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Write a Short Story a Week Like Ray Bradbury

Write a Short Story a Week Like Ray Bradbury

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Once many years ago, Ray Bradbury decided the best way to become a good short story writer was to write a whole bunch of them. So he committed to writing a short story every week for a year. He also decided the only way to get published was to submit short stories, so he submitted a story once a week for a year too.

It’s a simple formula many beginning writers just don’t get — you got to put in the effort, and you have to send your stuff out there. As Bradbury explained in this speech, practice will help you, and it is impossible to write 52 bad stories in a row.

So let me introduce you to Write1Sub1, an online group where we encourage each other to write and submit a short story every week. They don’t have to be the same short story, because you probably want to let a story sit for a while before going back and editing it with a fresh set of eyes.

Many of us (including yours truly) are more novelists at heart, so if you don’t think you can face a weekly challenge, you can write and submit once a month. When I did this challenge back in 2014, I tried the weekly challenge. I burned out after four months, but got 16 stories written, more short stories than all previous years combined. Many got published in magazines and anthologies and the rest assembled into a collection I indie published. It really does work!

Check us out on our Facebook page. It costs nothing but your time, commitment, and perhaps your immortal soul. Keep on writing!

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The Future of Iraq, According to the Country’s Science Fiction Authors

The Future of Iraq, According to the Country’s Science Fiction Authors

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1907297246With all the grim news coming out of Iraq, it’s easy to think the country has no future. That’s wrong, of course, because being one of the oldest countries in the world, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

But what will that future look like? To answer that question, UK publisher Comma Press has released Iraq +100, an anthology of Iraqi writers imagining the future of their nation. As the blurb says:

Iraq + 100 poses a question to ten Iraqi writers: what might your country look like in the year 2103 – a century after the disastrous American- and British-led invasion, and 87 years down the line from its current, nightmarish battle for survival? How might the effects of that one intervention reach across a century of repercussions, and shape the lives of ordinary Iraqi citizens, or influence its economy, culture, or politics? Might Iraq have finally escaped the cycle of invasion and violence triggered by 2003 and, if so, what would a new, free Iraq look like?

Covering a range of approaches – from science fiction, to allegory, to magic realism – these stories use the blank canvas of the future to explore the nation’s hopes and fears in equal measure. Along the way a new aesthetic for the ‘Iraqi fantastical’ begins to emerge: thus we meet time-travelling angels, technophobic dictators, talking statues, macabre museum-worlds, even hovering tiger-droids, and all the time buoyed by a dark, inventive humour that, in itself, offers hope.

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SFFWorld Announces Kickstarter for Ecotones Ecological SF Anthology

SFFWorld Announces Kickstarter for Ecotones Ecological SF Anthology

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ecotoneslrgThe folks over at SFFWorld are working on their latest in a series of themed “pro-am” anthologies. These anthologies bring together big names, rising stars, and relative unknowns around a common theme. This year’s book, Ecotones, is taking a speculative look at ecological issues with stories by Lauren Beukes, Tobias S. Buckell, and Ken Liu. It will come out in December 2015. Other authors include Matthew Hughes, Stephen Palmer, Daniel Ausema, Victor Espinosa, Andrew Leon Hudson (also the editor), Kurt Hunt, Christina Klarenbeek, Jonathan Laidlow, Igor Ljubuncic, P. J. Richards, and Rebecca Schwarz.

(Full disclosure: Contributor/editor Andrew Leon Hudson is a friend of mine here in Madrid. He’s also my most obnoxious beta reader, so he’s serious about clean prose.)

You can check the project’s teaser page to learn more about the stories, which appear to span the realm of speculative fiction from space opera to urban fantasy.

SFFWorld is trying to raise £1,000 to cover costs and pay the authors via a Kickstarter campaign. As inducements they’re offering the anthology, plus bundles including their three previous anthologies and other goodies. Rewards start at the £3 mark, which is cheap for a Kickstarter. While the authors have already been offered a nominal fee, the Kickstarter is pushing for additional  £2,500 and £5,000 goals in order to pay them semi-pro or pro rates.

The Kickstarter is on for the entire month of November.

Click here to help the Kickstarter. Check the anthology’s blog for more information and updates.

Sean McLachlan is the author of the historical fantasy novel A Fine Likeness, set in Civil War Missouri, and several other titles, including his action series set in World War One, Trench Raiders. His historical fantasy novella The Quintessence of Absence, was published by Black Gate. Find out more about him on his blog and Amazon author’s page.

Short Fiction Review: Fast Forward 2 edited by Lou Anders

Short Fiction Review: Fast Forward 2 edited by Lou Anders

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Fast Forward 2 cover“So just what is science fiction?” asks editor Lou Anders in the preamble to his second and latest volume of Fast Forward, an annual collection of original genre stories (you can find my review of the first edition here). Theodore Sturgeon, whose definition Anders includes in the epigraph, used to seem to say it best: “…a story about human beings with a human problem, and a human solution, that would not have happened at all without its science content.” Maybe back when Sturgeon was writing, that covered all the bases. What, then, would you call this anthology’s “True Names” by Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctrow, in which nary a human can be discerned in a computer generated simulacrum? And while Paul McCauley’s “Adventure” does take place off-world, this would be an example of where you could take the science out of it and still have a story in which the protagonist attempts to confront his illusions, with disappointing results.

Another reason for continually posing the question is to distinguish science fiction even while mainstream literature adopts conventions of the genre that dare not be named by publicists and marketing programs. Another, related, part of the challenge is that we live in science fictional times. Used to be, a character accessing a globally connected computer network to get directions to the nearest sushi bar could only be taken seriously in the funny pages of Dick Tracy wrist communicators. These days, it’s merely another mundane background detail.

Anders’s definition has multiple aspects, but the one notable criterion is that, “To my mind, science fiction is first and foremost entertainment and must be entertainment if it is to function effectively…” (15). While he goes on to say that it should be more than just entertainment, I think the reason most people start reading science fiction in the first place is that it is great fun, something that frequently gets overlooked in the sometimes ponderous discussions about what is, or is not, science fictional. If Fast Forward 2 has an overriding theme, it is that the fourteen stories here are highly entertaining (though, as it happens, the stories I found the most intriguing were actually the least purely escapist).
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