Sable Aradia's Blog, page 29

Season’s Greetings and Happy Holidays to All!

Gunsmoke & Dragonfire: Official Lineup!

Thank you so much to everyone who submitted to Gunsmoke & Dragonfire: A Fantasy Western Anthology! We had so many excellent submissions that I had to refuse several stories I would much rather have accepted. But I’m excited to announce the final lineup! We’ve got an amazing list of authors, who have penned every conceivable variety of fantasy western story, from weird western to horror western to cattlepunk to sci-fi western to post-apocalyptic western. Stories range in length from flash fiction to novelettes, and cover every classical western plot:

Inheritance – Ethan Hedman
When the Bell Strikes Three – Joachim Heijndermans
The Case of the Vanishing Unicorns – James Blakey
A Different Kind of Law – Eric S. Fomley
Red Tide Rising – Sara Codair
Pinkerton – Liam Hogan
The Teeth of Winter – Diane Morrison
Fallen Horseshoes – G. Scott Huggins
Raiders of the Lost World – Ron Friedman
No-Sell – Ricardo Victoria
Blazing Beamard – Stanley B. Webb
A Handful of Dust – Laurence Raphael Brothers
Rick and the Green Gunslinger – Zach Chapman
One Hell of a Game – Robert Lee Beers
Orcus Express, Derailed – Russell Hemmell
Glorious Madness – Jude-Marie Green
El Diablo de Paseo Grande – Milo James Fowler
By Way of Answer – Sean Jones
The Sound of One Shoe Tapping – R. Daniel Lester
Balthazar Beausoleil’s Blink Wolf Basher – Paul Alex Gray
The Burning Plains – Brent A. Harris
A Prayer for the Reaping Season – Mackenzie Kincaid
Rollo’s Herd – Claire Ryan
Lonesome – Carrie Gessner

Also, check out this sneak peak of our cover art by the awesome Aaron Siddall!

Information on pre-orders will be made available SOON! Keep watching this blog for updates, sneak peaks, our Kickstarter announcement, interviews with some of the authors, and a whole lot more!

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Why Canadian Writers Make Less Money (My Thoughts)

Recently, The Toronto Star published an article stating that after the Canadian Writers Union conducted a survey, Canadian writers make an average of $9,380 CAD per year. There are many problems with this survey, the primary one being that this is strictly a survey of the Canadian Writers Union, and I would hazard a guess that most Canadian writers do not belong to the Canadian Writers Union. For example, someone like myself doesn’t see the CWU as being a good investment because it does little for genre writers, the membership fee is somewhat high, and American publications do not qualify to earn your membership. That last detail is significant and I’ll explain why I think so later.

However, what is clear is that Canadian writers probably do not make nearly as much money as their counterparts in Europe or the United States. The CWU seem to be concerned with uncompensated copying that happens in educational settings, something which has changed in recent years, and therefore makes a logical subject of complaint. I’m sure it’s a factor, but I don’t think it’s the most significant one. I have some other ideas:

Canadian Market Pay SUCKS

One of the most significant Canadian science fiction publications is On Spec magazine, a publication that publishes roughly on a quarterly basis.  On Spec pays flat rates that are nowhere near “professional rate.” This is fairly typical of Canadian publications. It’s not their fault; the Canadian market is smaller, so the income to be made just isn’t as high. If they tried to pay competitive rates, they would simply go out of business. Therefore, it seems to me most wise English Canadian writers would compete for the American market instead, or self-publish; neither of which would have been considered in this survey.

The American Market Absorbs Everything

With a neighbour with ten times our population right next door, the American creative market often absorbs Canadian talent, for the simple and logical reason that there’s more money to be made over there. Flat out, the bottom line matters.

American / U.K. Privilege

It’s much harder for Canadians to compete in the American market. American editors have American cultural biases that are more difficult for Canadian writers to fit into. Canadians write about subject matter that Americans just aren’t interested in (like Canadian history – or in my genre, Canadian alternate history). The same holds true in trying to compete for the lucrative U.K. market, which is also an option for Canadian writers who aren’t satisfied with the limited market in Canada.

Shipping

Even indie Canadian writers are suffering. One big reason that I’ve certainly found in my own career is shipping rates. To send a single trade paperback to one person in the U.S. costs me $17.00. The American postal service, by comparison, has a media rate that limits the expense of shipping literature. I just can’t compete. I think if the CWU wanted to do Canadian writers a favour, they would pressure Canada Post to bring in an equivalent media rate for us.

Location

It’s harder for Canadian writers to get to the significant events, such as writer cons and SFF cons, where important connections are made to advance in the industry. It’s also harder to get to the big writing classes that are offered in the U.S. I assume this probably has parallels in the French-language market as well.

There’s also greater distance between major cities when you’re planning a book tour or a signing, so a Canadian writer spends more on travel, which cuts into profit margin.

Exchange Rate

Not only are Canadian writers getting paid less in the Canadian market, and not only are our shipping costs higher, but the exchange rate makes our dollar value shrink. Which leads to:

Prohibitive Canadian Book Pricing

My book The Witch’s Eight Paths of Power was published by an American publisher. It’s worth $20 if you buy it in the U.S. It started out as being worth $25 CAD. When our dollar reached near parity to the American dollar the Canadian price was raised to $27.50. They didn’t drop it when the dollar fell again.

This kind of thing is an ongoing complaint from Canadian readers. While Eight Paths was a success in the American market, I sold many more copies in Canada, because I’m known here, and this was where I did my book tour; mostly because exchange rate made an American tour financially prohibitive. Publishers: you could sell a whole lot more books in Canada, and make a lot more money, if you’d attend to this little detail.

If you’re a Canadian writer, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Why do you think we’re making less money, and what can we do to fix that? Let me know in the comments!

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What Really Happens After the Apocalypse

By Arkady Martine

Right now, the largest and most deadly wildfire in California history is burning. Last year, Hurricane Harvey drowned southeast Texas under punishing, endless rain; a month ago, Hurricane Florence did the same to North Carolina. Apocalyptic-scale disasters happen every day (and more often now, as climate change intensifies weather patterns all over the world.) Apocalyptic disaster isn’t always the weather, either: it’s human-made, by war or by industrial accident; by system failure or simple individual error. Or it’s biological: the flu of 1918, the Ebola outbreaks in 2014.

In science fiction, apocalypse and what comes after is an enduring theme. Whether it’s pandemic (like in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Stephen King’s The Stand), nuclear (such as Theodore Sturgeon’s short story “Thunder and Roses” or the 1984 BBC drama Threads), or environmental (Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, and a slew of brilliant short fiction, including Tobias Buckell’s “A World to Die For” (Clarkesworld 2018) and Nnedi Okorafor’s “Spider the Artist” (Lightspeed 2011), disaster, apocalypse, and destruction fascinate the genre. If science fiction is, as sometimes described, a literature of ideas, then apocalyptic science fiction is the literature of how ideas go wrong—an exploration of all of our bad possible futures, and what might happen after.

Most of apocalyptic literature focuses on all the terrible ways that society goes wrong after a society-disrupting disaster, though. This is especially prevalent in television and film—think of The Walking Dead or 28 Days Later where, while the zombies might be the initial threat, most of the horrible violence is done by surviving humans to one another. This kind of focus on antisocial behavior—in fact, the belief that after a disaster humans will revert to some sort of ‘base state of nature’—reflects very common myths that exist throughout Western culture. We think that disaster situations cause panic, looting, assaults, the breakdown of social structures—and we make policy decisions based on that belief, assuming that crime rises during a crisis and that anti-crime enforcement is needed along with humanitarian aid.

But absolutely none of this is true.

Read the full article at Tor.com.

How Do You Ask for a Blurb?

By Jennifer Brozek

Blurbs… those short endorsements on the front and back of your novel. They are the icing on the cake of months of hard work. Sometimes, those pithy phrases are what it takes to make a sale.

For new authors, and lesser known authors, getting the right blurb for your book can make a difference. It can help the author and the novel’s reputation. More importantly, it tells people who are not familiar with you that someone else read this book and found it worthwhile. That the person the blurb is from is willing to put their name behind it.

While the dream would be to get a household name to recommend your book, the reality of the situation is that you should get blurbs from other authors in the genre you are writing in, or from authors known to read the kind of stuff you have written. The higher up the food chain you can go, the better.

Read the full article at the SFWA blog.

Come Write with SFWA!

We’re hosting a live virtual write-in today from 11 am to 7 pm Pacific time!  Come join us if you’re working on the last words for you National Novel Writing Month project, or just if you want to write! Different sprint leaders will be in and out throughout the day. Love to see you there!

Longest Continual Time Lapse from Space (Video)

Please do yourself a favour and watch this video. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful and awe-inspiring! Thanks! – Diane

European Space Agency release

Since the very first module Zarya launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome on 20 November 1998, the International Space Station has delivered a whole new perspective on this planet we call home. Join us as we celebrate 20 years of international collaboration and research for the benefit of Earth with ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst’s longest time lapse yet.

In just under 15 minutes, this clip takes you from Tunisia across Beijing and through Australia in two trips around the world. You can follow the Station’s location using the map at the top right hand-side of the screen alongside annotations on the photos themselves.

This timelapse comprises approximately 21,375 images of Earth all captured by Alexander from the International Space Station and shown 12.5 times faster than actual speed.

Read the full article (and watch the video) at Phys.org.

Call For Submissions: Rosalind’s Siblings

Galli Books

Deadline extended to December 31 2018!

Rosalind’s Siblings is an anthology of speculative stories about people of marginalized genders/sexes who are scientists: scientists doing good, changing the world, or just getting on with their work of expanding human knowledge in a speculative context, presented in a positive light. This anthology is named for Rosalind Franklin, the so-called Dark Lady of DNA, one of the most famously erased female scientists in history, and a direct relation of the founder of Galli Books. The anthology is being edited by Bogi Takács.

The stories do not need to problematize gender/sex, though this is also welcome, and we would like to publish a mix of approaches. We are generally interested in positive portrayals of science and the protagonists doing research, but this can include a critical reappraisal. (E.g., we would very much like to see stories in which science is decolonized and/or Indigenized, or…

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2018 Awards Eligibility Post!

Hey friends; awards season is on us again, and because no one should ever self-reject, I’d like to present some of the stuff I’ve done this year for your consideration. If anyone who is considering making nominations wants a review copy of any of these, I can provide e-copies in pdf upon request (and would be happy to do so!)  All of these works have been published in the United States, Canada, and the U.K. and elsewhere in the world in the 2018 calendar year:

The One I Think You’re Most Likely to Have Read (Short Story):

In September, Third Flatiron published my short story “The Android Graveyard” in Terra! Tara! Terror! This was my first major professional story sale, and it’s receiving excellent critical reviews, even from tough reviewers. (Genre: Science fiction)

The One You Probably Haven’t Read Yet (Novel):

In September I ran a successful Kickstarter to publish my book Once Upon a Time in the Wyrd West. It’s a collection of stories, but I suppose it could be considered a novel, in the same way that Pavane by Keith Roberts is a novel. I doubt many of you will have had a chance to read it as an indie publication, but I’ll be happy to provide review copies. (Genres: Fantasy, Horror, Science fiction – dystopia/post-apocalyptic, possibly YA)

The One I’m Sure You Haven’t Read but I’m Proud of Anyway (Novella):

In May my novella “Homefront” was published in a limited-edition book bundle called On the Horizon: Simple Worlds of Speculative Adventure (the theme being low-tech fantasy or sci-fi.) It’s out of print now, but I think this novella is one of my best, and I’d be happy to provide you with a review copy. (Genre: Fantasy – space opera)

The Ones You May Not Have Considered (Fan-Related):

This year I have taken over the helm of the SFWA YouTube channel. It’s the official channel for SFWA, so as such, it may not be eligible for any SFWA-related awards (not sure about the rules). Even if so, the individual programs I’ve created there might be, and they would certainly be eligible for other awards. I run two panel-style talk programs. One is called #ThePanel and the other is #SpecWomenChat. I bring together writers and professionals in the genre to discuss topics of interest in a free-form panel-style discussion. If you haven’t checked out an episode yet, I recommend this one and this one. (Genres: Fantasy, Science fiction, Horror, Speculative Fiction)

Perhaps you might also consider me for New Writer awards? I’m new, I’m shiny, and I’m just getting started!

Thanks for your time and consideration! If you want those review copies, please don’t hesitate to ask me in email, social media, or the comments. My only caveat is that you must be qualified to nominate to at least one award. Whether you decide my work is worthy or not is up to you! You get to keep the pdf anyway!

Blessings,

Diane

Writing Women Characters into Epic Fantasy without Quotas

By Kate Elliot

The cold equations of “realism,” some claim, suggest there is little scope for women taking an active and interesting role in epic stories set in fantasy worlds based in a pre-modern era. Women’s lives in the past were limited, constrained, and passive, they say. To include multiple female characters in dynamic roles is to be in thrall to quotas, anachronisms, Political Correctness, and the sad spectacle and dread hyenas of wish-fulfillment.

Is this true?

Read the full article at Tor.com.