What I like most about ConDFW is … well, that it’s so close to where I live. But besides that, it’s a literary con. It’s for us writers.

I spent the whole weekend hanging out with my good friend and co-editor Bill, who’s a Campbell-nominated SF author as well as the president of the Dallas chapter of the National Space Society. Day 1 (night, actually) I had a reading, and Day 2 found me hob-knobbing with NASA guys, space enthusiasts, and preparing for the NSS room party, while outside a huge dust storm made the Dallas sky look like doomsday. This segues right in with the fact that I spent some fun quality time with the Four Redheads of the Apocalypse. Yeah. Not only did they do interpretive dance to my reading Friday night, but Saturday they all four signed a copy of their book for me.

Yard Dog Press Sci-Fi really does kick ass. If Selina Rosen had her way, SF&F authors would all be more like rock stars. How can I argue with that?

After the panels and dinner, we proceeded to party far into the night … er, morning … and I ended up staying in the party room. Bill and I got up this morning, hit Starbucks, and then jumped right back into it with another NASA panel.

Then lunch, then the final panel of the day. This one interestingly enough was titled “The State of the Industry” which, instead of being about NASA (this was a SF&F con, after all) was about the publishing industry. In a gesture of unintentional but deadly accurate symbolism, only one of the panelists, Teresa Patterson, bothered to show up, and so she grabbed Robert Aspin to step in and help her. She and Robert then proceeded to paint pretty much the same picture I had already concluded for myself: print publication is choking to death, and while it’s never really going to die, the sad fact is there is far less money in it, and far less room for anyone other than top-tier writers.

My opinion is that the future of writing is online, and the money is in contextual advertising.

• Odyssey, the venerable fantasy writing workshop, is now offering free online podcasts of their lectures: Odyssey Podcasts
• MIT offers a recent lecture by Joe Haldeman on The Craft of Science Fiction (requires Realplayer): Haldeman’s Craft of SF

Enjoy!

Our very own William Ledbetter is administering a new science fiction short story contest jointly sponsored by Jim Baen’s Universe and the National Space Society. It’s called the “James Patrick Baen Memorial Writing Contest.” The winner will be published in Baen’s Universe at pro rates (their lowest rate is .06/word), so this is a worthwhile effort.

Details can be found at Bill’s website, here:

http://www.williamledbetter.com/contest.htm

Check it out and here’s wishing good luck to all who enter!

We’ve just added another item to our menu… “Recommended Books”

There you’ll find Speculative Fiction that we personally recommend (and, um, a plug for my own novel, but y’know that’s going to be a given), as well as science books that we find fascinating (modern science is so much like science fiction that it’s scary) as well as our favorite Sci-Fi / Fantasy movies … and some gadgets we either personally recommend (or are drooling over!)

What it boils down to, though, is if you actually see anything you’d like, and you buy it from our links, you help fund this site and ultimately our authors.

Go check it out and spend freely! 

I put some Yahoo content-sensitive ads on the site. I was going to put them on the stories, too, but it didn’t look right. We’re hoping to generate a bit of extra income on the side, and plan to use all of it (if there is any) for paying our writers.

Until this point, you see, we’ve been paying authors out of our pockets. It will no doubt remain this way for the time being, because it takes time to built up income from these ads. Our hope is to fine tune the context matching so that the ads that show up here will be of genuine interest to our readers, and thus be of use to them. They click and learn (or find) something they can use, the company that placed the ad gets business, and we get a percentage of the revenue for the click. Everyone wins.

At least, that’s the theory.

So did we sell out? I don’t think so. We’re just trying to get more money to pay for more stories.