Tag: Publishing

  • Rejection, yippee!

    Anyone else out there breathing a sigh of relief when a standard submission response hits the inbox? It’s so good to get a rejection. No more need to steady yourself for the kind of comprehensively critical appraisal beta-readers tend to provide. You look better without that fake frozen grin, and you know it. Bye bye…

  • Rewrite to make Technovelgy?

    Familiar with Technovelgy? I only just discovered this wonderful place, where you meet innumerable SciFi books and authors through the devices they introduced. Would love to make that list. Why not? One of the triggers that made me write Plugger stuff was my dissatisfaction with the lack of plausible space travel scenarios disgracing the bulk…

  • Carpe Diem

    What a difference two nights can make. Spending them in a hospital, after undergoing extremely minor and totally successful surgery, has a way of sharpening your mortality awareness. This in turn can lead to all kinds of unexpected non-medical side effects. Less than a month ago, the plan was to submit Think-o-mat to three agents.…

  • Three submissions

    Writing fiction is tremendous fun, but by the last chapters long format projects tend to turn into a bit of a tedium, as described and tentatively analysed in a previous post. No problem, though, won’t happen again for at least a year, now is hurrah time: Think-o-mat has been defined completed. And another dreaded task, writing…

  • Alt Left SciFi pitch

    Some amazing advice kindly provided by Ariel Ayangwo: Eight Ways to Spark More Social Shares on Your Content Fast It’s targeted at bloggers, but Ariel’s 4U-rule can easily be applied  to fiction writing. The corresponding Alt Left SciFi pitch reads: Useful: Feeling challenged? Your life no paradise? Regardless of whether you love or hate the changes…

  • The 2k challenge

    Fascinating, the number of formats out there.  Longshot Island does me the favor to define precise criteria: Usually stories with more characters work better than stories with fewer characters. Check. Lots of spiky characters, that’s the easy bit.  We prefer shorter stories, 500 words to 2,500 in length. Wordcount feels kind of low, even for shorts. The…

  • Genre malaise

    Time for my very first call for help to the LinkedIn community. The more diligently I read, the more confused I get. Very basic basics are under reconsideration. I’m still convinced what I write should be called Science Fiction. Little science and lots of fiction = Science Fiction. Used to feel like a no-brainer. Looking at…