Jason's blog

Electric Spec

The October issue of Electric Spec is out with my short story "The Quantiversal Coefficient of Fate". I actually wrote this story twice. Once as it appears in Electric Spec, and once in a longer, more upbeat version. I've always liked the darker one better. So, just in time for Halloween, go read it. You can get it in either .PDF format, or MobiPocket's .PRC.

Satirica in Hand

I finally have a copy of Satirica in my hand. The cover art looks even better in real life than it does on the screen. I need to give one more shoutout to Cac for the excellent art work. Of course, you folks know what I'm talking about, because you already bought yours, right? Hmm?

By the way, it turns out that at least four of the authors are in the NYC area. We're looking into doing some kind of reading/signing/appearance in the area. If you're interested in attending something like that, let me know.

Electric Spec

I almost forgot to mention that Electric Spec has puchased my short story "The Quantiversal Coefficient of Fate" for their next issue. The publication date is slated for October 31st. No, it's not a pro market, but they do pay, and it's a nice publication that has a taste for the darker stuff that so many markets shy away from. Check it out, it's well worth reading.

If you haven't submitted to the outstanding publication Clarkesworld Magazine in a while, be prepared to be pleasantly surprised. Their new online submission form/tracking system is beautiful. It reminds me alot of Jim Baen's Universe's system, except that it's automated. It sends out confirmations with a tracking link, and maintains a "queue count". That, combined with the fact that they no longer send out detailed critiques on every rejection, appears to have trimmed their response time way down.

At last, the Drupal-ization of the site is complete. Well, it's as true as that statement can ever be. There are tweaks and tune-ups galore to do, but it's complete enough to take it live. I'm still deciding whether or not I want to write a custom module for displaying online edition of The Heretic. It needs to handle keeping track of structure, the way the book module does, but I'd really like to construct some kind of auto-paging hook so that I can do formatting in the way I did with pageview.pl. For now, though, I just updated (am updating) the pageview template to fit the rest of the site.

More on Literary Science Fiction

Okay, so I was asked who I considered the literary gems of science fiction. Read Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delaney, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale, Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, Stanislaw Lem (forget the movie and read Solaris). Thomas Disch, perhaps, or Dan Simmons. A lot of Roger Zelazny's work.

That's off the top of my head. There are many more that I'm leaving out, I know, but that should be enough to get someone started.

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