The perfect grab-bag of Halloween fun, from free books to ghosts to corgis in costume -- read on! Treat! Glamour by Andrea Janes is free today-only on Kindle. Get your copy of this funny, witchy novel where the lives of the haves and the have-nots collide . . . in an ice cream shop . . . with witches. It's awesome. Got ghosts? What about animal ghosts or the creepiest New Mexico ghostwalk ever, or NYC's Boroughs of the Dead, or how about thirteen creepy stories of ghosts, specters, and things we can't quite identify in Specter Spectacular: 13 Ghostly Tales? Right now when you use the code HAUNTED at checkout, the ebook edition is 50% off the sale price. Last day to submit to Corvidae and Scarecrow anthologies is today. Information here. But if you keep scrolling down that page you'll see another treat: Far Orbit: Apogee a sequel to the first Far Orbit anthology will be accepting submissions starting in the new year. Dressing up this year? These eight super-sexy Halloween costumes for moms may not be what you're expecting. And these five nerdy science costume ideas are uber delightful. Add a little humor to your Halloween with a Southern belle and a Velvet Elvis painting possessed by the King himself in Susan Abel Sullivan's The Haunted Housewives of Allister, Alabama, also 50% off the ebook sale price on WWP when you use the code HAUNTED at checkout.
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By Eileen Wiedbrauk. In an NPR essay, Saladin Ahmed wrote of the lynch pin of epic fantasy world building: the map. For works of second world fantasy, the inclusion of the map once was a splendid means of entry into a new world. Then it became so ubiquitous that yet another tired old map that looked vaguely like Europe with a few extra lumps and bumps neared the status of a joke. I can recall conversations from the past decade when my fantasy-reading friends would hear a certain speculative novel was bland, and they'd immediately ask: "Did it have a map?" A derisive snort followed. Of course, in the decade preceding that, I would buy only books that had maps between their end papers and opening chapters. No map, no deal. How quickly our tastes change. You asked for it! And so you shall receive. We've pooled data from Reading Editor Stephanie Sauvinet and myself (Eileen Wiedbrauk) and complied the following numbers and statistics from queries sent during our June 2014 open period. If you're interested in February's numbers, they're here.
There were other ways we could have crunched data -- female protagonists vs male protagonists vs animal protagonists (yes, we get animal queries, no, we're not quite sure what to do with them) or agent vs unagented submissions -- but that felt occasionally invasive and universally like too much work. I think the biggest draw for those who requested on Twitter that we run stats again, is curiosity. While those submitting to the next go-round can certainly learn from the mistakes of #QueryFail or QueryOops! there is no magic formula for success to be found in these numbers. If only it were that simple. (And if there is a reason you love to look at these numbers that I've not thought of, feel free to leave it in the comments. Unless it's mean. In which case, take your mother's advice on silence. And failing that, take my mother's advice on silence.) Queries received in total: 88 Length of query period: 30 days Received before/after period: 2 Received as a result of an #SFFpit request: 17 By Eileen Wiedbrauk, Editor-in-Chief. June submissions are my favorite. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s the long hours of daylight, or maybe the weather. Spring in Michigan has been cool and wet, which I love. Or at least I love reading during rainstorms. Once the rain stops and the lawn’s shot up four inches overnight, the flower bed’s full of mushrooms, and the basement’s become home to a reflecting pool’s worth of groundwater that seeped in for a visit . . . then I’m not so enamored. It’s been a few months since my last “From the Editor’s Desk” column, in part because big behind the scenes changes were going on. I teetered between writing about them, and consequentially announcing them too early, and being too exhausted post-change to sketch it down in some coherent form. But here they are! Unpreemptive and (hopefully) cogent! Who was your first vampire? We're contemplating the first vampires we encountered in film, fiction, and television. From Rebecca Roland, author of Shards of History: When the movie The Lost Boys came out, I was 12 years old. I developed an immediate crush, not on the Coreys, but on Keifer Sutherland who played David, the ultimate bad boy and leader of a band of vampires in Santa Carla, California. With a perfect vampire sneer and contempt for the living, Keifer managed to scare me and send a pleasant little chill down my spine. Looking back on the movie now, I think David and his vampire gang represented the pitfalls we all must navigate as we're growing up, and so that movie spoke to me on many different levels. And did I mention the fabulous soundtrack? "People are Strange" still takes me back to that movie and that moment in my life. Junior high is one of the strangest times in a person's life, isn't it? Things change so quickly at that age -- not just our bodies, but our personal tastes as well -- as we start to try on and discard different personas. From Susan Abel Sullivan, author of Cursed: Wickedly Fun Stories and Haunted Housewives of Allister, Alabama: My first vampire was Barnabas Collins on the original gothic soap opera Dark Shadows. I was only four or five years old when the show first aired, but Barnabas was the reason I kept watching. The wonderfully talented Jonathon Frid, a Shakespearean actor with a Master's in Drama from Yale, brought a deeply textured performance to a character that very easily could have been campy in the hands of a lesser actor. I had a major crush on Barnabas even though I was pretty young. Surprisingly, Frid was a middle-aged man with average looks, nothing at all like the leading men of that time such as Paul Newman, Robert Redford, or Rock Hudson. But he brought such heart and pathos to the character that I couldn't help falling in love with him. And neither could the ladies of Dark Shadows such as Josette DuPre, Angelique Bouchard, Roxanne Drew, and Dr. Julia Hoffman. I believe Barnabas is the first instance of the vampire as a tragic hero in film, TV, or movies. Dracula was portrayed as a villain by Bela Lugosi in the 1930s and Christopher Lee in the 1950s, and Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire's tragic vampire hero Louis was not published until 1975, four years after Dark Shadows' last episode. The character of Nick Knight from the TV show Forever Knight owes quite a bit to Barnabas Collins, not only in Nick's quest to reclaim his humanity, but also in the character of Dr. Natalie Lambert, a coroner, who like Dr. Julia Hoffman on Dark Shadows, attempts to cure Nick of vampirism with medical science. By Eileen Wiedbrauk, Editor-in-Chief. The Importance of Backstory, Told and Untold. So much has been happening behind the scenes at World Weaver Press these past few months. We've picked up five new novelists from our 2013 open submission period, and set the table of contents for our upcoming anthology Far Orbit: Speculative Space Adventures. Not to mention all the reading that's been going on for the anthologies Specter Spectacular II: 13 Deadly Tales, Fae, and He Sees You When You're Sleeping: A Christmas Krampus Anthology (all of which are still in the selection process, please be patient with us, and scheduled for 2014 releases). In the coming weeks we'll be bringing out A Winter's Enchantment, an anthology of three winter novellas by Elise Forier Edie, Amalia Dillin, and Kristina Wojtaszek -- and yes, that will include a new Fate of the Gods story! Speaking of Fate of the Gods, not only is the second novel in the trilogy newly out this month, but we're giving away books -- honest to god, tangible, paperback books! -- potentially lots of books: see previous post. There’s a little shindig happening this month known as Pitch Madness, (a.k.a. the colossal Twitter explosion #PitMad). Whenever one of these events happens, there’s a flurry of social media activity prompted by writers wanting to know who knows what about which press or agency. But reaching out to the void might not be the best way to answer the question How do I get to know such-n-such press or agency? Now, before I break into my best off-key rendition of “Getting to Know You,” with full-on The King and I giant hoop skirt,* I must stop to wave my metaphorical pompoms for the wonderful review Forged by Fate recently received from Book Chick City which lavished praise on Amalia Dillin’s ability to seamlessly weave Norse, Greek, Biblical, and Egyptian mythologies into one epic romantic fantasy. Back to Getting to Know You — For writers, Pitch Madness has several layers of activity, including entering the Twitter Pitch Party in the hopes that it will pique the interest of an agent or editor who’s also attending the party (i.e. reading the #PitMad stream). World Weaver Press Reading Editor, Stephanie Sauvinet, and I will be taking part as editors in the Twitter Pitch Party on September 12. We participated in May 2013, and requested queries and samples from some interesting projects. To date, we’ve not made an offer of publication on a project that came to us directly through #PitMad, but we’ve seen an interesting correlation to our involvement: the number of regular queries jumped in the weeks after Pitch Madness in good part, I suspect, from observant #PitMad lurkers. Here’s where the lurkers show their strong suit: If you’re going to send an agent or editor your query letter, you’re beginning the submission process in earnest. It’s like dating — a Twitter Pitch Party might be akin to speed dating, but if you can’t see yourself getting involved with someone, then you really shouldn’t agree to go on a real date. So how do you know that you want to submit to that publisher or agent? How do you get to know them? How do you judge them? The answer is simple: you read the books they publish or represent. Additionally, you can see if a watchdog group has flagged them as running a scam, you can glean their personality through their blog and Twitter feed (savvy marketers know that you have to have someone knowledgeable and invested in the company run the Twitter account, not the intern; at WWP, about 85% of the tweets are me and the other 15% come from our Reading Editor). Admittedly, these getting-to-know-you activities take time. Time that the lurkers have invested — they see a press participating in #PitMad, they check them out: they toodle through the website, check out the type of fiction being produced, check out the authors and the publicity they’ve received, they read some of the published books before submitting because they understand that in the end, a publisher’s product is their books not their website or social media presence. I love it when I get down to a query or make an offer of publication and the writer tells me what they appreciate about our previous releases, that they liked our publicity campaign, or that when we requested their full MS they politely contacted a couple of our authors to see how we were to work with. (Although you might want to hold off if we've only requested the partial — I don't want to flood my authors with emails!) These are writers who've done their research and know they’re ready to publish with a small press. We know where we stand in the market. Our goal from day one has been to produce great speculative storytelling and bridge the gap between between self- and traditional-publishing. We’ve looked at work through agents as well as directly from authors. But as Dahlia Adler points out in her brilliant essay On Querying and Submitting Simultaneously, writers should decide if they want an agent or want to work directly with an editor before submitting to either. Agents and editors are on the same team: the author’s. They have different functions, but writers should think of them as offense and defense, not rivals to be played off one another. They don’t want to fight, they want to work together to get your book across the same goal line. I highly recommend Dahlia Adler's essay linked above; it’s eloquent, thorough, and avoids almost all sports metaphors. In my case, the latter is likely symptomatic of my TV’s unfortunate new inability to pick up Notre Dame football games. So I invite you to get to know us. Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter. Order or download a book. Leave a comment. Have a conversation. Tweet me the Notre Dame score. Just don’t ask me to sing — show tunes or otherwise — I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket. *N. B.: I do not, in fact, own a hoop skirt. Giant or otherwise.
Happy birthday to us! This month marks the one year anniversary of the launch of World Weaver Press -- and we've got so much to celebrate: It's a bit hard for me to believe it's already been a year since we brought out our first title, Cursed: Wickedly Fun Stories, a short collection with a delightfully creepy sense of humor by Susan Abel Sullivan. Seems like we released Cursed, and the next thing I knew it was summer and we were publishing our first novel, a beautiful second-world fantasy with a strong, believable heroine, Shards of History, by Rebecca Roland, a novel Good Choice Reading described as "remind[ing] us of why we love books in the first place." Fall brought with it the release of Specter Spectacular: 13 Ghostly Tales our first anthology: a Night Owl Reviews top pick and a spooky little read to pass a dark autumn evening. Two of the stories within even made Tangent's 2012 Recommended Reading List alongside the biggest and best pro-markets publishing short spec fic. In fact, we had so much fun with this anthology, that come May 1, we'll be reading for volume two: Specter Spectacular II: 13 Deathly Tales. |
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February 2024
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