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Teaser from Fairypunk Sleeping Beauty Story, "Seven Clockwork Angels, All Dancing"

Cover for "The Little Airship That Could"
Another offering is Peter J. Wacks' "The Little Airship That Could".
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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Let's Retain ALL the Rights!

Picture of a handwritten pageOne 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.

Take some time to skim through the contract and find out what the publication is buying. What’s the “exclusive period,” the period where they are the only ones that can print it? What forms are they planning to release your work in? Here’s a Columbia Law School resource that may be helpful in trying to decipher legalese.

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?

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

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Class Notes From Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction

View of a Japanese Garden
Images speak differently than words. They speak in color and shapes, smells and movements that our writing can only hope to approximate.
We’re coming up on the end of the Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction class I teach at Bellevue College. Tonight’s the next to last session. In earlier sessions we’ve talked about the writing process, story parts and mechanics, delivering information, characters, description, and worldbuilding. A number of past blog posts have come out of those classes: 5 Things to Do in Your First 3 Paragraphs, Active Verbs, Foreshadowing and Establishing Conflict, Plotting and Re-plotting Stories, Three Strategies for Snaring the Senses, Three Things that End a Story Well, Using Random Tools Like Stumbleupon For Rewriting, and Why Titles Matter.

Here’s what we’re covering in this session and the next:

Tonight (Rewriting, Revising, and Polishing)

  • The difference between rewriting, revising, and polishing
  • Rewriting – ways to do it
  • Revising – things to look for
  • Polishing
  • Working at the sentence level
  • Placement of sentences
  • Breaking up paragraphs
  • Titles
  • Quoting song lyrics
  • Collaboration

Next Week (Publishing & Career Stuff)

  • Markets: researching them, submitting to them, querying them, foreign markets, reprints, audio.
  • 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?

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