Paula’s Comments (group member since Oct 28, 2015)

Paula’s comments from the Science Fiction Microstory Contest group.

Well, Andy, great idea, but keep in mind some of us--possibly those who've done journalism?--*like* the supershort form. But maybe we should all do another contest, one for the standard US 2-5K short story form? sf, presumably--or sf and fantasy--?
And Jack, I agree with Heather, your writing's crackerjack/first-rate. Wish you'd used an original/(not "game") plot, as that was the only problem with the piece.
Richard and J.J., pheomenal pieces too, btw!

Well, I agree, Andy--a bit choppy and here and there can use some more work, but nevertheless--an excellent story. Congratulations!

You are involved in this blog, Carrie? Nice clean layout, some good ideas. Can you give us some background on it? Very cool blog.

Great to know, Marianne and Carrie! Both for the anthologies and for our own books. Thanks---these are good ways to support one another's writings.

Yes, @Carrie. This article is excellent. And Bookbub sounds interesting--shall check that over, too. btw, so what's your twitter handle so we can look over how you use it?

I find some of the suggested posting frequencies and other data strange and/or needing elucidation. On fb, for instance, posting new threads twice a day might be sufficient, but you'll have to post also to others' threads/timelines and, sometimes, repond to posts on your thread. Twitter---I don't know about bots there--am pretty much an amateur; it's good for watching breaking news, and probably a good place to put, for instance, comments re one's own new book/s in a string about a relevant breaking news story; I'm not sure of other ways to use twitter. And as for LI--does that "1 per day" include the sort of networking and friendship-building of the sort we did there in this group?

Carrie, sounds like one fascinating series. In fact. Kalifer's too. Both of you with so very serious themes.
Just finished reading the latest 3 stories in this month's contest. I'd have never expected the rather spelled-out theme/parametrs would have done such a firstrate job in kickstarting such firstrate stories as many this month. It must be the major themes of loss, of regret, of guilt, of caring and sorrow that these parameters bring forth, but many of these tales are tremendous.

What Marianne just said.
Also, btw, another room-clearing device is the very long post.

On social media, do not snark, do not be longwinded, and do be friendly and respectful.
"This is a promotional device."

Maybe check also with P&W and also with SFWA, which may have particularly relevant info, re podcasting?
btw, Richard's description of the relevant trademark issue sounds straignt-on.

Haha, Andy. Yes, I've some reading to catch up on, too--trying to work it in when I've so-called "free time" :) :] :D (and so on).

Following Elizebeth's and Andrew's phenomenal edits/beta reads of my novel of the old Berkeley antiwar movement, I have that mostly ready for its polish-edit and copyedit. Then find an agent and/or publisher, I hope; if not, I need to get a formatter/designer for print and ebook versions, get good blurbs, write a release and versions, booksheet, etc., arrange readings if any, and contact whomever I still know in media. And of course the fb, li, blog, etc. stuff. And tweet, presumably ("What would YOU have done to keep US troops from Vietnam?" "Even as LBJ' attacked Hanoi, she cased the bombs stacked in San Jose" "The midnight phoner hissed again; trembling, pregnant, she lowered the receiver," etc.).

Like Andy, I'm meanwhile inundated with paid work--in my case, editing, including of some remarkable books.

Great to hear how many books everyone is working on. Sharon, 3 at once is cool; 8 at once (did I count right?) is remarquable! And Heather, oh yes a graphic novel (or 2, or 3)--tremendous; I love graphic novels, and they sell well too; great you can do the art for this.

Jack, Ronald---haha, those long stories aren't telling you yet but long stories have (some, but no not all) such a propensity for turning into novellas and novels. Long stories can be great, novels or otherwise!

By the way, Elana Gomel's fantasy novel, Tale of Three Cities, is very worth reading; you'll remember her Cinderella story here last year.

Marianne, same reaction here and then, like Andy, I happened to think of something that fit right in. See what happens--you may flash on one, all at once.
On another subject, how many of us here are working on/finishing/soon-publishing a book/books?

My concern, Ron, was the same one we've been discussing here--how it may affect future publication. Keep in mind that if one makes considerable substantive changes to a story, at some point it becomes a new story--not only legally but in one's own sense of it. And that can happen between the story is in one of the anthologies and the (running) present when one might want to post the story.
Well, as long as the author's permission must be asked first, there's no problem.

Why not check with the Authors Guild re how podcast or GR postings affect (1) copyright, (2) in their members' experience, subsequent publication? --I don't have time to do this, right now, but anyone else here who's a member and has time, please do.
And I'd certainly take seriously the response Carrie got from Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future.
Ron, so far I've no reason to think any publisher checks whether stories that appeared in vol 1 (at least) of our anthology have been published. But that might change if we posted them publicly on the contest main page (in fact, I worry when this is done for each story when it wins, on the "help congratulate. . ." page).

Yeah, Tom, we need you here! Good to hear from you again.

I remembered I’d told her
Copyright © 2016 Paula Friedman

Of course I don’t expect you to understand.

Ar-Corteix 9 is small, smaller than the Solar System’s Mars or Old Earth’s moon. For Earthlings, for Erigis, even for the fragile-built but deep-lunged folks from Ar-Corteix 3, the atmosphere required dwelling spaces limited to “Domes,” magnetically demarked but hightly vulnerable, susceptible to quick disintegration all the same. Such as from alien attack. And all too soon—I was still a boy then, barely 4 in Earth-years, though I thought myself a “big boy,” much too big to play with a little sister, and that’s part of what you have to understand—all too soon, the aliens came.

They were akin to Slash—the throat-ripping, sac-digesting creatures humans first encountered on the ice-storm planet Hel. But whereas the Slash of Hel had long become our friends, these new creatures saw us (or at least those of us enwrapped and vulnerable in our thin Domes on Ar-Corteix 9) as a cross between a handy mining device for one of their gem-rich frontier asteroids, an expendable form of "cannon fodder," and a possible steak.

They came down.

Came out of the sky, they did, gleaming in their ebon ships and golden uniforms, and I was playing outside, finally left alone, with my Kitsy-Doll that Mom didn’t like to see me with, and dived with it under the plastic toy house and, blessing of blessings, somehow they never looked or sniffed, nor did their drones, and did not find me.

Miree, inside our home, was not so lucky. They were after babes especially, and she was barely 2 Earth-years. Then, as Mom told me often in forthcoming years, they were gone and she too.

You get used to all loss, I guess. I don’t know; you won’t comprehend but there it was. Dad was in the Fighters and, when his ship did not return, Mom put in for Return and we went back to Earth, where I grew up. Grew up, hiked and swam, read olden books, served my military year in Earth’s Sky-Blues, and turned into—believe it!—a professor! Married, two kids—Ria’s a physician, Jon a Force Captain. One day, my Ria came home excited.

“Dad.”

“Yes, lovey.”

“Aunt Miree—I’ve found her.” Oh, they knew the family tales, these kids.

Yet I went cold. “Where is . . .?”

“Outside, Daddy. Here, waiting on the lawn.”

“Why--?” But I walked outdoors to greet her. Tall and slim she was, and eyes aglow and slantlike, mouth slantlike too, and long, much like a Slash, so that the cold stayed with me, yet . . . this was my Miree, my baby sister, and still delicate, a frail-built thing like all of us of Ar-Corteix 3 ancestry, but gleaming now in the proud Sky-Blues of our own Earth, and I rushed to her, my own eyes streaming, “Miree, Miree!”

Then I stared down, bleeding, at my ripped-up arm as Miree turned to slash again, but I saw her dissolve, even as I watched—dissolving all the way up to her thighs, and the paralysis spreading (“painlessly,” we’re told) toward her heart. Beside me, taut-mouthed, Ria and Jon re-sheathed the Lases they’d earned in their own years of Sky-Blues service. “It’s their second wave, Dad,” Jon said. “But Earth Command’s worked it out. Slash planned to go for Earth’s jugular this time, using our own, but they’ve overshot. We are wiping them bloody well out.” And “No third try,” Ria said. “The Sacs won’t be back.” She smiled then, my daughter; I’d not known she could act so cold.

But the tears keep running from my eyes. This creature half-dissolved now on my lawn was still my baby sister. I would’ve pushed her in her wee stroller through our Dome’s green woods. We’d have played in the park. I watched the long mouth drool, the alien eyes go flat. Her tongue protruded; the sac throbbed once. I remembered I’d told her, that chilly Dome morning, “Go play in the house, baby,” and to leave me alone.

I wish I hadn't. I wish it could have been different.

Ron, what insightful and kind comments/critiquing! Thank you.
As for insights, your mention of Burgess's Clockwork Orange delighted me, since in fact my writing teacher/mentor at SF State some years ago, William Wiegand, used this novel in showing us ways to instantly immerse a reader in a strange world through, in part, use of its language and imagery!
Thank you again.

Andy, thanks for the clear and wonderful job of interpreting the GR terms of service here. (Leaves me wondering whether we could consider moving this to GR's creative writing section; could that even work for us, and if so how much does its TOS differ from the groups-section's?)
Ben, your wrote "Now], if the entry wins the contest and is selected into the collection to be marketed"---whoa/wait, no. The anthology's stories include the winners plus a certain number (generally, 2) selected by the stories' own authors. That's been firm so far in this group. Let's keep this discussion to the issue of the contest's location. Thanks.

Interesting re GR's TOS.
Wonder if that clause in enforceable; some contract clauses aren't. And wonder if having a copyright notice on a piece changes the issue.
Wonder how passage of the TTP will affect our copyrights.
Wonder how much changing to someone's website will affect/help with any of these issues--e.g. with web crawlers and e.g. with copyright issues.

;

Oh, forgot--I did have it happen that one story posted here (while we were on LI) went on to win an award in a traditional magazine's contest, and, perhaps from excess caution, I told them about the "publication" in the contest. Being very nice people, they said, though they would not then publish it, I definitely could keep the award. --the thing is, as a couple people here have said, we don't necessarily know at the time of posting a story what we may do with it.

Thank you, Ben, Jack, Carrie, Marianne, Richard,. . . enormously valuable information. A question--how would publishing in a closed Goodreads group differ from publishing on LI in a group, so far as publishers are concerned? Would a search tool find the GR one but not the LI one? (Carrie's test search would seem to contraindicate that.) Or have publishers or publishers associations/journals indicated that they don't count LI-group appearance as "publication" but do count a GR-closed-group appearance as "publication"? I ask because these seem rather equivalently nonpublication, since closed to outsiders; and I know that, a dozen years ago, in a writing workshop-retreat overseen by experienced publishing professionals (who presumably knew--but perhaps not--on this issue), I handled one workshop's "publication, only for circulation among ourselves," of a chapbook, on which we placed precisely that statement; and we were given to understand this did not count, to publishers, as publication.
Ben, great discussion of some copyright issues.
Jack and Carrie and others, I'm finishing up a much-edited novel which I'm first shopping to the "majors" and a few small presses, but if it doesn't move fairly quickly shall be publishing myself, in which case I'll need a pub designer/e-formatter/e-marketing pro; you both sound good.