Free lessons in cyberspace for Genre writers

I decided to have a post consisting of links to sites, articles and blogs that might be useful for potential submitters to our little zine (and submitting stories in general). I’ve taken the liberty of listing these links in easy-to-follow categories:
 
Writing craft:
http://www.coffeehouseforwriters.com/fictionfix/
http://www.sfwa.org/writing/turkeycity.html
http://www.storytellersunplugged.com
http://www.lazette.net/Vision
http://www.sff.net/people/Vonda/Pitfalls.html
 
Why are these important?
Writing fiction (short stories or novels) [...]

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The Ultimate Superhero for Writers

I was inspired to start writing speculative short stories after reading Fondly Fahrenheit by Alfred Bester. The story broke a lot of preconceptions I had about short fiction and the limits that were inherent to the form. For example, before reading the story, I had gotten it into my head that because of the length [...]

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The scarcity of Why-dunnits in the slushpile

Our slushpile suggests that Why-dunnit is not as popular as the Who-dunnit or the How-dunnit. Although quite a few submissions have combined all three types of mysteries, the full why-question-centric tales are not forthcoming.
I guess many writers believe that if you already have the ‘who’ and ‘how’, then the ‘why’ (although important) is just not [...]

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Why does TV get Speculative Fiction right more often than Film?

JB Dryden made the comment that television produces more a consistent quality of Speculative fiction than film. That got me asking myself: “why?”
JB went on to mention the tendency of film to grab the nearest Specfic novel as the basis of their projects. Television does the same on occasion, but with a slight difference:

TV tends to [...]

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Inspiration from other interests – juggling hats

In my previous post, I mentioned my short story featuring a Technological Singularity in a historical setting. I thought it would be a good spark for a discussion on inspiration. 
Firstly, I should make it clear that I didn’t set out to write about a technological Singularity in ancient times. It was more a case of [...]

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Check this out

Everyone who knows me knows that I prefer reading short fiction anthologies rather than novels.
My reasons:
1. I like getting 15-plus stories for the price of one long one.
2. If the plot or writing (or insert any aspect) of a novel sucks, the whole novel sucks for me. However, if  plot or writing (or insert any aspect) of [...]

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