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Janni Lee Simner’s first young adult fantasy is the post-apocalyptic
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This collection will take you on a truly fantastic journey
through versions of Texas that never were, and might have been.
Nebula Awards Weekend
The Forty-Seventh Nebula Awards Weekend will be held Thursday through Sunday, May 17 to May 20, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia, near Reagan National Airport.
We honor Connie Willis as our Grand Master!
To register, click on “Registration” in the menu to the immediate left. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the “Register” button.
Tours, workshops and panels are available for registered attendees (the number of people who can be accommodated on the tours and workshops is limited.) Active and Associate SFWA members may nominate works, until February 15th, for the awards to be presented at the May 19th Nebula Awards Weekend Banquet. Hour long interviews and readings will be recorded by Jim Freund for his Hour of the Wolf radio show broadcast on WBAI (99.5FM) in New York City.
Jon Williams is our Toastmaster (he will also conduct a half-day Writers Workshop on Friday morning.) Mike Fincke is our Keynote Speaker.
The Mass Autographing Session on Friday, May 18th will be followed by a reception to honor the nominees and other honorees.
You don’t have to be a nominee, a member of SFWA, or even a writer to participate in the weekend. Registration for the 2012 Nebula Awards Weekend is open now. The cost for the Nebula Awards Banquet is $75.00 per person. The cost to register is $50.00 for a SFWA Member and $60.00 for a non-SFWA Member until February 29, 2012. Rates for registration will be higher as the date of the event draws closer.
Results from the 2010 Nebula Awards (presented 2011).
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Archive for December, 2010
Guest Post: Blowing Up Planets
Thursday, December 30th, 2010
by Nathan Bergey
Doomsday scenarios are a dime a dozen. When a villain claims to be on the verge of ‘destroying the Earth’ he/she usually means killing everyone/everything on it. But sometimes simply killing all humans isn’t good enough. Unfortunately even the vast amounts of energy necessary to wipe out all civilization is woefully inadequate to physically destroy the planet. To do that would take some serious power.
Planets Die Hard
The Earth has been here for about 4.5 billion years. Nothing yet has been able to destroy it, including being slammed into by another planet. Why is it so hard to destroy? The short and somewhat obvious answer is Earth is big—really big. And if you simply break it into a bunch of pieces it will just fall back together again because of gravity. In order to really destroy it you have to break it up and then fling to pieces away at a high enough speed such that they will never come back together (escape velocity). This requires going above and beyond with one’s diabolical destruction schemes.
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Tags: Nathan Bergey
Posted in SFWA Blog | 8 Comments »
Quick Updates for 2010-12-30
Thursday, December 30th, 2010
Member News
- Hugo Award Winner and SFWA member Will McIntosh On the Future of Spec Fic/Historical Mashups & Other Things at Stephanie Dray’s blog.
- SFWA member Joanne Merriam was just published at Every Day Poets.
- Welcome to SFWA's newest Associate member Maureen K. Power, with a sale to InterGalactic Medicine Show. Read an excerpt here.
- Welcome to SFWA's newest Associate member Anne M. Pillsworth. Read her qualifying story at The Pedestal Magazine.
Industry News
- Angry Robot will be reading unagented manuscripts for the month of March, 2011. More information here.
- NEWS: Highlights for Children is SFWA's newest qualifying market.
Tags: Anne M. Pillsworth, Joanne Merriam, Maureen K. Power, twitter, Will McIntosh
Posted in News, SFWA Blog | Comments Off
Highlights for Children is SFWA’s Newest Qualifying Market
Wednesday, December 29th, 2010
Today the board of directors of SFWA unanimously voted to add Highlights for Children to the list of SFWA qualifying markets. This venerable magazine began publishing in 1946 publishes short fiction for children. It has served as an early gateway to reading for many science-fiction and fantasy writers.
Speculative fiction short story sales to Highlights may be used toward membership with SFWA.
Congratulations to the entire editorial staff at Highlights and their writers!
Tags: Highlights, qualifying market
Posted in News, SFWA Blog | 1 Comment »
Nebula Awards Guest Post: Sex, Skin and Secret Messages
Wednesday, December 29th, 2010
by Sheila Finch
Sailing off the coast of Long Beach, we’re likely to see harbor seals sunning themselves on a bell buoy. They lift their heads lazily at our passing, perhaps wondering about our lives as we wonder about theirs; they fascinate us, these sea-dwelling mammals, teasing our imagination. If our boat comes too close, they’re likely to bark at us and slip away below the waves.
What is it that makes us entertain fantasies about mating outside our own species? Surely this can’t be in our DNA; the mule, sterile offspring of a horse and donkey’s mating, is an example of the evolutionary dead end that results.Yet since our earliest days we’ve apparently been fascinated by the non-human cultures we co-exist with, and the fantasy of strange creatures, able to shift from wild animal to human. Long before we could write, we told stories around the campfire about them, as lovers, not monsters.
We must leave out of the discussion immortal beings such as Zeus that adopt animal shapes in order to seduce human females, and those that are portrayed as half-and-half, such as satyrs and the like. The hallmark of stories about the shape shifting animal spouse is that both partners are mortal (thus the stories are fairy tales, not myths), they are each clearly one species not hybrids, and they involve suffering for both, sometimes physical, almost always emotional.
Bruno Bettelheim wrote in The Uses of Enchantment (1975) that fairy tales were the means by which human tribes handed down their accumulated wisdom to the next generation. They are not message-free; in fact, the opposite is true. In later centuries, we seem to have watered down the messages (especially in the post-Disney world), but the continuing popularity even into our scientific age of what might otherwise be considered mere “nursery tales” tells us at least some of the original serious intention seems to be getting through.
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Tags: Nebula Awards, Sheila Finch
Posted in Nebula Awards, SFWA Blog | 4 Comments »
Guest Post: Experiments with E-books
Monday, December 27th, 2010
by Jim C. Hines
Earlier this year, I was studying my royalty statement from DAW, comparing my print and electronic sales. I’ve been hearing for years that print is dying and e-books are the future, so I was rather surprised to find that electronic sales made up only 3-5% of my overall book sales.
Certain champions of self-publishing were quick to point out what I was doing wrong. My books were priced too high at $6.99. Digital rights management (DRM) was hurting me too. And of course, by going through a major publisher, I was cutting myself out of the big royalties.
So I decided to experiment. In October, I put my out-of-print mainstream novel Goldfish Dreams up for sale on B&N and Amazon as a $2.99, DRM-free e-book. My friend Steven Saus did the conversion for me. (This is not an instant or easy process; both Amazon and B&N have guidelines for their preferred formats.)
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Tags: electronic publishing, Jim C. Hines
Posted in Networking and Self-Promotion, Publishing Technologies, SFWA Blog, The Business of Writing | 23 Comments »
Key Conditions for Reader Suspense:
Part 2 – The Three Problem Types
Saturday, December 25th, 2010
by John D. Brown
In the last post, I talked about the idea that suspense is a reader concept—it happens in the reader. With this post we begin looking at the key conditions that build reader suspense. Stories are made up of four main ingredients: character, setting, problem, and plot. All of these are important, but problem is the engine that makes suspense go. So we’re going to start there.
Form follows function, so what types of problems lead to us hoping and fearing for a character?
I see three main types.
Problem Type 1: Danger/Threat
In this type of problem, there’s a danger or threat to some aspect of the character’s happiness that is significant enough that the READER can sympathize.
With these problems we HOPE the character avoids or eliminates the danger, but we FEAR they may not. There are many aspects of happiness that might be threatened or in danger. I’ve listed below those that raise my FEAR and would raise my fear for someone else. I’ve stated them in first person, but you can think about them in third.
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Tags: John D. Brown
Posted in Advice for New Writers, Information Center, SFWA Blog, The Craft of Writing, Writing Technique | 2 Comments »
Quick Updates for 2010-12-25
Saturday, December 25th, 2010
- Angry Robot will be accepting unagented manuscripts for the month of March, 2011. http://is.gd/jnBbB #
Tags: twitter
Posted in Excluded Categories | Comments Off
Quick Updates for 2010-12-24
Friday, December 24th, 2010
- Hugo Award Winner and SFWA member Will McIntosh On the Future of Spec Fic/Historical Mashups & Other Things http://bit.ly/e4gh3r #
- SFWA member @joannemerriam was just published at Every Day Poets. http://is.gd/jlfPV #
Tags: twitter
Posted in Excluded Categories | Comments Off
Holiday Hiatus
Thursday, December 23rd, 2010
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware
Because even watchdogs have to rest sometimes, the Writer Beware blog will be taking a break over the holiday season. Unless there's a really juicy publishing story, this blog will be on hiatus until the new year. (We'll still be answering email, so if you want to reach us, drop us a line at beware @ sfwa.org).
Tags: Writer Beware
Posted in SFWA Blog, Writer Beware | Comments Off
Guest Post: Steampunk/Alt History Week
Living in Color
Thursday, December 23rd, 2010
by Tanita Davis
When steampunk hit its recent resurgence, I thought back to my love of The Wild, Wild West reruns with just a bit of nostalgia. Though the whole idea of mad scientists and brass implements, gears, cranks, and alchemical pseudoscience is so much fun, I didn’t feel particularly drawn. After all, steampunk is based on Victorian times, the period of 1837-1901. In the West, the Gold Rush was just starting, the Chinese were immigrating, the Civil War was just ending, and the British Empire was forcing imperialism on any country who couldn’t escape. Considering that history, I wasn’t sure steampunk was entirely accessible to everyone… and by that, I mean, I thought there wasn’t anything for people of color to get into. After all, historically during that time, people of color were either slaves or indentured, with their countries being invaded or occupied. They didn’t seem to me to be the inventors or the major players in the world.
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Tags: steampunk, Tanita Davis
Posted in SFWA Blog | 5 Comments »