More information is included in the linked article, and full details will be posted at the SFWA site in March. Given the shifting landscape of publishing and the multitude of ways authors now have to reach an audience, this is great news. If you write and are paid at a professional level, you will be eligible for SFWA membership regardless of venue. All the more reason to keep at it:)
In it, the author details the terrors, trials and triumphs that went into the making of his latest series. Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance make up the Southern Reach trilogy, about “a dysfunctional secret agency called Southern Reach and its efforts to solve the mysteries behind Area X, a strange pristine wilderness.”
I’ve had this series on my books to read list and now plan to bump them up to the top. For more on the books, including sample chapters and links to retailers, or on the author, check out the links above.
The headline sums it up but if this topic interests you it’s worth checking out the attached infographic. It allows you to highlight author age at first published book, at their “breakthrough” book, and also shows a nice timeline of the number of books published before and after death. J.R.R. Tolkien was 46 when The Hobbit was published (also, Nora Roberts is a publishing machine, and I mean that in the best possible way).
So fret not, and keep at it. Because writing well is a skill, and skills take time.
Want more UFO-logy in your life? Look no further, because almost 130,000 pages of declassified files on UFOs from the U.S. Air Force are now archived and searchable online:
Considering a weekend getaway? Check out travel posters for these new destinations, courtesy of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Kepler Space Telescope.
I love the WPA-style presentation and terrific design sense. Want high-resolution versions to call your own? Check out the linked images in the engadget article or go to the NASA PlanetQuest Exoplanet Travel Series and click away.
Kepler-16b, here I come! (Now, where did I put my spacesuit?)
… the ways by which men arrive at knowledge of the celestial things are hardly less wonderful than the nature of these things themselves.
Exciting news via Locus, folks, CC Finlay has been named the new editor at Fantasy & Science Fiction. He succeeds the excellent Gordon Van Gelder, who became the magazine’s editor in 1997 and will continue as publisher.
Will this mean a permanent shift from F&SF’s traditional snail-mail submissions process to e-subs? @ccfinlay sheds some light on the question, and it’s shiny:)
This means that electronic subs are going to be preferred. The online form will stay open after January 15.
Update: CC Finlay has posted answers to some of our more pressing questions in a new blog post. TL:DR version: e-subs forever! As an international author in favor of increased diversity, this makes me very happy. Also (via Twitter), no simultaneous subs, and currently a minimum 15 days between submissions.
There are a lot of books, essays, posts and (no doubt) scratchings on cave walls discussing ways to be more creative. One of the most useful and compact versions I’ve found so far is a talk (via David Farland) by John Cleese, Monty Python funny man and deep thinker on this and other topics.
The video is only ten minutes long but does a terrific job of summarizing the essential requirements one needs to be creative. You don’t have to quit your day job or win a year-long fellowship or even trap your very own Muse. It’s simple really, and not what one might guess when thinking about the problem. We don’t need “more,” we need less. We need boundaries. Specifically, boundaries of time and boundaries of space.
If you’d like to hear Cleese in a longer discussion on the topic, check out his speech from 1991 as well.
Someone asked me why I write fantasy and science fiction. Even better, the question was posed with the sort of genuine interest and curiosity everyone hopes to hear in a personal question that holds meaning. I gave an involved answer that I won’t repeat here because I’m going to give you a better one:
A new anthology is out for free from Tor.com, and it includes twenty-six of their favorite short stories, novelettes, and novellas from 2014. Tor.com does publish its fiction online, of course, but if you prefer a transportable and handy-to-read format for Kindle, Nook or similar device, you can download the full anthology now for the low, low price of nothing, nada, zip, rien, tipota.
You must be logged in to post a comment.