Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Three Cool Things Just For You

We're at the height of conference season in the wildlife field and I've had no time blog about cool writing...things...and stuff.

As you can tell, my already fragile mental powers are at their breaking point.

Never fear though! I have three cool things for you that I just have to share.

1. Daily Science Fiction - This has been a great find for me. Every day DSF publishes a new, high quality (we're talkin' Hugo award winning) science fiction short story. You can sign up to have them delivered by email, which is sweet. I usually don't have time to keep up with every story so I print the emails to pdf's and throw them on my Kindle. Perfect diversion for "waiting for my wife time". All you husbands out there know what I'm talking about. 

Here's a blurb from their site:

Original Science Fiction and Fantasy every weekday. Welcome to Daily Science Fiction, an online magazine of science fiction short stories. We publish "science fiction" in the broad sense of the word: This includes sci-fi, fantasy, slipstream-- whatever you'd likely find in the science fiction section of your local bookstore. Our stories are mostly short short fiction (flash fiction) each Monday through Thursday, hopefully the right length to read on a coffee break, over lunch, or as a bedtime tale. Friday's weekend stories are longer. 

2.  Duotrope - I'm probably lagging behind the curve when it comes to discovering this site but holy crap is it ever useful! You can search for markets for any genre of fiction or non-fiction and use their submission tracker to...track your submissions (amazing!). One of the coolest things is that you can view reports on the data they track such as reply times and acceptance rates. Sweet!

3. Drop everything and watch this short film about the Dutch robot wars (I originally found this on io9). This is short story science fiction at its finest!!! (be sure to watch all the way to the end)


11 comments:

  1. Oh no to fragile mental powers! :/

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  2. I'm working on a science fiction piece myself. It's called my master's thesis.

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    1. Sounds like a page turner. Maybe I should try writing one of those.

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  3. DSF is one of my favorite markets. I love the diversity of work they publish and the fact that they focus more on cool (sometimes risky) ideas than on sheer prose.

    And yeah, Duotrope is a godsend! I was lucky enough to know about it when I first started writing shorts. I don't know what I would have done without it. I love that it lets you back up your subs to a PDF file for record keeping, as well.

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    1. Have you been published on DSF? I've submitted one story there and it was turned down. Someday though!

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    2. Alas, not yet. I've had a couple second round bumps though, and one rejection with a "P.S. Almost" at the bottom.

      I'm trying to make an effort to send them more flash, since that's what they prefer. Thus far, I've mainly been sending shorts, just because that's most of my output.

      Good luck! We'll crack them one of these days.

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Love to get comments!!!