Online Fiction Recommendations & Publications for 3/12/2013

Here’s some pieces that I’ve particularly enjoyed over the last week, as well as pointers to some recent publications of my own.

Print:

Apex Magazine had some terrific pieces in its March 2013 issue. My favorites are Mermaid’s Hook by Liz Argall and If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love by Rachel Swirsky. I will confess that I’m particularly fond of the latter because Rachel wrote it during a group flash writing session I was part of.
GrÃ¡ Linnaea has kicked off a serial fiction effort that’s a lot of fun. Check out The Curious Investigations of Miranda McGee on his website.
I love pieces of fiction masquerading as something else. It’s such a fabulous device when used well. Jake Kerr’s produced a great story doing exactly that in Biographical Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince for Lightspeed Magazine. (Question: is there no audio version? The “Listen” link doesn’t work for me.)
A lovely, resonant piece about grief from E. Lily Yu is up at Eclipse Online.
The Nymph of Limantour by J.J. Roth, up at Every Day Fiction, is a marine love story — or is it?
My collaboration with Ben Burgis, Logic and Magic in the Time of the Boat Lift appeared in Giganotasaurus. It’s a story of a motorcycle mechanic with a graduate degree in paraconsistent logic and a summons from the Powers that Be investigating a mystery involving were-gators, demons, and dreams of Che Guevera, all set in 1980s Miami and Cuba.

Audio:

Part of the Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading at Arisia, featuring Roxanne Bland, Kimberly Long-Ewing, and Gail Z. Martin. Broad Universe is a good organization for writers and well worth checking out if you don’t already know about it.
This piece on YA fiction podcast Cast of Wonders has a simple, almost pastoral world with a sinister overlay: magic that demands the sacrifice of young women and strict societal sexual roles. An almost inevitably tragic love story between Charlotte and Lily plays out against it. Eliza Hirsch, A Song for the Season, read by Kate Baker.
Sandra M. Odell writes wrenchingly and wonderfully. Check out David Milner Is… narrated by Joe Sammarco for Tales to Terrify.
The Drabblecast kicked off its Women and Aliens Month with Amid the Words of War, which originally appeared in Lightspeed Magazine and was reprinted in Near+Far. Eric Marsh does a super job with it.
Podcastle has the audio version of Logic and Magic in the Time of the Boat Lift, read adeptly and wonderfully as always by M.K. Hobson. I always smile when I hear her distinctive voice.

P.S. If you’re in the Seattle area, Deb Taber is reading tonight at the University Bookstore and should be well worth attending.

One Response

Jake Kerr says:

March 12, 2013 at 10:54 am

Thanks for the kind words, Cat! To answer your question: The nature of the piece was one that the Lightspeed team wouldn’t lend itself easily to audio. So I’m currently thinking of sending it off to an audio publication.

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Guidelines for Guest Blog Posts

June 22, 2017

Assembling an itinerary for a blog tour? Promoting a book, game, or other creative effort that’s related to fantasy, horror, or science fiction and want to write a guest post for me? Alas, I cannot pay, but if that does not dissuade you, here’s the guidelines. Guest posts are publicized on Twitter, several Facebook pages and groups, my newsletter, and in my weekly link round-ups; you are welcome to link to your site, social media, and other related material.

Send a 2-3 sentence description of the proposed piece along with relevant dates (if, for example, you want to time things with a book release) to cat AT kittywumpus.net. If it sounds good, I’ll let you know.

I prefer essays fall into one of the following areas but I’m open to interesting pitches:

Interesting and not much explored areas of writing
Writers or other individuals you have been inspired by
Your favorite kitchen and a recipe to cook in it
A recipe or description of a meal from your upcoming book
Women, PoC, LGBT, or otherwise disadvantaged creators in the history of speculative fiction, ranging from very early figures such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Wollstonecraft up to the present day.
Women, PoC, LGBT, or other wise disadvantaged creators in the history of gaming, ranging from very early times up to the present day.
F&SF volunteer efforts you work with

Length is 500 words on up, but if you’ve got something stretching beyond 1500 words, you might consider splitting it up into a series.

When submitting the approved piece, please paste the text of the piece into the email. Please include 1-3 images, including a headshot or other representation of you, that can be used with the piece and a 100-150 word bio that includes a pointer to your website and social media presences. (You’re welcome to include other related links.)

Or, if video is more your thing, let me know if you’d like to do a 10-15 minute videochat for my YouTube channel. I’m happy to handle filming and adding subtitles, so if you want a video without that hassle, this is a reasonable way to get one created. 🙂 Send 2-3 possible topics along with information about what you’re promoting and its timeline.

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First Editing Class: Notes and Observations

February 13, 2012

Photo of a black cat named Raven — The cats remain fascinated by the classes. They can't figure out who I'm talking to.

The Editing class is split into three sections. In this first session, we focused on developmental, or “big picture,” editing.

Some people are taking the class in order to edit their own stuff, others to edit for other folks, a couple for a combination of that. We talked about what a developmental edit is intended to do, and how it’s different from a copy-edit. In fact, you want to avoid copy-editing (other than a couple of cases which I’ll get to in a minute) because often that sentence you’re tinkering with will end up discarded or substantially revised in the final version.

Honing your editing ability to where you can trust it is one way to free yourself up when writing. Instead of listening to the internal editor telling you that sentence isn’t perfect or that you need to check that name on Wikipedia before using it, you can assure that editor it will get its chance during the revision process and go on writing.

Developing a process also helps you know when to stop rewriting. I work from the big picture stuff in, moving to small sentence level details in a second or third draft. Usually my process goes like this:

Bang out a first draft. It may have parenthetical directions like (expand on this) or (transition here) or (describe), but it is a complete story.
(Optional but encouraged) Let it sit for a week or two. This is where procrastination can really bite you in the ass.
Print out the draft and write all over it. This is my developmental edit, in which structures may get changes, sections moved (or eliminated), point of view or tense changed, etc. It’s also where all those parenthetical directions get fulfilled.
Entering these changes onto the computer may involve some more tinkering as I do so, but generally I’m working towards another draft that I can print out.
That draft gets printed out and edited again. This stage is where I read aloud and tinker at the sentence and paragraph level. I may changes names at this point, and I’ll do things like look for adverbs (as discussed in The 10% Solution).
I will probably do another read aloud pass after that’s entered into the computer, depending on how hard a deadline is pressing.

More on developmental editing, what it is, how I do it, and how one needs to adapt editing to genres such as hard SF, dark fantasy, horror, etc, in another post.

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Online Fiction Recommendations & Publications for 3/12/2013

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