Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

I’ve decided to get more regular about updating this blog, partly to make it more attractive to you, dear readers, and partly to help me be more organized about it. To that end, I’m thinking of having several recurring themes: Writing Wednesday, Physics Friday (phear not, it’ll be phun — and include astronomy, planetology, and so on.), Manic Monday. Er, wait, that’s a Bangles song — Miscellaneous Monday, perhaps. And so on.

To kick this off, it being Wednesday (for a while longer in this timezone, at least), something about writing. I’d considered doing this before, and wrote a couple of draft articles for what I was going to call “Writing to Publish” before putting it on hold. There are plenty of writers and writing blogs on the web already — some of them with some quite strange ideas about how the world works, some with some very good information — and I wasn’t sure the world needed another one. But the proprietor of one such encouraged me to go ahead with it, so here we go.

The first of these Writing Wednesday’s will be the first of my “Writing to Publish” articles. I should narrow that down further to “Writing Fiction to Publish”. Writing non-fiction takes quite a different approach, although many of the basics are similar enough to get you by. If you’re looking for tips on writing essays or term papers, you’ve come to the wrong place. Although neatness counts almost everywhere. The full article is here.

I just finished up a great novel workshop with Dean Smith and a handful of other writers in Lincoln City, Oregon. There was a lot of good interaction and hammering on submission packages for our recently-completed novels. My package is now eagerly on its way to the hands of an editor who (I hope) will be eager to see the whole thing.

Yesterday, at the end of the workshop, Dean gave us all a little advice on dealing with inevitable piracy — folks posting our work on the web without our permission. I won’t go into details, it was mostly commonse sense given the realities of the world.

But imagine my surprise when, doing a casual out-of-curiosity search on a couple of key phrases today, I found that a website has already posted a complete (but shoddy) copy of my first Analog story. Shoddy in two senses: they got the byline wrong (they left out my first name) and they changed some typography that was important to the plot and the humor in the original story. The really weird thing is that, given the nature of the rest of the site, it makes no sense at all for them to have posted an SF story — or any fiction — in the first place.

Anyway, I won’t get my knickers in a knot over it. I might not even have minded if they’d got my name right — but please don’t take that as permission to post an author’s stuff without asking.

David Lee Summers, the editor for the upcoming anthology Space Horrors which will include my story “Poetic Justice”, has a sneak peak at the cover for it on his blog here. It’s gorgeous, the smaller image here doesn’t do it justice. It will look even better with the author names on it ;-). There’s a neat personal connection to the cover, too: the artist, Laura Givens, is a long-time friend of Jill’s and mine.

The book is due from Flying Pen Press in time for Halloween this year. David hopes to have a release party at MileHiCon 42 Oct. 22-24th, and perhaps a preview party at CopperCon in Phoenix over Labor Day.

The server hosting this website seems to have been having unsuspected problems for the past few days. After a reboot, a restore, and some tinkering it seems all right now, but some of the recent posts are temporarily missing in action — I restored an older backup of the database until I can figure out just what happened.

No deathless prose was lost (of course not, it wouldn’t be deathless then, would it?) and I’ll back and fill soon. However, “soon” won’t be for about a week since I’ll be heavily involved in a novel workshop (led by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rusch) in Oregon for the next several days.

On a lighter note, yesterday I got a rewrite request from Stan Schmidt at Analog for a story I submitted a while back. Not a sale yet, but likely to be one after I turn in the revision (mostly trimming it to fit the Probability Zero format).