Eat better.

No, I don’t mean just eat better foods. After all, disinformation aside, at this point I feel reasonably confident that “eat food. not too much. mostly plants” works just fine for my body type, metabolism, and tax bracket. Granted, I don’t always take that advice. But I mean eat in better ways. Don’t choke down breakfast; chew, savor, appreciate, think of the all the days I woke up sad and punished my system with a Bustelo-only diet.

And on the flip side of this, no more gorging - whether stoned, in a hurry, or having just come off cardio. No matter what basal command urges an ever-ramped chew/swallow/repeat, slow down. Create a reasonable portion. Dip over the boundary of that portion only when appropriate, not just when available. Quit eating with a scarcity mentality.

Binge good TV, use bad TV as emotional caulking

I was piercingly depressed this week and I watched the 2nd half of THE LEFTOVERS first season, which for all its shaky starts turns out to be the truly bleakest and most perfectly depressing show on the current roster. This is good TV. HOMELAND, for all its stupidity, can be binged in two days for an experience akin to classic 24 with better casting and half the episodes. 

Bad TV is used to muffle the buzz of boredom when nothing more healthy will do. It is a way of sitting in one place, alone, dislocated. When you must exist in empty space. But it should seal narrow cracks, not shingle your roof.

Stop softpedaling language

Professional interactions in publishing (and I’m sure it’s not alone) so often subsists on a mat of insincerity and complicity in that insincerity. We say that sounds great but we mean that sounds like words. We say we’ll do it but we mean we’ll do it when you prompt us the 2nd time. We say it’ll be good when we mean we have no fucking clue how it’ll be. We say we’re excited when we mean we don’t want to say we feel nothing. We say she’s nice when we mean she’s boring. We say that’s unfortunate when what we mean is that we’re happy they’re failing. We say all good when we mean some good. We say we really enjoyed it when we mean that we burst into fractured sobs upon turning the final page because somewhere in this mound of edited text was a sharp edge that rent a hole in our heart’s exoskeleton and we don’t like that such a thing can happen because it hurts and pain is bad. 

Stop being so negative to seem cool

Negativity and irony in media and publishing is easy and comforting. By saying something is terrible or the worst thing ever or the worst or pretentious or flawed or just awful or stupid or that it’s your most hated example of another thing you don’t like, you’re very quickly and efficiently saying I’m Not Like That. Compulsive othering is a human feature but it’s not a good thing. Especially when it’s used to silence benign positivity; “I was happy because of this thing, it made me feel good” “you must be naive and stupid and if you really think that you’re not one of the cool kids” it’s fucking sickening and it drives so many ad-revenue engines and while I recognize nobody can always exist in a perfectly warm bath of good vibes about any and all things unless that person is literally a god, it is tiresome and boring to read and listen to people who can never be expressly and messily vulnerable about the many things that make them feel comforted and beautiful and perfect in the moment and strip away every ounce of self-consciousness like a cleansing fire, because they are afraid of sounding happy. Criticism and lazy outrage are not easy unless that’s all you do. A heart that beats with emotional flab is not one I wish to sync with.

Defend Kid Rock

Kid Rock writes great songs, he’s very talented, he gives a lot to charity, he likes a lot of the same music as me, and I’ve been listening to him for years. He has a new album out. I’m gonna probably like it just fine and continue to argue that anyone who doesn’t listen to him because a mean kid in fifth grade used to yell the lyrics to Bawitaba during recess (or equivalent) is being needlessly self-limiting.

Be skeptical and call out when appropriate the people who use texts to validate their opinions poorly

Smart people have nuanced ideas of how “the world works” and “how humans think” and yet I see some cling to the idea that one book like sof (or similar) has unlocked the secret molecule of Truth about all humans and therefore they can make sweeping statements on how neuroscience works is gonna be getting a frowny face from yours truly. I’m drawn to these people, but I prefer smart people who remember they’re tiny and stupid and insignificant sometimes.

Visit every NYC bookstore new and used

Every Barnes and Noble, every tiny stack of used books on the streetcorner table or in the cramped floor-through apartment, every place that sells books in every corner of this ridiculous city. Staten Island, Gravesend, Bronx, I’m coming, I swear.

Panic better

Every time I panic now I set my phone timer for 45 minutes, to trick my brain (panic part) using another more powerful part of my brain (procrastinating part). I can panic in 45 minutes. It’s working.

Read white guy novels with healthy and skeptical abandon

I like Knausgaard, Richard Ford, John Updike, and DFW. Don’t need to defend that because nobody is threatening this. Nothing wrong with enjoying books by or about members of your tribe - just as long as you don’t get hung up on it. (This includes books only set in the last decade.) There’s a lot of good- and bad-natured criticism of white dudes who write books, and none of it should stop you from reading their books if you want to. Just read non-white non-guy books with abandon too. This is part of the “like what you like” thing. 

Re-embrace uncertainty

I have a Career now, but I still don’t know how my 401k works, the difference between “then/than” every time, or when my parents will die. I have a new nephew but I don’t know what his life is gonna be like (though it’ll be filled with love and good food because my sister’s a bomb-ass cook and nurturer). But in order to not get riveted by the Now and spiral into a pit of depression, I must remember that I cannot understand the ramifications of every single action I do or do not take. Sometimes shit is just going to happen and no amount of control-freakiness can change that, so I might as well quit worrying so much.

Trust the right doctors

Before I switched jobs I got a physical where the doctor found a suspicious mole. I then visited a dermatologist (my first - I don’t have the world’s best skin but it’s always been a'ight) and got a biopsy that said nothing cancerous but the doctor still urged that I should get the whole thing removed.

Then I got a new job and switched insurance and suddenly I had to start the process again - find a new dermatologist and find a surgeon that wouldn’t ask for two week’s pay up front. Months went by. And every month, that first dermatologist emailed and called to check if I’d gotten the mole removed. Without any possibility of financial compensation, she urged me over and over to address the mole, get it cut off, do it quickly, wherever, whatever it took. I resented this. Not everyone is a rich doctor, right? Not everyone can afford to get surgery for a benign cluster of cells at any point in the pay month.

So I finally slipped in an appointment with a new doctor before Christmas, who biopsied the rest of the mole to be absolutely sure what the follow-up treatment would be. Turns out I have a stage zero melanoma. Which is exactly as unconcerning as skin cancer can possibly be - you basically just get it snipped off and that’s it - but I wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t for the first doctor, who gave so much of a shit that she hectored me like a good doctor should. When I emailed to thank her, she just said “I just wish we had national health care. I’m glad you did this.”

Find good doctors, stick by them, keep yourself alive.

Say I was wrong

Admitting you fucked up when you fucked up will make your life a lot easier. Just don’t admit it all the time and for no good reason.

Don’t smoke things you find on the street, it never ends well

Street weed gave me a headache and street Newports gave me the hangover equivalent of Ragnarok so, yeah.

Read more poetry

The more good and blood-drawing poetry I read the cleaner and stronger I get. It’s expensive to buy. It’s worth it.

And finally…

Read what scares you and makes you angry

Patricia Lockwood scares me. She’s so good and writes such terrifying things. Kiese Laymon scares me. He describes anger and paralysis and fear and systemic injustice so perfectly and so VITALLY. People who are either so talented or are so good at describing terrifying realities or fictions that they make you question the entire cocoon of ways you make yourself Feel Okay are the people you should read. People who disagree with you and who say things that offend you and frustrate you are always hard to read and you can burn yourself out but if you approach them out of a sincere desire to understand who they are, why they do and say what they do and say, and what big tectonic forces and filters have shaped their perceptions to make them so different from yours, are the people who will save a significant part of the intelligent person’s life, every time.

Happy new year!

In his keynote address at the International Festival of Authors, wildly successful and powerful agent Andrew Wylie, in his latest public salvo of anti-Amazon rhetoric, compared the retail giant to Islamic terror group ISIS. This may seem like it crosses the line, but it’s certainly not out of character, especially when you look at the public history of Wylie’s statements on Amazon.

In2013: “Amazon and Bashar Al-Assad, have way more in common than anyone in the publishing world would admit. And both of them collude with the US Government!”

2012: “Amazon wants to knock the publishing industry in the head with a shovel, tie it up, drive it to the top of the Fiscal Cliff, and push it off.”

2011: “Make no mistake, we’re facing a Fukuskima-esque catastrophe, and Amazon is the one buying up all the lead underpants.”

2010: “If it was up to Amazon, the entire ocean would belong to BP and the Chilean miners would rot underground. Free Assange!”

2005: “Amazon has too much ambition. And they want to blow up ALL the levees.”

2001: “More like Amazon-Quaeda.”

1996: “Make no mistake, there’s only one mail bomber you need to worry about. And that’s Amazon.”

1980: “The goddamn Russkies have nothing on Amazon. At least communism is morally good in theory.”

April 10, 1970: “You won’t have to look far to figure out who really broke up the Beatles, and her name ain’t Yoko.”

1950: “That’s right, I’d rather Russia have the bomb than those godless heathens at Amazon. You can quote me on that,”

1942: “(something wildly racist about Japanese people)”

1929: “Al Capone is like Amazon, but with scruples!”

April 15, 1912: “Amazon’s buying stock in icebergs right now, mark my words.”

1888: “If my time in England taught me one thing, it’s this: Amazon is as courteous to its vendors as Jack The Ripper was to his.”

1773: “If you told me that tea was sold by Amazon, I’d dive into the harbor, scoop it up, and throw it back in again.”

August 24, 1572: “Huguenots? Sounds an awful lot like "Amazon”.“

1095: "To quote the Pope, Amazon is a Seljuq-Turk-like distributor.”

218 BC: “Amazon doesn’t need drones. It’s got elephants, and it hears the Alps are lovely this time of year.”

Pleistocene: *grunts and gestures that say “fuck Amazon and the mammoth it rode in on”* 

Forms of ingress into a location with unknown hostiles and/or civilians are divided into two types: warm and cold.

Cold ingress points rely on externalized sourcing; blueprints, visual surveillance, and any intel we can gather from locals if it’s a residence. We work up a complete outside profile - there’s not a single hole or seam visible that we don’t work into our planning. You’ll know the obvious - doors, windows, skylights, chimneys, vents, and the odd ventilation shaft - but the subtle cold ingress points are the trickiest, and the most rewarding if you like tricky, which I very much do.

Consider,par example, a scrounged blueprint that indicates an addition was build on within the last few years. Say we do our research and discover that there’s no insulation in the addition - maybe they couldn’t decide between fiberglass or blown cellulose or maybe they’re just short on liquidity or motivation - and what this tells us is that there’s a cold ingress point in the space behind the drywall. Not large enough for a human (or at least not one that’s legal to employ for the hours we’d need her) but large enough for a directional mic with a thermal sensing feed and who knows, maybe a directional charge. That’s how you make a door in less than three seconds. Try to hit a cold ingress point with a battering ram and it’ll take three seconds, assuming there’s nobody on the other side. Impossible to detect the heat signature unless you’ve got the sensor on the door, and any location that we put this much calories into crafting the perfect breach will have at least one shitty camera trained smack on that door. Know when to make a door. Measure twice, cut once.

Warm ingress points are cold ingress points that for become viable for their minimal obstacles and time sensitivity. Say the loading dock is unmanned during shift change, only two minutes a week but that’s the chance. Maybe the side office is closed while the manager takes a vacation - once every three years. Maybe the sunlight hits the north face of the bank building on November 18th at 2:13 PM and dazzles the entire block like disco. Warm ingress points are like the boy in high school you never considered viable until a few years later, when you’re riding that hometown bar into the witching hour, and he shows up all cute and airy and well-dressed as if all the work you passed on putting into him got picked up by some other nobler girl. The warm ingress point and you may not work out, but the golden window is there. You will laugh about the three things you both held onto from school - the molest-y teacher, the stolen trophies, the mold. will You drink in a livid sort of joy. You will toss off his mention of a girlfriend. You will breach him.

If you want a short short story writen just for you, donate to Tim’s page and email your receipt at [email protected].

Dear men of the tri-state area who feel hemmed in by the swipe-left philosophy that extrudes the dating process through a series of sterile tubes: STOP.

There is hope. There’s also beautiful women. Real ones. Not just avatars. Note that I said beautiful - beautiful in soul, spirit, bookshelves, and probably glasses. Not just pretty. Beautiful.

• Do you wish that there was someone out there who shared your deep abiding love of Alice Munro AND could keep you warm at night?
• Do you sometimes wish that the dating process was less deterministic and more like a gentle flow of current, bringing you ever closer to true happiness and satisfaction?
• Is your bookshelf filled with books you haven’t read yet?
• Do you know who Roxane Gay is?
• Do you tire of visiting bookstores and rightfully keeping your graceful pickup lines to yourself, wishing that there was an appropriate context to politely compliment women who are for the time being tolerating your presence?
• Do you wake up all alone and wonder where you are? 

Then stop fucking around and go to literary speed datingathousingworksbookstore on 10/16, courtesy of coverspy. 

I’ll be honest with you - the joke of “oh wow if you’re a straight (Editor’s note: or straight-passing) guy in publishing you really just have an embarrassment of dating options” IT’S TRUE IT’S TRUE IT’S TRUE but you NEED TO MEET THE RIGHT PEOPLE. As the Cat In The Hat (an icon all males should aspire to) said, “it is fun to have fun but you have to know how.”

So come to Housing Works, have a drink, buy that copy of A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing, make fun of Knausgaard despite having not read him, and meet the best eligible ladies that the city has.

And save money by entering promo code “WOOLF” at checkout. Spelled like the author, not like this:

By now, the bloom is still on the crowdfunding rose, but it’s not nearly as dewy fresh as it once was. Whether it’s the backlash at celebrities who use the system to gain independence from their corporate overlords, the inanity of certain projects, or the fact that the hard unglamorous toil of charity is still not fully compatible with a browser-eye-view of the world that values short, hot, and sexy (content-wise), the process of using direct-to-donator approaches to cut through the bullshit and amass necessary resources without having to kowtow to (too many) middlemen is still valid - it’s just being marketed now, which distorts any idealism that’s run through it. 

Tim is one of my best and oldest friends and he has seen me through many phases of my life, often seeing me at my worst. He’s a strikingly noble person with a mind the size of a country and an iron sense of community that he’s retained despite New York City and associated elements’ best attempts to dispell or deteriorate it (remember, it’s harder for people to sell you stuff when you don’t feel alone). 

And you don’t know him. You very well never may. (Though considering how small this city is I’d be unsurprised if you did.) What’s worth knowing is that he’s running the NYC marathon in November for the simple reason that he’s a runner who wants to make money for an organization about which he cares a great deal. They give STEM classes and training to high school students who’d otherwise have the socioeconomic deck stacked against them. Pretty fucking awesome stuff.

I lived with Tim for a year and a half, while he was teaching school in Connecticut and commuting from New York. It was grueling. He spent his time teaching, commuting, and running. He never became bitter, and now, he’s in a better place - and he’s giving to a cause he aligns with, using the hard-won skill of being able to beat the shit out of your body over long distances.

I don’t expect that you’ll read this and immediately donate; that’d be insane, right? Altruism to a Tumblr stranger’s friend makes little sense without the element of trust. Sure it’s tax deductible. Sure it’s good to give. But there must be more to this. So here’s what I’m proposing:

If you find it in your heart and pockets to donate to Tim’s fundraiser, send me the email confirmation at [email protected], and in return for your generosity, I will write you a brand new short short story, and either post it for all to see to remind people of your generosity, or keep it just between you and me, whatever you prefer. And Tim will beat the shit out of his body using the streets of New York as a weapon, and high school gets get a bigger slice of the pie of chance. 

Tim’s page is here.

Lena Dunham Still Hasn’t Specified How She Will Be “Compensating” Her Book Tour Openers

Lena Dunham Promises “Openers Will Be Paid In Money, Obviously” So We Know She’s Gouging Them

We’re Offering Fifty Dollars To Anyone Who Can Produce A Pay Statement For One Of Lena Dunham Tour Openers 

We Break Down The Costs Of Lena Dunham’s Book Tour To Indicate How Little The Openers Were Actually Paid So You Won’t Have To

A Stream Of Trashpile Rats Reviews Lena Dunham’s Book

Real Slick Nick Denton Non-Reference In The Season Premiere Of GIRLS, Lena Dunham

Did Lena Dunham Harass One Of Her Tour Openers? Yes.

Did Lena Dunham Neglect Lamby The Dog During Her Book Tour?

Did Lena Dunham Smother Lamby The Dog During Her Book Tour?

We’re Offering One Hundred Dollars For Pictures Of Lamby The Dog Next To Today’s Newspaper

A Death Row Inmate Reviews This Season Of Girls

We Slept With Lena Dunham’s Assistant So You Wouldn’t Have To

We’re Offering A Job To Any Accountant Who Can Provide Us With Lena Dunham’s W2

It’s Lost All Meaning Now, Seriously, No Matter How Many Times We Say It, Lena Dunham Lena Dunham Lena Dunham

Today is the birthday of both Truman Capote and the Sufi poet Rumi, so I can’t help wondering how bacchanalian a party they could have co-hosted if they’d lived in the same century. 

anghraine:

nemertea:

anghraine:

anghraine:

anghraine:

so I’m looking at short story publishers (fantasy)

1. Tor, cream of the crop. 25 cents a word. Stories can be read for free (YES). Slowish response time at ~3 months. Prefer under 12k, absolute maximum is 17.5k. Don’t bother if it’s not highly professional quality. SFWA qualifying.
2. Crossed Genres. 6 cents a word. Different theme each month (this month’s is “failure”). Submissions must combine either sci-fi or fantasy with the theme. Response time 1 month. 1k-6k, no exceptions. SFWA qualifying.
3. Long Hidden, anthology from CG. 6 cents a word. 2k-8k, no exceptions. Must take place before 1935. Protagonist(s) must be under 18 and marginalized in their time and place. Must be sci-fi/fantasy/horror. Deadline 30 April. Response by 1 October.
4. Queers Destroy Science Fiction. Sci-fi only right now, author must identify as queer (gay, lesbian, bi, ace, pan, trans, genderfluid, etc, just not cishet). 7.5k max. Deadline 15 February. Responses by 1 March. You can submit one flash fiction and one short story at the same time. (My network blocks the Lightspeed site for some reason, so I can’t get all the submission details. >_>) Probably SFWA qualifying?
5. Women in Practical Armor. 6 cents a word. 2k-5k. Must be about 1) a female warrior who 2) is already empowered and 3) wears sensible armour. Deadline 1 April. Response within three months.
6. Fiction Vortex. $10 per story, with $20 and $30 for editor’s and readers’ choice stories (hoping to improve). Speculative fiction only. Imaginative but non-florid stories. 7.5k maximum, preference for 5k and under. (I kind of want to support them on general principle.)
7. Urban Fantasy Magazine. 6 cents a word. 8k max, under 4k preferred. Must be urban fantasy (aka, the modern world, doesn’t need to be a literal city). 
8. Nightmare. 6 cents a word. 1.5-7.5k, preference for under 5k. Horror and dark fantasy. Response time up to two weeks. SFWA and HWA qualifying.
9. Apex Magazine. 6 cents a word. 7.5k max, no exceptions. Dark sci-fi/fantasy/horror. SFWA qualifying.
10. Asimov’s Science Fiction. 8-10 cents a word. 20k max, 1k minimum. Sci-fi; borderline fantasy is ok, but not S&S. Prefer character focused. Response time 5 weeks; query at 3 months. SFWA qualifying, ofc.
11. Buzzy Mag. 10 cents a word. 10k max. Should be acceptable for anyone 15+. Response time 6-8 weeks. SFWA qualifying.
12. Strange Horizons. 8 cents a word. Speculative fiction. 10k max, prefers under 5k. Response time 40 days. Particularly interested in diverse perspectives, nuanced approahces to political issues, and hypertexts. SFWA qualifying. 
13. Fantasy and Science Fiction. 7-12 cents a word. Speculative fiction, preference for character focus, would like more science-fiction or humour. 25k maximum. Prefers Courier. Response time 15 days.
14. Scigentasy. 3 cents a word. .5-5k. Science-fiction and fantasy, progressive/feminist emphasis. 
15. Fantastic Stories of the Imagination. 15 cents a word. 3k maximum. Any sci-fi/fantasy, they like a literary bent. (psst, steinbecks!) They also like to see both traditional and experimental approaches. Response time two weeks. 
16. Beneath Ceaseless Skies. 6 cents a word. 10k maximum. Fantasy in secondary worlds only (it can be Earth, but drastically different—alternate history or whatever). Character focus, prefer styles that are lush yet clear, limited first or third person narration. Response time usually 2-4 weeks, can be 5-7 weeks. SFWA qualifying.

added some more!

reblog for my writer followers who sleep at night ;)

Clarkesworld has really fast turn around time and pays 10 cents a word for your first 4k, 7 cents a word after that, up to 8k and Kate Baker will read your story, which is a fantastic bonus.

Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show has a strict PG-13 rating guideline and pays 6 cents a word.

Interzone accepts stories up to 10k in length. Not sure what they pay, though.

Thanks! I added them to the post. 

(For people who want to save/reblog, that’s here.)

Tags to use on your story posts

We had a request for a list of tags that writers might want to use on their story posts to get more attention on their writing. Warning: There are a LOT. Sadly, Tumblr only allows the first five tags to be searchable Tumblr-wide, and only the first twenty tags are even searchable on your blog. (We are not sure how blacklisting via xkit or filtering via Tumblr work as far as where a trigger warning tag needs to be. If you have information about this, please let us know!) We’ve recently discovered that reblogs of posts aren’t searchable Tumblr-wide, either. This means that we have to choose those first five tags on our original post VERY CAREFULLY. What we’ve assembled here is a list of all possible tags that we could think of and variations on their spellings and abbreviations. If you can think of any that need to be added, just let us know!

Click here for the whole list!

On the second tab are bundles of tags that the Pond has been using when reblogging posts. We now know that this wasn’t helping you like we’d planned, but thought you might like having these tags bundled for you to use on your posts. Using the new post editor, you should be able to copy and paste a whole bundle into your post all at once. Again, if you think of tags that should be added to these, let us know!

the960writers:

kayespivey:

I cannot emphasize enough how much you need to read thoroughly through the terms of any publication before you send your writing to them. It is mandatory that you know and understand what rights you’re giving away when you’re trying to get published.

Just the other day I was emailed by a relatively new indie journal looking for writers. They made it very clear that they did not pay writers for their work, so I figured I’d probably be passing, but I took a look at their Copyright policy out of curiosity and it was a nightmare. They wanted “non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide license and right to use, display, reproduce, distribute, and publish the Work on the internet and on or in any medium” (that’s copy and pasted btw) and that was the first of 10 sections on their Copyright agreement page. Yikes. That’s exactly the type of publishing nightmare you don’t want to be trapped in. 

Most journals will ask for “First North American Rights” or a variation on “First Rights” which operate under the assumption that all right revert back to you and they only have the right to be the first publishers of the work. That is what you need to be looking for because you do want to retain all the rights to your work. 

You want all rights to revert back to you upon publication in case you, say, want to publish it again in the future or use it for a bookmark or post it on your blog, or anything else you might want to do with the writing you worked hard on. Any time a publisher wants more than that, be very suspicious. Anyone who wants to own your work forever and be able to do whatever they want with it without your permission is not to be trusted. Anyone who wants all that and wants you to sign away your right to ever be paid for your work is running a scam.

Protect your writing. It’s not just your intellectual property, it’s also your baby. You worked hard on it. You need to do the extra research to protect yourself so that a scammer (or even a well meaning start up) doesn’t steal you work right from under you nose and make money off of it.

Exclusive publishing rights have to have a set time frame! Do not agree to anything that doesn’t clearly state “up to five years from signature” or something like that. 

What if the publisher goes defunct? What if they get bought by another publisher who doesn’t care to promote or publish your work? You still can’t to anything with it, you don’t own it anymore!

For a thorough overview of what you should be aware of regarding your intellectual property and publishing rights, please read through this collection of post [https://kriswrites.com/business-musings/contracts-and-dealbreakers/] by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. 

Protect your IP. Do not give away your stories.