A Little SF For Your Christmas

I received a free download copy of an issue of Apex Magazine today. It was a thank you gift for entering the A Merry Little Apex Christmas Flash Fiction Contest.

Whether we’re ready to admit it or not – and I’m definitely not ready to admit it yet – Christmas is right around the corner. This means all the lights, the music, the festivities, and the cheer. To help brighten up the holiday Apex style, we’ve decided to run a flash fiction contest.

How to enter:

• All entries must have to do with Christmas, but have a distinctly Apex slant – dark science fiction, fantasy, or horror
• You can submit anytime between now until December 16th
• 250 word limit
• Email entries to apexwritingcontest@gmail.com with the title and author name in the subject line
• Limit 3 entries per person
• Story should be in the body of the email
• Submissions will be read by Jason Sizemore and me (Lesley Conner) with the winning story being published on the Apex blog on December 23rd. Besides getting their flash fiction published on the Apex blog, the winner also receives the following fantastic prize pack: a short story (up to 5,000 words long) critiqued by Apex owner/publisher Jason Sizemore, payment of 5 cents a word, and a one year subscription to Apex Magazine.
• To make sure that everyone has a merry Christmas, all entrants will receive a free issue of Apex Magazine. All you have to do is let us know in your submission email which issue of Apex Magazine you would like and we will send it out to you.

They didn't quite make it clear whether they wanted the stories in one or separate emails, so since I had three stories, I put them in separate emails, noting which ones were (1 of 3), etc. And I included my one back issue request in each email, noting I was assuming it was one per author, not one per sub.

Now I'm not noted for writing short, but I do on occasion write a Christmas themed short for the blog. Sometimes I don't get around to it, so any stories which don't get picked, will grace these pages instead. Merwy Cripsmess, Dammit.

And you can spread your own holiday cheer to them as well, if you hop onto this quick. Deadline is the 16th and I believe they'll be posting the winners on the 23rd -- I'll let you know either way where my three stories will go. (grin)

Dr. Phil

The Writer As Metaphor

2007 Tiptree Award honoree Nnedi Okorafor has a piece on the WOTF blog about The Sport of Writing. The things you don't know about authors -- Nnedi was involved with junior tennis for a while. (grin) I mean, I knew of her through her writing, and that she had a Ph.D. from UIC and teaches creative writing at Chicago State University. Stuff like that. Possibly more than I know of many SFF authors. But still.

Go ahead and click the link to read the essay. I won't mind. It's not what you think from the title.

. . .

. . .

. . .

The reason to read the essay isn't because of tennis -- or track and field -- but of the act of writing. From staring at the blank page*** through the blacking out in the middle of writing to the high of completing a story, you may find some or all of these familiar. So if it's so damn obvious, why talk about?

Because new writers often feel like they are reinventing the wheel and the silicon PNP transistor all at the same time. There are plenty of creative writing classes and books on writing which aren't much help, especially to genre writers. I suspect Ms. Okorafor's creative writing classes at Chicago State might be different. Being actually published in non-literary journals isn't a requirement for most creative writing instructors, as I understand it.

Reading widely, meeting other authors, blogs, websites and high valued targets like Clarion and WOTF. It surely helped me as a writer to get out of my secret hiding place and just talk to people. To get some idea how markets worked, etc. But the Big Thing was realizing that writing was a lot like any other endeavour -- you don't have to work in a vacuum and you won't find that all of your writing quirks are unique in the history of mankind, or at least SF/F/H. But that doesn't make you some cookie cutter drone on some assembly line. We only care about the stories on this end. (evil-grin)

Anyway, it's a nice essay by a terrific author.

Dr. Phil

*** Or the not so blank screen of the modern word processor for many of us. Which brings me to another point, regarding how much blank screen you get. Back in the MS-DOS days, I knew a lot of people who preferred WordPerfect because you got more screen real estate to work with. As opposed to WordStar whose default menu took up a third of the screen if you didn't turn it off. Windows made us get used to multiple menu bars intruding on our space. The problem these days is that applied on tiny devices, my Kindle Fire HD for one, the usable writing area gets smaller and smaller.

But I digress...

UPDATE: 12/11/2013 -- In today's email, "Nnedi Okorafor was originally a published finalist in Writers of the Future Volume 18 in 2002 and has since gone on to a very successful writing career and is now a contest judge." And this essay first appeared in the current WOTF XXIX. No wonder I felt like I had seen it, but not read it -- in hospital I read all the stories but saved the essays for later... And like me, she was a published finalist, not a winner. (In doing a quick pre-lab for this piece, I glanced at the list of WOTF winners.)

Something For My Five Readers Out There -- And A Giveaway

Blind Eye Books is having a sale.

End of the Year Sale – Backlist Titles $7.00!!

Happy Holidays!

The Bellingham Blind Eye Books warehouse is getting pretty crowded. In order to make room for our 2014 releases we are having an end-of-the-year sale! Select print titles are only $7.00 (plus shipping). That’s right, you can now own print copies of Blind Eye Books backlist titles for less than the cost of an ebook. Stock is limited to what is available in our Bellingham warehouse so get them while they’re hot! Sale ends on December 31, 2013, or when we run out of stock, whichever comes first.

And just to save you the trouble, here’s a list of what’s on sale:

Tangle, Nicole Kimberling, editor
Tangle Girls, Nicole Kimberling, editor
Wicked Gentlemen by Ginn Hale
Strange Fortune by Josh Lanyon
Lord of the White Hell Book One by Ginn Hale
Lord of the White Hell Book Two by Ginn Hale
Turnskin by Nicole Kimberling
Irregulars by Nicole Kimberling, Josh Lanyon, Astrid Amara and Ginn Hale

Why do I care? Because one of my favorite stories, "Under Suspicion", is in the anthology Tangle Girls. Editor Nichole Kimberling was at the 2004 Clarion, and when she made a call for a lesbian themed anthology, I told her I was threatening to send her a military SF story -- and she replied that if I included my armored marines, to bring it on. Challenge accepted on both sides. I'd been considering a story idea for years about how one might ask first a first date on a starship. But it needed conflict. Problem solved.

Under Suspicion: Ensign Lily Branoch can’t keep her mind off of Marine Daniella Cruz-Ortega. But are the other woman’s flirtations real or a ploy to hide her involvement in the disappearance of a dangerous arms shipment?

So, you can order a copy of Tangle Girls or any of the SALE books for just $7+shipping at the Tangle Girls webpage. There's a convenient shipping calculator and a link direct to PayPal.

But Wait -- Didn't You Say Giveaway?

Indeed.

Since a lot of you wouldn't ordinarily cruise for LBGT fiction, despite some of the cool material out there, I decided to help Nikki and two of my five readers. (grin)

So... I've already ordered two copies of Tangle Girls and I'll be giving them away. Since this post is being crossposted between Dreamwidth and LiveJournal, as well as linked on Facebook, you can enter by:

• Commenting on this entry on LiveJournal (Anonymous comments do get moderated, don't worry) or Dreamwidth (I'm not sure if my Dreamwidth setting takes Anonymous comments).
• Comment on the Facebook entry.
• Or email me if you have one of my email addresses.
• By 11:59pm EST Friday 13 December 2013.

Winners will be selected by a random number generator. Books will be mailed out as soon as I get them and turn them around. Losers can still take advantage of the SALE price until Tuesday 31 December 2013 or the warehouse runs dry.

Winter Is Coming, especially as it's still officially Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere. As is Christmas. Just sayin'.

Dr. Phil

UPDATED: 12-17-2013 -- (1) Ah, the virtues of cut-and-paste and auto correct... I've fixed the anthology title. It's Tangle, not Tangled. (2) The winners are announced here (DW). Dr. Phil