m. c. de marco

As part of being back on the wagon, I wrote a new story this week and submitted it to Writers of the Future—-at 11:50pm Thursday night, thanks to their new online submissions policy. Today I finally got around to logging it and my NaNoWriMo novel in my giant writing spreadsheet, and I noticed that I’d gone over the million word mark back on November 30th. Since I started writing in the summer of 2001, I also managed to do the whole thing in just under 10 years.

I found my way from Dean Wesley Smith’s twitter feed to L. M. May’s posts on learned helplessness and Barry Eisler going indie. I read Barry Eisler’s long two part dialogue with Joe Konrath about self-publishing.

Paramourtal is up for sale in Kindle format and many more at Smashwords, thanks to the ceaseless efforts of editor Kevin Hosey.

The Kindle version of Paramourtal is now up at Amazon, along with the trade paperback:

Via a mailing list: GigaNotoSaurus is a new market for longer science fiction and fantasy stories (up to 25,000 words), paying a flat rate of $100. Check out the submission guidelines.

Thanks to some fellow Odyssey graduates for pointing me to the latest Writers of the Future contest news. The first set of honorable mentions for last quarter has been up at the new location of the WotF blog for a while now. The second set appeared in a press release last week; yours truly was honorably mentioned. The semi-finalists and finalists came out yesterday in another press release.

Via @sfwa and SFScope: Pyr has announced they’re slushing unagented fantasy doorstops—uh, novels.

Pyr is only reading unagented submissions in “the subgenres of epic fantasy, sword & sorcery, and contemporary/urban fantasy.” Their needs for horror, science fiction, and slipstream are being met by agented submissions, so they’re not opening up those subgenres to the great, unagented masses.