Not a sale, but the story made it past the first round. Which is encouraging! Lord knows you can feel stalled in this business, sometimes. Or more than sometimes… still, mustn’t grumble. I’ll know more at a later time – and, again, this isn’t a sale, just me making advancing along in the process.
Thanks, by the way, for all the encouragement that I’ve gotten in the past and will get in the future. It really does help. Anybody who does art will tell you that, too.
Is there something interactive online somewhere that can help with that*? – Not that I’m ever likely to need to convert from that alphabet into the Roman one, but it might be helpful if I ever need a block of text for a game, or something. …For that matter, is the Tengwar subject to copyright? I mean, obviously Tolkien created the various scripts and alphabets himself.
Moe Lane
*I did look, and I found some helpful tables, but I’m looking for something more interactive.
Oh, 2017. How much nicer you are to me than that last, horrid year was. From Hollywood Reporter:
After nabbing a spaceship’s worth of Oscar nominations for Arrival, Shawn Levy and his 21 Laps banner are jumping back into the elevated sci-fi drama genre.
Fox 2000 has preemptively picked up an untitled pitch that is based on Inconstant Moon, a short story written by Larry Niven, the author behind the sci-fi literary classic Ringworld.
Continue reading Arrival/Needful Things production team 21 Laps to do Larry Niven’s Inconstant Moon.
Now, you could order “The International Spy Film Guide 1945 – 1989” via Amazon, but if you get it directly from the website then it works out to about $200 American, which is about thirty bucks less. I don’t exactly want to own this, though*. I want my local library to own it. I now bitterly regret not spending the last ten years worming my way onto whatever advisory board handles said library’s acquisitions…
Via Ken Hite. Of course.
Moe Lane
*More accurately, I don’t have $200 to blow on something that will spend 95% of its life on my shelf, gathering dust.
I am fairly embarrassed that I somehow missed Ken Hite’s and Christina Rodriguez’s Goodnight Azathoth. Sloppy of me, really. Oh, well, my oversight was easily fixed.
I am starting to feel that the single most egregious thing that was done to me in college was to omit explaining just how entertaining Jane Austen was as a writer. I mean, sheesh, it turns out that Northanger Abbey is a meta-fiction parody that snarks out on the excesses of the genre fiction of the day… and written by somebody who was good at said genre, too. I would have happily read that. Shoot: if Jane Austen was around today I’d probably be signed up for her Patreon and her Twitter feed. She’d certainly be writing books in the genres that I read.
And so, adieu to Red Storm Rising. Heh. A Jane Austen technothriller. The mind reels…
Come, I will conceal nothing from you: one major reason why I bought Empire Games was for the amusement of watching Charlie Stross extricate this particular story line from the morass of pseudoscience and conspiracy theory that he originally drove it into. ‘Peak oil.’ ‘Aspartame causes brain damage in children.’ ‘Secret US nukes set up for domestic false-flag operations.’ ‘President Rumsfeld, master manipulator and Destroyer of Worlds*.’ It’s not nearly as bad as David Gerrold’s continuing inability to figure out how to get humanity to win the War Against the Chtorr**, but neither is it trivial. Fortunately, ‘alternate history’ can handle this sort of problem…
Moe Lane
Continue reading In the Mail: Charlie Stross’s gingerly-tap-dancing ‘Empire Games.’
Mostly, they involve watching my wife take my kids to the pool, then grabbing my Chromebook and retreating to a Panera Bread or something so that I can get some writing done. I have, like, three short stories that need finishing and this weekend has been not great when it comes to my larger productivity. A couple of hours writing in peace and quiet sounds like a great idea…
OK, look.
I picked Red Storm Rising because I was trying to remember a passage from it the other day, looked it up, and ended up reading half the book at one sitting. When Tom Clancy was on, he was on – and this was classic ‘conventional WWIII against the Soviet Union’ stuff. But: it is not a goram ‘Jack Ryan novel.’
Sheesh.
And so, adieu to Fugue State.
Details here: I need to double-check whether they want the pitches for fiction tomorrow, or the actual submission. I have finally written it out (been thinking about it for a week), so I’m good either way. Still, the sooner it’s submitted the sooner I can get it either accepted, or rejected and thus ready to go out into the great wild world of the submissions merry-go-round. This one’s never been published, too, so it’s nice and fresh and has a better per-word rate.
