Competitions etc

A gathering of some of the notices that have come my way lately:

2010 Bristol Short Story Prize
Stories up to 3,000 words, entry fee £7 and the deadline is March 31st.

RealDeal Theatre's Sitcom Saturday
RealDeal are looking for 15 minute sitcom scripts. The entry window is March.

Prole
This is a new literary magazine looking for submissions for their fist issue in June.

The Third Step will get published!

A while ago, Pantechnicon accepted a second short story from me. The Third Step was supposed to go into Issue 9 but didn't make it. Then Pantechnicon had to close and I thought, well, that's that then. I suppose I better send it off to some other places.

I didn't. Life has been very much on hold this year. A very large part of the last ten months has been taken up with the need to secure permanent employment. That is still the case and will be for the foreseeable future. I've been lucky to get a temporary contract and be earning enough to pay the mortgage, eat and buy a few nice things. It still means that every spare moment is eaten up by job hunting and it still feels very insecure.

Yesterday I had some good news. Pantechnicon will be putting out two final issues alongside Theaker's Quarterly Fiction. My story had got lost between editors; now it's been found again, they'd like to publish it in the final issue of Pantechnicon, which will come out in April 2010.

Time to Write

The day job is going well but naturally a lot of my headspace is being used for learning about the job. Fortunately it's not completely new and I'm looking forward to being able to write in the evenings once I get to grips with it. I plan to blog at lunchtimes.

Currently I'm reviewing Crossed Genres, Issue 5. In the meantime, I thought I'd post just to have something fresh up here and to let you know that the deadline for Crossed Genres, Issue 9, is 30th June. They are looking for sci-fi/fantasy stories with an alternative history theme.

Crossed Genres Issue 2

Crossed Genres is a new online magazine that specialises in scifi/fantasy stories that have elements of another genre. Issue 2 has four dystopian scifi/fantasy stories.

Of the four, Nesting Instinct is the best. It may be a result of the dystopian theme but I found the stories hard work. Too much telling, too much description of a future world and not enough story for my taste. All of the stories lack action and dialogue; character and plot are sacrificed in favour of describing the dystopia.

Still, Crossed Genres is a new magazine and I'm willing to give it a few more issues to see if the quality varies with the theme.

They have announced that with Issue 4, Crossed Genres will become a paying market. They are looking for fiction, articles and artwork, so see the submission guidelines for more information.

Space Westerns

In the course of wandering around in the internet, I stumbled across an ezine called Space Westerns. It publishes weekly and pays money.

They are looking for stories, radio plays, artwork, comics, film, poetry and reviews. Have a look at the submission guidelines.

Strange Horizons

Strange Horizons is an online magazine considered a professional market and paying reasonable rates. They publish weekly in bite size pieces.

I'm sure this isn't news to a lot of people, but I just found out about them so I thought I'd mention it.

Get the first page of a story read and critiqued at the ElectricSpec blog

The kind and generous editors are playing a mini slush pile game. Entries are posted on the blog with comments - and so far, it's been highly constructive advice.

Read ElectricSpec.

Read the ElectricSpec Editors blog.