So, like, you’re paying $20 billion for a company that has never turned a profit, and doesn’t plan to? And you’re telling me that you’ll make money that way? Please do tell how it works, Mr. Ponzi.. Read More
It’s been a while since I wrote something here, so I’m a bit rusty. But this is something I need to say, and hopefully something you need to listen to:
Find your heroes.
Simple as that. Call them mentors or teachers, parents or guides, I don’t care. To me they are heroes, people I look up to, people I want to emulate.
For a long time I had no idea how to do it. Isaac Asimov‘s dead. So’s Jack Vance. Ursula Le’Guin died a month ago. Louis McMaster-Bujold, Dean Wesley Smith, Howard Tayler, pretty much everyone I admire, lives on the other side of the world. And even when I knew Tayler was going to be in Finland, for the World Fantasy Convention last August, I put that aside. Didn’t have the time. Didn’t have the strength to chance it. Promised myself that I’d go meet them some other WorldCon. When I’d made enough money from my writing.
Wrong. Read More
Some time ago, I submitted a story to an anthology of catastrophes, “Enter the Apocalypse”, edited by Thomas Gondolfi. I’m now the proud owner of my first physical anthology.
Of course, Apocalypse is a term that can be interpreted ad infititum. For me, it was intelligent dolphins. For writer Janice Law, it was something completely different. Read More
But there was a twist. Each attendant got a tag that tracked where they were in the room, and who they talked to. And it turns out that although every attendant stated beforehand that they went in order to meet new people and make new business ties, immediately upon entering the room, they made a beeline for old friends – and stayed there the entire event. If they did speak to a stranger, it was because the stranger was a friend of a friend. Read More
So the year is at an end. Yeah, yeah, new year, new possibilities, same old 24 hours/day. Anyway, here’s how I did in 2016:
Writing wise I…
(2015 numbers in paranthesis)
… submitted 164 (109) stories to publishers.
… got 4 (8) stories accepted.
… of which 4 (2) acceptances were by pro markets.
So, more submissions, less acceptances. But I only submitted to pro markets this year, meaning that all of my acceptances were from pro markets. Which rocks! Read More
Rejections are a part of the writer’s life. And yet, a bad rejection at the wrong time can crush an aspiring author.
Knowing that others have been rejected before you, that authors you admire, who’ve won prizes and gone on to glorious careers, have been badly rejected, can ease your burden. Here are some of those rejections. Read More
September was better than August. A lot better. I managed to actually sit down and do some work again, pounding out close to 19 000 words.
For a while I felt on a roll. Then I had the week from hell…
So there hasn’t been a new blog post for a while. It’s one of those IRL things – when time and energy become scarce I’ve needed to prioritize. And I’ve chosen writing above writing about writing.
But here’s an update about what’s been going on.
I’ve been writing a lot of AI/Singularity based stories lately, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no good pronoun for non-human, intelligent, asexual entities.
Him/her suggest a divergence that likely won’t exist amongst AI (due to the aforementioned lack of sex). It suggests that AI is a thing – and once you get self-aware AI, they’re likely to object to that.
There are several solutions to the problem, question is, which is more likely? Read More
I’ve been doing something wrong. I’ve been calling it my Rejections and Dejections. Of course I’ll never sell anything that way. So from now on it’s “Sales and Submissions”.
And, yeah, I did think of calling it “Sales and Sunshine”. Read More