m. c. de marco

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.

I found the Wall Street Journal article on The Death of the Slush Pile that’s making the rounds, via a mailing list. As an aside in a very long thread about agents, Dean Wesley Smith pans it. The whole thread is worth reading, but here’s the short version: agents should not be used for marketing, only accounting.

Clarkesworld Magazine announced that they’ll be accepting submissions up to 8,000 words in 2010, although they still prefer 4,000.

SFScope reported on the fourth annual Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest, being co-sponsored by the National Space Society. Submissions should be positive, near-future space exploration stories of less than 8,000 words, due April 1st.

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.

I heard via a mailing list that Flash Fiction Online is now a SFWA qualifying market (that is, one of the professional short fiction publications a sufficient number of sales to which qualify one for membership in the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America organization). I like writing flash (very short stories), so this may be my ticket to full SFWA membership. A few other markets have gotten onto the list lately: Tor.com, Apex, and the Grantville Gazette.

I Should Be Writing has some links about Black Wednesday, the day Houghton-Mifflin stopped buying books. Pyr-o-mania and John Scalzi recommend fighting the recession with a book shopping spree. Dean Wesley Smith reminds us that for the publishing industry, bad news is good news:

As previously promised, the second part of The End of Science Fiction by Nader Elhefnawy, concerning the poor business prospects of the genre, went up at The Fix on September 15th. First of all, you should watch your word counts:

Back in the days when the pulps controlled the market, books rarely got much beyond 60,000 words, as Robert Bee noted in an article on the subject in the April issue of IROSF. However, a well-known literary agent (who deals in science fiction, among other things) confirmed what a lot of people have long suspected when he briefly included in his site’s guidelines a flat statement that works in that range were unsalable.