I won the Leilani doll in the Locus Awards raffle, and the lei is also a souvenir of that delightful occasion. But the coolest thing received there was the Arc of NEAR+FAR!!It’s the start of another Clarion West season. As always, it was marked by the Locus Awards, which were a ton of fun and extra cool because they were my first chance to see the ARC (advance reading copy) of the book coming out this September. I’ve been to the house and met most of the students — they all have that glazed, not-sure-what-to-expect look in their eyes. And the Clarion West Write-a-thon is starting. This’ll be the 6th or 7th time I’ve participated in it, I think.
This year I’m using it to spur effort on the urban fantasy novel I’ve been working on, THE EASTER BUNNY MUST DIE! At Rio Hondo, they suggested a new way to begin it, so I’ve got to write that chapter, tweak the existing ones so they fall in line nicely after that, and then take up where I left off, in a grumpy healer’s cavern, confronting the Marlboro Man. Nuff said?
So I must tell you, that should you wish to support me in the Write-a-thon, even if it’s just a buck, you’ll be receiving snippets in the mail that will not be made available to the public – perhaps ever, perhaps not until the book is done. I hope you’ll support me (or perhaps some other fine writer working on Write-a-thon goals) this summer.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Documents of Tabat: Fashions of Tabat
What are the documents of Tabat? In an early version of the book, I had a number of interstitial pieces, each a document produced by the city: playbills, advertisements, guide book entries. They had to be cut but I kept them for web-use. I hope you enjoy this installment, but you’ll have to read Beasts of Tabat to get the full significance. -Cat
An Instructive Listing of the Fashions of Tabat, being Pamphlet #2 of the first series of “A Visitor’s Guide to Tabat,” Spinner Press, author unknown.
Tabat, like any city, has fashions that distinguish it, often shaped by the city’s history and resources. To look like one of the natives, you may want to purchase one or more of the following to wear.
Feather cockades, worn pinned to the breast or on a hat, represent a long tradition in the city. The explorers of the early expedition Perseverance found a river of feathers, cast off by vast flocks of waterfowl. They brought back sackfuls of the varicolored feathers to the city and it became customary to show one’s support for one expedition or another by wearing the cockades. In recent times they have become associated with different political powers in the city and with the coming of the elections, they are widely used to indicate one’s party affiliation.
Rain market hats, wide-brimmed and tightly woven of purple reeds, are seen in abundance on the streets of Tabat and are as functional and cheap as they are picturesque. Some sellers sell hats with designs or slogans painted upon them, often distributing the latter at political rallies.
Great-coats, woven of wool or made of dyed fur, are traditional gear for Merchants, Explorers, and others who travel widely. Their styles may vary from year to year in matters like buttons, pocket cut, or thickness of piping, but generally they remain the same in overall look.
Dandies of either sex prize the fine lace gloves produced by the Altos factory, where they are woven by the large spiders exclusive to Altos use by order of the Duke. If on the street outside where they are housed in early morning or evening, linger to hear their haunting song.
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Love the world of Tabat and want to spend longer in it? Check out Hearts of Tabat, the latest Tabat novel! Or get sneak peeks, behind the scenes looks, snippets of work in progres, and more via Cat’s Patreon.
Putting Your Work Through the Mill: The Submissions Grinder
As a follow-up to Sylvia’s guest post about Submitomancy, I asked David Steffen, who’s working on a similar project for a Duotrope replacement, to write about his Submissions Grinder. Here’s David:
The announcement in late 2012 that Duotrope was going paid caused a (relative) uproar in the writing community. The problem wasn’t that they wanted money. It was that requiring a subscription fee to use
the site drives away the most valuable asset the site has to offer–submission data. Everything else that Duotrope had to offer could be found somewhere else, but their submission tracker combined with market listings and statistics aggregation offered a tool for writers. Even for those people who are willing to pay $50, they are now paying $50 for what even Duotrope estimates will be perhaps 15% of their prior user base.
Anthony Sullivan and I have created a replacement, called the Submission Grinder (http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/), with the intent of milling your submissions into something useful… Because we’re hosting this new project as a subodmain of our zine Diabolical Plots (http://www.diabolicalplots.com/) we wanted the name to sound like something the mad scientist of our site art would invent and use.
We are starting out with the promise that we will never charge a compulsory fee for subscription. We think that’s the primary way where Duotrope has gone wrong, in driving away the data. We may open for donations at some point, and may run some kind of Kickstarter campaign. But rather than ask the world to donate to us for a theoretical product, we would rather provide a concrete product that people can use, soon enough after January 1st to allow a decent handoff, and then ask for donations from people who like what we have provided at a later time.
Phase One of our project is complete, in which the goal was to create something that could replace Duotrope’s functionality as close to January 1st as possible. And we’re there, with market listings, a submissions tracker, and compiled statistics. The site is in beta right now as we resolve some issues, but it gets better every day and there is daily development work being done on it. We are the first site aiming at the Duotrope userbase to become available for use.
The next phase involves adding new features that Duotrope has never provided, including new statistics based on only your own works, visualization of submissions data (rather than only numbers), and more!
Do you want to help? Here are ways that you can help right now.
Register on the site.
Did you get an export file from Duotrope? Import that into your account. You can pick up right where you left off and it gives more data to provide more robust statistics, as well as giving us new blank market listings for the markets you’ve submitted to (which we will fill in as time goes on).
Suggest new market listings.
Submit bug reports, and suggestions for new features/enhancements. We’re writers too, and anything that you suggest that would be useful (or at least something that appeals to statistics-lovers even if not
strictly useful) will get us excited. The comment thread at this link would be a good place: http://www.diabolicalplots.com/?p=3176
Help us spread the word. The more the merrier. The more writers import and track their data, the more useful the statistics will be, the more useful the site as a whole will be, the more users will come. Blog posts, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Stumbleupon, posts on writing forums, emails to writer friends, sky writing, bathroom graffiti, any other way that you can think to share this link with the world.
One Response
Yay! I am looking forward to reading the revised versions and picking up more.