Dark Energy SF welcomes Wendy Kovak as our new junior editor!

Wendy is blonde, feisty, and wields a wicked red pen.  She is now our first line of defense against slush pile backlog.

Welcome aboard, Ms. K!

We’re open for submissions.

Please look over our guidelines as they’ve changed.  Most notably, we’ve pushed our response time out to 60 days.

This gives us more breathing room, and allows us to give more attention to more stories.  The goal is to not take all 60 days before responding.  But if we fall behind, we won’t feel under the gun to catch up, which would cause us to be a bit quicker in judging stories in the slush pile.

We’re writers too.  We have stories in slush piles as well.

We’re all in this together.

Come and schmooze with us in Dallas! Bill and I are going to be two of the guests at FenCon IV in September, and we’d love to meet you.

This month Dark Energy SF was a featured market on WOW! Women On Writing.

Cool! Thanks, girls! You might consider listing Quantum Kiss as well.

…when no one is looking at it. Proven by the latest scientific experiments:

“…physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism — giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871).”

From PhysicsWeb.org

We are proud and happy to present to you two new stories!

Helios by Gary Moshimer is a rare thing — a very original ghost story. I love this story. I mean, I love it. It’s a fun read and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Skinned Cats by Mike Howard is another rare thing — a fun and convincing tale told from an alien point of view. That might not seem so rare but, trust me, it is. This one is great!

Please do yourself a big favor and read these stories. You’ll be glad you did.

Oh, and, um… don’t forget to tip the writers. You only get out of this life what you put into it, and if you want more great stories like these, you have to do your part to encourage the writers to keep writing them. Every little bit helps.

Enjoy!

Because of other projects, we’re going on submissions hiatus starting April 15 and probably coming back on September first.

I’ve updated the Submissions Guidelines. It says the same general things but now more succinctly. One thing that’s different is that I’ve given a definite word limit. We used to leave it nebulous, but now it’s between 1000 and 20,000 words.

Oh, there is one other change I did make. We pay using PayPal (always have!) but now if you don’t have PayPal and don’t wish to use it, then submit somewhere else. Until a better system comes along, that’s what we use and that’s how we’re set up. It’s the Internet standard and, folks, we’re living in the year 2007. We may not have flying cars but we do have a universal electronic payment system.
Do I sound a bit irritable? Stressed is more like it. Don’t worry, I’ll be back to my sweet nurturing self after the hiatus.

In the meantime I know we’re publishing at least two stories, and there’s some more gems in the slush pile we’re eyeballing. So keep coming back. Just because we’re on reading hiatus doesn’t mean we’re not putting up stories.

When you’re submitting a story to a publication who’s submission guidelines clearly state “Please, NO SIMULTANEOUS SUBMISSIONS” and a day after you submit the story, send another note saying you are pulling the story from consideration because you just sold it somewhere else… guess what?

You’ve just pissed off an editor.

After you’ve done that, don’t bother sending anything else.

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!