I was pleased to be asked to participate in the very cool Fairypunk Stories project. Here’s a teaser from the version of Sleeping Beauty that I just sent off.
(From “Seven Clockwork Angels, All Dancing”)
If a clock has ticked, it must tock, and thus time moves along. And in every tick and tock, there’s a story. Sometimes more than one.
Once upon a tick and tock, there was a great Lord and Lady, who were Patrons of the Arts and Sciences. They endowed libraries and laboratories, and commissioned portraits and poems and marvelous machines that could pay chess or spin a silk thread so fine you could barely see it or build their own, even tinier machines that could make tinier machines in turn, and so on and so on, until they produced the head of a pin inhabited by seven clockwork angels, all dancing.
The Lord and Lady loved the works they commissioned, but they yearned to produce something of their own. One day it came to pass that the Lady announced to her Lord that they had collaborated very well indeed, and that she would soon produce an heir.
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"The Wayward Wormhole, a new evolution of writing workshops has arrived. And I’m here for it! Geared more towards intermediate speculative fiction writers, the application process doesn’t ask about demographics like some other workshops and focuses entirely on your writing. The television free Spanish castle made for an idyllic and intimate setting while the whole experience leaned more in the direction of bootcamp slumber party. Our heavy and constant workload was offset by the family style meals together with our marvelous instructors. The Wayward Wormhole is not for the faint of heart but if you’re serious about supercharging your writing, then this is the place to do it."
~Em Dupre
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Let's Retain ALL the Rights!
One of the questions being raised repeatedly on a discussion board I participate on is the question of electronic rights. Should a magazine be able to buy a story and display it on their website in perpetuity without additional payment? Does it make a different whether or not it’s behind a paywall? If there’s no additional payment, when should rights revert? What happens with something like an anthology that is in electronic form and hence won’t go out of print the way a hard-copy edition does?
I’m presuming that most people reading this know that normally when you “sell” a story to a publication, what they’re actually buying is the right to publish it in a particular form. You, the author, retain any rights not spelled out in the contract. You can (and I encourage you to) sell the story again as a reprint, and you may want to look at forms like audio or in another language.
This is something that’s still very new, and it’s not something that’s been factored in when lists like SFWA-qualifying markets were put together. It’s not mentioned on sites like Ralan.com or the Submission Grinder. As a writer, though, you need to be aware of what you’re selling.
If you’re publishing, how do you feel about perpetual rights? Is the horse already well out of the barn as far as that goes, or can writers push back on the practice of acquiring perpetual rights without payment?
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Submissions: how to, tracking them, etiquette, types (flash to novel)
Agents: researching and querying them
Conventions: why go, what to do to make the most of them, top cons
Workshops: why do (or not), how to make the most of them, top ones
Blogging & websites: why, BRIEF discussion of mechanics
Publications to follow
Networking
SFWA and other professional organizations
Writing groups
Resources
Keeping yourself motivated
So here’s my question. I’ll be glancing back at this list when thinking about future blog posts and drawing from it as well as from what I’m experiencing in my own writing. What would -you- like to see?