WRITERSoftheFUTURE.com

A-yup, just PM away. :)

(Oh, and I'm obviously interested in doing this, in case that wasn't clear... )

Tight on time, but want to give and get feedback? Let's swap the first 450 words of our entries each quarter! Why will this be helpful? The first 450 words will be about the first two pages of your entry (if you're using Standard Manuscript Format, which you should be). This isn't much of a story, b...

...the speculative element really doesn't appear for the first 2,700 words. Up until that point, it might be a mundane story where some of the characters simply believe in the supernatural. My SF entry wasn't speculative at all for about the first 7,000. To resolve this, I just inserted a brief (~1...

...the speculative element really doesn't appear for the first 2,700 words. Up until that point, it might be a mundane story where some of the characters simply believe in the supernatural. My SF entry wasn't speculative at all for about the first 7,000. To resolve this, I just inserted a brief (~1...

Need help with avatar. Again, tried to upload an avatar, double checked the pixels, but no luck. Is the 'how' listed somewhere I'm missing? I have it in my facebook page, after seeing someone managed to upload it from their facebook, but still invalid. Is the file size greater than 6kb? (you can ri...

Very cool, Steve!

Welcome!

I'm still waiting for Digital SF to get back to me about my HM winner. I reckon their reader is at Worldcon too. It's the only thing I have out so I guess we'll see. wotf005 They're also overloaded. They promised a three week turnaround, but have recently apologized that they're not hitting their t...

True enough!

I don't think you need to worry about speaking out of turn on a forum like this--I was just offering up a counter-example. :)

As far as word counts go, I'd hazard a guess that 4% isn't going to make or break a story. If it's good enough to win a contest/get published/change the world, it'll manage just as well at 11538 or 12000. I doubt most publishers nitpick quite that much about word counts. (As a caveat, please don't ...

I'm an Open Office person myself, but I use Open Office and Word both Have you noticed different word counts in Open Office and Word? Last year, a contestant in the Dutch SF writing contest "Fantastels" (maximum number of words 12.000) asked if his story was okay if Word said it was 11.99...

Three sentences about non MS-Word software is hardly a war. Barely even a salvo!

edit: Okay, four sentences if you count "What's Word?"

Hooray for OpenOffice!

Maybe this has to do with that "don't rewrite" thing again. I like to tinker with my prose, so if I accidentally had track changes on... it'd be pretty obvious from all the underlined red stuff everywhere.

Track changes is really useful when you're critiquing someone's work, but I'm not quite sure how it could be useful when revising your own...

Why not just save a new version, instead, and make the changes there?

Joni has made it utterly clear to me that SFWA-qualified markets only are the ones that count. Here is her email when I asked: Correct, only the SFWA qualified count as pro sales. So you are still good to enter. Best, Joni Labaqui Works for me. But why in the heck don't they update the contest rule...

You know, with all these folks selling to Digital Science Fiction , I guess it's time to ask this question: Has anyone queried to see how the contest views pro-rate sales to markets that are not yet SFWA-qualifying? My own reading of the rules would be that they count as sales for contest purposes,...

Speaking from an accessibility point (and maybe all this webby discussion ought to be moved off the welcome thread?), flash-only websites are a terrible idea. For instance, due to an humorous anecdote involving 64-bit Microsoft Vista, Firefox, and eighty-six brightly-coloured rubber bands, my defaul...

For that matter, in fiction you can probably get by (and people usually do) by just naming the source. Er... though reading your question again, quoting it with the URL is definitely not plagiarism. Not quoting it, and pretending it was your own words, would be plagiarism. Plagiarism is use of text ...

E.CaimanSands wrote:So I wanted something up there to brag about how annoyingly smart I am.

Isn't that the only reason anyone has a blog?

If it makes you feel any better, I actually read it how you meant it and didn't even spot the typo.

There are probably some posts from KD Wentworth floating around the forums which describes what she looks for in a contest piece, but I'm not sure where they are. There in often overlooked Information Alley . Also, you can search posts by user and look up all of KD's posts. Aha! I must have figured...

Welcome, Tony! I tend to agree with Martin--that background makes me go

I hear you on the "attractive website" thing, though. I've visited some professional author's sites and been amazed at how awful they are. (The fact that part of my job is web design probably does it.)

Contest aside, know your market. Some markets are good for obscure and artsy. Others are not. I'm not sure WotF would be a good fit (although of course it's impossible to tell without reading the piece). Most of the stories I've read in earlier volumes, although not without artistic merit(!) or wort...

I got the book one too--but as I haven't read anything by either author, ever...

Took me three tries to get past those questions.

Halloa, all. :) I've been lurking on the forums for a while now, mostly popping in and being paranoid in the Quarter threads to see whether or not other people have gotten responses. Figured I should go ahead and register, and--after a bit of confusion with the "I am not an automated process&qu...