Just a brief post today to make an ebook recommendation. It’s one of my favorite stories, “Teddy Bears and Tea Parties” by S. Boyd Taylor, which I first heard on the Drabblecast. Don’t be fooled by the title; it is not for children. I am very serious about this. It’s a very dark story from a child’s point of view. Taylor’s an excellent writer, and I hope he continues to have success; I’ll be on the lookout for more of his stories.
I decided to volunteer for 3 episode artworks for now, and I’ve completed and submitted by the time of writing this post. These will go up on the Drabblecast site when it’s ready to launch, but I’ve asked for permission to show the artwork I’ve done here. And, for those who might be interested in such things, I will describe how I did each of these pieces of visual art from start to finish.
My 5th published story is now available. “Fruitful” at Digital Science Fiction, a story of parenting in the far future:
http://www.amazon.com/Therefore-Am-Digital-Anthology-ebook/dp/B005BSYWVO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1310355865&sr=8-2
My streak of good fortune continues with a third sale in quick succession!
The story: “The Quest Unusual”, a story about a strange… knight?
The magazine: Daiy Science Fiction.
I don’t often post about myself but I wanted to share some good news. I’ve sold my short story “Fruitful” to Digital Science Fiction. I’m very pleased that this has happened now. I was getting rather down about the writing, more than a year having passed since the last non-reprint sale.
Clarkesworld has published some amazing stories. Like all markets, I don’t like every one of their stories, but when they do publish a story that I like, the story’s not just good, it’s great. It was not hard to fill this list. It was so hard that the entire top 5 are equally worthy of 1st place in my opinion. But ranking them a 5-way tie for first place would be rather wishy-washy and would sort of undermine the point of having a list. So I thought about it long and hard to decide on particular aspects of each story that I liked more than the others to come up with this final ranking.
written by David Steffen Yes, con season is in full swing once again. As usual, over Easter weekend, Minicon has come to the Twin Cities. Charles Stross was originally scheduled to be the writer guest of honor, but family medical emergencies caused him to bow out (good news: according to Stross’s blog, the prognosis is … Continue reading MiniCon 46, Con Report
If you’re looking for a new magazine to read, and you’re a fan of some quality worldbuilding, you’ve got to check out Beneath Ceaseless Skies. They have a neat little niche market, focusing on worlds that are “other” in some way, either a past time period (with speculative elements added in) or an alternate world; no contemporary, no futuristic.
One of the aspects of the craft writing that never seems to get much discussion is the choice of title. Now, certainly there are lots of other things you need to work on, endings, the beginning hook, characterization, so on. And those other things are more likely to affect your chances at making a sale. But titles do matter. At the very least they can be the icing on the cake. At the most they can make the story itself more memorable and thus easier to recommend and discuss (always an important thing). Their value is less obvious and harder to measure.
And here’s the last of my Best of 2010 lists. This’ll be another short one, covering a bit more than half a year (the rest of 2010 after the last Best of Drabblecast) covering episodes 169-193. Big news for Drabblecast this year: they won a Parsec award!
