S.L. Viehl's Blog, page 120

Short Story Sub Op

I found this interesting sub op over at Ralan.com and thought I'd pass it along (and this one has much better payment terms than the last one):

Phobos magazine is looking for submissions for their inaugural issue: "We want short and flash fiction and poetry. We want horror, SF, fantasy, slipstream, adventure tales, noir exercises, bizarro experiments, boxing stories, and sea-yarns. We want well-written pulp fiction. Genre boundaries are unimportant. If your work attempts to astound, unsettle, thrill, baffle or completely terrify the reader, it probably qualifies. We want huge twists, epic journeys, two-fisted adventures, maximum drama, and we want it accomplished in under 3,000 words. We want writers unafraid to read their work before an audience, to record their stories for mass download, to be part of the process from typesetting to cover art to publication and beyond. This part is crucial; it takes more than a good story to be part of this, which is why we are strongly biased towards submissions from local writers. As such, if you'd prefer to "submit it and forget it", please look elsewhere. We'll be accepting two short stories (1,000-3,000 words), two to four pieces of flash fiction (below 1,000 words), and a handful of poems. If you have a longer piece which would need to be broken into two or more parts across two or more issues, please contact us" Payment: 5¢/word. Query on reprints, electronic submission only, see guidelines for more details. Deadline: August 31st, 2013.

Elsewhere with Her Ladyship

For this Friday's video post I have to send you over to SF Signal here to see it. Why should you go? This time it's my video.

You should also know that this trailer was produced by amazing author and fantastic filmmaker Jeff Somers, whom I highly recommend as a genius when it comes to putting together a writer's crazy ideas and making them into a terrific video.

New Online Publisher

Freedom Fiction has opened it doors for business and is looking for novel and novella submissions; here's what they want to see: "Novella and Novel length Fiction works of genre fiction (all genres) or pulp fiction only; Word Count is to be minimum 30,000 to maximum 90,000 words; Payment is 8 cents per 100 words in year 2013. Please note this will change every year in progressive manner." No reprints, electronic submissions only, see guidelines for more details.

Added: As of this morning the publisher's site is down, and as there is some confusion about the exact payment terms I'm going to save us all a lot of headaches and strike this one.

A couple of reminders: there's still time to enter my Steampunking Barbara Samuel giveaway over on the Disenchanted & Co. blog, which runs through midnight EST on Friday, and my newsletter subscribers have until midnight EST tonight to enter June's giveaway; see the June newsletter for more details.

Elsewhere with Barbara Samuel

Today over on Disenchanted & Co. we're steampunking our very first guest: award-winning author Barbara Samuel. Stop in, read the interview and enter in comments -- over there, not here -- to win this giveaway of her books and other goodies themed to Barbara's world-building (gorgeous girl not included.)

LJ's Antho

Our blog pal LJ Cohen has a new Spec Fic antho project about to debut, and all of the proceeds will go to helping other writers, which is one of my favorite things:

Interrobang Books is pleased to announce the publication of "Pen Ultimate: A Speculative Fiction Anthology". The anthology, edited by LJ Cohen and Talib S. Hussain, is comprised of eleven short stories written by up-and-coming writers in fantasy and science fiction and includes a foreword by Craig Shaw Gardner and an afterword by Jeffrey A. Carver.

All proceeds will be donated to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) Emergency Medical Fund. The fund offers interest-free loans to members facing unexpected medical expenses. Active SFWA members are eligible to request assistance from the fund. More information about the fund and how to directly donate to it can be found here.

The anthology will be unveiled at ReaderCon 24, an annual convention devoted to "imaginative literature". The book is available in trade paperback edition through Amazon and CreateSpace, and e-Book editions through major online venues. For more information and purchase links, head over to LJ's site.

No Cost Ten

Ten Things You Can Have for Free

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

Blender is the "open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Blender has proven to be an extremely fast and versatile design instrument. The software has a personal touch, offering a unique approach to the world of Three Dimensions. Use it to create TV commercials, to make technical visualizations, business graphics, to do some morphing, or design user interfaces. You can easy build and manage complex environments. The renderer is versatile and extremely fast. All basic animation principles (curves & keys) are well implemented" (OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7)

Compositions is a "great tool for those who enjoy writing, and want a tool which allows for easier access. Using Compositions allows for easy drag-and-drop file access. You can also use the tool on mobile devices, and transfer files easily that way. You can also export the file in a .txt format" (OS: Mac OS X 10.7.3 or later, 64-bit processor)

Foto-Mosaik-Edda "allows you to create photo mosaic pictures from your own computer. A photo mosaic picture is made up of tiny photos which are fitted together in such a way that, from a distance, they blend together to create the appearance of a new picture. To create a photo mosaic picture, you can use digital photos from your collection, for example from your last vacation or family get-together. Foto-Mosaik-Edda analyses the photos and then adds them to one or more databases from which they are drawn to create your photo mosaic" (OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7)

Free Desktop Clock is an "advanced replacement for standard Windows tray clock. View the time, seconds, month, week and day in different skins in the Windows system tray clock. 9 skins are included in the distribution" (OS: Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7/8 [32-Bit/64-Bit])

Instagiffer is a "free tool to easily create animated GIFs from various video file formats and online video sites. In addition to video file support, users can also create animated GIFs from images. The program features an easy to use interface that allows you to adjust the quality of the GIFs, add effects and text captions, crop images, a screen capture feature to create animated GIFs, and more" (OS: Windows XP/Vista/7 [32-Bit/64-Bit])

Money Me is a free program to manage your income and expenses. Although it includes an extensive set of features, the simple interface makes it easy to use. You can quickly and easily add your expenses and start making statistics. You can create budgets, organize your debts and administrate all of your coupons with a simple interface" (OS: Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7/8 [32-Bit/64-Bit])

Password Pad Lite "allows you to create multiple note files, each secured by a different password. The key feature of password pad is its simplicity, which makes it easier to use and allows it to be easily extended to other uses. Keep your data in the format that you want, not in the format that someone else has decided for you. Later, simply search for the data that you want to retrieve" (OS: Mac OS X 10.6 or later)

Photoscape is a "fun and easy photo editing software that enables you to fix and enhance photos. Features: Viewer: View your folders photos, slideshow; Editor: resizing, brightness and color adjustment, white balance, backlight correction, frames, balloons, mosaic mode, adding text, drawing pictures, cropping, filters, red eye removal, blooming; Batch editor: Batch editing multiple photos; Page: Make one photo by merging multiple photos at the page frame; Combine: Make one photo by attaching multiple photos vertically or horizontally; Animated GIF: Make one animation photo with multiple photos •Print: Print portrait shot, carte de visite, passport photo; Screen Capture: Capture your screenshot and save it; Color Picker: Zoom in screen on images, search and pick the color; Rename: Change photo file names in batch mode; Raw Converter: Convert RAW to JPG" (OS: Win 98/ME/2K/XP/2K3/Vista/7)

Textcast "turns any text — documents, web pages and entire blog feeds — into personal podcasts you can listen to right on your iPod and iPhone" (OS: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard)

Ultimate Calendar is a "free, easy to use calendar with rich features and settings. Features: Calendar for any year from 1 to 9999-th in table and list; Common and personal dates differing by sets and groups •Movable, cyclical, periodical, particular dates; Internal editor for easy work with dates sets; Two view modes: Whole year and Monthly; Popup window which contains the list of nearest events and displayed when the mouse hovers over the tray icon; Tracking change of day; Options «Autostart on system startup», «Hide to tray on minimize», *new* «Run only one copy», *new* «Always on top»; Plugins support. Distribution includes the following plugins: Sun and Moon. Displays, in accordance with the selected geographic location, the time of rise and set of Sun and Moon, the duration of the solar and lunar day, the current phase of the Moon; Julian dates. Displays the date on the Julian calendar (old style), Julian Day and Modified Julian Day; Displaying schemes support; Export to Microsoft Excel and formats BMP, RTF, TXT; Multilingual interface and Unicode support; Contains predefined dates sets with holidays and events for Armenia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine, USA" (OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7)

Comments Catchup Day

See you in comments.

If Ideas Were Alligators

If ideas were alligators they wouldn't be so bad.



We could hide them for a time beneath a handy lily pad.

When they'd pop out they'd be (almost) a kind of cute surprise,



as long as we remember not to look into their eyes.



Idealligators would likely sleep a lot each day,

and hardly ever bother us or get into our way.



It's fairly easy to ignore the prehistoric twerp,

and think of him as silly or some sort of mental burp.



but like ideas a gator waits until the time is right,

when he can catch us off-guard and lunge in to take a bite.



Perhaps we should be grateful that all ideas can do is seethe,

and won't turn into anything with quite so many teeth.

Paper Dreamworld

What would it be like to drive through a city made of paper? This video gives you a wonderful tour (some background music and sound effects, for those of you at work):

Paper City from Maciek Janicki on Vimeo.

I'm also having a giveaway today over at the Disenchanted & Co. blog, so stop by if you get a chance. (Video link nicked from Gerard at The Presurfer.)

Wishing You