Rachel Swirsky was nominated for her novelette “A Memory of Wind”. Instead of asking that tired question of why you became a writer, I’m curious if there were ever any moments in your writing career where you were tempted to set it aside for a while and do something else?  If so, what kept you […]

Amazon.com is now offering BookScan information to authors enrolled in their Author Central program. For authors, previously one had to subscribe to BookScan or to get their sales numbers through their agents or publishers. Amazon says: We’re happy to announce that – for the first time ever – authors can see weekly sales trends of […]

When we write, it’s easy to get carried away, to fall in love with our own endless descriptions of whatever we personally think is amazing: sunsets, flowers, action, aliens, guns, food, sex, shoes…. But when you read your work aloud and discover you’ve spent five minutes on something, no matter how pretty the words are you have to realize you’ve gone long.

Every book on how to be your own boss has instructions about when to give up your day job. Each one of these books has a particular rule of thumb. Some say you cannot quit your day job until you have three months’ salary in the bank.

People once learned from one another what was worth knowing and doing, and the best of these memes worked their way through the population like a unending game of telephone. It was only with the advent of mass communication technology like printing, radio, and TV that a select few became able to easily influence great numbers of people. But with social media those select few are now finding themselves increasingly drowned out.

Renovation is delighted to announce an open competition for the design of the 2011 Hugo Award base. The Convention is soliciting artists and designers from around the world to come up with a base that is worthy of the Hugo Award and which reflects the convention’s theme of the New Frontiers and/or the region of Reno, Nevada and the North-Western United States.

Machiavelli advised that, “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” And all he had to scheme about was petty squabbles between Italian city-states. Which brings us to InterstellarNet: New […]

Why does the Nineteeth Century have such a hold on the imaginations of science fiction writers and readers?

by A.C. Crispin Introduction Agents–When Do You Need One? Getting Started–Compiling a List, Researching Agent Listings, and Following Submission Guidelines How to Recognize Real Agents Writing the Synopsis Writing the Query Letter Sending Out Your Query Letters Playing the Waiting Game Make Sure Your Manuscript Lives Up to Your Query The Psychology of Querying Introduction […]

While a great deal has been written about Cold War culture, very little has been written about post-Cold War culture as such, science fiction included. Part of it may be the lack of really significant, defining movements or innovations, at least since the cyberpunk of the 1980s.