Leah Cypess is a fantasy author with 2 novels under her belt (“Mistwood” and “Nightspell”, 2 recent stories in Asimov’s (“Twelvers” and “Nanny’s Day”), another novel due in early 2014 (“Deathsworn”), and a fist full of rave reviews. A free anthology of her short stories is entitled “Changelings and Other Stories” and is available from B&N, Amazon, and Smashwords. Her website is www.LeahCypess.com.
This marks the fourth year in which I am reviewing the Writers of the Future contest. As a long time reader (I bought Volume I when it came out), and frequent submitter of the past few years, I have come to appreciate the work K D Wentworth and her predecessors have done putting this mammoth endeavor together every year. In the past, I’ve read issues and thought I can do better than that. It wasn’t until I started writing did I realize it wasn’t as easy as it looked. When I started reviewing, I had begun to marvel the work the authors put into each story.
I wanted to write a post to draw attention to a service that I am offering that I call “pet cartooning”, converting a photograph of an animal into a cartoon image. This could be a fun surprise present for an animal lover, or a loving tribute to your own pet. Here are a couple of examples of the results of this:
“Thief of Futures” by D. Thomas Minton demonstrates value in terms of wealth and talent; the story is only concerned with characters who are either rich or possess a very certain innate skill. Everyone else is consigned to the background. “Antiquities and Tangibles” by Tim Pratt examines value through connections and luck; the more social-oriented tools of achieving success and accruing value. Those without connections and luck have no chance of exploring happiness to the extent the main characters do.
I highly recommend listening to this podcast for your fiction fix. Not since the Drabblecast has any publication given me a stream of stories that I so consistently enjoyed. Their choice in style does remind me somewhat of the Drabblecast, though they take longer stories, but Rish and Big have instilled the podcast with their own brand. This Best Of list covers the episodes from Episode 0 all the way to the current Episode 114.
A thick skin doesn’t come naturally. You have to cultivate it. One of the biggest ways that I did this when I started writing fiction is critique forums. My particular favorite is Baen’s Bar. Post some stuff there in the Baen’s Bar Slush, get some feedback, post feedback on other people’s stories. Yeah, the negative comments can be hard to take at first, but you learn to extract the useful parts of them.
At the time that I am writing this, DSF has passed its first year of publication. No news has surfaced on whether it is now a SFWA qualifying market. With a subscriber base of over 2600 and website that receives 10,000 visitors a month, I can only imagine that it is the-powers-that-be have yet to do the necessary homework to determine what most of us know already; they’re one of the most widely read speculative fiction venues out there right now.
A whole year of stories have gone by and here I am, 4 months behind. I’m catching up though. DSF does it make it easy for me. As long as they keep picking good ones, I’ll keep reading.
On to this month’s offeringsâ€
What else can I say? I’m still enjoying DSF. For those of you who have yet to read it, for heaven sakes, subscribe already. Can’t beat the price, that is for sure.
On the day I am writing this, Daily Science Fiction is marking its 7th month of production. The online publication is listed with 41 other pro-paying publications on Ralan. I counted only 6 that offer a better rate for its authors (8 cents a word). Most have a guideline that is narrower on the type of speculative fiction they want, a few have a word count ceiling as high (10,000), and none publish as much as they have. After reviewing four months of DSF, I can’t help but notice the brightest and freshest writers in speculative fiction today have graced its pages (or web pages if you prefer).
