by Theodora Goss
When I teach writing, I teach craft. Art goes beyond craft, and has to do with what a writer, as an individual, brings to writing. Art is in the way Virginia Woolf explores consciousness. In the way George Orwell writes about politics.
by Helena Bell
The application season for Clarion West and other Clarion (UCSD) has begun. I’ve already seen posts on twitter from past alums encouraging people to apply and telling the world what wonderful, glorious experiences they had.
I’m not going to do that. I’m going to tell you not to apply. To not go. And here are my reasons:
Dragons in your pickle jar. Devils at the diner. Sentient space ships named for epic poetry. All these and more inhabit the pages of the annual Alphanthology, an illustrated collection of flash fiction by alumni of the Alpha SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers. Alpha is a nonprofit, ten-day residential workshop for teen writers of genre fiction, held every summer in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
Ever wonder what the sky looked like in 1006 CE, when a supernova could be seen during the day? What dates did full moons illuminate the fog of Whitechapel as Jack the Ripper prowled the streets? When a character swims the Arctic Ocean, in a story set two thousand years in the future, what star might she use to guide her passage? Stellarium provides answers.
Shelfari is, like GoodReads and LibraryThing, another social book cataloging website. Online book retailer AbeBooks owns a large percentage of the company. Users catalog the books they own or have read and can rate, review, and tag those books as well as discussing them on the site.
Here at Writer Beware, we love the weird stuff–the nutty, fring-y, even, dare I say, totally freaking insane things that are always cropping up at the boundaries of the publishing world, often spawned by people who haven’t really taken the time to think things through.
Last week a literary agent contacted me on Twitter. “Ever heard of these folks?” she asked. “They’ve been spamming us all day.”
The link she gave me led to a service called Agent Artery.
Neal Barrett, Jr. (b.1929) died on January 12. Barrett was named SFWA Author Emeritus at the 2010 Nebula Award Weekend in Cocoa Beach, Florida.
Geoffrey A. Landis, science fiction author and scientist working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), is the 2014 winner of the Robert A. Heinlein Award. The award is bestowed for outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space.
The judges of the 2013 Philip K. Dick Award and the Philadelphia SF Society, along with the Philip K. Dick Trust, are pleased to announce seven nominated works that comprise the final ballot for the award:
The Drunken Dragon is a satire of epic fantasies told from the dragon Draco’s perspective. If Groucho Marx had done GOT from a dragon’s perspective, it might have turned out like this.
L. Marie Wood creates immersive worlds that defy genre as they intersect horror, romance, mystery, thriller, sci-fi, and fantasy elements to weave harrowing tapestries of speculative fiction. Wood is a Professor of English and Creative Writing.
