Know why this story makes me mad?

Because it means that now even elephants are better at math than I am…

– S.

Though there isn’t any official update yet on the Writers of the Future site or blog, I have it on good authority that Ian McHugh of Hackett, Australia is the new Writers of the Future Grand Prize Winner.

Congratulations Ian! Welcome to the club! I hope (and know) that you’ve had an amazing week at the WOTF workshop and I hope you enjoy the hell out of the next year until you, too, have to pass on your crown.

Ian won for his story “Bitter Dreams”, which I can’t wait to read when the new WOTF book comes out in a few weeks.

A quick Google search reveals that Hackett is part of the Australian Capitol Territory, where it just so happens I’ll be during part of my trip to Oz; I’ll be visiting friends in Melba, another part of the ACT.

Weird.

Perhaps these two Grand Prize Winners should get together for a celebratory drink?

– S.

As reported in today’s Globe & Mail, scientists have apparently proven the benefits of narrative fiction to it’s readers: bookworms have exceptionally strong people skills.

Their years of research – summed up in the current issue of New Scientist magazine – has shown readers of narrative fiction scored higher on tests of empathy and social acumen than those who read non-fiction texts. And follow-up research showed that reading fiction may help fine-tune these skills: People assigned to read a New Yorker short story did better on social reasoning tests than those who read an essay from the same magazine.

Those benefits, researchers say, may be because fiction acts as a type of simulator. Reading about make-believe people having make-believe adventures or whirlwind romances may actually help people navigate those trials in real life.

“Fiction is really about how to get around in the social world, which is not as easy as one might think,” said Keith Oatley, one of the researchers and a professor in the department of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto. “People who read fiction give themselves quite a bit of practice in understanding that. And also, I think reading fiction sort of prompts one to think about these questions – you know, what are these people up to?”

I particularly like the part of the article that says:

“…this body of research is still in its infancy, and there are still many unanswered questions that he and his collaborators plan to tackle.

For example, most of their research has focused on fiction in general. But would they find similar effects if they looked at biographies? And do sci-fi tales about chasing aliens through the galaxy have the same benefits as Alice Munro’s short stories about love and loss? And what parts of the brain are stimulated when literary simulation is in full effect?”

My answer would, obviously, be “Yes…because you never know when we’ll need to chase aliens through the galaxy.” 😉

As a writer of narrative fiction I sometimes ponder the social value of what I do. In those dark moments I wonder whether maybe I’d be doing something more worthwhile if I wrote non-fiction, or strident polemics or something. I don’t have any particular inclination to do so, however, so I’m left with hoping that there’s something redeeming about fiction (which, if you’re to believe St. Augustine, there isn’t…)

So it turns out that there is, beyond simple enjoyment and entertainment. Science fiction has always touted itself as a form of literature that’s concerned with (depending on who you talk to) predicting, preventing, or preparing people for the future. It is a lofty claim that has a strong emotional appeal for me (sorry, St. A) but it’s nice to know that such claims turn out to have been right all along.

– S.

Hi all –

I see that TESSERACTS 13 is now open for submissions. I found the details on the Edge Books website, but thought I’d mirror them here.

This year’s volume will be co-edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and David Morrell, and will feature tales of dark fantasy and horror.

I was at first a little put off by the appearance of a theme–I think the TESSERACTS volumes have traditionally been a venue for the best new Canadian works in SF & F, whatever the breakdown in terms of mood, content, etc. But when I realized it was TESSERACTS THIRTEEN, well, of course the theme made perfect sense!

Now if only they can get it out for Halloween 2009… 😉

TTFN

– S.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Tesseracts Thirteen Guidelines

# The anthology is open to Canadians, landed immigrants, long-time residents, and expatriates.

# Open to submissions in either English or French. (French-language stories must be translated into English for publication before they can be accepted, but they can be submitted in French for a preliminary evaluation). Translation into English is the sole responsibility of the author. Canadian authors who write in languages other than French or English are welcome to submit an English translation of their work, provided it otherwise falls within the parameters of this anthology. Please supply details of original publication for any submission that originally appeared in a language other than English.

# Genres: Dark Fantasy and Horror.

# Length: all submissions must be under 5 000 words. Stories outside of this will not be considered.

# Open to short fiction and poetry (no plays).

# Deadline: Post-Marked October 31 2008

# Do not query before submitting.

# When submitting, you must send both email attachment and a hard copy.

# Mail submissions:

Attention: Series Editors
c/o Tesseracts Thirteen Submissions
P.O. Box 1714 Calgary Alberta, T2P 2L7 CANADA

# Email submissions: tesseracts13@edgewebsite.com.

# Emails MUST contain the word “submission” in the subject line, or they will be deleted automatically by the server. Please also include the story title in the subject line.

# Submissions MUST come in an attachment: WordPerfect, RTF, or Word are the only acceptable formats.

# Emails MUST contain a cover letter in the body of the email; for security reasons, email attachments with no cover letter will be deleted unread and unanswered.

# Cover letter: include your name, the title of your story, your full contact information (address, phone, email), and a brief bio. Do not describe or summarize the story.

# Manuscripts must be typed double-spaced, 12-point type (preferably Times New Roman or Courier font) on quarto (8 1/2 x 11) OR A4 (8 1/4 x 11 3/4) paper, minimum weight 16 lbs; near-letter-quality dot matrix printing is acceptable, provided the ribbon is sufficiently dark and computer printouts are seperated and paperclipped.

# Submission format: no strange formatting, colour fonts, changing fonts, borders, backgrounds, etc. Leave italics in italics, NOT underlined. DO NOT leave a blank line between paragraphs. Indent paragraphs. ALWAYS put a # to indicate scene breaks (a blank line is NOT enough).

# Spelling: please use Canadian spelling, as per the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

# ALWAYS include your full contact information (name/address/email/phone number) on the first page of the attached submission.

# If your address is not within Canada, please indicate in the cover letter your status vis-à-vis Canada.

# Reprints (stories having previously appeared in English in ANY format, print or electronic, including but not limited to any form of web publication) can be considered but will be a hard sell; reprints must come from a source not easily available in Canada. If your submission is a reprint, please supply full publication history of the story. If your story appeared previously, including but not limited to anywhere on the web, and you do not disclose this information to the editor upon submission, you will be disqualified from consideration.

# Authors’ fees will reflect a payout of all author royalties.

Payment is $20.00 for poetry, $50.00 for stories under 1,500 words, rising to a maximum of $100.00 for stories over 5,000 words (longer stories are paid a slightly higher fee, but in order to exceed the word length limit of 7,500 words, editors must judge a story to be of surpassing excellence). EDGE buys non-exclusive world rights; that is, EDGE is free to market the Tesseract Thirteen anthology as a whole anywhere in any language, but contributors retain the right to market their individual entries outside the anthology.

# Publication details: Autumn 2009, in trade paperback.

Nancy Kilpatrick
Award-winning author Nancy Kilpatrick has published 18 novels, over 190 short stories, 5 collections of stories, and has edited 8 anthologies. Much of her body of work involves vampires.

Nancy writes dark fantasy, horror, mysteries and erotic horror, under her own name, her nom de plume Amarantha Knight, and her newest pen name Desirée Knight (Amarantha’s younger sister!) Besides writing novels and short stories, and editing anthologies, she has scripted 4 issues of VampErotic comics. As well, she’s penned a couple of radio scripts, a stage play, and much non-fiction, including the book The goth Bible: A Compendium for the Darkly Inclined (St. Martin’s Press — October 2004).

Nancy won the Arthur Ellis Award for best mystery story, has been a Bram Stoker finalist three times and a finalist for the Aurora Award five times.

David Morrell
David Morrell is the award-winning author of First Blood, the novel in which Rambo was created. He was born in 1943 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. In 1960, at the age of seventeen, he became a fan of the classic television series, Route 66, about two young men in a Corvette traveling the United States in search of America and themselves. The scripts by Stirling Silliphant so impressed Morrell that he decided to become a writer.

Morrell is the co-president of the International Thriller Writers Organization. Noted for his research, he is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School for wilderness survival as well as the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security. He is also an honorary lifetime member of the Special Operations Association and the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. He has been trained in firearms, hostage negotiation, assuming identities, executive protection, and anti-terrorist driving, among numerous other action skills that he describes in his novels. With eighteen million copies in print, his work has been translated into twenty-six languages.

Tesseracts Thirteen

ARRIVING Autumn 2009

Yeah, so I’ve been kinda lax in posting to the old blog of late. Shut up 😉

But I have returned, faithful reader, with a great promise of frequent updates.

See, I find myself with a lot of time on my hands and no summer project to occupy me. So I’ve decided that I’m going to take up the challenge laid down by two of my younger brothers: write a novel by September 1 (they each plan to write one, too, in that time.)

Now, I had been planning to write a novel anyway–I’ve been casually researching various things, including the lives of Mark Twain and Nicola Tesla–but this challenge seems the best way to get my ass in gear and actually do it sooner rather than later…and a good way for me to remind my brothers who the REAL writer in the family is. 😉

While there’s been some debate amongst us as to what word-count actually constitutes a ‘novel’ for the purpose of this contest (I maintain that it’s 100 000 words, which is the average length of a 300ish page mass market paperback) my brother Charlie insists that something much shorter will do.

Orson Scott Card has some interesting thoughts on proper novel length which can be found here. While I stand by what I said about a 100 000 word novel (which OSC backs me up on, by the way) I guess I’ll have to give this one to my brother (the twerp) since for Hugo and Nebula Award purposes a novel is considered to be “a work of 40,000 words or more.”

That having been said, I don’t plan on wimping out like my brothers, so I’m aiming for at least 100 000 words. Whether the story will be done by 100 000 words I’m curious to find out. I don’t think (based on the vague plot I have now) that it will be done in much less than 100 000 words. But I plan to let the story and the characters dictate just how long this tale will be in the telling, and then we’ll see what happens when I redraft the thing in the Fall.

So the plan is this:

The balance of this week I will spend in research, outlining, and drawing up some character sketches/biographies.

Beginning one week from today (that is, by Monday, June 23) I will start writing the actual draft, with the goal of having 100 000 words and/or being finished by Friday, August 29–a period of ten weeks.

Now, 100 000 words breaks down nicely in that time to 10 000 words a week. That subdivides neatly into 2000 words a day, assuming (as I do) that I’ll write Monday through Friday. Weekends I can take off if I feel like it, but any work I get done on Saturdays or Sundays is a bonus towards my word count (or possibly a few days to catch up for any shortfall the previous week–I’m not so naive as to think that writing a novel is so linear a process, that some days things just won’t work out, etc.)

If any of you remember First Annual (and so far ONLY) Great Christmas Write-a-thon I undertook a few years ago, you might comment that attempting 1000 words a day for ten days nearly killed me. And you’d be right. But don’t forget the breakthrough I had at the Writers of the Future workshop! After pounding out 7000+ words in a single day 2000 shouldn’t present too much difficulty, especially once I get rolling. The key I learned was in shutting off the inner editor–that nagging little voice of question and self-doubt that says: “You’re not really going to write that, are you? This really isn’t very good. Maybe you should quit now.”

Not only should this plan allow me to finish the draft before the deadline, but it will also allow me to finish before I go on my long-planned trip to Australia. Having a month or so away from my draft should give the poor souls who volunteer to be my first readers a chance to plow through the pages and make copious notes and will give me as the author some time away from the manuscript as well, hopefully making it clear to me when I return to revise in the Fall just what worked and what didn’t.

Anyway, I’ll be posting fairly often about the progress–certainly weekly, perhaps daily. I’ll probably post anytime I finish a chapter or something, too. We’ll see.

Let the Summer of Scivening begin…in a week.

– S.

Well, I confess I’m having one of those moments myself.

I just read on the BBC website that British author Doris Lessing, who won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, is complaining that her win has been (quote) “a bloody disaster.”

“All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed,” she complains. The increased media interest has meant, she says, that writing a full novel is next to impossible. She thinks she’ll probably give up writing novels altogether.

Now, granted the woman is 88 years old. And she’s already written some 50 books. But giving up entirely?

I can understand media interest being high in the six months or first year after her win, but they’ll give the award to someone next year. And at that point, barring a bunch of phone calls the day of the announcement for “So what do you think of the choice for this year’s winner?” kinds of questions, I have to think the interest in her win would diminish substantially.

Okay, a year can be a long time when you’re 88. But throwing in the towel? Hmmm. Strikes me as giving up a bit easily.

When Lessing won the Nobel, LOCUS made a big deal of it, claiming her as the first science fiction writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature–her writing includes the five-volume Canopus in Argos science fiction series (beginning with Shikasta, 1979).

Whether Ms. Lessing would call herself a science fiction writer or not (I tend to think not–such a designation is usually a self-identified one) this seems a little like SF grasping for recognition. And given how she’s bemoaned her success (and $1.5 million dollar prize) do we really want to claim her as the first Nobel Laureate of Science Fiction?

Thus I make this promise: when I win my Nobel Prize for Literature, with no confusion about my chosen style and genre being SF, I vow to enjoy the hell out of the money, fame, and accolades that come with such recognition. I won’t whine or complain, no matter how old I am, and I promise to continue writing afterward no matter how many feature articles written about me or dinners held in my honour.

After all, I owe it science fiction to do no less.

– S.

The 2008 Prix Aurora Awards were announced Sunday 18 May 2008 at Keycon 25 in Winnipeg.

Congratulations to Hayden Trenholm, whose story “Like Water in the Desert” won Best Short-Form Work in English. Hayden is a really nice guy and a heck of a competitor. He wrote a great story and definitely deserves an Aurora. And watch out next year when his first novel, Defining Diana (Bundoran Press), will be eligible in the Best Long-Form Work in English category.

The 2008 Best Short-Form Work in English Aurora Nominees,
from this year’s Ad Astra. Left to right: Stephen Kotowych, Tony Pi,
Hayden Trenholm, David Livingstone Clink, Douglas Smith.
(Photo courtesy Robert J. Sawyer & Caroline Clink)

However, I’m thrilled to be associated with an Aurora Award by proxy, because Julie E. Czerneda & Jana Paniccia won the Best Work in English (Other) Aurora for edited Under Cover of Darkness! Yay! Congratulations Julie and Jana! I had my first published story in UCoD and I’m thrilled that they won for their excellent work! A well-deserved accolade!

The full list of winners are:

Lifetime Achievement:
Dennis Mullin

Best Long-Form Work in English:
The New Moon’s Arms by Nalo Hopkinson (Warner)

Best Long-Form Work in French:
Cimetière du musée by Diane Boudreau (du Phoenix)

Best Short-Form Work in English:
“Like Water in the Desert” by Hayden Trenholm (Challenging Destiny)

Best Short-Form Work in French:
“Sur la plage des Èpaves” by Laurent MacAllister (Solaris)

Best Work in English (Other):
Under Cover of Darkness edited by Julie E. Czerneda & Jana Paniccia (DAW)

Best Work in French (Other):
No nominations.

Artistic Achievement:
Lar deSouza

Fan Achievement (Fanzine):
No award.

Fan Achievement (Organizational):
Penny Lipman

Fan Achievement (Other):
Paul Bobbitt (editor of The Voyageur)

Hi all –

The Prix Aurora Prize has arrived! Online voting closes Saturday, May 17th at 5 pm (Central Std Time).

My story, “Saturn in G Minor”–which has previously won the Writers of the Future Grand Prize–is a finalist in the Best Short Form in English category. You can read the story for free right HERE.

Any Canadian citizen anywhere in the world and all landed immigrants, as well as all attending members of Keycon/Canvention, are eligible to vote.

Online voting (available HERE) and on-site voting at KeyCon 25 must be completed by Saturday, May 17th at 5 pm (Central Std Time).

Don’t delay! Vote today!

While I won’t be attending KeyCon myself I will post as soon as I hear who won what at the Aurora Award presentation on Sunday night.

Best,

– S.

So I’ve been woefully behind in regular postings of late–I’ve been traveling a lot for work–but I saw something today that I just had to post about.

Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano as saying the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

“How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Fr. Funes said. “Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’ and ‘sister,’ why should we not talk about an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would still be part of creation.”

Funes said that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures. Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom, he said.

Now as a Catholic myself and as a sci-fi writer it was nice to hear this. I’ve been thinking it for a long time, but it’s nice to have my opinion backed up 🙂 But what was even more interesting to me was Fr. Funes’ speculation that some aliens could even be free from original sin, that primordial break with God that gave rise to (amongst other things) the saying “forbidden fruit”.

The funny thing is when I was about twelve I asked my dad, who was in seminary for a while and who has a Church degree in Tomistic philosophy, whether he believed in aliens–we’d been watching a lot of ST:TNG at the time and were also having a debate about whether Data could have a soul (my father assures me that, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, that would be impossible. He backed this up by assigning me some reading from the Summa Theologica on the nature of the soul–I was TWELVE…)

As I recall, he didn’t ever give me a yes or no to the alien question (which I think means it’s a “no”), but dad did speculate–as does this Vatican astronomer–that if there were aliens they might not have suffered original sin. If that were the case, he reasoned, these perfect aliens in their state of grace might not want anything to do with us, or perhaps we simply wouldn’t have anything to say to each other. My dad used this to duck the question and say something to the effect of “So what does it matter if there are aliens, then?”

You can imagine how this infuriated a young, would-be SF writer… 🙂

– S.

The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy group on Facebook has been running a series of interviews with Aurora Award nominees on their discussion board, and the interview with me (conducted by fellow Fledgling Karen Danylak) is now posted and available here.

In the same thread you can also find posts by a number of this year’s Aurora nominees, including most of the rest of the finalists in the Best Short Form in English category.

Special thanks to Donna Farley, one of the admins of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy group, for starting and organizing the interview thread. Great idea, Donna!

– S.