Category: blog post

Win a signed copy of Writers of the Future, volume 32 (plus, info about the wotf32 website)

Posted on by Stewart

The incorrigibly English Matt Dovey and I (although mostly Matt) have put together a website for volume 32 of the Writers of the Future anthology, which will feature a story I’ve written (the title of which cannot yet be shared).

The site features author information, illustrator information, blurbs and snippets for each story, and general information about the anthology, as well as where you can pre-order it.

Hooray!

So go check it out: Writers of the Future, volume 32.

Some time in the next few weeks, the site will be updated to feature thumbnail illustrations for each story, as well as information on which 1st place winners wrote which story.

I’d be interested to see if anybody can guess which is mine from the 4 titles featured on the “Stories” page.

In fact! Let’s do a little giveaway.

Everyone who wants to can leave a comment on this post with the title of the story you think is mine, based on the little blurb and synopsis included on the wotf32 website. You can comment with your Facebook, Google, or Twitter accounts, or with a Disqus account if you have one. Or you can comment as a guest if you don’t have any of those.

I’ll give everyone who guesses correctly 3 entries, and everyone who guesses incorrectly 1 entry, and will then randomly select one entry and mail that person a copy of the anthology signed by me and maybe a few other authors/illustrators (depending on if I can get my hands on a suitable copy during the workshop in the first week of April).

So giveaway! Much excite! Wow!

Direct links to the 1st-place stories:
Star Tree

Images Across a Shattered Sea

Squalor and Sympathy

The Sun Falls Apart

I’ll announce the winner on Thursday, April 14th here on the blog. If you want to be sure you don’t miss it, you can sign up for updates using the little “follow” button on the bottom-right-hand corner of the browser window.

(A few details:
1. I will never share subscriber e-mails with anyone, and you’ll get roughly 1 update e-mailed to you per week in the mean-time.
2. Shipping on the signed copy will be free but may be really really slow if you live outside the continental US of A.
3. You will have to give me your address at some point to receive the signed copy, should you win.
4. I will happily purchase a Kindle e-book version of the anthology for the winner instead, if they prefer.
)

Up and Coming: Stories from the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors – Free download!

Posted on by Stewart

The inimitable SL Huang and equally awesome Kurt Hunt have put in some serious hustle and created an anthology containing over a million words of fiction(!) from the authors who are eligible for the Campbell Award this year.

For those not in the know, the Campbell Award for Best New Writer is awarded each year concurrently with the Hugos, and is awarded to a SF author who has had their first professional fiction publication in the past two years. Past winners include luminaries like Lev Grossman, Sofia Samatar, and Wesley Chu, and–the further back in time you go–Cory Doctorow, Nalo Hopkinson, Ted Chiang, CJ Cherryh, and Spider Robinson.

So you know you’re in for a treat with this anthology.

And did I mention that it’s free to download?

Here’s what Lisa has to say about the anthology:

This anthology includes 120 authors — who contributed 230 works totaling approximately 1.1 MILLION words of fiction. These pieces all originally appeared in 2014, 2015, or 2016 from writers who are new professionals to the SFF field, and they represent a breathtaking range of work from the next generation of speculative storytelling.

All of these authors are eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2016. We hope you’ll use this anthology as a guide in nominating for that award as well as a way of exploring many vibrant new voices in the genre.

This anthology will be offered as a free download through March 31, 2016 only.

You can download the anthology in various formats over at Bad Menagerie: http://www.badmenagerie.com/up-and-coming-stories-from-the-2016-campbell-eligible-writers/

Hey! You can now pre-order Writers of the Future 32, featuring a short story by me.

Posted on by Stewart

As I am pretty sure I have announced multiple times already, I was a first place winner in quarter 2 of the Writers of the Future contest last year.

Well, now it’s this year, which means the book will be coming out soon and my story will be in it.

Indeed, thanks to fellow Writers of the Future winner J.W. Alden‘s eagle eye, I can share some exciting information: Writers of the Future volume 32 is now available for pre-order.

So if you’d like to buy a copy of a book with a short story in it by me (not to mention stories by a bunch of great writers), now’s your chance: Pre-order Writers of the Future volume 32 on Amazon.

There are a lot of awesome stories in the anthology (I’ve read quite a few!), and it will have fantastic art as well—although I haven’t seen any of that yet.

Plus it has a really spiffy cover:
Writers of the Future Volume 32 cover image

Webcomics I’m reading (post at SF Signal)

Posted on by Stewart

I read a fair number of webcomics (I like that I can get through my list every morning pretty quickly and move on to other things like work).

Now, thanks to this mind meld over at SF Signal on graphic novels, you can too!

Or, if you just want a list of some of my current favourites:

  • Stand Still, Stay Silent
  • Project Skin Horse
  • Trial of the Sun
  • Mare Internum (trigger warnings for child abuse and suicide)
  • Spacetrawler

    • This weekend is your last chance to vote in the Quantum Shorts competition.

    Posted on by Stewart

    As the post title suggests, the deadline for voting in the Quantum Shorts competition is coming up.

    Voting is open until “the end of January,” which I’m guessing translates to the middle of the day January 31st in most places (the contest organizers are Singapore-based).

    My story “How to Configure Your Quantum Disambiguator” is on the short-list, along with a lot of other great stories. Go give them a read and vote for your favourite!

    Quantum Shorts voting period extended to January 31st

    Posted on by Stewart

    As I’ve probably already mentioned a few times, my story “How to Configure your Quantum Disambiguator” is on the short-list for the Quantum Shorts flash fiction competition.

    The “people’s choice” voting for the contest has been extended to the end of the month, so if you haven’t checked it out and voted yet, go give it a look! There are a lot of strong stories in the top ten, and still a whole 11 days to read ’em.

    Also, don’t forget the youth division: http://shorts2015.quantumlah.org/shortlisted-stories

    My story “How to Configure your Quantum Disambiguator” up for people’s choice award at Quantum Shorts

    Posted on by Stewart

    A few days ago, I received an e-mail from the administrators of the Quantum Shorts contest letting me know that my entry, “How to Configure your Quantum Disambiguator,” was in the short-list of ten entries that will be judged for first and second prize.

    So huzzah(!) for that good news about this quirky little humorous flash, which first appeared in Nature‘s Futures column back in February.

    My story is also eligible for the people’s choice award, so if you enjoy that particular piece of mine, I’d appreciate your vote on the shortlist page. (Each person can only vote one time, though, so make sure you read the others before you decide! There’s some tough competition.)

    Story sale! “The Plumes of Enceladus” to Abyss & Apex

    Posted on by Stewart

    Thrilled to announce that I have sold “The Plumes of Enceladus,” a roughly 7,000-word science fiction story, to Abyss & Apex. It is by far the “hardest” story of mine to see publication to date. Most of my skiffy is much squishier…

    This one was originally written for the Baen Memorial contest back in February of 2013(!), and has lived a long and varied submission life since then, including an “almost” from Giganotosaurus and Future Fire’s Accessing the Future anthology. It’s been through a number of revisions for clarity and scientific accuracy, and I’m very pleased with where it ended up.

    The story follows two pilots, Andry (who is disabled) and Jim, as they race to Enceladus to harvest water from its cryovolcanic plumes. They start the race as bitter rivals, but distance from Earth and isolation from the rest of humanities can have a surprisingly mollifying effect. You’ll have to read it to find out the rest.

    Anyway, the publication date is October of 2016, by which time I will probably have forgotten I sold the thing. All the same, I’ll post a link when it’s out!

    Want to appear in a story I write? Now’s your chance!

    Posted on by Stewart

    “Tuckerization,” for anyone not familiar with the term, is the practice of including real people in fiction as a sort of in-joke, either using their real name, an obvious parody of it, or just similar interests/quirks.

    For anyone who’d like to appear this way in one of my stories, I’m offering Tuckerization as a backer reward on the ongoing Plasma Frequency Kickstarter. For $20, you’ll not only get written into a story, you’ll also get a year’s e-subscription to the magazine.

    If you’re not familiar with Plasma Frequency, you can read through their back issues, which include two weird little flash pieces by yours truly:
    Some Salient Details about Your Former Lives

    After the Ascension

    Out today: an Interview and an Anthology

    Posted on by Stewart

    Actually, both of these things were out yesterday. But today is the new yesterday! Or it will be tomorrow. So: close enough.

    The first thing is an interview with me in the Polk County Itemizer-Observer (my local newspaper) about my win in Writers of the Future. I was happy that the journalist agreed to interview me by e-mail, as I do not do well speaking extemporaneously, and probably as a result gave him way too much text to fit into an article. Still, it’s neat to see myself in print this way. Or electronic print, at least: http://www.polkio.com/news/2015/sep/30/writer-future/

    The second thing is a shiny, hardcover print anthology my story “Behind the First Years” is in. The release date for that was some time between September 28th and yesterday (I got conflicting information), and if you’d like a copy you can order it here: http://amzn.to/1ieyQ5z (If you’d like a taste of the anthology, you can listen to an audio version of my story on StarShipSofa.)