So, yeah, I’ll be at VCon tomorrow in the morning and afternoon. If you’ll be there too, I’ll be the dorky guy who likes sci-fi and video games. You can’t miss me. Seriously, though, i’ll be checking e-mail all day due to the wonder that is the iPhone. So e-mail me and I’ll come say hi!
For everyone else, this is 100 YouTube hits in four minutes. How many do you recognize?
Click here to view the embedded video.
Read Full Story
I was recently interviewed by the lovely and talented Silvia Moreno-Garcia over at Innsmouth Free Press regarding my stint at Clarion West and Writers of the Future. I was extremely pleased to do the interview, first off because Silvia’s a friend, and a fellow Vancouverite, but also because I’m excited by the concept behind Innsmouth Free Press.
From their website:
Innsmouth Free Press is a fictional newspaper publishing faux news in a Lovecraftian/Cthulhu Mythos universe, as wel... Read Full Story
I wrote a posting called “Lame Responses to Rejected Stories” a couple of days ago that has caused way more angst than I expected from a 102 word posting. The problem arose from my choice of articles to which to link.
First, a little framing.
Nick Mamatas used to be the slush editor at Clarkesworld Magazine, one of the highest paying, and in my opinion, most literary of the pro magazines. It’s been one of my top markets to submit to for quite some time, and guided much of my... Read Full Story
In my “money always flows towards the writer” post, I said that if your odds of winning a contest was 1% you had a good chance of winning over 100 tries. A few people took issue with that in the comments so I thought I’d explain the logic here with a fun example:
Your neighbour has two kids. One of them shows up at your door and it’s a girl. What are the odds that the other one is a boy? 50/50 right? R-O-N-G, wrong. It’s 66%. Wanna see why?
These are the possible... Read Full Story
This is almost certainly one of the worst movies ever. The cinematography is terrible, the writing is hackneyed and cliched, and the actors are chewing the scenery.
Worse, the concept is awesome, which means they’ve ruined it for everyone else, too.
Read Full Story
The short answer to this question of course is: Yes. The longer answer, which we shall get to presently, is “Treat writing like a business and do a Cost Benefit Analysis”.
There are plenty of services that will take advantage of you otherwise. Literary agencies that charge reading fees, bogus fee-charging contests, and unscrupulous Vanity Presses are traps that immediately spring to mind. By adhering to this rule, the novice writer can avoid being bilked of both their time and the... Read Full Story
Oh man, I just got an e-mail from an author we rejected from EDF because of a dead narrator. First, we get TONS of dead narrator pieces from beginning authors and it’s almost always a cop out. If you’re a master writer, you can do this… but this guy wasn’t.
So what does he write back to us? “My friends like it, so screw you!”
Wow. And I bet his Mom thinks he’s cool too.
Sometimes I wanna go all Mamatas on these guys, but then I think… what’... Read Full Story
