So a couple of hours after I published my last blog post, China Mike Glyer of File 770 infamy picked it up for his daily pixel scroll. Hi, China Mike! I thought you might be looking for some red meat to feed your readers—aside from the Chinese clickfarms, of course—but I was especially pleased that… Continue reading Navigating Woke SF, Part 2: When Is It Not Worth Submitting?
Category: Short Stories
Navigating Woke SF, Part 1: Short Story Markets and Author Blacklists
Last year, I had a short story published in the anthology Again, Hazardous Imaginings: More Politically Incorrect Science Fiction. Not only was it one of my highest paying short story sales to date, but it also made it onto the Tangent Online 2020 Recommended Reading List with a *** rating, their highest tier. Only 13… Continue reading Navigating Woke SF, Part 1: Short Story Markets and Author Blacklists
Are short stories worth publishing?
Every couple of years, I get the short story bug and write maybe half a dozen short stories in the span of just a few months. Then, I get really excited about putting them up on submission, and for the next couple of years I systematically send them out to all the professional markets… and… Continue reading Are short stories worth publishing?
NaNoWriMo 2020 Day Thirty
It’s done! I did it! Hit the big 50k word mark in thirty days! The T-shirt is on the way! Here are all of the stories that I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2020: “Lord of the Slaves” (about 9,200 words) “The Real Hell” (about 3,700 words) “The Scales of the Space Whale” (about 9,800 words) “A… Continue reading NaNoWriMo 2020 Day Thirty
NaNoWriMo 2020 Day Twenty-Six
Words written: 2,682 Total words written: 39,545 Stories written: 6 Character interviews written: 4 Total words behind: 3,788 Catching up! Slowly, but surely. We’re in the home stretch now, and with just over 10k words to go, I think I may actually be able to pull this off. It’s gonna be close, but I may… Continue reading NaNoWriMo 2020 Day Twenty-Six
NaNoWriMo 2020 Day Eighteen
Words written: 2,344 Total words written: 26,730 Stories written: 4 Total words behind: 3,270 My graph on the nanowrimo.org site looks like a wavy shadow following the line where I should be. Still in the game, just not where I should be. If it keeps going this way, maybe I’ll do a stream-of-consciousness interview with… Continue reading NaNoWriMo 2020 Day Eighteen
NaNoWriMo 2020 Plans
It’s been a long, long time since I attempted to do NaNoWriMo. Usually, I have something else on my writing schedule which prevents me from taking off a month for another project. I think my last NaNoWriMo attempt was in 2013, but even then I was juggling that with another WIP, and the WIP won… Continue reading NaNoWriMo 2020 Plans
A New Short Story Plan
So I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how best to leverage my short stories, not just from the traditional publishing angle, but from the indie publishing side as well. The problem is that self-published short stories really don’t sell much, so after you’ve sold them to a traditional market, what are you supposed to… Continue reading A New Short Story Plan
2019-09-26 Newsletter Author’s Note
This author’s note originally appeared in the September 26th edition of my author newsletter. To subscribe to my newsletter, click here. So for this newsletter’s author’s note, I thought I’d do a roundup of all the magazines that have published my short stories in the last six months. There’s a surprisingly large number of them.… Continue reading 2019-09-26 Newsletter Author’s Note
“Lizzie-99XT” published in Serial Magazine!
It’s another week, and I have another short story out, this time in Serial Magazine! Here’s what the editor has to say about it: We kick off ISSUE TWELVE with “Lizzie-99XT” by Joe Vasicek. This futuristic sci-fi tale follows a half-human, half-AI space pilot as she travels the galaxy to fight in an interplanetary war.… Continue reading “Lizzie-99XT” published in Serial Magazine!