Futurismic

The times, they are a’changing, as Dylan once whined. Nowhere is that more true than in genre fiction publishing, it seems, with some interesting examples of new delivery systems among this week’s free reads:

At Manybooks.net, they’re rocking the old-school sf novels for free: Gordon Randall Garrett and Laurence Randall Janifer’s The Impossibles and Supermind, to be precise.

Free Speculative Fiction Online list a whole batch of newly available works; go and see, and give the gift of traffic.

Pete Tzinski (of Blood, Blade and Thruster magazine fame) is blogging an online fiction serial called God in the Machine. (As a side note, I reckon this will be one of the fiction formats of the future, so I’ll be watching closely to see how this does.)

The webzine Byzarium returns from the metaphorical wastelands of the intarwebs, complete with their archive of previous material. All new material will be for paid subscribers only - another interesting potential business model for short fiction online.

Classic free pulp-era science fiction: Edmond Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved”.

Don Sakers is inviting people to subscribe to his latest ongoing Scattered Worlds novel, Hunt for the Dymalon CygnetHunt for the Dymalon Cygnet. You can read everything that’s been published already for free, and then sign up to get the latest parts before anyone else.

Here’s Paul McAuley’s short story “Gene Wars”.

The first stages of Subterranean Magazine’s Fall 2007 issue have started to appear - columns, audiobooks and fiction by the big guns of the genre, costing you nix.

Electric Velocipede’s John Klima has Ezra Pines’ story “Antevellum” available as a PDF - read about this satire on Hal Duncan at the EV blog, then grab the file.

And a few bonus tidbits for the writers among the readers:

Nick Mamatas on the scene break, and why you shouldn’t overuse it.

Futurismic’s own Jeremiah Tolbert shares a nugget of wisdom on “the holy math of story”.

Enjoy!

Writers, editors and anyone else - if you want something you’ve written or published on the web for free mentioned here, drop me (Paul Raven) an email to the address listed for me on the Staff page, and I’ll include it in next week’s round-up.

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My feed reader is full of useful advice for writers once again, so I thought I’d share the wealth:

Jeff Vandermeer’s Evil Monkey delivers the second short sharp installment of his Guide to Creative Writing:

“Alas, market predictions aren’t like assholes, because everyone has two or three, and they usually serve little purpose.”

Luc Reid tries to nail down what it is that makes certain stories rise from “good, but not quite what we’re looking for” to “sold”:

“So what makes a story rise above its fellows, inspire love, stand out? The intuitive response would be that it does the things we talked about better. The characters are stronger, the plot is more compelling, the description is more vivid. But usually standing out is going to mean something else, and it’s going to differ from writer to writer and sometimes from story to story. The stories that rise above are not just more competent than the stories that don’t, although more competent is always better.”

Moving beyond the writing itself and into the territory of promotional work, Charlie Stross explains the dos and don’ts of public readings with his usual dry humour:

“The water jug isn’t an optional extra. I usually take the precaution of bringing along a drink of some sort, simply because my throat dries out after ten or fifteen minutes of speaking and if I’m scheduled late in a day of readings, the folks providing supporting facilities such as jugs of water tend to be getting a bit erratic themselves.”

And finally, David Louis Edelman has some advice on how to self-promote with ethical integrity:

“3. Avoid glaring sins of omission. This is a difficult guideline to follow, because it’s very subjective. Don’t use ellipses to claim that your book is “an absolutely terrific… thriller” when the actual review states that your book is “an absolutely terrific example of what not to do when writing a thriller.” Don’t try to sell to a group of Vietnam vets by claiming that your book has a Vietnam vet in it, while conveniently forgetting to mention that said character gets run over by a truck on page 4.”

Ah! The intarwebs: helping aspiring writers (to avoid writing by supplying them enough advice from genuine writers that they can convince themselves reading it is a more valuable way to spend their time than actually writing) since 1997!

[Cross-posted to VCTB]

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There seem to be a lot of posts containing advice for writers in my RSS reader at the moment, so I thought it would be nice to share them with everyone. Let’s see …

First up we have Jeff Vandermeer reposting the start of his “Evil Monkey Guide to Creative Writing” at his recently-relocated blog.

Futurismic blogger and rising science fiction novelist Tobias Buckell is too modest to plug things from his own blog when he writes here, but I have no such shame; he’s got links to some extensive notes on plotting that were taken at the Taos Toolbox writer’s workshop.

Finally, Jetse de Vries is e-submissions fiction editor for Interzone, but he’s a writer in his own right, too. He shares with us the lessons he’s learned from reading the slush pile, and discusses the value of “trunking” stories that you just can’t seem to sell.

[Cross-posted to VCTB]

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If you write short fiction with an eye to getting published, you’re probably hungry for advice on how to make your manuscript survive the slush-pile process. So give thanks to Doug Cohen, fiction editor for Realms of Fantasy Magazine, for sharing this insightful essay where he looks at the openings of genuine slush-pile survivor stories, and analyzes what it was about them that saved them from the default rejection note. Of course, not all parts of the writing process are quite so easily explained - witness Jim van Pelt talking about where story ideas come from. [Cross-posted to VCTB]

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