Tag Archives: writing

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Submissions Update

As of today, I’m completely caught up on all the fiction submissions to Futurismic for the reading period that closed at the end of March.  If you’ve submitted a story to us and haven’t received a reply yet, please query me via our contact form and I’ll try to track down what happened to your submission — sometimes they simply never arrive, and other times my replies go astray (incorrectly typed e-mail addresses being the main culprit).

Our webform is still closed for now, but we’re tentatively expecting to reopen in early June.  That gives you a little over a month to polish up your latest effort, so get to work!

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Brain Hacks for Writers: new Futurismic column from Luc Reid coming soon

I very nearly didn’t bother emailing Luc Reid earlier this week. “C’mon, the guy’s probably waaaay too busy with other stuff to take on a monthly column for Futurismic, Paul,” I told myself… but I’m very glad I ignored that inner cynic, because he mailed me back just a few hours later, pretty much asking when he could start.

So, allow me to introduce Futurismic‘s newest columnist! Luc Reid is a short fiction author whose writing advice I’ve read (and linked to) frequently, and he also runs The Willpower Engine, a blog about self-motivation. As its title should suggest, his Brain Hacks for Writers column will cover the area where those two fields intersect. Here he is explaining it in his own words:

Unlike most writing resources […] BHfW will be solely about the practice of writing and not the craft of writing: it will cover topics like productivity, writing motivation, goals, and learning, but generally won’t touch on style, voice, point of view, characterization, or other features of actual stories. It’s not about what you write, but about how you approach the job of writing.

Speaking for myself, I think I’ve read more advice on the craft of writing than I’ve ever needed (indeed, I think I’ve read so much of it that it’s made me a worse writer rather than a better one, because I find myself trying to obey a multitude of contradictory instructions). But advice on the practical side is much harder to find. Luc’s plain talking style and deep interest in motivational psychology should make it an enjoyable and educational topic, too… and a fine addition to the Futurismic stable. I’m really chuffed to have the man on board. 🙂

The first Brain Hacks for Writers column will be published next month. In the meantime, if there are any burning writerly topics you’d like Luc to cover, why not mention them in the comments here?

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Blue genes: poetry encoded in DNA

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Via Lauren Beukes comes the news that Canadian poet Christian Bök has thought of a way to transcend Keats’ epitaph of being “one whose name was writ on water”; he seeks a poetic immortality that could outlive the human species itself, by the expedient of encoding some of his work into the DNA of a hardy strain of bacteria.

… it’s a tricky procedure, and Bök is doing what he can to make it even trickier. He wants to inject the DNA with a string of nucleotides that form a comprehensible poem, and he also wants the protein that the cell produces in response to form a second comprehensible poem.

You can’t fault the guy’s ambition. Who knows – his work might be rediscovered in some nigh-unimaginable future where interest in poetry hasn’t withered away to nearly nothing.

Then again, maybe it’ll stage a comeback – Damien Walter argues that the social media era is ideally suited to poetry’s narrative and expressive concision. I’d very much like to see it happen… but I’ll not hold my breath just yet.

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Quicklinkage: writers on writing, Godin on slush

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Some quick links collected in a spare segment of a manic Monday, in lieu of our usual fare (i.e. me waffling on about stuff): here are some science fiction writers going all meta on our arses and writing about writing:

And to close up with a topic for discussion, here’s Seth Godin’s take on the oft-reported death of the slush pile:

If you have something good, really good, what’s it doing in the slush pile?

Bring it to the world directly, make your own video, write your own ebook, post your own blog, record your own music.

Or find an agent, a great agent, a selective agent, one that’s almost impossible to get through to, one that commands respect and acts as a filter because after all, that’s what you’re seeking, a filtered, amplified way to spread your idea.

But slush?

Good riddance.

What do you think: is this a case of Godin just not understanding the way fiction publishing works, and hence applying an inappropriate business model to it? Or is he prophesying the unavoidable future of fiction publishing? Your thoughts and opinions would be appreciated.

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“Strong” female characters, and why they’re bad for women

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For all the writers reading along (and anyone else with an interest in the mechanics of modern storytelling), here’s a post at Overthinking It which cuts into the cardboard portrayals of “strong” women in modern film and television (and, by extension, in books). In a nutshell, a half-hearted accommodation of feminist demands has led to the “hottie with manskills” stereotype – which is a step up from the Damsel In Distress, but still massively unrepresentative of the spectrum of real people in the world.

… the feminists shouldn’t have said “we want more strong female characters.”  They should have said “we want more WEAK female characters.”  Not “weak” meaning “Damsel in Distress.”  “Weak” meaning “flawed.”

Good characters, male or female, have goals, and they have flaws.  Any character without flaws will be a cardboard cutout.  Perhaps a sexy cardboard cutout, but two-dimensional nonetheless.  And no, “Always goes for douchebags instead of the Nice Guy” (the flaw of Megan Fox’s character in Transformers) is not a real flaw.  Men think women have that flaw, but most women avoid “Nice Guys” because they just aren’t that nice.  So that doesn’t count.

So what flaws can female characters have?  Uh, I don’t know.  How about the same flaws a male character would have?

Written with plenty of snark, but that’s why it works. Essential reading for any writer, I’d say, if not for everyone. [via GeekFeminism]