Mark your calendar: Original flash fiction submissions open Oct. 1. Submission window closes Oct. 31.
Behind the Standing Stones
Reading Time: 4 minutes Craig and Hailey had very different ideas about how to celebrate their anniversary. One wanted sunshine and drinks on an island beach. The other was more interested in the enchantments that might be found beyond the standing stones.
The Last Time I Saw the Yellow Skies of Venus
Reading Time: 5 minutes Terraforming Venus is a dream come true, but what about the people who already live above the clouds, eking out a living through technology and grit? The pioneers-on-balloons are forced to relocate, leaving everything their families have built for generations.
Follow Me
Reading Time: 21 minutes When Influencer Jan Pham downloads an app from the dark web that promises fame, fortune, and – most importantly – more followers, she gets more than she bargained for.
Apocryphal Herbaria
Reading Time: 3 minutes This plant you might not want in your living room.
A Sampling of Seven Dragons
Before any of the more artisanal offerings you’ll be tasting today, let us begin with a fairly traditional preparation. Yes, the one just before you, and then we’ll go round the plates widdershins from there. Anticlockwise, that is. As you take a bite, note the full-bodied ferocity, the natural balance between dread and might, that …
Snail’s Pace
Reading Time: 6 minutes Becoming the tutor of an alien on a ship sounds like the perfect answer to Susannah’s problem — she’s orphaned, alone, and penniless in Hong Kong in 1884. What she doesn’t know is that the alien is not Chinese, and the ship is not on an ocean. When she finds her new charge is from another planet.
Ashes
Reading Time: 17 minutes Thirty years after the Burn, Jackson, an aging ex-soldier, is just trying to survive. A moral person in a world where morality isn’t a particularly good survival trait, Jackson has to choose between his self-interest and doing what’s right.
The Update
Reading Time: 3 minutes When an almost heavenly woman, Sister Mary, dies she expects she’ll go straight to heaven. But the stranger who shows up for her soul has a trick up his cell phone.
A Visit from the Tooth Fairy
Reading Time: 2 minutes An obsessed tooth fairy finds a new way to collect now that their favorite child is all grown up.
The Mistaken Haunting of Seth Harrison
Reading Time: 15 minutes Excerpt
Lizzie Borden took an axe.
Gave her mother forty whacks.But did she?Three grifters get caught up in the Lizzie Borden murders and it plays itself out one hundred years later.
It’s Not in Your Head
Reading Time: 2 minutes When The Soul© chip is implanted in the cerebral cortex at birth, it’s imagined it will create an immortal soul. But there are problems.
The Great Chickenomachy of Chandler County, Kentucky
Reading Time: 3 minutes Sometimes, a weasel raids the henhouse. Sometimes, the hens fight back.
RNA
Reading Time: 9 minutes When an aging baseball player suffers a career threatening injury, his HMO takes over. He is entitled to the lowest level of care which includes an attractive home health aid. He is crushed when she informs him that she’s not really a person.
Inuksuk
Reading Time: 17 minutes Erecting a cell tower in the middle of an arctic waste–next to one of those ancient stone Inuksuks to fix location, to show scale, and to provide a little local color–would be perfect for the “We’ve got you covered” ad campaign. What could go wrong?
Small, Precious Things
Reading Time: 4 minutes William is a dutiful son and a caring doctor who keeps a special collection to honor his dead mother and estranged father.
Rainbow Sprout
Reading Time: 4 minutes Stupid car accident. Stupid sister. Stupid globetrotting, summer-consuming, plant-feeding adventure.That’s what Mother said. “Oh, it’ll be an adventure! Just think how happy your sister will be with her sprout! She needs this now.” I get it, I’m grateful to have a working spine, but that doesn’t mean I should have to waste months trudging around… where the hell am I now? Greece?
10207
Reading Time: 6 minutes Probably nothing bad happens after you donate your body to science, right?
Flowers for Humanity
Reading Time: 4 minutes A haunting tale of the Fundamental Equation of life in this Universe, and its accidental misapplication by the hidden god of the ancients.
On Our Own
Reading Time: 4 minutes On a dead planet, two prospector friends find two huge statues with a secret.
The Last Thing Taken
Reading Time: 9 minutes When Sophia meets Oloku, she thinks it’s the perfect, strings-free affair. But when she learns his secret, she finds there’s a price to pay for loving him.
Gentle Autumn Rain
Reading Time: 4 minutes The ages have been kind and humanity has spread to the stars, but the sun’s time is growing short, and all of her children are coming home.
The Road to Vitebsk
Reading Time: 4 minutes A dedicated officer refuses to leave until others are safe. Death sometimes does not defer duty.
Magic Makes Fools of Us All
Reading Time: 4 minutes An unusual family plots a summer camping trip that will satiate their blood-lust. It doesn’t go entirely as planned.
The Ways We Played the Game
Reading Time: 6 minutes A LitRPG jam in Singapore, with a code that really works for those that want to try it.
Metastellar shopping
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MOST POPULAR VIDEOS
REVIEWS
Free Friday: Today’s top free Amazon sci-fi and fantasy books for June 16, 2023
Reading Time: 17 minutes We read the first few chapters of each of the top ten free fantasy and sci-fi books on Amazon. Today’s list features an action-packed space opera by a USA Today bestselling author, a secret organization like Men in Black, but for fairies and dwarves, and a couple of very sexy aliens.
Free Friday: Today’s top free Amazon sci-fi and fantasy books for June 9, 2023
Reading Time: 16 minutes We read the first few chapters of each of the top ten free fantasy and sci-fi books on Amazon. Today’s list includes a space opera by a USA Today bestselling author, a Western with outlaws and mages, and a cynical private eye who shape-shifts into a wolverine.
Juniper and Thorn by Ava Reid
Reading Time: 2 minutes Troubled young lovers, an awesome-but-miserable wizard father, a setting based on a Ukrainian city amid industrialization, and a door-mat protagonist who gradually finds her strength…
Free Friday: Today’s top free Amazon sci-fi and fantasy books for June 2, 2023
Reading Time: 16 minutes We read the first few chapters of each of the top ten free fantasy and sci-fi books on Amazon. Today’s list includes a divorced witch, an archeologist sent to explore alien ruins, and two teenage girls accidentally pulled into a dystopian future.
The Bridge to Magic by Alex Thornbury
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Bridge to Magic is a dark YA fantasy with a feisty female lead.
Free Friday: Today’s top free Amazon sci-fi and fantasy books for May 26, 2023
Reading Time: 16 minutes We read the first few chapters of each of the top ten free fantasy and sci-fi books on Amazon. Today’s list includes a creepy stalker-ish vampire, a witch trying to get her powers back, another witch who has to solve a murder mystery, and a box set of six EMP survival books.
Where the Lighting Goes by Jackery Salem
Reading Time: 3 minutes Salem builds something truly unique out of many familiar fantasy tropes — dwarves, dragons, amnesia, all kinds of magic — and ties it up with compelling characters and a deeply satisfying conclusion.
Free Friday: Today’s top free Amazon sci-fi and fantasy books for May 19, 2023
Reading Time: 17 minutes We read the first few chapters of each of the top ten free fantasy and sci-fi books on Amazon. Today’s list includes a home care nurse who takes care of old vampires and werewolves, several different types of witches, and a gravedigger’s son who finds a mysterious amulet.
ESSAYS
ChatGPT is great – you’re just using it wrong
Reading Time: 5 minutes So it doesn’t have facts, per se. It just knows what word should come next. Put another way, ChatGPT doesn’t try to write sentences that are true. But it does try to write sentences that are plausible.
13 free AI detectors tested, why they don’t work, and what to do instead
Reading Time: 9 minutes In the battle against AI-generated spam, some people are turning to AI detectors to weed out AI-generated content. Unfortunately, they don’t work.
7 top misconceptions about ChatGPT and writing
Reading Time: 10 minutes There are a lot of myths and misunderstandings about what ChatGPT can do and how it works. Most people tend to fall on one of two extremes — either that it’s all-powerful and will destroy the writing profession, or that it’s completely useless. The actual truth is somewhere in the middle.
How to create a short film on a budget
Reading Time: 3 minutes You can make a high-quality film on a small budget, if you plan and manage it right. Here’s advice from someone who’s done it.
NEWS
5 best free alternatives to Midjourney for writers who need marketing or cover images
Reading Time: 12 minutes The top five free, easy-to-use alternatives to Midjourney: Lexica, Canva, Playground AI, Mage Space, and Dreamlike.
Sci-fi magazine editors wary of AI spam, reluctant to charge for submissions
Reading Time: 7 minutes Sci-fi and fantasy magazine editors are discussing charging submission fees, changing submission schedules, limiting submissions to known authors, using AI-detection tools, and other means to combat AI spam.
Clarkesworld swamped by AI spam, temporarily stops accepting submissions
Reading Time: 2 minutes Clarkesworld has temporary stopped accepting new short story submissions because of a flood of AI-generated spam.
Apex Magazine launches Kickstarter for robot anthology
Reading Time: 2 minutes Apex Magazine launched a Kickstarter today for a new anthology of fiction about robots, called Robotic Ambitions. The anthology, to be clear, is about robots, not written by robots. It’s written by humans.
P.E.A.N.U.T.: 6 steps to staying ahead of AI as a fiction author
Reading Time: 11 minutes If you want to be successful as a human author in an age of AI-generated content, you will need to make your writing Personal, Emotional, Authoritative, New, Unique, and Trustworthy — PEANUT, for short.
New Edge Sword & Sorcery Kickstarter two-thirds to goal, with 20 days to go
Reading Time: 2 minutes New Edge Sword & Sorcery magazine launched a crowdfunding campaign at the beginning of February and is already two-thirds of the way to its US $14,940 goal with 20 days to go.
Yes, you can submit AI-assisted stories to us. But they better be good.
Reading Time: 6 minutes MetaStellar is now accepting works of fiction written with the help of AI assistants. Our next submission window for original fiction opens March 1, and we accept reprint and excerpts any time throughout the year.
Hope in the face of disaster: anthology seeks eco-fiction submissions
Reading Time: 3 minutes New Canadian anthology “Through the Portal: Stories From a Hopeful Dystopia” is now accepting submissions of eco-fiction that celebrates the complexity of relationships and the emotional and physical journey from catastrophe. Submit your work by May 31.
ON WRITING
This week’s top writing advice from around the web for Jul. 16, 2023
Reading Time: 9 minutes I subscribe to more than 175 writing advice sites and YouTube channels and lovingly pick the best advice from this past week for your edification. We have 86 links this week, covering every topic imaginable.
Can Claude AI fix your grammar mistakes? No, it can’t, but there’s an AI that will.
Reading Time: 11 minutes Claude AI, the hot new chatbot for book authors, works well as a grammar tutor, but is bad at fixing mistakes in your text. However, I did find one AI-powered tool that caught every error I threw at it.
10 ways Claude AI can help you self-edit your book — for free
Reading Time: 16 minutes Claude AI is the single best editor I’ve tried so far. And it can do a whole book at a time. For free.
Book editing with AI: Code Interpreter vs. Claude — there’s no contest
Reading Time: 8 minutes Anthropic’s Claude beats ChatGPT hands-down when it comes to analyzing full-length books.
This week’s top writing advice from around the web for Jul. 9, 2023
Reading Time: 9 minutes I subscribe to more than 175 writing advice sites and YouTube channels and lovingly pick the best posts from this previous week for your edification. This week, we got an interview with Brandon Sanderson where he talks about the future of publishing — and what he thinks about AI.
This week’s top writing advice from around the web for Jul. 2, 2023
Reading Time: 9 minutes I subscribe to more than 175 writing advice sites and YouTube channels and lovingly pick the best posts from this previous week for your edification. This week, lots of great tips for creating a writing habit, plus practical advice for using AI to help your marketing — and your writing.
Best free Canva fonts for sci-fi, fantasy, and horror
Reading Time: 6 minutes More than 70 great free fonts for Canva ebook covers for sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genres.
This week’s top writing advice from around the web for Jun. 25, 2023
Reading Time: 9 minutes I subscribe to more than 175 writing advice sites and YouTube channels and lovingly pick the best advice from this past week for your edification. This week, we’ve got some great videos from the 2023 AuthorTube Writing Conference.