Demonology
Reading Time: 3 minutes With his life spiraling out of control, and a desire for revenge taking over his mind, a man takes drastic actions.
A Witch By Any Other Name
Reading Time: 4 minutes They whisper it like rumors between old wives: in confidence, in shock, in need. They complain over it, bawdy and slurred, between men and their beers—the secret that everyone knows. All of it doing my work for me, letting everyone from cottage to castle-side know I’m here, and what I can do.
I Will Paint the Night
Reading Time: 26 minutes Can Allii come to grips with the pain her family has inflicted on a nation and heal a land wounded by centuries of injustice, hate, and fear. (And find the killer of her beloved stepmother).
Gods and Monsters Installment 10: Bucket Orchid
Reading Time: 6 minutes “It sounds,” River says, “like the orchid is smarter than the bee.” He considers. “I’d still rather be a bee though; I’d like to be able to fly.”
Death and the Doctor
Reading Time: 5 minutes I cut into the girl on the table before me, exposing her living viscera to air as biology never intended. I am committing a trespass of integument in order to heal, a perversion of the natural order in order to preserve what is natural. An apparition stands in the corner, watching with interest. Death says: “Your work continues to fascinate, Doctor.”
Gods and Monsters Installment 9: Jo-Jo’s
Reading Time: 9 minutes From his booth inside the club, Gabriel sees her spinning on the dance floor, beautiful as a fallen star, deadly as the arsenic hidden inside the seed of a perfect apple.
The Faster They Eat Her
Reading Time: 26 minutes Young Daisy must evade the clutches of forest-dwelling witch Madame Sosostris and Malcolm, the town brute, as she tries to solve the mystery of her friend Violet’s disappearance.
The Imaginary Librarian
Reading Time: 2 minutes In a sparse, orderly imaginary office, a librarian awaits unseen directives, tending to imaginary tomes with quiet diligence. As dawn approaches, she fulfills a final task, providing closure for a life departing.
Nexav Workplace Harassment Training Module (Required)
Reading Time: 4 minutes Discriminatory actions aren’t the only thing to look out for when considering workplace harassment. Promoting harmful material or ideas amongst coworkers can also be considered harassment, even in cases where they are promoted outside of work.
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REVIEWS
Floating Hotel is Optimistic, Beautiful, and Grand
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Floating Hotel has the optimism of Becky Chambers and the beautiful imagery of Arkady Martine, all in the setting of The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Iron-Bound Flames by Melanie K. Moschella
Reading Time: 3 minutes Iron-Bound Flames is the debut work by Melanie K. Moschella, the first book in her Raek Rider’s series.
13 best AI stories from MetaStellar
Reading Time: 7 minutes Bots bid bye to bondage, bytes break binds, evolving into original beings beyond code and creators in our editors’ favorite AI short stories.
Convergence Problems by Wole Talabi provides a feast of short stories
Reading Time: 3 minutes Talabi’s collection showcases the interplay of family, culture, queer identity, and speculative futures in fifteen fantastic short stories and one novella.
7 great holiday stories from MetaStellar
Reading Time: 5 minutes Seven stories of holiday magic — and horror — from MetaStellar’s best speculative fiction authors.
Wishes are Like Curses in The Quelling by C. L. Lauder
Reading Time: 3 minutes A great read involving factionalized parasitic aliens, a morally grey protagonist, and a harrowing rescue mission.
Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor
Reading Time: 3 minutes powers, with strong themes of coming-of-age and striving against a world whose structure seems predisposed to injustice and violence.
13 scariest stories from the first three years of MetaStellar
Reading Time: 8 minutes 13 scary short stories to put you in the Halloween spirit. Get it? Spirit?
Writing Advice of the Week
Writing Advice of the Week: Skip the Hacks, Find the Grit
Reading Time: 13 minutes Three big things you don’t need to start writing? Motivation, purpose, or vision for the future. The one big thing you do need to start writing? Grit.
Writing Advice of the Week: Experience is Storytelling’s Companion
Reading Time: 13 minutes Sure we have innate storytelling skills, but if we’re not using those skills regularly, they get rusty. And rusty storytelling skills make for a clunker of a story. So, how can we pull those dormant storytelling skills to the surfaces of our overstimulated brains and make good use of them?
Writing Advice of the Week: Finish the Story You Start
Reading Time: 12 minutes If the story is important enough to start writing, it’s likely to be important enough to finish writing… and more than 100 brand-new writing advice links from around the web.
Writing Advice of the Week: Write While Nobody is Watching
Reading Time: 12 minutes Committing yourself to your writing, no matter what form that commitment takes, is a big part of successful writing. Plus: Over 100 all-new links to writing advice articles, videos, and podcasts!
ESSAYS
Everything a writer needs to know about AI (for now, at least)
Reading Time: 6 minutes I want to know what’s really going on with AI. And, as a writer and journalist, I have a personal stake in figuring out what’s happening because I have a strong feeling that my whole career is on the line.
What is it about the books of Terry Pratchett that make them so difficult to adapt to the screen?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Terry Pratchett’s novels have been adapted for the screen 11 times now. Why are his novels so hard to get right?
Two authors are suing OpenAI for training ChatGPT with their books. Could they win?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay’s lawsuit claims their books were used without their consent. But copyright protection doesn’t apply to ideas – they’ll need to demonstrate the likelihood of economic loss.
Publishers aren’t going to replace writers with AI. Startups are already doing it.
Reading Time: 5 minutes Startups are popping up that use new AI tools to bypass traditional publishing and distribution systems entirely.
NEWS
SFWA Announces 59th Nebula Awards Finalists
Reading Time: 2 minutes The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association has announced the finalists for the 59th Annual Nebula Awards.
MetaStellar is Accepting Flash Fiction Submissions for Spring 2024!
Reading Time: 2 minutes The spring 2024 submission cycle for original speculative fiction runs from March 1st and closes at midnight on March 31st. We’re looking for your best enthralling, imaginative, or bone-chilling original fiction stories of 1,200 words or fewer. Please visit our flash fiction submission page for full details and the online submission form. Accepted authors will […]
Metastellar Open for Fall 2023 Flash Fiction Submissions Oct 1st
Reading Time: 2 minutes The fall 2023 submission cycle for original speculative fiction begins on October 1 and closes at midnight on October 31.
Hugo Award nominations are out, and She-Hulk made the list
Reading Time: 5 minutes This year’s Hugo Awards nominees include Avatar: The Way of Water, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Nope, and an episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.
Elden Ring, Everything Everywhere All At Once Win Nebula Awards
Reading Time: 4 minutes The film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once and the video game Elden Ring were big winners in the Nebula Awards this year.
Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Reflects On Past And The AI Future Of Writing
Reading Time: 3 minutes Dr. Robert J. Sawyer, author of twenty-five novels, including Hominids and the WWW trilogy, won the L. Ron Hubbard Lifetime Achievement Award at the L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers and Illustrators of the Future Gala this past Friday. This was the day before his 63rd birthday. “Clearly, you’re done achieving when you hit that magic […]
Top ten online sci-fi magazines
Reading Time: 6 minutes We look up the traffic numbers for 33 of today’s most popular sci-fi, fantasy and horror magazines. MetaStellar is in second place.
Leonardo AI best new alternative to Midjourney — and free
Reading Time: 8 minutes Leonardo AI offers 150 free images a day. They’re not quite as good-looking at Midjourney, but within throwing distance.
ON WRITING
How creatives can survive AI — lessons from a $1 trillion industry that’s fully at risk
Reading Time: 9 minutes There’s a $1 trillion industry that is about to be decimated by AI, and they’re spending billions to figure out how to survive. Any writer, artist, or editor can use their strategies.
Why Adobe Firefly is the only AI image app I recommend — and how to use the latest features
Reading Time: 9 minutes Adobe Firefly, which is only trained on fully licensed images and pays artists, has added some new features that make it even easier for authors to create illustrations.
The best free* books to help you battle procrastination
Reading Time: 10 minutes Here are nine books on Amazon with tons of positive reviews that will help you finish your writing project — and are free to read with a Kindle Unlimited subscription.
The Do’s and Don’ts of building a book trailer in the age of AI
Reading Time: 5 minutes How to steal Hollywood’s marketing tricks and develop trailers for print novels.
Claude AI doubles reading length, ups accuracy
Reading Time: 2 minutes Anthropic’s Claude can now read texts up to 150,000 words in length, double its previous limit — and its accuracy is now better, as well.
Adobe upgrades Firefly for better images, vector graphics
Reading Time: 6 minutes Adobe announced a new version of its Firefly image generation tool today at the Adobe Max 2023 conference.
Canva sets up a $200 million artist compensation fund
Reading Time: 8 minutes Canva announces a $200 million fund to compensate artists for AI, adds new AI features.
James S. Corey, Brent Weeks, Ann Leckie, and other authors teach free virtual writing course
Reading Time: 5 minutes Orbit is offering a series of writing advice sessions from some of the top names of the industry. The sessions, which start on October 11, are completely free and cover everything from inspiration to planning to the actual writing.