CALLIHOO Newsletter Market News for Writers of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Julia West, Editor Vol. 9, No. 2 16 October 2001 Website: http://www.sff.net/people/julia.west/CALLIHOO/index.htm ----------------------------------------------------------------- IN THIS ISSUE Deadlines Anthology Beyond the Last Star (gls) Market Guidelines Strange Horizons (gls) ----------------------------------------------------------------- DEADLINES Check out the CALLIHOO website, listed above, for more information on these contests, magazine issues, and anthologies. (Where it says "GLs in Vol. X No. Y," these are volume and issue of the CALLIHOO newsletter.) Writers of the Future, 1st quarter 2002 Deadline 31 December 2001 [$1000 first, $750 2nd, $500 3rd place. No entry fee. L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest, P.O. Box 1630-JBW, Los Angeles, CA 90078. (GLs in Vol.9, No. 1)] Beyond the Last Star Open 1 December 2001 to 1 March 2002 [Print anthology, SF/F/H, pays 5-10 cents/wd ($25 min, $300 max) on accept. No sim or mult subm, no reprints, E-mail subm okay but snailmail preferred. (GLs in Vol 9 No. 2).] Low Port Deadline July 2002 [Open antho, SF/F 3,000 to 10,000 wds, pays 5-8 cents/wd. on accept, reading between Sept 2001 and July 2002. No electronic subm., Low Port, Lee and Miller, P.O. Box 179, Unity, Maine 04988-0179. (GLs in Vol 9, No. 1)] ----------------------------------------------------------------- ANTHOLOGY BEYOND THE LAST STAR [Print anthology, SF/F/H, pays 5-10 cents/wd ($25 min, $300 max) on accept. No sim or mult subm, no reprints, E-mail subm okay but snailmail preferred. Open 1 Dec 2001 to 1 Mar 2002 (but may fill up sooner).] darkfire@sff.net http://www.sff.net/books/guidelines.html Edited by Sherwood Smith Volume V in the Darkfire Anthology Series Important Note =Beyond the Last Star= is the last volume in the Darkfire anthology series. We currently have no plans for another series. These guidelines may be distributed freely to any venue. However, if you are reading these guidelines somewhere other than at , you should check there before continuing. We reserve the right to make changes in the guidelines from time to time, and the official version will always be at http://www.sff.net/books/guidelines.html. In particular, we will post a note there when the anthology is full (which will probably happen long before the official closing date). General No simultaneous submissions, and only one submission at a time. No reprints. No fan fiction. Must be original stories. Dates Open submission starting December 1, 2001 and continuing until March 1, 2002, or until the anthology is full. Payment Payment is 5-10 cents per word ($25 minimum, $300 maximum per story) on acceptance for First World Anthology Rights. Regular Mail Submissions Snailmail submissions to: Beyond the Last Star Sherwood Smith, Editor [address forthcoming--check back on December 1] NOTE: Include Self-addressed, Stamped Envelope (SASE) if you want a reply! Email Submissions Email submissions to darkfire@sff.net (plain ASCII text only). Snailmail subs preferred; email subs will be read last. Format Please format your manuscript using Courier or a similar typeface, double-spaced, with large margins. Include your email address on the first page. If your story is selected for the anthology, we will ask you to provide it electronically in MS Word or RTF. Description Stories for this volume should be set in the far far distant future--so far distant that there is little connection with our present world. Therefore, almost anything goes in terms of setting and genre: =Beyond the Last Star= is for stories that take place in the universe after ours--either metaphorically or literally--on new worlds after the next Big Bang, in a fairytale universe, in a spiritual afterlife, or in new sort of life here. Recent volumes in the series dealt with technological advances we might expect to see in the near or distant future rising from humanity's current situation. Think beyond that to what comes next--changes of kind rather than changes of degree. Characters may be human, alien, machine, sentient suns (but be sure to explain how that works), or something entirely new. * If your story is SF, it should not focus on gadgetry directly, or be derived from any of the standard tropes. If you do the next-step-in-evolution-is-psychic thing, avoid having your characters "blesh" or do "stardances" ... be original, be wildly creative, be brave. * If your story is fantasy and has damsels in distress, dragons, evil wizards, or otherwise goes back in time to a real or imagined milieu on Earth, make a nod toward the circumstances that allowed the same culture to rise again on a new world. If magic works, it had better have a mechanism and discernable rules. * If your story is horror, emulate King's =Apt Pupil= or =Delores Claibourne= rather than his =Christine= or =Carrie=. That is, go for drama and psychological horror rather than magic and unexplained (and unexplainable) things that just happen. The successful submission will have strong characters, realistic challenges, and solutions that come from clear thinking or depth of insight. Tone and genre are open, but dystopian visions will be a tough sell for this book. Stories don't have to suitable for =Reader's Digest=, but should have an element of hope: characters should show growth, and challenges should be resolved. http://www.sff.net/books/guidelines.html ----------------------------------------------------------------- MARKET GUIDELINES STRANGE HORIZONS [Weekly webzine, F/SF to 9,000 wds (prefer to 5,000 wds. Pays 4 cents/wd. No sim or mult subm or reprints. Prefers E-mail subm.] Editors: Jed Hartman, Senior Editor Susan Marie Groppi Chris Heinemann fiction@strangehorizons.com www.strangehorizons.com What We Want and What We Don't Want We're looking for high-quality stories that explore both the possible and the impossible: stories about human and nonhuman experience, about reality and dreams, about the here-and-now and otherwhere-and-elsewhen. We want stories from imaginative and unconventional writers; we want voices from diverse perspectives and backgrounds. We want stories that have some literary depth but aren't boring; styles that are unusual yet readable; structures that balance inventiveness with traditional narrative. We like characters we can care about. We like settings and cultures that we don't see all the time in speculative fiction. We like fantasy (especially urban fantasy). Dark fantasy is fine, but we're not looking for outright horror. We like magic realism, "slipstream," and even a dash of the surreal now and then, as long as it's readable. We also like science fiction, as long as it involves three- dimensional characters and interesting stories, not just science puzzles. If half your story explains a scientific or technological phenomenon, this is probably not the right venue for it. Any sex and violence in the story should be artistically justified; no excessive gore. Here are some of our favorite short-fiction writers: Joan Aiken, Eleanor Arnason, Greg Bear, Ray Bradbury, Orson Scott Card, Ted Chiang, Tony Daniel, Samuel R. Delany, Greg Egan, Harlan Ellison, Nicola Griffith, Zenna Henderson, Nancy Kress, Raphael Aloysius Lafferty, Tanith Lee, Ursula K. LeGuin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cordwainer Smith, Theodore Sturgeon, James Tiptree, Jr., Connie Willis. Consider those names as signposts mapping out some of the literary landscape we'd like to cover. This is by no means a complete list, and of course your work should be in your own style, not the styles of any of these writers. Pay Rates and Lengths We will consider submissions up to 9000 words, but we strongly prefer stories under 5000 words. We pay 4 cents/word. We buy first-printing world exclusive rights for two months. After that period, you are free to republish the story elsewhere. We hope (but do not require) that you'll allow us to post the story in our archives indefinitely after it's rotated off the main table of contents. You have the right to remove your story from the archives at any time. How to Submit Email stories to fiction@strangehorizons.com. Type "FICTION SUB: Your story title" in the subject line. Please don't leave out either the "FICTION SUB:" part or the story-title part. Stories should be in plain text (also known as ASCII) format in the body of your email message, not sent as attachments. Stories submitted as attachments will be deleted unread. (One way to insert the story into the body of a message: use your word processor's Save As Text command to save the story, then copy the resulting text and paste it into an email message. Be sure to format the story as described below before sending it.) If your Internet Service Provider (such as AOL or CompuServe) won't let you send the story in the body of the mail, drop us a note and inquire about alternatives, but note that the 32K limit that some ISPs impose is generally plenty for a 5000-word story. Formatting: Use plain black text. Do not use boldface. Do not use blue, or red, or any other color. Plain black is what we want. Use two line breaks (double spacing) to indicate paragraph breaks. (In Microsoft Word, you can insert double line breaks between paragraphs by doing a search-and-replace, replacing ^p with ^p^p.) Do not use two line breaks between lines within a paragraph. You don't need to turn on line wrap (which inserts a line break at the end of every line of text). However, if you do use line wrap (or if your emailer automatically wraps lines), be sure to set wrapping to 75 characters/columns or fewer; otherwise we receive the story as a series of alternating long and short lines. Be sure to use plain (ASCII) text; don't use curly quotation marks or apostrophes. Don't use the ellipsis character -- use three periods instead. (And beware: by default, Microsoft Word changes ". . ." to the ellipsis character, which comes out looking like a capital sigma on our computers. So make sure that your dot-dot-dots are three characters, not just one.) Don't use an em dash (a wide dash) -- use two hyphens instead. If you send us something full of curly quotes and em dashes and ellipsis characters, it will be hard for us to read. Place _underscores_ at the beginning and end of a word or phrase to indicate italics; use *asterisks* to indicate boldface. For any other special formatting, please include an explanatory note. We strongly recommend that you email the story to yourself before you email it to us. When you receive it, does it look okay? If possible, if you have a Windows computer, try emailing it to a friend with a Macintosh; a lot of Windows characters are unreadable on the Mac, and vice versa. Submissions which are not properly formatted may not be read. For information about cover letters and an example of how to format your submission, we strongly recommend that you see our additional guidelines page. We strongly prefer email submissions. If that's not feasible, we may be able to accommodate alternatives; write and ask. Don't send us your story until you have thoroughly proofread it. Accepted submissions may be edited for clarity or to correct minor errors, but submissions which do not meet minimum standards for correct spelling and grammar will be rejected, except in cases of obvious artistic license. Spellcheckers can be useful, but in many cases they merely compound spelling errors; if you're uncertain about your spelling, ask a human to proofread your story. To help us keep our response time down, please wait until we accept or reject each story before sending us another story. Sorry, no simultaneous submissions or reprints. Material other than fiction should be submitted to the appropriate editor. Thank you. [www.strangehorizons.com] ***************************************************************** * "If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without * * love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you * * are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one * * ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not * * being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first * * thing a writer should be is--excited. He should be a thing * * of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as * * well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows * * it'd be better for his health." * * --Ray Bradbury (Zen in the Art of Writing) * ***************************************************************** ==End of the CALLIHOO Newsletter for 16 October 2001==