Clarkesworld and You

Image credit: Clarkesworld cover gallery

If you are a fan of science fiction and fantasy, which I hope many of you are, then you may well know of Clarkesworld already.  Some of you may even be citizens or subscribers.  To that group, I say, “Good on you; feel free to move along.”  If you’re not in that camp, here’s the skinny: Clarkesworld is an online magazine publishing science fiction and fantasy short stories, and it has won two Hugos and a Nebula for doing so.  That’s quite a feat.  It also pays its authors quite well–$0.10/word (double the minimum SFWA professional rate) for the first 4000 words, and $0.05/word thereafter.  And you can read all these stories for free.

Neil Clarke, the man behind the magazine, has not been having a particularly good year of it.  He is also, from what I understand, one of the nicer people in the genre.  John Scalzi will vouch for him, and I’m generally inclined to believe Scalzi.

So what can you do?  Well, you can subscribe to the magazine and have it delivered electronically to your device of choice for less than the smallest cup of coffee Starbucks will sell you each month.  You can also just straight-up donate to Clarkesworld and become a citizen.

FYI, while I have submitted many pieces to Clarkesworld, I have not been published there, nor am I getting any sort of monetary compensation for this.  I subscribe to the magazine because I believe it is one of the finest examples the genre has to offer, and because I want it to stick around long enough that I might someday get myself into its pages.

Monster Links

This isn’t a proper post, sorry.

Image credit: Retronaut

First: some Japanese monsters from the Kaibutsu Ehon, via Retronaut.  Pictures of monsters are cool, yo–especially monsters from another culture.

Second: an article on the science of monsters from NPR‘s Science Friday.  This piece is actually an excerpt from a whole book on the subject.

All the time that I would normally spend blogging this month is being filled up with finishing a second draft of a novel and also trying to write another novel for NaNoWriMo.  No, I don’t really expect that I’ll win this year’s NaNo, but it’s always good to get the writing juices flowing and produce some new content.

Wreck-It Ralph: A Study in Character-Driven Plotting, or How to Do It Right

Before I go any farther, I want to warn you that there will be some spoilers in this post, though I will try to keep them to a minimum.  If you haven’t seen the movie yet, you have been warned.

Image Credit: Filmofilia.com