WRITERSoftheFUTURE.com

I need to revise what I said about mine -- I seem to have checked my dates all wrong, I have a Monday, a Tuesday, a Thursday, and a Friday in my list. The first time I checked, I thought I had two Sundays, which seemed weird, because I didn't remember getting any on a Sunday...I just put it down to ...

I find curse words work well, but only if they're the perfect word -- which is similar to other words, but with one magnified caveat. Sometimes, they're perfectly timed, or delivered for perfect impact -- but more often they seem lazy and heavy-handed, and serve no purpose. And curse words are parti...

Well, my wildly unscientific assessment of when I got my own responses produced two Sundays, a Monday, and a Tuesday. Nary a Thursday in sight -- and yet, I have come to think of them all as Thursdays.

I think SFWA qualifies a market at 1,000 or more readers / issues / what-have-you. So it could well be that they qualify a story for SFWA membership more leniently than WotF considers one to count towards excluding you as being eligible to enter the contest.

Or if it's not anonymous. The contest entry form is very clear on that point too.

...with so much time ahead, why write only one? Why not push yourself and say I'll write both? Why not pick from the best of your fresh best each quarter? If I do this challenge for the next volume, that's how I would up the game. We are capable of much more than we believe, and must push our bound...

I'm in as well, now -- a new story for Q2 to go with my new one for Q1. This year is feeling awesome to me, I've worked more, read more, and written more in the last six months than I have in a great while. I feel like either this year will end up being tremendous, or I'll end up keeling over from t...

I've got that Q2 entry in now, with today's final read-through complete. I have a sense of when my revisions mean I'm starting to get pedantic, which is generally speaking my stopping point -- I reached that today. And thanks to being pushed aside, I already have my second draft for Q3 ready -- all ...

And I'm in for the quarter.

The real thing you want from F&SF--aside from an acceptance letter--is for the editor to write "Charlie" on your rejection. Look for that. When you get it, do "Dear Charlie" on your cover letters from there on out. It's been noted he only gives that to people he really wants...

Did not know that about F&SF rejections. Got a few "didn't quite win me over" from Finlay. Now I feel better about those rejections. Awaken the rejectomancy! No, don't, but it wants to so bad. I have a couple of nicely personalised rejections from him that referred to specific details...

wotf022 wotf022 . why so sure? maybe your Q2 is going to be finalist? Alas not, I had to put it aside due to sudden time constraints. I have a fall-back story that I'll be sending out for Q2 instead, and the story I had intended to be my Q2 entry will be pushed back, and then I'll finish the revisi...

Trust me, I get it. I had to switch stories mid-stream, but I don't think the first story I was working on this quarter is ever going to make the grade. It's just too hard to write properly. This one is similar, a challenging story to write well -- but I think I was close to having it. Just not clo...

And I'm falling back to the position of using a largely elaborated flash story I wrote before -- it's not at all what I'd planned to do, but work schedule just yanked the wheels off my carefully-planned trolley of the month, and this is something I can definitely complete and get out in time for the...

And, turns out my current Q2 is about to become my Q3. Twists and turns...

Blargh, I just discovered I'm probably going to be working very late for the next three weeks, which completely blows my plans for editing this story out of the water, I don't feel like I'll have resolved my issues with it by then. I have a fall-back position though, another story I had sidelined to...

Lightspeed is the same, I think -- I've received the regular "it didn't quite work for me" one, and the "it's nicely written and I enjoyed reading it, but overall it didn't quite win me over" one.

Do you plan to query your novel or indie-publishing? I'm going indie way on my first novel. So, that means I'm not out of WOTF contest until I've sold 5000 print copies? I'm purposefully delaying my novel launch to try my hand at the contest. My current plan is to query, but I'm still researching i...

Escalation is king, no doubt. It's an emotional rollercoaster -- no good if the first rise and fall is the biggest and best one, all the rest will feel like a bit of a let-down after that.

Gahhh, you guys are leaving me in the dust! I'm still trying to finish my Q2, which is driving me crazy today because all I'm having is thoughts about what to do with my budding novel. This is objectively unhelpful. On the up side, if you guys show up in Hollywood without me, you'll be close enough ...

Even at Future Science Fiction Digest, where I'm an editor, I can tell you it's highly annoying to be moved to read a story at that length that shows promise, and then, after investing a significant amount of precious time, discover it fails by the end. There's a good reason for this bias. Many sto...

I've taken four weeks to let it simmer, and now I'm back to do my revisions and make a draft 2 -- though this time around, my first sweep of "revisions" is going to be sticking the various pieces I wrote together into one vaguely coherent whole, and then editing it so that I have one story...

So, I now have my story concepts for the next two quarters -- that feels awesome to me. :-) I've been novel-writing in the gaps while I'm letting the second story rest, but I'm looking forward to the third quarter entry, as it'll be the first time I set out to try and write a comic short story in an...

I'm in the Pending Edit stage of my Q2 entry, which is the stage where I put it aside, ignore it for a few weeks, and then work on my novel draft instead. That's going fairly well at the moment, insofar as I haven't stared at it and yet been compelled to stab myself in the eyes with my pen, which I ...

I can haz a first draft. My Q2 is properly underway! (I saw a quote from Neil Gaiman popping up on that MasterClass thing online -- something to the effect of, "The purpose of writing your second draft is to make it look like you knew what you were doing when you wrote the first one." This...

I have a real fondness for manuscripts in Courier, myself. I get that people may feel that they're outdated and don't apply, but there's just something about it that appeals to me on a level I'd have a hard time explaining. (Wouldn't want to read a book printed in that, mind you...) I'm mid-draft fo...

(Speaking of which, am I wrong in thinking that one Patrick Rothfuss might have had success with a piece of a novel in the past?)

Terry Pratchett was so witty, every sentence was a play on words, and most of those sentences were hilarious. I felt that he was to humorous novels what Gary Larson was to comics. He spun world society like a top and gave us views from angles only he could identify, and we'd chuckle and say, you kn...

Humor typically has to get in and out quick to be funny (unless you're Terry Pratchett). The thing with Pratchett is, if you took out all the humour, it'd still be good. Not all humour writers do that, including a good many pretty successful ones. I think that's why it never feels like it overstaye...

And just submitted also. :-) Mine's also a three-day effort, the first time I've ever tried this...