Planetside Full Archives

by Kate Heartfield In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was a dabbler in short fiction. I wrote about one story each year. I’d send that story out once, maybe twice if I felt cocky, and then I’d trunk it, figuring…

Winners and accepters at the 2015 Nebula Awards. (L to R) Steven Gould, Nancy Kress, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Scott Edelman, Ursula Vernon, Larry Niven, Stanley Schmidt, Usman T Malik, Sam J Miller, and Matthew Kressel.    

I am often asked what is the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. My shorthand answer is that we are an organization of Professional Writers working and publishing in the SF & Fantasy field. But what is this thing…

Working in Manhattan meant I was in the center of the universe. While working for DC Comics, I was a few blocks from Pocket Books where I was contributing to their Star Trek line of novels and a few blocks…

  In my freshman year in college, I made a serious mistake. I tried to workshop a science fiction story in my first creative writing class. I was completely addicted to science fiction and fantasy, having spent my childhood and…

Daughter of two Cuban political exiles, M.C.A. Hogarth was born a foreigner in the American melting pot and has had a fascination for the gaps in cultures and the bridges that span them ever since. She has been many things–web…

  I suppose I wanted to be convinced. While at a convention last summer, I attended a panel of SFWA members there to discuss and answer questions about the organization. When the panelists mentioned it would be nice to hear…

Back in college, when I first set out to be a professional author, the biggest question I wanted answered upfront was: “What does being a pro author mean?” What were the qualifications? How did I set goals to become a…

When I first qualified for SFWA, it had been going through yet another kerfuffle—which one almost certainly doesn’t matter; they tend to come up again and again. People were quitting, and there were questions about whether SFWA is still relevant….

It happens that I’m writing this blog in an airport, on my way home from a con where I moderated a panel about what SFWA offers to members. It’s something I’ve talked about a lot over the last few years,…

When I heard that the SFWA blog editors were asking members to write about their experiences with SFWA, my first thought was that I wasn’t the right person to do such a post.  After all, I’m not a big-name author,…