Summer wound down, and we entered heat-mad August, days of sweat and sunshine, so hot you didn’t really want to move. But somehow, when evening started falling and the air cooled off a little, your energy would return.
And sometimes one of the places to burn some of that off was by driving up to the Michigan dunes, building a fire and getting drunk on the beach. I went up one evening with Anna, and a bunch of other friends from high school. I didn’t particularly like them or want to hang around with them, but Anna wanted it, and she made me promise to come.
It was what I had expected. A lot of beer and a couple of bottles of Jaeger getting passed around. We knew a spot that was technically private property, but the owners of the house far above were rarely there to disturb us. We sat on the soft sand around a fire made from the wood we’d brought and I watched the stars far out over the lake, wondering when I could gracefully excuse myself and slip away.
That was why I was the first person to see them. Somet, out in the water, coming towards our fire. At first I thought they were fish, or seals, or something, not people. But as the heads came up out of the water, I realize they were human. Women, three of them.
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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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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.
Tabita interrupted. She was a classic old crone of Tabat, her skin darkened from exposure to the salt wind, her hair cut short in the manner of sailors, which older women affected due to its easiness, if they had retained enough hair to make the style dignified.
Tabita had. She was a severe but elegant woman of perhaps sixty, with turquoise eyes and a string of amber around her neck. “They say ghosts linger because of unfinished business,” she said to the Doctor. “Is that true?”
He stroked his whiskers, eying the squid pudding that trembled like a fever patient in the center of the table. “On occasion, ma’am, aye.”
“Is that why our twins linger then? Some unfinished business?”
“It is more likely that one or the other of them does not realize she is dead,” he said, parceling out a fragment of the pudding, which smelled better than it looked. An oily sheen rainbowed its surface.
“How could they not know that?” a waitress squeaked, he wasn’t sure which one.
Doctor Fantastik fixed her with a portentous eye. No particular amount of ghost energy clung to her, other than the growth that covered them all, the ectoplasmic snail ooze that ghosts could not help but exude and which grew throughout this building, shaggy and slimy as rotting moss.
Summer wound down, and we entered heat-mad August, days of sweat and sunshine, so hot you didn’t really want to move. But somehow, when evening started falling and the air cooled off a little, your energy would return.
2 Responses
Nice. And I love the Cat Rambo sketch! — from the other Cat 🙂
I think all the spec-fic Cats need to get t-shirts made that say something like “I’m part of the SF Cat posse.” 🙂