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The Poet’s Toolbox: Three Strategies for a Vivid Prose Voice

By Ursula Whitcher Writing poetry allows for rapid experimentation with language on a fine scale. Though there’s lots of mystique around being a poet, the key genre expectation is close attention: poetry rewards readers for noticing what’s happening at the level of a page, a phrase, or even a pair of words. But poets don’t […]

Gamifying Your Writing Goals

By Gideon P. Smith We all have writing dreams, but they often remain dreams without solid productivity goals to turn them into reality. Unfortunately, as with adhering to the Prime Directive or making the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs, most quickly fail. Many systems have been proposed to help us succeed. SMARTER goals is […]

In Memoriam: John Maddox Roberts

John Maddox Roberts (25 June 1947 – 23 May 2024), also writing as Mark Ramsay, was a prolific and best-selling science fiction, fantasy, historical, and mystery writer over the course of thirty-five years. He was the author of many novels set in ancient Rome, including Hannibal’s Children and its sequel The Seven Hills, and the […]

Results of the 2024 SFWA Officer Elections

Full SFWA members had the opportunity to vote last spring for 2024 candidates for the SFWA Board of Directors and another chance to vote in a Special Election in October. We’d like to thank all our members who took the time to vote. The SFWA Board and staff would also like to thank the candidates […]

How to Rewrite a Story for a Different Call

By Dannye Chase So you’ve got a solid story and a perfect publication. The problem? They don’t quite match up.  Have no fear! If you wrote it, you can unwrite it, and then rewrite it for that sweet new market.  Before we get started, it’s important to note there are some really good reasons not […]

Culture: Moving Beyond Set Dressing

by Kanishk Tantia The first story I ever wrote was unabashedly my own: written with unfiltered childlike enthusiasm, completed within a single draft and, to my eyes, perfect upon completion. Two donkeys killed each other because one was purple and the other brown, and their bodies blocked a rickety bridge. A nearby settlement relied on […]

Perceiving the Wind: Finding Magic in the Mundane

by Austin Conrad As advice, “write what you know” is nearly as hackneyed as “show, don’t tell.” Both pieces of advice are essentially correct, but writers hear them so often we don’t really process either recommendation. This is doubly true in speculative fiction. After all, very few of us have ridden on the back of […]