TECHNOLOGY / INTERNET
Public Provides Giggles; Bloggers Get the Book Deal
By JENNA WORTHAM
Published: April 18, 2009
Publishers are hoping that millions of page views on a blog will translate into booming sales on the bookstand.
The Dream
Okay. So, The Soulless Machine Review is a hobby, and with each new review, I feel that I improve my style and the quality of the content. I do it for fun. I do it because I love short fiction and there aren’t many other sites (blogs) that truly review individual short stories, as if they were just as important as novels. They are you know, short stories, they are just as important as novels, if not more important, especially in an age of shorter and shorter attention spans.
The dream of publishing my short stories is still alive. I might have jumped the gun a little with posting my collection online: Keeping Watch: and other short stories. However, I felt that I wanted these out in the world regardless of publisher approval. It will also force me to target markets, write stories, my kind of stories, that better fit a specific journal. This ought to increase my success rate.
Beyond my own stories, I have a new dream, a dream that I would someday be contacted by a publisher or a journal to read short fiction for them, help select top stories for publication, and earn an ‘editor’ credit line. Better yet, a publisher would ask me to create "The Soulless Machine," a collection of short fiction from my review blog, to be published as an anthology. Here is a short list for such an anthology:
OBITUARY by Alexandra Wolfe
CTHULHU’S NIGHTMARE by Bric Barnes
THE CHATHAM BEAR by Mathias B. Freese
BONE SIGH by Tim Pratt
CLOCKWORK by Trent Jamieson
RADIODEMONOLOGY by John Medaille
PERIODS by Florence Ann Marlowe
BENT, NOT BROKEN by William R. Potter
MAY 18, 2010 by William R. Potter
REGENCY SPRITE by Dave Freer
FERRY TRAFFIC by Aidan Moher
NEEDLES by Jens Rushing
NO RIGHT by Jens Rushing
MUDCOLORED BEAUTIES OF THE PLAINS by Alicia Conroy
NO FACE by Junot Diaz
SCROOGLED by Cory Doctorow
WAR NO. 81-Q by Cordwainer Smith
SQ by Ursula Le Guin
THE SCHOOL by Donald Barthelme
TV PEOPLE by Haruki Murakami
MICHAEL IN ANTARCTICA by Kim Stanley Robinson
MASON’S RATS by Neal Asher
A CASE OF CONSILIENCE by Ken MacLeod
DEUS EX HOMINE by Hannu Rajaniemi
Down boy, down, for now, those dreams go back on the shelf, and I must return to grading student papers
0 comments:
Post a Comment