It's been a while, but I'm back and posting. This year's been busy, with moving, house hunting and a baby and so not much time for writing. I have, however, managed to whip the <a href="http://utilityfogpress.bravehost.com/farspace.html">Farspace Anthology 1</a> into shape. The contents have been finalized, the author contracts received, and the copy edit done. Now we are just finalizing the page count, applying for ISBN, and finalizing the size and cover art. I still hope to have the book available by the end of September.

I've also started setting up a small publishing company <a href="http://www.utilityfogpress.com">Utility Fog Press</a> for publishing Farspace and other themed anthologies. Shortly, there are four other anthologies (including Farspace Anthology 2) that I will be opening for submissions.

Yes, in many way the death of science fiction author and visionary Arthur C. Clarke on Tuesday feels like the end of an era.  Along with Isaac Asimov and Carl Saga, Arthur C. Clarke was one of the most influential people in my early life with regards to science, science fiction and skepticism.

In addition to being a science fictions writer, Arthur C. Clarke was an expert and a visionary in the field of communications technology.  In WWII he was involved in the development of radar defense systems.  In 1945 he lay the theoretical foundations for geosynchronous satellite orbits, which were realized two decades later.  Such satellites are now placed into what are called Clarke orbits, in his honour.  One day he may also been more widely known for championing the space elevator, which was featured in several of his books including the 2001 series and is now under development.

Clarke celebrated his 90th birthday last December. His clarity and vision will be missed.

It sounds slow, 20 grains of rice at a time, but since October 7, 2007, FreeRice has raised over 20,000,000,000 grains of rice (yep, that's over 20 billions grains).

Why am I telling you this on my writing blog (apart from the fact that it is a good cause)? Because to raise the grains you go to their web site and play a simply vocabulary game. You can boost your word knowledge AND help the hungry. It works by having embedded advertising on the site. Each time you play, the advertiser donates 20 grains (and each word you guess is one play). So far I've raised 1340 grains of rice for a few minutes of interest and fun between work. 

Oh, and they are part of Poverty.com so--Check it out!

On a related note, I'm rather disgusted at Canada. According to Poverty.com, 22 countries have pledged to raise the necessary $195 billion/yr necessary to wipe out almost all deaths from hunger and treatable disease in the 3rd world. Canada is one of those countries and yet, to date, not only are we one of the lowest donors, with only 30cents/$100 earned in the country going toward foreign aid, but we have yet to set a date as to when our pledged contribution will be met. Some countries (mostly the Scandinavian ones) have already met their pledged contributions! Come on Canada, what's your problem?

I've just signed up at YouWriteOn. It's a site for writers to get helpful reviews and, perhaps, to be noticed by publishers--the top five stories of each month are sent to publishers for review. I'll be posting New Horizon there as soon as I can access hotmail to finish the sign-up.

The move is almost done and hopefully soon my routine can return to something vaguely normal (at least until April). In the meantime I'm looking into way to make the Farspace Anthology the best that I can. One of those ways is to improve the typesetting. MS Word has a lot of wordprocessing features, but it has long been recognized as lacking good typesetting. For almost as long, TeX has been a recognized leader, at least for amateur typesetters. Originally, it was only on Unix but now, like many other once-Unix-only programs, it has been ported to the other major OSes.

Recently, I have downloaded the free Windows version of LaTeX called MikTeX. Information and documentation can be found at LaTeX-project.org and links to the installation packages for all OSes can be found here.

Once I use it some more, I'll post my impressions.  Or you can just wait and see when the anthology comes out

Many of you may have heard of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest but for those who haven't, basically 5000 people have submitted their novels to Amazon and the winner will receive a publishing contract with Penguin for their book. The contest closed to entries in early November (but maybe keep an eye out for the second one?--October 1 was the opening of submissions last year). So why am I telling you?

Because...

The first round of selections has finished and the field has been narrowed to over 800 novels divided into five categories:

    * General Literature
    * Historical Fiction
    * Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
    * Romance
    * Science Fiction & Fantasy

The next two rounds of selections are decided by the public.

Selection Round 2

The second round has started (Jan 15 - Mar 2). All you have to do is go to the link I posted, login with your Amazon account and read excerpts (up to 5000 words each) from a book that looks interesting.  You can also download the excerpt as a free PDF file to read at your convenience. Then post your review on Amazon.

Why would you do this?

If you're a writer:

Experience1:  It gets you directly involved in the selection process of a new novel.

Experience2:  You get to be editor for a day (or month and a half), in that you see what an editor will normally see and judge the stories as they will (ie: from a short excerpt) which can help you better prepare your own stories for submission (for example, Penguin usually only accepts submissions of 10 pages or half the amount you'll see in the amazon excerpts).

or

Prizes: Yes, amazon knows that altruism, or even self-growth, is not a strong motivating factor so there are 3 prize packages of: Amazon Kindle, a $2,000 Amazon.com gift certificate, and an HP photo printer given to the top three reviews (as judged by their own panel).

Selection Round 3

The 10 finalists from the second round will be announced on March 3 and during March the public will have the opportunity to rate and review these to choose the ultimate winner.

So lets all get out there and support some new novelists  by reviewing their work.

And may the best story win.