Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction

Here are some of the interesting writing- and SF-related things happening around the Internet:

Bryan Thomas Schmidt launched a Kickstarter campaign for his next anthology yesterday. This book is called Raygun Chronicles and collects space opera short stories from the now-defunct Raygun Revival magazine as well as a number of original stories.  Raygun Revival was most recently owned by Every Day Publications (which produces the excellent Every Day Fiction magazine) so you get to support both Bryan and EDF in one shot. Click here to pre-order your copy via Kickstarter.

Amazing Stories is back! It’s relaunching this week at amazingstoriesmag.com

Steve Davidson rescued the world’s oldest science fiction magazine when the previous owners allowed its trademark to lapse. Davidson registered the trademark and spent several years working behind the scenes to resurrect the storied brand.

There is no original fiction – yet. But there are several dozen bloggers who will be covering various topics of interest to SF fandom, including some very familiar names. If all goes according to plan, new fiction is soon to follow.

This isn’t the first time Amazing Stories has been brought back to life. It remained in print for nearly 70 years, finally closing its doors in 1995. Two different publishers attempted to engineer its comeback, but neither attempt succeeded. Let’s hope that third time is the charm and that Amazing Stories will be here to stay.

While Duotrope is doing whatever it is doing behind a pay wall and Submitomancy is still in the process of raising the funds necessary to code their site, Diabolical Plots masterminds Anthony Sullivan and David Steffen created a basic, effective, and free-to-use Wiki tool to track and report submissions called The Submission Grinder.

Although the site is fairly basic and there are still some bugs, it is improving rapidly and moving in the right direction. Anthony and David are committed to always keeping the service free to its users (though there’s a handy Donate button if you’d like to thank them for their hard work!).

But no matter how great a job the two of them do, Wiki sites are always only as good as their data. I encourage the readers of this blog to create accounts and upload their submission results. In my estimation, if we can get over a thousand active users on the site (its at just over 250 as of today), we can turn an already useful tracking tool into a useful and reasonably accurate snapshot of what’s happening at speculative markets.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013 at 7:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.