m. c. de marco

My shortest story yet was published today at Thaumatrope, an sf/f/h twitter fiction magazine. I dimly recall submitting it, apparently in response to a call for steampunk and/or holiday stories, but I figured Bad Elf had killed little Timmy and buried his body in the slush pile.

To submit your own 140 characters of immortal speculative prose, all you need is a twitter account.

Via HTLit: Merlin Mann advises against reading all that helpful plot advice I read yesterday.

Reading it all helped me, but Merlin has a good point about restricting the NaNo blog-hopping to outside your scheduled writing hours. Nothing helps me do that quite like Freedom, a virtual license to print words. And I can’t say I’ve yet figured out the Twitter hashtag #amwriting. When I’m tweeting, it’s because I #amnotwriting.

Via twitter: the new HTLit blog seems to be a handy clearinghouse for information about “literary hypertext.” It is itself on twitter; hypertext has always been a high-tech genre so nobody in the community is complaining about how pointless or incomprehensible twitter is.

Via Jenny Williams on twitter: Shelfari has a virtual spread of Neil Gaiman’s bookshelves.

Naturally we’d assumed that someone whose work is filled with references ranging from literary to mythological would have a fairly extensive library but even so, we were a bit unprepared for the scope of what he sent us.

Via twitter, of course (@eastgate): Dene Grigar’s 24-hour microfiction project begins next Friday at midnight.

Inspired by Richard Brautigan’s pithy “The Scarlatti Tilt”, a story of only 34 words published in 1971, my work centers around a collection of 24 stories about life in an American city in the 21st C. Each story involves 140 characters or less delivered––that is, “tweeted”––on Twitter over a 24 hr. period.

SFScope has links about the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, along with a mock-interview with Michael Collins.

Usually, you find yourself either too young or too old to do what you really want, but consider: Neil Armstrong was born in 1930, Buzz Aldrin 1930, and Mike Collins 1930. We came along at exactly the right time. We survived hazardous careers and we were successful in them. But in my own case at least, it was 10 percent shrewd planning and 90 percent blind luck.

The deadline for Jetse de Vries’ upcoming SHINE anthology (Solaris Books) has been extended to August 1st. See the website for ample advice in addition to the actual guidelines.

The twitter version, Outshine, seems to be tweeting strong. It has its own guidelines.