419 Memoirs & Other Strange Stories.

My first full length ebook story collection is now available:

An outcast child and a mountain shaman hold the keys to humanity's survival. A gunfighter steps out of myth and into the twisted realities of the modern personal development movement. One weary universe collapses-and a new one rises. Voices from an all-too real future reach out to one another, desperate to connect. Hamlet celebrates his 40th birthday with an old friend and a to-do list. A television producer descends into madness. The god of sound taunts the god of sight.

Set in impossible pasts, bizarre futures, and skewed-but-recognizable versions of the present, these sixteen stories, and more, from the inimitable Michael Canfield will take you on iconoclastic voyages of the imagination you won't soon forget.

Includes The Food Processor, Library Rules, They Get Away from You, Once Upon a Time ... At the Learning Annex, A Flavor of Quark, The Last Confessions of NinjaBaby, The Whited Child, A Flavor of Quark and nine others. Plus a complete short novel: The Plastic Fruit Museum, excerpts from two forthcoming novels: Red Jacket, and Growing Up Zombie, and many other extras.

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Smashwords

How To Create a Quick Ebook Cover Using Pages (mac)

Many dedicated graphics programs exist, but writers without a design background find the learning curve steep. Mac users who own the word-processing program Pages already have an easy tool to make an ebook cover themselves.
First, have your art ready. Free and low cost art is available from many stock art sights. Try googling "stock photos", "royalty free art" etc. Keep in mind that simple artwork without multiple complex elements work best for covers. Much of the art you will choose gets covered by text. Think background image.
In Pages open a document. Choose the "blank" template.
Under the File menu go to Page Setup ... > Paper Size.
From the dropdown menu choose "Manage Custom Sizes." Create a new custom size. Call it "Book Cover Ratio, set the width to 6 inches and the height to 9 inches. Leave the other fields alone and hit "Okay." This will give you a page size the correct portions of a standard book, which will look professional when displayed on Amazon or other sites.
Drag your art or photograph onto your open document. Resize the art on the page by clicking and dragging any of the photo's corners or edges. Use the "Lock" icon on the tool bar (or under the "Arrange" menu) to lock your art down and keep it from moving.
Under the "Insert" dropdown menu choose "Text". This creates a box to type into. Create three text boxes: one for your title, one for your byline, and one for your cover blurb if you want one. (A cover blurb can be anything from a subtitle for the book, a teaser about the contents, or a one-phrase background on the author.) Separate boxes work best, so that you size your various text elements differently. Place the title text box near the top of your cover, and the byline text box near the bottom. Keep the blurb near your title, as seen on most professionally produced book covers.
Choose "Fonts" from the main toolbar, which will bring up the fonts window. Play with the fonts and sizes until a combination grabs you. Strive to keep your text readable. A single font works best. Avoid "distressed" fonts, or anything else difficult to read. For text color, black or white usually prove the most readable options.
With ebooks, most prospective buyers see a version of the cover at thumbnail size. Choose View > Show Page Thumbnails, which will allow you to judge how readable your cover appears.
Pages has no capability to save a document as a .JPG. Instead, save your document as a .PDF and then use iPhoto or another photo/graphics program to save the .PDF as a .JPG.
You now have a professional looking cover for an ebook that you can use with any document format.

Free Story of the Week S01E01:

PEAS AND CARROTS

Sophie. The script called her Sophie; and Sam the optimist, Sam traveler-without-cares, loved her since creation. Azure-eyed Sophie, orphaned country maid, as new in Vienna as the century was young; Sophie in chiffon frock of cobalt blue; her brown hair unadorned with silk ribbon, tied in plain linen.

Tonight, upon hearing him speak say, Pardon me, Fraulein, do you believe in fate? brown-haired, azure-eyed Sophie would surely fall into his arms, her cheek upon his breast. His body, breath, and kisses would let her know that fears could no longer trouble love. For this alone had he been written: to rescue Sophie from Maximilian, and sweep her away forever. The invisible hand had scripted it and tonight he'd win her, though she did not even know his name.

<Continue reading the whole story free until at least 03/05/11.Expired!


Available for purchase at Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Diesel, and other sites.

Fifth story up on Smashwords now.

"Wednesday" from the Stoker-Award nominated anthology Corpse Blossoms.

It's .99¢ unless you want to get it free on Smashwords using this coupon:


Promotional price: $0.00
Coupon Code: BN94Q
Expires: February 18, 2011 Expired!!

A million words of crap.

Last year I wanted to figure out how much fiction I'd written in my life, so I did, and realized that by the end of 2010 I could reach a nice round total of one million words, which is the John D. MacDonald starting line. I did reach that number, on December 30th.

I'd actually written quite a bit more than that, but decided not to count anything that was incomplete. Really it's not that helpful to keeping starting stories and novels; it doesn't count unless it's finished, not even as practice, imho. Even a shitty, inept ending will teach something, even if it's only: I should have never started this.

I say a million words of crap, but I hope it's not all crap. I've managed to pursued nice editors to publish some of it, although, depending on who is commenting, a least some of that is crap too.

Anyway, I'm now a few thousand words into my second million. I'll check in with you later.

The most important rejection I ever received.

This wasn't my first rejection letter; it wasn't even my first personal rejection letter, but it's the most significant one. It would be another six years before I sold my first story to Karen Joy Fowler for the Mota: Courage anthology, but one letter with a little praise and some very important criticism from Algis Budrys (whose few novels, which seem unjustly forgotten, I have always adored and admired) kept me going a long long time. This first paragraph was Budrys's standard rejection template, I have a few other that say the same thing, so it rocked me to see the three paragraphs that followed. Budrys wrote rejections that were turning points in the careers of many writers. Stephen King, in On Writing, wrote about one he received when Budrys edited F&SF.

My rejection slips.

I'm moving, and at the same time, I'm getting rid of a lot of stuff. I no longer feel the need to keep physical copies of old rejection slips. I have about 540 altogether (a ream plus a novelette of paper!) Here's a pile of them. I'm keeping exactly one, which I'll share about later in the week. You can see, in this picture, that I submit to mainstream as well as genre markets, though not necessarily the same stories. I have NO idea what I sent to Redbook though,  or when I sent it. Don't recall that one at all.

1 way I'm saving time on the internet.

When Gawker Media user accounts were hacked I went through my passwords to various things, tightening up security giving some thought to all the little accounts for various bullshit I have signed up for over the past decade. I've come to the conclusion that I'll never sign up with anything for the privilege of making blog comments again. The reason has nothing to do with security, it's just the blog commenting is a waste of time. Huffington Post, Gawker, boingboing, The Daily Beast, etc all get thousands of comments a day, most of them in written to protest the point of view of the blogger or some of the other comment-leaver, and, I suppose, correct their thinking on the subject at hand. This sets other people off, who comment in outrage to correct the corrections and soon you've a threat of a couple hundred comments, that if you really want to keep up on the post you will have to scan and rescan frequently. By then, unless your comment is especially outrageous or obnoxious your contribution will be lost in the crowd. You will see that others are still making the argument the you so succinctly demolished pages earlier, and then you will consider posting again.

I say don't do it! The only way you can have an impact is if you are one of those power comment-leavers and have the time to leave dozens, if not hundreds of comments a day. I know you; you have better things to do, many more useful and satisfying ways you can contribute. If a big registration-required blog has an article you really feel passionate about just share the link on facebook, your own blog, or tweet about it. Don't sign in the blogs using your facebook or twitter: not that there is a security danger. Linking a blog to one of you existing accounts will save you time and convenience in set-up, but you'll lose more time in the end if you start leaving comments. The real danger is time-suck.

A cover for my short ebook.

Some of my previously published stories will soon be appearing in various ebook formats. Here's the cover of one, "Peas and Carrots" which originally appeared in Realms of Fantasy awhile back, and is now available through Smashwords. (The background photo is by weatherbox.)

W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook, 1940:

"Fundamentally man is not a rational animal. It is this that makes fiction so difficult to write; for the reader, or the spectator of a play, demands, at all events today, that he should behave as if he were. We feel dissatisfied when the persons of a story do not act from motives that we accept as sufficient. We expect their behavior to be rational, and if it isn't we say: "But people don't act like that." Our demand for probability grows more and more stringent. We balk at coincidence and accident. We expect the characters that are presented to us invariably to behave like themselves.

The behaviour of the persons in Othello, of Othello himself principally, but to a less extent of almost everyone in the play, is wildly irrational. The critics have turned themselves inside out to show that it isn't. In vain. They would have done better to accept it as a grand example of the fundamental irrationality of man. I am quite ready to believe that contemporary theatre-goers saw nothing improbable in the behaviour of any of the characters."

Nanowrimo: The Widgets

I'm writing a novel called "Red Jacket." This is how the first draft is going:

Write Or Die thingy.

	405
20
lab.drwicked.com

Just saying

The lyrics of "Comedy Tonight," the opening number in "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" make up a five-minute master class in the elements of farce.

Requires research ...

Your challenge is to write crossover fanfiction combining Dilbert and NYPD Blue.
The story should use a sex-change operation as a plot device!

Generated by the Terrible Crossover Fanfiction Idea Generator

Via Mamatas

What if Warner is barred from releasing "Watchmen"?

Then Alan Moore will be at peace.

Legal Battle Between Fox and Warner Over ‘Watchmen’ Heats Up - NYTimes.com

Nisi Shawl is blogging

The pieces she has collaborated with Brian Charles Clark on so far, are eclectic, entertaining, and a good deal more thoughtful than the average blog post. But what else would we expect? It's Nisi.

Puck » Joni Mitchell and the I Ching

A sudden bigger project

*sigh* Once you start drawing yourself reference maps -- you're probably moving out of short-story lengths.

Stuff I hate (part 1 of a series)

Finding I left kleenex in a pocket after doing laundry.

"Napoleon ... with dragons!"

"The American Revolution ... with dragons!"

"Apollo 13 ... with dragons!"

"The Holocaust ... with warlocks!"

"The Cold War ... with aliens!"

I hate video blogs

And most audio posts too. Example: Slate V. I keep seeing rss headlines for Slate articles I think I'd like to read but turn out to be videos. I don't want to load a video, or put my headphones on just to see something I may or may not be interested in. You can scan video or audio the way you scan text. I think Seth Godin blogged some time ago about this being the reason vBlogs and podcasts will not supplant text. But vblogs are popping up everywhere, and that's annoying.

Russell Davis

is running for president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and his platform is here. In addition to his writing resume, he seems to bring a great deal of publishing, business and non-profit experience to the table. I especially like his statements about the need to enhance SFWA's reputation in the publishing industry.
[via Scalzi via Buckell.] [Err ... I'm mean via Nebula-nominee Buckell! Congrats Toby!]