So the whirlwind continues…

I’m back in Toronto just long enough to do some laundry and pack again for a trip to Chicago, where I’ll attend the American Political Science Association annual meeting as part of my responsibilities in the scholarly book editor day job.

Suffice to say I haven’t much time then to go into detail about the WOTF week the way I’d like. What I will promise, oh loyal reader, oh true believer, is that when I return from Chicago I’ll run such a series on the WOTF week as to make you regret ever asking for details (perhaps you already do…)

So beginning Sunday, September 2, I’ll post a week-long day-by-by recap of the events of the Writers of the Future week, along with my thoughts, reflections, and impressions about the most amazing, incredible week of my life.

In the meantime, however, you can content yourselves with the recap of events on the WOTF blog, as well as on several blogs by my friends in the WOTF 23 cohort. You can find some of them in the links sidebar now, with more to come soon.

To tease you, however, here are a couple of photos from my 166 MB (!) of shutterbugishness during the week:

What a good looking group of writers… We were fueled almost
entirely by takeout Mexican food from Rubio’s that week.

A somewhat blurry shot of the Big Moment, which is okay because at this point it’s actually how I was seeing the world–rather shaky and kind of fuzzy around the edges. To my left is Tim Powers–writing instructor extraordinare, Coca Cola fiend, and all-around good guy. He was the only thing holding me up at this point.

The world’s smallest (and ugliest) science fiction fan, sinking his
teeth into a pre-release copy of the anthology and enjoying it very much.

More to come next week!

Best,

– S.

Hi everyone –

It’s 150am in California and I just got back from the WOTF prize night–I’m actually still in my tux.

I wanted to let you all know that this evening I won the Grand Prize at the Writers of the Future award ceremony. I’ll be posting WAY more about WOTF once I get back to Toronto, but I wanted to let you know now because…well, because this is possibly the most excited I’ve ever been in my whole life.

Being convinced that I was not going to win, I hadn’t prepared an acceptance speech and was UTTERLY stunned by the announcement. I’m told that there were words coming out of my mouth, that they were in English and that they made some sense. I don’t exactly recall them, however, as I was focusing on breathing and not passing out. It was one of the most intense moments of my life and there’s really no way to describe it.

I didn’t expect to win because two hours earlier Jerry Pournelle and Prof. Yoji Kondo (two judges) had told me that I hadn’t won. I said to him afterward: “You tricked me!” He looked at me with a mischievous glint in his eye and said in a Louisiana accent: “I did do that, didn’t I?”

It was an amazing moment.

I’ve spent the last four hours signing books, doing interviews, and taking more pictures than I think I’ve ever had taken of me in my entire life combined. I’m on such a rush right now I may never sleep again.

Tomorrow is a giant book signing with all the authors and hopefully some downtime for the first time all week. I’ll be back in Toronto Sunday for two days before I leave for Chicago for a week on business, so I’ll talk to you as soon as I can.

TTFN

Stephen – Master of the Universe (for tonight anyway…)

Hi all –

Okay–last chance to post before I head for California.

Don’t know if you’ve seen the latest issue of THE WALRUS, but there’s an article in there about the death of the book-as-paper-artifact and the future of reading. It’s written by Jon Evans, an author upset that his publisher won’t let him put his novel up for free on his website.

In terms of content, the article doesn’t strike me as saying anything I haven’t heard before, but maybe that’s because a) I’m a writer and concerned about the future of publishing, b) I’m an SF writer and concerned about the future of publishing, and c) I’m a professional editor and concerned about the future of publishing.

So if you haven’t been previously aware of these issues the article might be a good place to go for an introduction. It does include a nice shout out about SF writers and publishers distributing content free online, and Canadian SF writer (and editor of mine) Cory Doctorow‘s free online fiction.

While most publishers tremble and fret, some authors actually want to put their work online. Many in this group are from the forward-looking field of science fiction. If you’re so inclined, you can go online right now and read (for free) highly acclaimed science fiction novels such as Charles Stross’s Accelerando, Peter Watts’s Blind-sight, and the entire oeuvre of Cory Doctorow. Science fiction publisher Baen Books has made available a “library” of copy-righted-but-free novels. You may be wondering why these authors and publishers have cut their own commercial throats. But the evidence to date indicates that releasing a book online actually increases offline sales. Readers try and then they buy.

The full article is available here.

When I eventually get off my duff and get a novel written I think I’d like to try the “Doctorow Method” and have it available free under a Creative Commons license. I, for one, used Napster as a kind of advanced music listening try-before-you-buy system, and figured that if I liked three or four songs off an album I’d generally like the whole thing and would buy it.

I think that someone who reads and enjoys a book online is quite likely to buy the hardcopy or perhaps the hardcopy of your next book. And when someone likes a book they tend to recommend it to friends, so you increase your potential sales a great deal by this read-before-you-buy system.

And I think this is the key benefit of the free online idea–expanding your readership. Especially as someone starting out and trying to get their writing noticed it could be a huge boon. Not many people will wander into the Sci Fi/ Fantasy ghetto of their local bookstore (it’s usually at the back of the store on a high shelf like it’s porn anyway) as there’s a real psychological barrier. But if someone recommends to you a book that, sure is sci-fi, but which you can read for free? Well, I think more people who “don’t normally read sci fi” would give that a chance. And the real future (and money) of SF lies in the ability to cross that divide and get out of the sci fi ghetto and be a sci fi writer who the mundanes will read.

And if someone reads the book free online and doesn’t like it (for whatever reason) you’ve perhaps lost that sale, but it’s unlikely you’ve lost any future sales to that same person. Generally when you don’t like one book by an author you’re unwilling to give another one a shot, right? So your potential benefits, in my mind, far outweigh your potential risks.

– S.

Saw a remarkable story on BBC News today about the red giant Mira–a star in the Cetus constellation racing across the heavens at 130km/s (80 miles per second), all the while shedding a vast tail of material that stretches a colossal 13 light years in length (!)

More details here.

– S.

Happened upon a really cool SF blog today called Prehistoric Pulp.

I’m not sure the identity of the blogger, but the site is dedicated to “fantastic fiction about dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, with reviews, cover blurbs and news about upcoming works.”

Now, I dig dinosaurs (n’yuk, n’yuk, n’yuk) but I had no idea there were so many stories out there involving dinos and prehistoric animals (the megafauna for which I may even have more fascination than the terrible lizards), let alone enough to blog regularly about. I know that around the time of the first Jurassic Park movie there was a kind of dino chic in SF, with a number of dino-themed anthologies coming out, but no idea the numbers both before and after. The only other instances I was really aware of were Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” (which, along with his stories “The Dragon” and “The Fog Horn”, completely blew my 10-year-old mind) and Rob Sawyers’ Quintaglio Ascension.

When you think about it, with the whole palette of time and space to play with, why not do SF stories about dinosaurs, right?

Anyway, my hat’s off to the dedicated blogger–they clearly have a love for all things dino- and prehistoric SF, tracking down and reading what are some really obscure titles. Well done.

I have a vague possible idea for an SF novel of first contact and environmentalism that involves human exploration of a planet dominated by dinosaur-like creatures and (for lack of a better explanation right now) sentient giant white apes…so maybe you’ll see a book by me on Prehistoric Pulp some day.

– S.

On the stereo/
Listen as we go/
Nothing’s gonna stop me now/
California, here we come/
Right back where we started from

At long last, and after much bureaucratic travail, I have in my possession one Canadian passport made out for yours truly (though they never did call either of my personal references or my guarantor–some security 😉

I actually kissed the little booklet when the man behind the desk handed it to me. This seemingly didn’t strike him as odd…

I keep opening it, looking at it, making sure I can still feel it in my hand, the tactile response reassuring. It is…precious to me. I imagine this is a little like Gollum felt about the Ring.

I will now, officially, proceed to freak out (in a good way) about getting to go to California for the Writers of the Future week! It’s very unlikely I will be able to function or get anything done until then.

– S.

This time next Sunday I’ll be leaving on a jet plane…

And tomorrow right around High Noon I’ll be venturing to the passport office in the hopes (please, God) that my passport has gone off without a hitch and I can pick it up.

They seemingly haven’t called either of my references or my guarantor…but I’m told that’s not necessarily something they do for everyone. I don’t have a criminal record, my last name isn’t bin Laden, and I’m not an Israeli spy, so maybe I’m not someone to be worried about 😉

Believe it or not I’ve actually been doing my best to keep utter giddy school-boyish excitement for this trip at bay until I have that precious blue booklet in my hand. When I get hold of it, well, I’m sure there’ll be no getting anything done for the rest of the week.

I can hardly contain myself! 🙂

– S.

So I recently joined SF Canada at the recommendation of my friend and fellow SF author Karen Danylak, and I’ve really been enjoying the member’s discussions I get via e-mail.

One cool thing that came today was a notice about a new peer-reviewed journal called Science Fiction Film and Television which is set to start publishing in March 2008. For anyone so inclined I include the full submission guidelines below.

I found this notice cool for three reasons:

1) As an SF writer and fan I’m glad that, at least to some degree, SF is being taken seriously in the academy…even if it has to start with sci-fi film and television, much of which is just bad (*cough*Andromeda*cough*) and isn’t really representative of the field or what I think SF could/should be. But hey–ya gotta start somewhere.
I know people like Ursula Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, and Robert J. Sawyer have their books assigned and discussed in various university literature courses, but that’s certainly the exception. More of this needs to happen for SF to start being taken as seriously as literature as, say, the works of Margaret Atwood (that closet SF writer amongst the literary elite), and not just pulp fiction (to borrow a phrase), so here’s hoping.

(OT: Did you know that Tesseracts Ten was recently adopted for course use by Prof. Mike Johnstone of the University of Toronto Department of English? U of T is Canada’s largest university and Tesseracts Ten is being used for ENG237H1F: Science Fiction this summer, as well as in the Fall and Winter semesters. We need more profs like Prof. Johnstone. Maybe he’ll be interested in Tesseracts Eleven when it comes out…)

2) My day job is as an acquisitions editor at an academic publisher, so I find this interesting from a SECOND professional stand-point. Film studies isn’t one of the areas I acquire in (I do social sciences like sociology, anthropology, and political science) but my colleague Siobhan does a great job in the area. Which brings me to my third reason for finding this cool–

3) One of the journal editors is not only Canadian, but is a UTP author (one of Siobhan’s).

Sherryl Vint (Brock University) recently published her book Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction with UTP.

Very cool, indeed.

– S.

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

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Science Fiction Film and Television

Science Fiction Film and Television is a biannual, peer-reviewed journal published by Liverpool University Press. Edited by Mark Bould (UWE) and Sherryl Vint (Brock University), with an international board of advisory editors, it encourages dialogue among the scholarly and intellectual communities of film studies, sf studies and television studies.

We invite submissions on all areas of sf film and television, and which situate texts, practices and institutions within broader national, historical, cultural, theoretical and critical contexts. In addition to popular and contemporary works, we are interested in papers which consider neglected texts, propose innovative ways of looking at canonical texts, or explore the tensions and synergies that emerge from the interaction of genre and medium. We encourage work that considers the specificities of the genre and what its increasing centrality to film and television globally might suggest for critical approaches to film, sf and television.

We publish articles (6000-8000 words), book and DVD reviews (1000-2000 words) and review essays (up to 5000 words). Suggestions for papers include but are not limited to the following areas:
* silent sf
* European sf (e.g., French New Wave, Turkish pop cinema)
* East Asian sf (e.g., kaiju eiga, anime)
* Hollywood sf blockbusters
* animation and greenscreen
* adaptations
* low-budget and independent sf
* children’s sf
* costume, design and music
* spectacle and special effects
* the `soap opera-isation’ of television sf
* sf and avant-garde practice
* the relationships between globalisation, transnationalisation, media convergence and sf
* the science-fictionality of media technologies and forms themselves
* cross-media and transnational franchises
* audience, fans and consumption

Articles should be 6000-8000 words (MLA format) and include a 100-word abstract. Electronic submission in MS Word is preferred. The deadline for submissions for the inaugural issue (March 2008) is September 1, 2007. Send submissions to both editors at mark.bould@gmail.com and sherryl.vint@gmail.com. If you are interested in reviewing a book or DVD, or have materials you would like reviewed, please contact Sherryl Vint.

Advisory Editorial Board:
Jonathan Bignell (University of Reading),
Catherine Constable (University of Warwick),
Susan A. George (University of California, Berkeley),
Elyce Rae Helford (Middle Tennessee State University),
Matt Hills (Cardiff University),
Brooks Landon (University of Iowa),
Rob Latham (University of Iowa),
Sharalyn Orbaugh (UBC),
David Seed (Univ. of Liverpool),
Steve Shaviro (Wayne State University),
Vivian Sobchack (University of California, Los Angeles)
and JP Telotte (Georgia Institute of Technology)

I got the proofs for “Citius, Altius, Fortius” e-mailed to me yesterday by the typesetter for TESSERACTS 11. I had a chance to go through them this afternoon (my schedule on vacation being so booked up with all that laying about and doing a whole lotta nothing). The only error I noted was one that was in my original manuscript (oops–my bad).

Instead of saying “fastest man on earth,” I had originally typed “fasted man on earth.” This slipped by my writer’s group, several other friends who read the tale, two editors and a typesetter, and me until right now. Not surprising I suppose, as the two words look very similar and I think your brain is anticipating what the phrase is meant to be.

But the other thing that surprised me was with the contract, which I received last week. It’s a very standard contract (quite generous with its terms, I thought) but it’s made between myself and Hades Publishing, the parent company of EDGE SF & F Publishing who will be putting out TESSERACTS 11 later this year.

Let’s just say with a names like Hades I read and re-read the contract a couple of times to make sure there was nothing about first-born children, immortal souls, and/or the requirement to sign in blood 😉

(I’m just kidding–Brian Hades, the eponymous president of Hades Publishing, surely has a lot of fun with such a colourful last name, and has doubtless already heard my lame joke a millions times before or the one about sounding like a James Bond villain. In fact, he bid at a charity auction to be a villain in a Rob Sawyer book, so he’s obviously got a good sense of humour).

Hi all –

This press release was sent out by Galaxy Press this morning to Toronto media. Should anyone happen upon a press reference to me or this announcement, I’d appreciate it if you could send me and e-mail and let me know.

Best,

– S.

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

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: John Goodwin
President
Galaxy Press
Phone: (323) 321-2144
E-Mail: jgoodwin@galaxypress.com

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

TONY PI AND STEPHEN KOTOWYCH OF TORONTO TO BE HONORED AS WINNERS OF WORLDWIDE WRITING CONTEST

Celebrities, Best-Selling Authors, Famous Illustrators To Fete Newcomers At the Prestigious Athenaeum Club on the Grounds of Caltech

Pasadena, CA– Twelve winning writers and twelve illustrators from around the globe–including Tony Pi and Stephen Kotowych of Toronto–will be honored during the 23rd Annual L. Ron Hubbard Achievement Awards at the Athenaeum Club on the grounds of California Institute of Technology on Friday, August 24th, 2007 beginning at 8 pm.

The highlight of the ceremony will be the announcement of the year’s two Grand Prize winners who will each receive $5,000. Quarterly winners also receive cash prizes from $1,000 to $500. Their winning stories and illustrations will appear in the annual anthology L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers and Illustrators of the Future, volume 23 (Galaxy Press, 2007).

Participating in the ceremony will be best-selling authors Kevin J. Anderson, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Tim Powers and Sean Williams who will serve as presenters along with celebrities Marisol Nichols (Fox TV’s “24”), two-time Emmy award nominated actress Lee Purcell, and Latin vocalist Carina Rico.

Throughout the Contests’ 24-year history, over 500 writers and illustrators have been recognized as winners. “What’s amazing to me is that a good 60 to 70% of winners go on to successful careers,” says New York Times’ best-selling author Anderson (Dune prequels, Seven Suns series). “You could call it ‘The American Idol’ for writers-long before there ever was such a show.”

The Writers of the Future Contest was initiated by L. Ron Hubbard in 1983 to provide a means for aspiring writers to get a much-needed break-its winners have gone on to publish over 550 novels and 1,400 short stories, selling an impressive 31 million copies of their works combined-enough books to fill the payloads of 6 space shuttles.

Because of the success of the Writers’ Contest, the format was expanded to include a companion Illustrators of the Future Contest in 1988. Many of the illustration winners have gone on to highly successful illustration and design careers.

“The Writers and Illustrators of the Future Contests have proven to be the most effective means for contestants to make their break in the publishing industry, an industry renowned for being closed to the newcomer,” said John Goodwin, Galaxy Press president. “Well over six million fiction and non-fiction manuscripts make the rounds annually to find a publishing home, yet only 2,500 new science fiction and fantasy titles are published each year, and many of these are from already established authors.

“That’s why these Contests were created – because it’s so hard to get published and there are so many talented people who give up on their dreams to see their works in print.”