So, I’ve never been quite happy with the cover art for DF10. What I saw in my head never quite came through on the screen, and I wound up with a collection of images that, while possibly intriguing, felt…confusing. It was too dark in the wrong places, you couldn’t tell what the elements were, and [...]
The good folks at AWP Books and I have a decision to make: What order do we publish things in? In the process of discussions, it occurred to us that you all might have an opinion, so here’s your chance to vote: [poll id="2"] You may vote for two of the three options (this is [...]
It’s mid January, and time for your vegetables. This year’s first link salad is here–I hope you enjoy this sampling of my weidrness and wanderings from around the web!
Time for your vegetables again. Here’s some of the fun stuff that’s flitted across my desk in the last few weeks. Crazy Silly Creative Things To start off with our garnish, you could do no better than watching this 3 minute video about what Welshmen really do with sheep. Don’t worry, it’s work safe–but you [...]
And, from the kitchen this weekend we have for you a lovely Link Salad, with leaves of history and science, garnished with a healthy dose of whimsy. But first, I begin with a special treat for my free-wheeling brewer friends. Beer has always been a problem in space — not because of drunk piloting, but [...]
In the “should have done this a long time ago” department, I’m going to start offering up a semi-regular link salad digest. These are links to articles, books, lectures, and other cool stuff that I’ve run across in the course of my ill-fated attempt to grok the universe. They also tend to feed my creative [...]
My recent post on zombie industries (in which I argued that the pissing and moaning coming from authors and some publishers recently is a sign of an industry that is currently in serious trouble) leads inevitably to the obvious question: If, appearances to the contrary, the customer actually sets the price in a marketplace, and [...]
Several people have asked for my current pro-rates markets list for short fiction. The following are periodicals only (i.e. no anthologies) broken out by genre, and listed in order of highest paying to lowest. Here you go, listed in or:
There’s a conversation going on at the always controversial blog of Dean Wesley Smith. The post itself is interesting for its unconventional wisdom, but it is the comments that are important. In it, several authors with pub credits in the dozens and loads of literary experience talk explicitly about contract terms, money management, professionalism, and [...]
An editor friend of mine recently asked me what I would consider an ideal rejection letter, if I were a hopeless writer with delusions of adequacy and no command of grammar. (I’m pretty sure the “If I were” bit was a ruse to make her think she wasn’t talking about me, so I actually expect [...]
Zombie industries are all around us–these are businesses whose models have ceased to be relevant and they’re just waiting for something better to knock them over. This doesn’t mean they’re not still earning money–some of them are earning quite well, thank you. And it doesn’t mean that they’ve been artificially resurrected with government stimulus money, [...]
[amazon-product align="right" bgcolor="#99CCCC" height="240" width="120" frameborder="1"]B003QP4F0W[/amazon-product] Circlet Press’s new anthology, Apocalypse Sex, is now available on Amazon and Smashwords. It contains a new and improved version my novelette Buried Alive In The Blues, which some of you may remember from its appearance on Erotica A La Carte last year. Now you can take it anywhere [...]
by J. Daniel Sawyer Thanks to Amy Gahran for sparking the idea Literacy is like heroin – it’s habit-forming. The more people try out the habit, the more likely they are to retain it. Exposure to books breeds consumption of books, which is good, because the act of reading requires deliberate commitment. This is important [...]
The folks at ClonePod liked Cold Duty so much that they ALSO bought it to run as a Christmas episode. You can find it by hitting this link here. Cold Duty: Selected Readings from the Diary of a Gelusian Repairman is the tale of a stable boy who gets caught working on a steam engine, [...]
As covered by SFFAudio, my story Cold Duty is now live at SteamPod. Head on over to hear a tale of a 100-years too early scientific and technological revolution that happens because a stable boy gets caught working on a steam engine. Steampunk memoir – and a tale very close to my heart.
