Garden State Horror Wrtiers Contest
Lookee here:
GARDEN STATE HORROR WRITERS SHORT STORY CONTEST
Extended Deadline: August 20, 2007
The GSHW is looking for enticing, well-written speculative fiction. There is no theme this year so let your imagination run wild, but please, no more than 3,000 words.
Entries can be in Horror ~ Science Fiction ~ Fantasy ~ Mystery ~ Suspense ~ Thriller.
First prize is $100 and The Graversen Award; second prize is $50 and third prize $25. Each eligible entry will be critiqued by three published writers and/or editors.
Go to www.gshw.net for deadlines, complete rules, etc.
Article About Writing Workshops
My article about writing workshops, “Basic Training for Writers,” which recently appeared in the SFWA Bulletin, has been published on their Web site [PDF].
[Excerpt:] Writers choosing to specialize in writing science fiction, fantasy, and horror have a number of opportunities to study with luminaries in the field by participating in writers’ workshops. These workshops are in-depth examinations of a writer’s strengths and weaknesses, and force students to both write and critique the work of others a great deal. This provides for a rather intense experience, which is why this sort of workshop is often referred to as a “writer’s boot camp.”
In my role as assistant editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, I’ve seen the results of these workshops first hand. Some writers don’t show an appreciable increase in skill or craft right away (for some it takes a while for the lessons to sink in, and for some it never sinks in at all), but for others it’s as if their writing experienced a quantum leap–as if going to the workshop turned some key and unlocked their inner writer. While examples of the former are fairly common, examples of the latter are harder to come by.
But one such writer is David Marusek. He’s what you might call a poster child for workshopping success. “I attended Clarion West in Seattle in 1992 and sold two short stories that I wrote there. I sold one on the spot to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. I sold the other a month later to Playboy. These were my first ever fiction sales, and I have been publishing regularly, if not prolifically, ever since,” he said. Marusek’s stories have gone on to be lauded by both fans and critics alike, and in 1999, his story “The Wedding Album,” was nominated for a Nebula Award and won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.
Before attending Clarion West, Marusek says that he had been writing for about seven years on his own, with no writing classes under his belt and only a few week-long workshops. He was collecting personalized rejections from editors, but he couldn’t seem to break into print. “In retrospect,” he said, “I believe I had taught myself the basic elements of the craft–characterization, plotting, dialog, etc.–but I still lacked that certain ineffable something that makes them all jell into a story. And that’s what I picked up at Clarion West.”
Read the whole article.
Tags: writing workshops science fiction fantasy
Header Notes
I was just reading Adrienne Martini’s review (in the Baltimore City Paper) of The New Space Opera edited by Jonathan Strahan & Gardner Dozois, which is generally positive, but ends with a negative comment about the anthology’s header notes:
While a large percentage of this collection is full of space opera goodness, Dozois and Strahan’s introductions do them no favors. Instead of interstitial bits of text that help place the writer or the tale in some sort of context, the editors have merely crafted extra long bibliographies. Dozois, who edited Asimov’s magazine for 20 years as well as more than a dozen other anthologies, and Strahan, former book reviewer for Locus magazine and an Australia-based anthology editor, have been in the field long enough to have some opinions. It’s a shame that they only provide details that you could easily find out for yourself, rather than their thoughts on any given tale. It’s also a shame that they used the same line of description–enough ideas packed into this short story “to fuel many another author’s eight-hundred-page novel”–for both Kelly’s and McDonald’s stories. That may be true, of course, but it makes the stories in question feel redundant rather than as vital and “new” as they are.
That got me thinking about what the essential ingredients to good header notes are. As it happens, I haven’t written the header notes to Wastelands yet, so this topic is of great interest to me. Any thoughts?
Readercon Schedule
I’ll be attending Readercon in Burlington, MA next weekend (July 6-8), and I just got my schedule:
Friday 8:00 PM. Kaffeeklatsch
an intimate get-together between author and readers
Saturday 12:00 Noon. Panel
Sense of Wonder, or Sense of Cool?
John Joseph Adams, Thomas A. Easton, Laura Anne Gilman, Ernest Lilley (M), Ian Randal StrockSf seeks that sense of wonder, but we think much of today’s best sf brings forth a different feeling. To some of us, stories such as those in Charles Stross’s _Accelerando_ sequence evoke a response more along these lines: “It really might be like that? Cool!” The emotion is less an awed contemplation of the universe and its inhabitants, and more the delight we have toward a new, really loaded computer, electronic gadget or online capability-what can we do with it, what are the implications? What the author shows us may be amazing, beyond present technology or knowledge, but it feels better understood and more under our control than the cosmic wonders of older sf. Cool is more widely shared than wonder, but less, er, wonderful. Can this be part of the reason for the decline in the popularity of sf-cool can be reliably found in more places? Does fantasy supply wonder more reliably today?
I’m driving up to the con Friday morning, along with Doug Cohen, Rajan Khanna, and Jenny Rappaport. We expect to stop over at the Traveler Book Restaurant on the way, and arrive mid-afternoon sometime.
The Kaffeeklatsch is the perfect excuse to come by and say hello if we’ve never met before. So if you’re free, be sure to drop by! If that “intimate” description confuses you as to the nature of a Kaffeeklatsch, just ignore that; it’s basically going to be me sitting at a table (with coffee!) and chatting with whoever shows up. Very informal and relaxed. At least, if I understand it correctly. I haven’t actually done one (or attended one) before.
Google Reader
Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions for my LJ feed problem with Bloglines. I’m currently trying out Google Reader, and I like it so far. It’s got a bunch of handy features, and a slick interface, and being that it’s very similar to Gmail (which I use), it feels very comfortable and familiar even though it’s new to me. We’ll see how well it works; so far it seems to be finding all of the LJ feeds I keep track of.
One cool thing Google Reader offers is a shared items page, which allows you to mark posts you find noteworthy and share them with your friends. You can see my shared items page here. Right now, it’s just got two posts I marked to test the feature. I noticed the shared items page also features an RSS feed of its own, so you can subscribe to the feed of my shared items, which would be, in essence, a “best of the blogosphere” according to me.
LJ Help
I continue to have problems keeping up with LiveJournals on Bloglines. Some of them show up consistently; others seem to never show up at all.
I’m contemplating wielding the power of my own LJ account to use the Friends feature to read LJs, but it sounds like it will be a tedious process to create the list. Also, is there a way to setup filters and whatnot, so that I can have only a certain group of Friends listed on the page where I see updated posts from my Friends?
Wind Unwinds Rogue’s Life
Golden Birthday
Fairly recently, I came across a story in the slush which mentioned a special, one-time birthday everyone has once in his/her life called a “golden birthday.” Curious if it was real or not, I googled it. Wikipedia defines it as: “the day when the age someone turns is the same as the day in the month he or she was born. (For example, someone turning 26 on December 26 celebrates his or her golden birthday).”
This was especially of interest to me because this year will be *my* golden birthday. My birthday is July 31, and I turn 31 this year. Seems like fate that I should discover this concept just in time to celebrate it myself. So…what should I do to celebrate?
UPDATE: Just wanted to add that I don’t drink, so if you’re thinking of that kind of celebration, that won’t work for me. :)
