People are Flooding Magazines With AI-Written Fiction Because They Think They’ll Make Money
themarysue.com – Saturday February 18, 2023
Neil Clarke, editor of the science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld, recently reported an unsettling trend: a huge increase in the number of fiction submissions plagiarized using AI.
The essay Clarke links to goes into more detail about would-be contributors using AI programs to scrape existing published stories and repackage them as original works. AI writing tools have proliferated in recent years, claiming to write original stories but delivering mixed results. In one Clarkesworld submission, Clarke writes, someone submitted a story with the following sentence: “Sitting on its three years’ experience, the fittest Shell was originally the size of more android subliminal observations than any other single subject in the Grandma.” The submission was reconstituted from a story published in 1956.
Clarke writes that he bans plagiarists from submitting again, but at least one has complained that they “need the money.” As his graph shows, the amount of Clarkesworld submissions has ballooned over the past few weeks, and many of them are AI-generated.
Woof. Where to start?
3 Common Writing Mistakes New Sci-Fi/Fantasy Authors Make
theportalist.com – Friday February 17, 2023
Ioften get two responses when I tell people that I write books. The first is, "Oh, I don't think I could ever do that!" The second is just the opposite. "You know, I had an idea for a book myself."
The truth lies somewhere in between those two thoughts. It's certainly not impossible to write a book, but it takes more than a single good idea. You can write a great scene in a day, but a novel is often a labor of deliberate love. It takes time, planning, and revisions.
As a writer and an editor, I have seen many first-time authors (myself especially) struggle with the same few problems. This article highlights one issue I often see at the beginning, middle, and end of new authors' works—and how you can fix them.
If you are writing your first book, these tips can improve your manuscript and help you actually finish.
Tor Publishing Group Announces Bramble, a New Romantic Imprint
tor.com – Wednesday February 15, 2023
President and Publisher Devi Pillai announces the creation of Bramble, a new imprint of Tor Publishing Group dedicated to a wide array of romantic stories for the modern reader.
From science fiction and fantasy to contemporary and family saga, romance belongs in every genre and every genre belongs in Bramble. Whether the last page holds happily ever after, to be continued, or an ending that isn’t so simple, Bramble books will take you on an extraordinary journey of love. With spice levels to suit all readers, with familiar tropes and uncharted territory, Bramble books will explore a love that’s tangled up, covered in thorns, and oh so sweet. Bramble is for everyone and everyone deserves a good love story.
Of the new imprint, Pillai remarked, “Tor Publishing Group is the gold standard of genre publishing and it’s the perfect time to have an imprint dedicated to romance. Bramble will be the destination for exceptional love stories of all kinds. Expanding into romance gives our team and our readers another chance to do what we do best: get obsessed! Plus, let’s be real, I just want to publish more books I love to read!”
Catapult to Shutter Online Magazine, Writing Classes
publishersweekly.com – Wednesday February 15, 2023
Catapult has announced that it will shutter its eponymous online magazine and writing classes program. The decision comes as part of an effort to "focus all resources on its core business of book publishing and its three imprints: Catapult, Counterpoint, and Soft Skull Press."
Catapult publisher Alyson Forbes said in a statement: “This decision to center our efforts on our foundational business will ensure a successful future for our imprints and incredibly gifted authors as we continue to publish with the passion and care that defines the Catapult Book Group.”
Want to be a writer? This bleak but buoyant guide says to get used to rejection
npr.org – Wednesday February 15, 2023
"No whining."
That's one of Stephen Marche's refrains throughout his provocative essay called On Writing and Failure. As a writer himself, Marche would never deny that writing is hard work: He well knows that writing for a living is fatiguing to the brain and tough on the ego and that the financial payoff is overwhelmingly dismal. But, by repeatedly saying, "No whining," Marche is telling aspiring writers, in particular, to "get used to it."
His aim in this little book is to talk about "what it takes to live as a writer, in air clear from the fumes of pompous incense." And what it takes, in Marche's view, is to have no illusions about the certainty of failure. Even beyond talent or luck, Marche argues, the one thing a writer needs to get used to is failing, again and again.
New Magazine Listing: Lost Lake Folk Opera Magazine
firstwriter.com – Wednesday February 15, 2023
Literary magazine published twice annually. Accepts short fiction (1000-6000 wds); one-act and other short plays or scenes (1000-6000 wds); essays and opinion (500-300 wds); poetry (no more than 10 poems or 10 pages).
Tips and Resources for Writing Your First Sci-Fi/Fantasy Novel
theportalist.com – Sunday February 12, 2023
These books helped me learn about story structure, characterization, and the most important aspect of writing: persistence.
Like many writers, my very first attempt to write a novel began with one scene. I saw dust motes floating through sunbeams, framing a woman sitting at a bar made of antique wood. Over the years, I’d wonder about that woman. Who was she? Why was she sitting at a bar all alone with nothing but trickles of sunlight to keep her company?
These are the kinds of questions and images that set authors on the journey of writing. But the more I tried to figure out who she was, what the story was, the more elusive it all became. This woman became the symbol of my creativity. Sitting in isolation, stuck in a liminal backdrop that refused to budge. The encouraging voices telling me I could write and should pursue it were drowned by a much louder, far more formidable force: doubt.
A.R. Capetta’s Top Ten Tips For Writing Speculative Short Stories
i0.wp.com – Sunday February 12, 2023
To celebrate the release of their sensational new YA sci-fi anthology, Tasting Light: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Rewire Your Perception, co-editor A.R. Capetta, shares their top ten tips for writing speculative short stories.
1. Write that first draft as quickly as you can get it down—without giving yourself time to judge it. If your story involves worldbuilding or even research, like many of the science and tech-inspired stories in Tasting Light, you can do that beforehand and layer in more afterward. But as you write a first draft try not to interrupt your brainwaves while they’re chasing the single, brilliant beam of light that is your idea.
2. Speaking of light! A great speculative short story is like a beam of light that’s gone through the facet of a prism. It is focused and transforming. As part of your writing process, read some of your favorite SFF stories. Look for the focus. Look for transformation—both in the story itself and in how it changes things for the reader.
Why publishers are such cowards
spectator.co.uk – Sunday February 12, 2023
After publishing 17 books, I’m no stranger to the publicity campaign. In my no-name days, my publicist would purr that my novel’s release would be ‘review-driven’ – which decodes: ‘We don’t plan to spend a sou on your doomed, inconsequential book.’ By contrast, as we’ve seen writ large with Prince Harry’s Spare, your volume can be cast upon the public waters as not a mere object but an event. The intention is to convince book-buyers that unless they snap up a copy sharpish they’ll be caught up short at cocktail parties.
Thus quite some time ago, some editorial Baldrick at William Collins must have whispered to Nigel Biggar, a newly signed author at the HarperCollins imprint: ‘I have a cunning plan.’ Clearly the concept driving this week’s release of the Oxford professor’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, which before our current Year Zero would never have caused a stir, was to convert misfortune to opportunity, much as manure can convert to fuel.
As I’ve read the story in some ten different articles, interviews and reviews, including in last week’s Spectator, we’ll keep the recap short: Bloomsbury commissions book on British Empire; Bloomsbury loves book on British Empire; Bloomsbury gets the willies about too-hot-to-handle manuscript claiming British Empire did some good things as well as bad and pays off author to go away. Behold, yet another ‘cancellation’ in an industry that once audaciously scandalised genteel sensibilities with the likes of Ulysses or Lady Chatterley’s Lover and is now renowned instead for cravenness, fearfulness and slavish conformity.
Tony Lee Launches £2500 Caliburn Prize To Aspiring Graphic Novelists
bleedingcool.com – Friday February 10, 2023
The Caliburn Prize is Tony Lee's new UK comic-based literary grant, recognising fresh and unpublished voices in the world of comic and graphic novel creation.
During lockdown, comic book writer Tony Lee of Hooded Man Media became bestselling novelist Tony Lee under a couple of pseudonyms. Now he is looking to share the love. The Hooded Man Caliburn Prize for Comic Creation, or The Caliburn Prize for short is a new UK comic-based literary grant, recognising fresh and unpublished voices in the world of comic and graphic novel creation. The Caliburn Prize is a £2,500 grant aimed at helping unpublished UK-based creators get a foot on the comics ladder.
"When I started in comics, it was a different world," Tony Lee explained. "I was able to walk into a publisher with experience in other media under my belt, but many of today's creators don't have the same advantages I did, as the industry has massively changed over the last twenty years, and the doors I entered through are now boarded up. The prize fund is a way to help the next generation of comic creators find their own route into the room where it happens."
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