Diabolical Plots

Eugie: I had the idea for the story—a society where people change their identities and their societal roles, even their personalities, based upon masks they don—rattling around in my creative subconscious for a while. But it took me a couple years to get around to writing it. I’ve always found masks so evocative. They’re universal icons, found throughout history and spanning nearly every culture. The donning of another face, or the corollary, the relinquishing of one’s own, is a transformative act, an unambiguous exchange of identity.

Welcome to the first issue of Redstone Science Fiction. Thanks for dropping by….

Thus opens the newest pro-market, SFWA wannabe, magazine to hit the speculative market scene. It is the brainchild of Michael Ray (previously interviewed here on Diabolical Plots) and Paul Clemmons. Mr Ray has been waging an ambitious ‘get out the word’ campaign for his project. He has used facebook, blogs, emails, and my favorite writers workshop, hatrack, to alert as many lovers of speculative fiction of its coming arrival and to solicit material for its pages.

Eight Against Reality is an anthology put together by a very exclusive writers group called Written in Blood. It’s eight members vowed to help each other through thick and thin. So confident are they with each other’s abilities that they all contributed a story for all of us to read.

Without further ado, here is my Best of Drabblecast list. For the purposes of the list, I’ve only included the feature stories in the list. It’s not that I don’t like drabbles or twitfic, but even though I enjoy them, fiction that short doesn’t leave a long-lasting impression because it’s over before I’ve really gotten the story congealing in my brain.

They were fun to watch, and they performed everything very closely to how it sounds on the album, which is always a plus for those who, like me, like to sing along. I have no complaints about the concert, they provided a great night of music. Check out their CDs and catch their concert the next time they come through town.

Here are the stories resulting from the Storygasm event in rough chronological order of prompts received. Feel free to take yours and post it elsewhere or link directly to this page. Thanks for contributing!

written by David Steffen
Two weeks ago we posted the article How to Write a Rejection Slip by Christopher Miller, which sparked quite a bit of interesting discussions here, on Facebook, and on blog sites that linked to us.  Some agreed, some didn’t, and a good time was had by all talking about what we really [...]

Here’s how it works: you give me a prompt, and I’ll turn it into a drabble, a 100-word story for you. The best approach, speaking from personal experience, is to keep the prompt between two and five words long, and to avoid getting too specific. For example, something like “werewolf shampoo” can lead all sorts of directions and gives me something to work with.

With publishing’s gatekeepers now comprising the bulk of short fictions’ readership, I think it reasonable to say that for every story read at least one rejection slip is also read. The rare instances in which writers’ stories are not rejected and to some degree published and possibly read by others are offset by writers’ publishing their rejection slips on public blogs and forums and disseminating them in emails. Similarly, publishers’ returning the same rejection slip to many writers is offset by writers submitting the same story to many publishers. So even ignoring that rejection slips, unlike the stories that inspired them, are almost always read in their entirety, taken to heart and remembered, it all more than cancels out. Ergo rejection slips are the most widely and attentively read short literary genre.

Each convention has it’s own personality, just like how every city has it’s own personality. Stumptown Comics Fest has one of the best personalities of all the conventions I have attended. It has a very do-it-yourself feel to the entire convention, with a strong feeling of optimism. Most of the artists and storytellers are self employed, or a part of a small artist collective. In fact, most of the tables are webcomics.