Send Yourself to Mars!

Or, at least your name ...

Slightly off-topic but this appeals to the SF lover in me. Later this year, NASA are sending the Mars Science Laboratory rover to the red planet (I know, I know, it's brown really) and they're allowing people to send their names along with it. Just fill in the form here and your name will be encoded onto a microchip and taken to the surface of Mars. How cool is that?

Actually, I couldn't resist including the address of my blog as well as my name. Consequently I'm expecting a flood of Martian followers some time in early 2012 ...

Flash Fiction : Light Years (73/100)

... before ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

The Tuesday Twitter Tale : First Contact

The Zorn first-contact envoys monitored Earth TV from orbit. Today, X Factor. ‘You’re right,’ said Z’ara. ‘They aren’t ready are they?’






The Tuesday Twitter Tale is a weekly work of tweet-length fiction. It is posted here and on Twitter (along with the #vss - very short story - hash tag).

Twitter Fiction Successes

Last Laugh, my entry into the Folded Word "Ash" competition is published today. You can read it here. Not sure where the slightly weird typography came from - there isn't supposed to be a line-break in it - but hey.

I also learned this morning that Trapeze has accepted another SF Twitter fiction piece of mine : Time Dilation, to appear in early April. I'll let you know when it's out.

I'm Hard!

A thousand thanks to Milo over at in medias res for the Write Hard award, given to people who have been in some way inspirational. Not sure how I've qualified - I generally just aim for coherent - but it's great to get the award. And thanks to Aaron Polson for starting this meme and establishing the rules in the first place.

In the way of these things I'm supposed to pass the award on to writers who inspire me. Gosh, where to start? There are so many it seems like an impossible task. So I've decided to pick four and provide the caveat that I could have listed lots of others. Here goes :

• KarenG over at Coming Down The Mountain : a very active, fascinating blog. Essential.

• Anne Allen at, um, Anne Allen's Blog : a constant voice of reason, her posts are always a delight.

• The Words Crafter at Rainy Day Wanderer :  always entertaining and inspiring.

• The Golden Eagle at The Eagle's Aerial Perspective : for all the great posts and, indeed, comments/encouragement on my posts!

Thanks guys!

Flash Fiction : Light Years (72/100)

... abyss ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

The Tuesday Twitter Tale : By The Power of Her Mind

By focusing her mind, Dawn found she could zap bluebottles in mid-air. Interesting. She wondered if it would work on larger animals.






The Tuesday Twitter Tale is a weekly work of tweet-length fiction. It is posted here and on Twitter (along with the #vss - very short story - hash tag).

Don't Tell the Kindle Owners Out There ...

... but as well as my epublished short stories/novelettes being available to purchase for the Kindle at Amazon (and, indeed, via Smashwords for all the other species of ereader), they're now also all available for free download from Feedbooks.

This may seem like economic suicide but, as you may recall, my foray into epublishing over the past 12 months or so has been pretty much an experiment. And a good one. The Armageddon Machine continues to shift units on Amazon US and Guitar Heroes, for some reason, does pretty well on Amazon UK. Between them they ratchet up 50-60 sales per month. Better than a poke in the eye. Meanwhile I've learned a lot about how to get the word out and engage with (potential) readers in the process : not least of which is that you do better the more time you invest in networking and publicizing. Which I guess is pretty obvious.

So why the Feedbooks thing? Right now, this is all about (hopefully) establishing a readership for me. If folks download my free stuff on Feedbooks, then maybe a proportion will like what they read enough to keep an eye on me. And maybe a proportion of them will think about buying a novel should I have one epublished. I've seen quite a few writers publishing their first few chapters on Feedbooks, with a link to where the complete novel can be purchased.

What do you think? Is that a good approach?

Meanwhile Feedbooks is going pretty well. Just checked the download figures. The works have been up there about 6 weeks now and so far they've had around 6000 downloads between them. I figure that's a few thousand people who probably wouldn't have heard of me otherwise. Around 60 Feedbook readers have bookmarked me on their bookshelves. I'm happy with that.

The analytics Feedbooks provide are fascinating too. They're kind of addictive. Couldn't resist, for example, including this graphic of the distribution of people who downloaded Armageddon.

I'd love to know who my one reader in Fiji is!

Flash Fiction : Light Years (71/100)

... the ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Drink Problem Published By One Forty Fiction

My tweet-sized story Drink Problem has been published by One Forty Fiction today. Reader critiques are welcomed. Eek!

The Tuesday Twitter Tale : Broken Bones

'Is it broken?' The radiographer frowned. ‘No. But your skeleton. It’s metal!’ Self-preservation routines activated. He flew to attack.






The Tuesday Twitter Tale is a weekly work of tweet-length fiction. It is posted here and on Twitter (along with the #vss - very short story - hash tag).

Kimota Resurrected as Kzine; Good Vibrations To Be Published

Way back in 2001 I sold an early SF story called Good Vibrations to a UK magazine called Kimota. I was delighted about it at the time : Kimota was a market I really wanted to crack. Not long after, though, Kimota folded. I don't think it had anything to do with my story appearing there ...

But the magazine was much missed. That's why I was delighted to learn just recently it is to be brought back to life. It is metamorphosing into Kzine, a Kindle-based eZine. Seems there are a few SF magazines popping back up over here. Is there a resurgence in speculative short fiction?

Anyway, Graeme Hurry, the man behind Kzine, also announced plans to publish an anthology of Kimota stories in a new anthology to support the setting up of Kzine. And Good Vibrations is to be there! w00t. It's kind of an odd story but I was very pleased with it at the time. Here's the opening line :

Mark E Moon put his empty pint glass down onto the bar, looked up at the barman and said, "So, what year have we reached?"

Fortunately Graeme recalled the story too :

I must say I found your story unique when it came in ... glad to have published it.

I'll let you have more details of the Kzine anthology when I know them.

Meanwhile they are already accepting submissions. Details on the web site. I shall definitely send them something. Payments, I see, "will be based on subscriptions and story length but cannot be determined in advance."

Flash Fiction : Light Years (70/100)

... into ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Her Long Hair Shining Sold to Abyss & Apex

Just heard that Her Long Hair Shining, a 3500 word supernatural, urban fantasyish short story, has been bought by Abyss & Apex. It should be appearing there in the Autumn/Fall. 2011 is definitely starting well here at Spellmaking Towers!

This is my second story to be accepted by Abyss & Apex. Museum Beetles appeared there back in 2005 and was reprinted in 2009 in their Best Of Abyss & Apex Volume One anthology.

Green Magick Published

Twitter fiction morsel Green Magick is published over at Trapeze Magazine today. Happy! 'Tis here if you wish to read it.

This is my second story to appear there, after Ghost Train got an honourable mention in their Hallowe'en competition - a competition in which, incidentally, saw myself, Milo Fowler and Stephen V. Ramey, the three instigators of Write1Sub1, appearing together on the podium (Stephen taking the top spot). Funny how it goes ...

The Tuesday Twitter Tale : Deleted

‘But you had me last week.’ She checks the screen, shrugs. ‘Record deleted. Only one thing I can do.’ The gun glints as she raises it.






The Tuesday Twitter Tale is a weekly work of tweet-length fiction. It is posted here and on Twitter (along with the #vss - very short story - hash tag).

First Acceptance of 2011!

On January 1st, keen to get off to a flying start with Write1Sub1, I wrote a Twitter fiction SF story called "wolF emiT" and submitted it to Trapeze. Today, it was accepted! Must be some sort of record.

Editor Jessica was kind enough to say of the story :

It's stories like yours that make me happy I decided to create this magazine.

Which is sweet. The story will go live on February 8th.

Hmm, perhaps I should do a microfiction daily Write1Sub1 next year ...

Flash Fiction : Light Years (69/100)

... word ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Write1Sub1 Launch Post

Happy new year everyone!

This being the start of 2011 it's also the start of Write1Sub1, the scheme dreamt up by Milo Fowler, Stephen Ramey and myself to kick-start out short fiction writing efforts. The launch post is here. Inspired by Ray Bradbury, we're going to write a story and submit a story each week this year. Starting today! Kinda like NaNoWriMo for short story writers ...

As well as the weekly scheme there's also a monthly level for those that prefer the challenge of 12 stories in the year rather than 52. There are currently over 50 people signed up. As well as the blog you can follow the scheme on Twitter, Facebook and there's also an Absolute Write social group.



Should be a fun ride. Anyway, gotta go! Stories to write. Best of luck to everyone in 2011.