A POC/non-white/mixie nerd scrapbook. Because we’re awesome.
Just a friendly reminder that the deadline to submit your work to the Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond anthology is May 1.
Our goal is to have somewhere between 25 and 30 short stories. We’ve already accepted some works by authors like Nisi Shawl, Eden Robinson, and Junot Diaz. We hope to soon be looking at something by you (and yes, previously published material is fine).
http://mothershipconnect.com/index.html
Submissions open April 1st, but Crossed Genres folks decided to post the guidelines first!
Who can submit
We welcome stories by authors from all walks of life. We especially encourage submissions from members of marginalized groups within the speculative fiction community, including (but not limited to) people of color; people who are not from or living in the U.S.A.; QUILTBAG and GSM people; people with disabilities, chronic illness, or mental illness; and atheists, agnostics, and members of religious minorities. The protagonists of your story do not have to mirror your own heritage, identities, beliefs, or experiences.
We also especially encourage short story submissions from people who don’t usually write in this format, including poets, playwrights, essayists and authors of historical fiction and historical romance.
Submission deadline and publication schedule
All submissions are due July 31, 2013. If it’s still July 31 in your time zone, you’re good. Acceptance notices will be sent by October 1. The anthology is tentatively slated for a February 2014 release.
Pay and rights
We pay USD 5¢/word for global English first publication rights in print and digital format. The author retains copyright. Payment is upon publication.
Story criteria
- Length: 3000-7000 words (FIRM)
- Your story must be set between the years 1400 and 1920 C.E., and take place primarily in our world or an alternate historical version of our world. (Travel to other worlds, other dimensions, Fairyland, the afterlife, etc. is fine but should not be the focus.)
- Your protagonists must be people who were marginalized in their time and place. By “marginalized” we mean that they belong to one or more groups of people that were categorically, systematically deprived of rights and/or economic power. Examples in most times and places include enslaved people, indigenous people, queer people, laborers, women, people with disabilities, the very young and very old, and people who do not share the local dominant religion, language, or ethnicity. Many people belong to multiple marginalized groups, and many are marginalized in some ways and privileged in others. Your story should acknowledge the complexity and intersectionality of marginalization.
- Your story must contain a significant element of science fiction, fantasy, horror, or the weird, without which the story would not work or would be a substantially different story.
- All submissions must be in English.
We will not accept any story containing the following:
- Gratuitous or titillating depictions of violence.
- Gratuitous descriptions of bodies or body parts, or people described only in objectifying ways.
- Horror that relies on shocking or grossing out the reader.
- Stories that are all about how someone non-marginalized became an enlightened champion of marginalized people.
- A protagonist from a societally or technologically powerful group who happens to be temporarily or situationally powerless (e.g. a peasant who’s really a prince, a representative of the British East India Company shipwrecked on Ceylon).
- Depictions of marginalized people as being doomed to hopeless misery.
- Depiction of any group, no matter how powerful, as universally, inherently, or irredeemably evil.
Handle with care
If you decide to incorporate one or more of the following elements, please do so with caution and awareness of the ways that they can be problematic or difficult to write about.
- Violence, particularly sexual violence. We recognize that sexual violence is frequently used as a weapon against marginalized people, so we are not issuing a blanket prohibition against it, but please consider very carefully whether you need to include it in your story; and if you decide that you do, please consider very very carefully whether your story needs to show the violent act itself.
- Consensual sexual encounters. We’re not averse to sexual or erotic content, but it needs to further the story and incorporate awareness of the ways real-world power relationships affect sexual behavior and decision-making.
- Stereotypes and clichés.
- Alternate history that drops magic powers or anachronistic technology into a historical setting.
- A protagonist who is the only marginalized person in the story.
- Revenge fantasies.
- A setting that’s already very commonly used in speculative fiction, especially one that’s often associated with stories featuring members of privileged/dominant/colonizing groups, e.g. Victorian England, the American “Wild West”.
What we do want
Your story doesn’t need to have all these elements, but we’re especially interested in stories that have at least some of them.
- Intersectionality.
- Accurate depictions of life on the margins.
- Thoughtful, sensitive incorporation of religion, superstition, and folklore.
- Depictions of historically accurate societal attitudes in the context of an authorial voice that does not condone or espouse bigotry. (For example, your female characters will probably have to deal with societal sexism, but your descriptions of them should not rely on sexist stereotypes.)
- An understanding of how economic, technological, political, and religious influences shape a time and place, especially in alternate historical settings.
- Research bibliographies and suggestions for further reading.
- Integration of friendships, family relationships, and community into the story.
- Protagonists who make conscious choices and take conscious action.
- Side characters who are real people.
- Personal triumphs and successes.
- Making us laugh, think, cheer, and weep.
We’ll make the submissions form available on Monday and post a link here. Again, the deadline for submissions will be July 31!
The Journal of EXUBERANTLY Bad Fiction!!!
The Journal of EXUBERANTLY bad Fiction is devoted to scraping the bottom of the barrel and publishing only the absolute worst of the worst. No matter how low the bar is set, we are looking for fiction that limbos under it with PANACHE. Stuff that makes Eye of Argon look like Literature with a capital fucking L.
PAYMENT: $10 per story. No, it’s not a lot, but nobody else is going to publish this shit, I guarantee it. I guess if humanity has terrible taste, it’s possible that I could make some money off this — somehow, and then I’ll pay more. We are talking ICICLE’S CHANCE IN HELL, people. Don’t hold your breath. I apparently started this zine because I felt like pissing my money away.
RIGHTS TO BE PURCHASED: First worldwide publication rights, non-exclusive, because seriously if you can find someone else to pay you for this stuff, more power to you. We’ll probably want some non-exclusive audio rights or whatever, mostly so that we can convince people to do public readings. Probs gonna do some kind of Kindle version, because people on Amazon will pay for ANYTHING. Maybe a print version. Iunno. I’ll figure it out in time for the contract.
FAKE NAMES ARE REQUIRED. Obviously I’ll need your real name for contract issues or whatever, but I refuse to publish anything under your actual name. If you do not supply a suitably ridiculous pen name, I will make one up for you.
EDITING: Stories will probably be edited. If so, you can like… refuse, I guess, but really if a story can be made even worse with a few errant commas, why not let me work my terrible art? That’s what I thought.
GENRE: Who cares? Any genre, so long as it’s terrible.
Submissions should be sent to journalofexuberantlybadfiction@gmail.comDo not come anywhere close to standard manuscript format. Preferred font is 14pt. Papyrus. Scanned images of crayon on butcher paper is also gleefully accepted.
There is a hard upper word limit of 3000 words, because really there’s no way you will stay funny enough for that length of time. IF you write long? No problem! Send the whole shitty story and I’ll excerpt what I want. Unless I just don’t want any of it, which is probable.
Be funny. Be terrible. BE EXUBERANT. It’s not enough to merely be bad. I want the bad that is so entertaining that you are physically unable to stop reading. Did you write it when you were twelve? AWESOME.
ALSO accepting Twitter fiction, but I’m not paying for it. Sorry! I’d pay like… a dollar, but I think Paypal would get it all and screw them anyway. Twitter fiction should be sent to journalofexuberantlybadfiction@gmail.com as well.
Watch @exuberantlybad for updates, nonsense, and all-caps screaming.
ART GUIDELINES: Go ahead and send it I guess as like a .jpg or whatever. I probably won’t take any of it because uh, I know how to use MS Paint. I’ll pay like $10 each. Maybe.
Attention creators! Princeless nearly swept the Glyph’s last year and I certainly don’t want to this year, because that means not enough of you are submitting!
So…
If you are a Creator of Color
Or/And your comic features black characters or black issues, get your stuff ready and submit it to the Glyph Awards, THE award show that was created to honor black creators and characters in comics!
They’re looking for science fiction, fantasy (“If it isn’t set in Medieval Europe, send it to us”) and horror stories of up to 8000 words from authors outside the US or UK. Reprints are fine, especially because they don’t pay. Go wild!
calling all: alien creatures, animorphs, astrologists, bitchy witches, celestial beings, clairvoyants, closet monsters, comix nerds, cyberpunx, cyborg feminists, deep sea divers, discordians, dungeon masters, dystopian sluts, elves & fairies, evil robots, extremophiles, genderqueer cans o’beans, glam goths, glamarchists, griminals, hackers, horror fiends, intergalactic babestars, kids who read about inanimate objects coming to life, techies, Linux geeks, mad scientists, pervy bookworms, post-apocalyptic prophets, sexy clones, stargazers, steampunks, superqueerdos, Tralfamadorians, Trekkies, wizards, wizard’s apprentices, vampire slayers, vamp tramps, superqueerdos, vengeful librarians, zombie survivalists, 1-800-psychics, and lovely so-ons… ***who aren’t cis***
We’re hoping to compile a rag tag collection of short sci-fi/horror/fantasy stories written by trans*, gender/queer, gender variant, questioning, or otherwise fabulous peeps. For the first volume, we’re hoping folks will consider, for your writing pleasure, the vague theme of ‘Solution-Oriented Dystopia’ and anything that may encompass.
After many (encrypted web-based) chatz we got to talking about the ways in which non-cis folk often gravitate towards each other to discuss our experiences living in a cis-centric world, and the ways we move through those worlds. These conversations often include talking about hard shit, sharing coping mechanisms, and plotting to tear down and piss glitter on the ruins of the realities that bring violence against us. and also, we talked a lot about sci-fi.
oppressive language gets put on us by so-called experts who feel entitled to narrate our lives and dictate what our bodies should or shouldn’t look like. our stories get spelled out to us by ‘professionals’ and/or any jerk who wants to tell some stupid joke. so we wanna reclaim ourselves and narratives through sci-fi. we wanna create fictions that could become realities, in some other quantum reality in the not-so-distant future/past/present.
we chose the theme of Solution-Oriented Dystopia because we want to talk about the terrible shit that happens to us and our loved ones by way of creative processes. We don’t wanna gloss over those things, because silence = death. our silence does anything but protect us, and for that reason we would rather obscure cis-centric worlds than pretend they don’t exist.
we think that writing is an escape hatch, an ejection seat out of the cis-centric death machine on a collision course to monotony. it’s an opportunity to not just work through, but speak out against, the ways in which the world fucks with us on a daily basis - and be fabulously geekxcore sassy while doing so.
deadline for submissions: february 2, the day of satanic revels
submission guidelines:
-no poetry (we love you… but…)-The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Award guidelines state that a short story is anything under 7,499 words. But… seriously. In keeping with the on-going life theme of railing against everything, we’re hoping you stick to between 1,500 - 2,000 words long (shorter is okay too)-grammar and capitalization is whatever.
-send in .doc, .odt-justified marginssend submissions to: sciencefagz@gmail.com (sciencefaggots was already taken!!!!!!!!)
SIGNAL BOOST! this sounds totally amazing
Most writers leave out a lot of what they know about their characters and the histories and workings of the worlds their characters live in. And that’s practically an invitation for readers to barge in and read between the lines and invent more than is actually on the page in the official, authorized version of the story. For “Missing Links and Secret Histories,” an anthology to be published by Aqueduct Press, I’m looking for wikipedia-page-style entries with the aim of compiling a Treasury of Missing Links and Secret Histories of stories we know and love. Such Missing Links and Secret Histories must shed critical or transformative light on the works they riff rather than appropriate them. These entries will probably not include zombies, sea-monsters, vampires, werewolves, and other such frequently interpolated monsters. They must, of course, make sense within the framework of the official, authorized version of the story they are glossing, and the more Wikipedia-like the better. Hyper-links are encouraged. Stylishness, wit, and ingenuity will be especially prized. And for Secret Histories, the more byzantine and buried they are, the better. A word of caution: if the official, authorized version of the story is not in the public domain, it behooves the contributor to be certain that author of the original story being riffed will not view the contribution as infringing their copyright.
Details at the link.
Contributions are invited for an essay collection on the representations of disability and the disabled body in science fiction. Technology is often characterized as a cure for the disabled body – one that either elides or exacerbates corporeal difference. From block buster films and televised space operas to cyberpunk and hard SF, disabled bodies are often modified and supported by technological interventions. How are dis/ability, medical “breakthroughs,” (bio) technologies, and the body theorized, materialized, and politicized in science fiction? This collection is particularly interested in the ways dis/abled bodies challenge normative discourses of ability, generate novel spaces of embodiment, and proliferate new understandings of human being.
Contributions are welcomed from both academic- and arts-based researchers and practitioners from a wide range of critical perspectives: literary studies, disability studies, feminist studies, science and technology studies, critical theory, race studies, queer studies, media studies, film studies, Aboriginal studies, cultural studies, and rhetoric studies. Papers may deal with the representation of disability in any form of popular genre SF: film, television, and print (including all SF subgenres i.e.: feminist SF, post-cyberpunk, hard SF, steampunk, etc.). All possible topics related to the representation of disability and disabled persons in SF are welcome: dis/ability, illness, technology as cure, prosthetics, diseased bodies/contagion, care of the self, alterations to the body, corporeal boundaries, environmental modifications, medical care, and alternative constructions of being.
Send a 300- to 500-word abstract, working title, and a brief bio, by email in a Word attachment, tokathryn@academiceditingcanada.ca before or on November 18, 2011. Inquiries are also welcome. Final papers should range in length from 5000-8000 words.
About the editor: Kathryn Allan received her PhD in English Literature from McMaster University (2010) studying feminist post-cyberpunk SF and theories of the vulnerable body. She currently is an independent SF scholar, working as a freelance writer and (academic) editor.
tl;dr: Planned steampunk/wuxia anthology seems to have insufficient measures to prevent Orientalism-fest, fails to acknowledge previous work in the genre.
[…] I’m really fucking sick and tired of all these cutesy white editors thinking they’re doing non-whiteness a favour just by having an antho that supposedly celebrates something non-white, but in reality, just gives white people another opportunity to wank all over non-whiteness.
Meanwhile, Derwin Mak and Eric Choi are trying to sell another Chinese-themed antho with no success, and can’t find a published for a pan-Asian spec fic antho, either.
Basically I think we Azns need to orc the shit out of this anthology. Submissions open September 20.
I met the editor at GearCon and she made it a point to tell me that she’s specifically looking for non-Victoriana steampunk.
Which can go either the way of Fail in which we have a ton of writers exoticizing non-white settings for Orientalist entertainment (I don’t care that they don’t mean to; you know it’s gonna happen and if we have to fall back on the intent excuse I will stomp on something), or it could go the way of fucking Win in getting POC writers out there.
So have at it, writers.
