Perhaps I exaggerate slightly. On making my way through the latest edition, I came across the following: Next Issue Aurealis appears ten times a year. Every month except January and December. The next issue, Aurealis #68 will be published in March 2014 featuring: “Icarus” by Tara Calby and “Avoiding Gagarin” by David Stevens I knew […]
An e mail awaited me when I woke this morning: Hi, David Stevens, We greatly enjoyed reading your story. It’s my pleasure to tell you we’d like to include it in issue # … Nothing like a bit of validation to lift the spirits! My first SFWA rate sale. Details to follow once everything is […]
A shout out here from Crossed Genres magazine, requiring 600 subscriptions before the end of the year so that it doesn’t close its doors forever. A year’s subscription for $15. There are few enough professional markets for speculative fiction, so check it out and see if it interests you, before the chance is lost forever […]
Aurealis has been promoting Australian speculative fiction and supporting Australian writers since 1990. Their latest endeavour is to seek to become a Science Fiction Writers of America qualifying market, one of the prerequisites for which is to pay writers 5 cents a word (soon to be 6 cents) for stories published in their magazine. In […]
Here at The Stevens Institute (charitable status pending, we shall be seeking your donations shortly), we seek to ethicise omnivorism (and invent new words to patent). We are trying folks, we really are. We have put all of this week’s grant money into considering balloon animals. Some of you may be scoffing, as you associate […]
Horace Tott spent an uneventful life in Cheshire always intending to write a large book on English magic, but never quite beginning. And so he died at seventy-four, still imagining he might begin next week, or perhaps the week after that. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
News of the bus misadventure high in the Canutes caused me to reflect on an incident from my school days. Those of a certain age will remember the tightening of the local school curriculum, when a scientific fine tooth comb was drawn through the hippy length hair of what in those days passed for the […]
The real reason to write fiction, after all, isn’t to make money, nor to show the human heart in conflict with itself, nor to give a picture of one’s time, nor to call attention to the plight of any oppressed classes, but to show off. You want to be able to say to visitors, “Sit […]
The world of rejection slips is probably more impersonal than it ever was, now that form letters have been replaced by form e mails. As a person who is able to work out what people were thinking by the way they placed a stamp on an envelope, (I have a story about that somewhere), I […]
I’ve been blogging in a few places under a nom de guerre, which was all lots of fun, but the years pass by and the things I meant to do remain undone, and I realised blogging had become another distraction, or worse, an ersatz alternative to writing fiction, a trick that allows me to think, […]
Nobody is looking 