Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Various tidbits of writing news

• If you're in SFWA, they've put together this really cool interactive Nebula Report that let's you search on things like what stories a given member has recommended, and to sort by author and date and so on. Very spiffy. I note that "Embracing-the-New" has seven recommendations -- wowzers!

  It's almost due to expire from eligibility, though. Partly motivated by this, and partly by the tremendous amount of play that "The Orange" got when I put it under CreativeCommons, and partly because CreativeCommons is just so cool (as I talked about before) , I went and put "Embracing-the-New" under a CreativeCommons license as well.

• I'd sort of been thinking of McSweeney's as a non-paying market, because they don't talk rates in their guidelines, and because they didn't pay anything when they printed my story "The Blow". Turns out that's because "The Blow" was printed as a "letter". They're sending me $500 for "Orphans". Howdya like that.

• Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (which, I must say, as much as i adore the magazine and admire to my core Gavin and Kelly for their spunk and integrity and the way they've revolutionized spec fic by invigorating the zine-scene, is still a really dumb name for a magazine) will print my funny collaboration with Paul Melko, “Collaborations by Well-Known Twentieth-Century Authors Which Were Rejected By Their Publishers”, possibly "in tiny tiny type". I've been working on a lot of collaboarations lately (with Ramin/David Ackert, Cory Doctorow, Greg van Eekhout/Kiini Ibura Salaam/Chris Barzak/and maybe Kelly), but that's actually the first collaborative thingie I've sold.

• And I hear Clean Sheets, an online magazine of erotica, is going to publish a story of mine, “One for the Road”, shortly. I'll let you know when it goes up. This is the first piece of erotica I've published, though I sold "Duet" to Mary Anne Mohanraj for the "Blowing Kisses" anthology. Those two are also, in a sense, the only stories I've sold that work as contemporary mimetic realism. Writing erotica is fun -- it's a lot like writing hard science fiction, because you have to juggle two modes of reader pleasure at once. The thing I've learned about writing erotica is to write sad -- tragic or at least bittersweet -- erotica; that's much more interesting to me than baldly "whee, look how much fun we're having in the sack" erotica.