Rachel Swirsky: Do you have any great stories about meeting someone at a SFWA event, or online? (And if you do, please tell them. )
Eileen Gunn: Most of my stories about SFWA events are far too scurrilous to put into print. SFWAns were not very well behaved in the Eighties and Nineties. Sit next to me at a Nebula banquet, and I might tell you some….
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has joined the International Authors Forum, an organization of authors’ groups created to “promote and defend authors’ interests and authors’ rights” by providing these groups with an “international platform to exchange information, develop positions and provide support in authors’ rights matters.”
by Cat Rambo
One of the tools I mention to students in my online class Building An Online Presence for Writers is a website called Namechk. You can input the user name you want to use and see whether or not it is taken on a number of social networks and well as domains.
by Theodora Goss
When I teach writing, I teach craft. Art goes beyond craft, and has to do with what a writer, as an individual, brings to writing. Art is in the way Virginia Woolf explores consciousness. In the way George Orwell writes about politics.
by Helena Bell
The application season for Clarion West and other Clarion (UCSD) has begun. I’ve already seen posts on twitter from past alums encouraging people to apply and telling the world what wonderful, glorious experiences they had.
I’m not going to do that. I’m going to tell you not to apply. To not go. And here are my reasons:
Dragons in your pickle jar. Devils at the diner. Sentient space ships named for epic poetry. All these and more inhabit the pages of the annual Alphanthology, an illustrated collection of flash fiction by alumni of the Alpha SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers. Alpha is a nonprofit, ten-day residential workshop for teen writers of genre fiction, held every summer in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
Ever wonder what the sky looked like in 1006 CE, when a supernova could be seen during the day? What dates did full moons illuminate the fog of Whitechapel as Jack the Ripper prowled the streets? When a character swims the Arctic Ocean, in a story set two thousand years in the future, what star might she use to guide her passage? Stellarium provides answers.
Shelfari is, like GoodReads and LibraryThing, another social book cataloging website. Online book retailer AbeBooks owns a large percentage of the company. Users catalog the books they own or have read and can rate, review, and tag those books as well as discussing them on the site.
Here at Writer Beware, we love the weird stuff–the nutty, fring-y, even, dare I say, totally freaking insane things that are always cropping up at the boundaries of the publishing world, often spawned by people who haven’t really taken the time to think things through.
Last week a literary agent contacted me on Twitter. “Ever heard of these folks?” she asked. “They’ve been spamming us all day.”
The link she gave me led to a service called Agent Artery.
Practical guidance, frameworks, and tools for incorporating the principles of peacebuilding and nonviolence into compelling fiction. Many examples in this book are drawn from speculative fiction genres.
Mary G. Thompson is the acclaimed author of Flicker and Mist, Wuftoom, and Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee, which was the winner of the Westchester Fiction Award and a finalist for the Missouri Gateway Award. Thompson’s short fiction has appeared in Dark Matt
