Archive for the ‘Tips for Beginners’ Category

Guest Post: Why You Don’t Want to Apply to Clarion West/Clarion UCSD.

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:

Guest Post: Alpha Workshop: Anthologies and Opportunities

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.

Tools for Writers: Shelfari

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.

Guest Post: Contrary Writing Advice: Don’t Finish This Story!

by Deborah J. Ross I love to take conventional wisdom and turn it on its head, following the tradition of rules are made to be broken but first you have to learn them. Beginning writers make mistakes. At least, I did, and I don’t know anyone who’s gone on to a successful writing career who didn’t. At […]

Alpha SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers accepting applications

Anyone who grew up yearning to become a writer knows it’s hard to do it alone. The Alpha SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers provides an environment for young writers ages 14-19 to build a community of likeminded wordsmiths. Each year, 20 students spend 10 days on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh’s Greensburg campus, crafting a short story and participating in peer critique groups.

Lit Fic Mags for Spec Fic Writers 103: Five Markets to Consider (and Two Databases to Bookmark)

by Caren Gussoff Note: Part One appears here: Lit Fic Mags for Spec Fic Writers 101. Part Two appears here: Lit Fic Mags for Spec Fic Writers 102: Is It Literary? ••• Now, you’ve decided to submit to a literary market for a particular story. You’re hip to the fundamental differences between lit mags and SFF mags […]

Lit Fic Mags for Spec Fic Writers 102: Is it Literary?

by Caren Gussoff Note: Part One appears here: Lit Fic Mags for Spec Fic Writers 101 This may seem totally obvious, but is actually worth a deeper dive: if you want to market your speculative fiction to literary markets, it has to be significantly literary. Literary markets, though they may protest that they do not like/accept/read […]