Sarah Brand

Cheat sheet update: Shimmer and Strange Horizons have both reopened, and Strange Horizons is raising its pay rate to 7 cents per word. However, as a result, SH will be publishing fewer stories each month.

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I ended up submitting two stories to the Dell Awards this year. I wanted to have a third, but I ran out of editing steam around New Year's, and the secondary world fantasy I started writing in September didn't get finished.  I guess I didn't meet all the writing goals I made way back in the day, but I'm a lot farther along with the novel than I thought I would be (thanks in no small part to some truly excellent critiquers). So, I'm pretty satisfied.  Good luck to everyone else entering the Dells!

(title quote: Pablo Picasso)

My first-ever attempt at NaNoWriMo is not going particularly well. If I'd had this novel percolating in my head for six months or so, and if I had a solid scene-by-scene outline (like I did once I had finally wrung most of the idiocy out of protospace), I could maybe be making better progress. As it is... not so much. I do have a week-long break at Thanksgiving, so it's not inconceivable that I could still make it to 25k (either on this story or something else), but I suspect I may need that time for writing things of a more academic nature.

In happier news, Realms of Fantasy is back! Another brave soul has stepped up to the plate: Damnation Books LLC has bought the magazine, and it looks like they'll start publishing issues again in April. The submission guidelines are exactly the same as they were before, which makes me think maybe they haven't been updated yet, and SFWA's eligibility page still lists RoF as defunct (probably because the news just came out today), so I'll keep an eye on that and make changes to the cheat sheet as necessary.

Two stories that I've been following: Burma held elections for the first time in 20 years, but it looks like they were completely rigged. Also, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian businessman who had everything taken from him and was thrown in jail because Putin saw him as a threat, was convicted recently of "Kafkaesque charges."  Gah.

Also, this post on the Futurismic blog got me thinking. The gist of it is that it would be interesting (to say the least) if citizens had the option of directing part of their tax dollars to the government agency of their choice. As an economist, I like the idea because it creates a market of sorts for public funds, with agencies competing for taxpayers' favor--which would theoretically give them an incentive to become more efficient and transparent, and to communicate the tangible, positive things they're accomplishing to the public.  The flip side of this, of course, is that agencies would also have an incentive to divert resources into advertising.  Not only would much of that advertising take the form of propaganda, but smaller, more obscure agencies could potentially lose out.  It's an interesting thought experiment, anyway.

It's been an unfortunate couple of days in the world of short speculative fiction. First came the announcement that Realms of Fantasy is shutting down, for real this time. And while Futurismic will still be around, it's not accepting fiction submissions for the indefinite future. I've removed them both from the cheat sheet, though I very much hope that I can at least restore Futurismic to the list at some point.

One very small bright spot is that Realms of Fantasy is making its final issue available for free.

Elsewhere on the web:

The ACLU prepares for futuristic threats to civil liberties (The American Prospect)

A DARPA-funded "hundred-year starship" program (KurzweilAI)

The D.I.Y. Foreign-Aid Revolution (New York Times)

What They Know (The Wall Street Journal's series on online privacy, or the lack thereof. Scary stuff.)

YES.  I mean, it's a first draft, and I know I have lots of revision to do, but I typed "End" after two and a half years, and that's what counts, right?

Thirteen months ago, I wanted to have the first draft plus some revision done by my 21st birthday.  It looks like I might just meet that goal after all.

To give you an idea of how insane the past two months have been compared to my normal speed of writing, I offer the following graph.  (Yes, I culled data from old LJ posts and made a graph of my progress in Excel.  I'm cool like that.)

In the interest of being the first kind of person, I have goals for the semester.  Let's be generous and say I have until New Year's.  Or maybe until five minutes before the Dell Awards deadline.  That'll work.

1. A finished draft of Apertures (otherwise known as the protospace novel), suitable for critique.  Mini-deadline: I want to have reached the end of the manuscript by October 17 (otherwise known as my 21st birthday, the end of fall break, and/or the point in the semester after which I cannot reasonably expect to do any intensive novel-writing).  After that, I already know there are lots of things I want to fix, so I'll aim to have those done by January, if not well before.  A while back, I wanted to have the revisions done by October 17 as well, but at this point, I think it'd be unwise to push myself that hard.

2. A finished and polished version of the secondary-world fantasy thing I'm writing right now, suitable for entry into the Dell Awards.  I think I can at least have a first draft of this one by October, thanks to elanid's iron fist if nothing else.

Bonus: Another short story, giving me a grand total of three for the Dells.  I'm not sure about this one because I only have the idea and an incredibly vague outline, plus it will require research.  I'll assess where I am in mid-October and decide whether this one's actually feasible.

If I don't finish at least 1 and 2... well, I'm aware this is really ambitious, and I'm not brave enough to be like fairfeather and pledge to do something distasteful, but I'll at least post that I didn't finish and LiveJournal (and Dreamwidth) will know of my shame.  Also, I'm posting this publicly.

Oh, and also I'm taking 16 credit-hours this semester, so letting school slide might be bad.

And now, it would be nice if I could sleep.

ETA, 9/9/10:  Okay, looking back at this, I am insane.  Even as much as I've been writing in the past month or so, I'm only managing about 5k every two weeks, which means I can probably only do about 12k between now and my birthday.  I'm really bad at estimating needed wordcounts, but I think I need at least 20k to reach the end.  So... Thanksgiving for my mini-deadline?  I don't know.

(title quote: Robert Byrne)

Two quick things:

The Help Pakistan LJ community is holding an auction to benefit survivors of the recent floods in Pakistan.  Bidding for the first round closes on August 28th at 11:59 pm EST.

Also, I have no fewer than eight Dreamwidth invite codes at my disposal, so comment here if you'd like one.

My latest post on the Alpha blog is up!  This one's on exposition.  Alphans who are similarly ancient may recall that I gave my Beta presentation on this very same topic in 2007.  So, go read it, make all the good points I totally forgot about in the comments, and while you're there, check out the other posts as well.  Good stuff.

In other news, I just spent a fantastic weekend in York with the lovely remarknj and two of her friends from school.  There were boats, castles, cathedral towers, dashing absinthe salesmen, street performers, many bookshops, and of course, Yorkshire pudding.  It was awesome.

And now, back to the grind.

1. You are awesome.

2. Wordpress generates about ninety zillion RSS feeds for different parts of the site, so make sure you're subscribed to the right one. If you subscribed to, say, the RSS feed for the home page's nonexistent comments section, it won't work.

I think I've disabled all the RSS feeds that don't have any content in them, so from here on out, visitors should have much less trouble finding the one they actually want. I apologize for any confusion that may have occurred.

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If you haven't subscribed to the Alpha blog, you totally should!

If you have no idea what RSS is, it's a really easy way to keep track of your favorite sites.  You should check it out.

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I'm going to make a real post at some point, I swear.

In the novel I am currently writing, a character is arrested by the authorities and held in prison.  His files are classified.  He can't even have visitors, let alone a lawyer or a trial, and the authorities can hold him as long as they want.  I'm not even going to get into what they do to him.  At the time of his arrest, he is nineteen years old.

As I was planning the outline, I wondered whether this might be unrealistic.

Everyone, meet Kyaw Moe Naing of Myanmar.

This is sick.

(More on human rights in Myanmar from Amnesty International.)

Today's updates to the speculative fiction markets cheat sheet: Strange Horizons and Ideomancer are both open. Electric Velocipede should be open as of yesterday, but you may want to hold off on submitting until the editor updates the guidelines page to reflect the fact.