Fantasy Magazine Accepts My Story

Solar Ikon's Cheers on Flickr, creative commons license“Moon Over Tokyo Through Leaves in the Fall” found a home at Fantasy magazine, an online fantasy webzine. It’s a great webzine and I know it will be a good home for the story. They really treat their contributors well. They spotlight authors with interviews, and the website layout is very professional. It’s a solid venue for all types of fantasy and magic realism stories.

The story I submitted had to do with wine-making, hence the picture. This is from Solar Ikon’s Flickr collection. The story won’t be on the website for awhile, but it’s nice to have the acceptance. May the new year bring us all ….Acceptance. Cheers!

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For guidelines to Fantasy magazine

Online SF Market: Futurismic–for near future stories

Another great market for Science Fiction writers, especially those dabbling in near future fiction.  Check out the full Guidelines here.  Here’s an excerpt of what they’re looking for.

Futurismic seeks contemporary, near future science fiction for online publication. We’re looking for innovative, exciting stories that use the tools of speculative fiction to examine contemporary issues and take a look at what’s just around the corner.

Whether by established professionals or promising newcomers, we would like to see the very best in today’s SF, with an emphasis on work that truly connects with and illuminates the fast-paced, fascinating times we live in.

Stories should be compelling and well written, with a strong emphasis on characters confronting or embracing imminent cultural, social, technological, and scientific changes.

PLEASE NOTE: Near-future, Earth-based science fiction is our primary focus!

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR:

  • Mundane SF
  • Post-cyberpunk SF
  • Satirical/gonzo futurism
  • Realistic near future hard SF

WHAT WE’RE NOT LOOKING FOR:

  • Fantasy
  • Horror
  • Space opera
  • Off-world SF
  • Distant futures
  • Aliens
  • Time Travel
  • Alternate History

Length: up to 15,000 words!  and there’s a webform to submit with.  No nasty stamps and paper problems.  $200 flat rate for stories, 2-5 weeks to respond.

Click on the Guidelines link and read the rest if you are interested.  Good luck!

Why Yukoners Secretly Love it When It Hits -40

Happy Nonetheless-- by Amanda GrahamLiving in the Yukon is a unique experience. We are a place of extremes. The long winter night, no stars in the summer, the snow layers caked on the downtown sidewalks, the wilderness at your back door. We are proud of our bison and moose encounters, spotting red foxes and coyotes drifting down lamplit streets, and, yes, we are thrilled to see temperatures drop below -35C.

Oh, you won’t hear it in our driveways. We ain’t “whistlin’ a happy tune” as we’re scraping our windshields; and the only joy about turning on our cars a half hour before we need to go anywhere is the glee from punching Command Start from your kitchen window (if you can afford it). And the wrong gloves can cost you digits if you ain’t careful. (Thank You, Katrina Brogden, for your timely save this afternoon, and for the new mitts!) Our cars act like we woke them up in the middle of a long nap–they are cranky and moan down the street and the ride is bumpy and aching. And there’s nothing like not being able to reach your keys in your pocket, forcing you to remove your glove and do the mental countdown of how long exposed flesh can last…and if you DROP the keys…well, metal keys at 40 below burn your fingers. And if there’s a wind—well, they don’t call it bitter for nothing. Oddly, it doesn’t seem to turn Yukoners bitter.

That’s because we enjoy living here for the stories we can tell. If we don’t experience -40 once every winter, Yukoners will want their money back. Oh, we already want our money back for the Celestial reneging of the past three summers, and that’s part of the same issue. We are both owed our amazing Summers and our -40. If we don’t get them, the Yukon ceases to be that place of extremes. Without the summers, the place is just damn cold and wet. Without -40, we might as well be in Winnipeg, or anywhere in Alberta, or Ontario. We get special honors for enduring the cold–and we damn well know it. We don’t want the dudes in Alberta to be able to say that THEY have endured the worst, right? We want Vancouver-ites to live in awe of our ability to withstand nature’s onslaught with a hearty laugh. We need the scientific weather proof to back up our mythos.

So, perhaps our worst fear involving global warming is that we might be turned into Wisconsin. Cold, but not that cold.

So, today, Yukoners are happy to know that for one more Winter, we had our litmus test of Strength, the Charlie Horse on the leg of our Winter, and I’m sure we phoned every southern relative and friend we had to let them know that we earned our frostbitten stripes, every last one of them. Let there never be a year that our children will only be able to say that they remember when it got down all the way to -20. We won’t be able to look them in the eye if we can’t bring them the very depths of Winter. They are Yukoners, truly, at -40; at -20, they are just Canadians who live way too far away from their relatives.

This is why we smile inside every time the mercury falls down. Really, -40 is our Blue Badge of Courage.

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Sita Sings the Blues: a great film we gotta see here

1sita-thumb-200x2312I just heard about this animated film that Ebert is raving about. Get this: an animated film based on the Indian epic, The Ramayana, with songs from 1930s singer Annette Hanshaw.

The Ramayana tells the story of a great betrayal by a husband and his mother on the husband’s wife. It is one of the oldest texts in India, and rife with magic, monkeys and religion. It was made to be a thriller–a very long thriller.

The movie though, is animated.

Here’s the trailer, without the Hanshaw.

The problem: Hanshaw’s estate won’t give Nina Paley, the creator of Sita Sings the Blues, the rights to use the songs, so no distributor will touch it. It can win tons of awards–and it has–check out this site. But it can’t be mass distributed. Update:  Here is Nina’s Distribution Plan since Ebert’s article!  Click there to find the movie…and where you’ll be able to see it.

I can’t wait to see this film. I wonder if we can get Yukon Film Society folks to bring it up. It seems to be showing at film festivals everywhere….

So, this is another outlet for fantasy writing: cartooning and reinterpreting world epics with lots of fantasy elements. And adding in some historical footage too. It’s remarkable. Listen to this. Here’s a nice mix of 1930s Singing, modern animation, and a world Epic:

There are no limits for fantasy writing. None. Okay, well, copyright….but really, no limits. 😉

Novelists! Classes start Monday at Yukon College

rightimg1Happy New Year to Everyone! I hope this coming new year brings you what you want.

It’s a long and interesting journey, no doubt.

Perhaps, you are looking to work on your novel? Perhaps, you have been working on one for years and you want to get some guided help through a course? Maybe, you just plunked one out in November during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and you want to work on revising it, or just getting feedback on it.

Yukon College is offering two courses: Monday nights for Realism/Mainstream writing and Tuesday nights for Speculative Fiction (Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, Fantastical Children’s Lit). The school, though, is closed till Jan 2, or Friday. So, if you’re gonna sign up and come to the first class on Monday, you’ll have to sign up on Friday or Next week. Regardless of when you sign up, come to the first classes. We have to get a viable head count to know if the classes will make. We need 8 people each class, at least, to make this happen. We’ll be working on synopsis writing and editing three chapters of your novel.

Click on Writing Classes to learn more.

Also, don’t forget that Yukon writers, in classes or not, should be getting ready for the Editor’s Weekend that is happening at the beginning of April. Six editors are coming up to talk with Yukoners, give workshops, about the next steps in publishing their manuscripts. This coincides with the last weekend of our coursework. So it makes a fitting transition after our class is done to move towards shopping a manuscript around.

So, if working on your novel is part of your planned journey for 2009, I hope to see you in class in the new year!

Go to the General Store in Whitehorse for the Chocolate Covered Potato Chips

Hey, gang. My friends bought me those dark chocolate covered potato chips here IN TOWN! The General Store carries them. Go make the store happy–and yourself–by trying these not-to-be-missed, soon-to-be your-favorite-snack goodies.

Apologies if you were looking for astute comments on Science Fiction and Fantasy. The Holidays have tuned my mind in a chocolate direction. Astutism will return soon.

New Anthology Market– Triangulation: Dark Glass

March 31, 2009, Deadline— From Their Website:

Taking Flight by Vincent ChongTriangulation is an annual 125-150+ page short fiction anthology that publishes science fiction, fantasy, horror, and any other speculative fiction that caught the editors’ fancy. Every year we have a theme: 2009’s theme is “Dark Glass”. We pay semi-pro rates and are available online at places like Amazon.com. We use Lulu.com as our printer, so if the publish-on-demand thing leaves a foul taste in your mouth, avoid us. We’re a small outfit but we work hard to produce a quality product; Asimov’s Science Fiction said we were “equal to any issue of your favorite prozine.”

No, we don’t get tired of mentioning that Asimov’s said nice things about us.

We define “short fiction” as “up to about 5,000 words or so.” We have no reason to impose hard and fast arbitrary word limits, but we are interested in publishing a wide variety of entertaining and literate stories, so the more space a story would take, the more it will need to impress us. If you have an awesome story that exceeds 5K then by all means send it; but be warned that if you’re closer to 10,000 words, it will probably need to have the editorial staff cheering and high-fiving each other so much that the senior editor’s roommate’s poodle runs into the room to see what all the commotion is about. And that dog likes his naps.

We dig flash; there is no minimum word count.

We have no interest in getting more specific about the term “speculative fiction.” Science fiction, horror, fantasy, magic realism, alternate history, whatever — if there’s a speculative element vital to your story, we’ll gladly give it a read.

We love creative interpretations of our theme, “Dark Glass”. Don’t ask us what it means — tell us what it means with a story that convinces us you’re right.

We publish both new and established writers; the level of experience for the authors gracing our pages has ranged from “first time in print” to “Hugo winner.” The majority of our stories usually wind up being from American authors, but we’ve had a number of international contributions; we’re happy to consider work from anywhere in the world, just as long as it’s written in English.

We will run mature content if we like the story. So make sure there’s an actual story in that mature content.

We will gladly consider reprints. If the story ran someplace obscure, then it’s probably new to our readers; and if it ran someplace high-profile, it’s probably really good. Either way, we win!

No poetry. Sorry.

No fanfic, even if it’s fanfic of a fictional universe that has passed into public domain. Cthulhu Mythos, I’m looking in your direction.

No thinly-disguised transcripts of roleplaying sessions, no settings obviously based on D&D or other such games. Don’t get us wrong, we love to game ourselves — which means our imaginations are probably too cluttered with elves and dwarves and orcs and the like as it is.

Submission deadline is March 31, 2009. All electronic submits must be sent by that time, all snail mail submits must be postmarked by that date.

Compensation:

We pay two cents per word (USA funds, rounded to the nearest 100 words, US$10 minimum payment) on publication and a single contributor’s copy. The anthology will be published in late July of 2009. We purchase North American Serial Rights, and Electronic Rights for the PDF downloadable version; since we’re cool with reprints, we really don’t care whether we have firsties. All subsidiary rights released upon publication. Contributors will also have the option of purchasing additional copies of the anthology at-cost, exact price TBD.

How To Submit:

Electronic submissions make our lives easier. Please send your story to editor@parsecink.org. Please put your subject line in the format of “SUBMISSION: Story Title” so we can tell you apart from the spam.

We’ll consider stories ONLY in the following formats:

  • .odt (OpenDocument Text — format used by the OpenOffice.org suite) — preferred format
  • .rtf (Rich Text Format — generic document format that most word processors can create)
  • .doc (MS Word — we’re not crazy about it, but let’s face it, it’s the one most people actually use)

Please use industry standard manuscript format. There’s disagreement on some of the exact details of the “standard” — we’re cool with that. We’re not testing you to see if you can follow each and every niggling detail, we just want a manuscript that looks professional.

If you absolutely positively can’t use email, please send the manuscript (with either a SASE or a return email address) to:

Triangulation 2008
134 Orchard Dr.
Penn Hills, PA 15235

No hand-written manuscripts. We gotta draw the line somewhere.

Please, no multiple submissions; only send us one story at a time. We’ll get back to you promptly, we promise.

For Full GUIDELINES, CLICK HERE>

Alpha Inventions: Just Go Somewhere

Okay, by fluke, it seems, a website called Alpha Inventions started showing my blog in a series of rotating blogs. It increased my traffic in seconds–with one caveat–it did not increase any clicks on any pages.

Here’s what happens: the carousel of blogs go round. They are random. Often they are from people who have come there seeking info about how their blog got on the carousel. You can pause a blog and read it. 

If you go there, you’re in control.  PAUSE something and read it.  Go browse on pages you find interesting. I found a few blogs myself that are pretty nifty.  

Some things that do cause a little concern on the site:  I just started noticing advertising on the page, and that the blogs which had been shown at 30 second intervals are now at 2 second intervals.  Not a lot of time to see anything of interest, or even for the pictures on blogs to download all the way.  Kind of defeats the purpose.  

My assumption, and I can be wrong, but it seems that Alpha Inventions, then, is just using your blog to get people to stay on the site to read the advertising.   From about twenty minutes on the site, where the blogs rotated fast, it seemed the Mormons were a top benefactor.  It’s unfortunate that Alpha Inventions will not show you what information they have gathered about you, so I couldn’t find where on the blog that my post was listed or how people were coming here.  Since they no longer show blogs for more than 2 seconds, its not a great way to browse blogs— Are they simply another commercial-producing site that uses my blog to hawk other people’s wares?  Maybe.  Those who subscribe get multiple showings.  But with two seconds, what are you getting?  What you paid for?  

And since I didn’t give anything to Alpha Inventions, is it just this entry that attracts the roving blog-grabber?  I don’t know.  But it seems that it capitalizes on a blogger’s desire to be seen, and so he/she puts their blog into the queue.  But it’s random, doesn’t last long in the queue, and you have no way of seeing how your blog got nabbed in the first place to get the attention.  

For something I don’t know much about–and which uses my blog to advertise other stuff–I’m a bit wary.

Like Love, but Chocolate

headerOkay, fast plug for Serotonin Chocolate from Vermillion Alberta. I am feeling something akin to love, a love that dare not speak its name, for Dark chocolate-covered potato chips. Amazing. I don’t know where my friends got these in Whitehorse, but when I find out I’ll let you know. You can’t put them down. They haunt you in that little bag with the cellophane window….and the two cows on the front…

The makers claim that chocolate releases serotonin in your brain–the same thing you feel when you are in love–which might explain my heart palpitations.  Thank you Dave  and Jaime!   You have brought us together–and I know love!  😉

chocolatechips