Gods and Monsters Installment 5: Hotel Tail Gate
Reading Time: 6 minutes A week after Gabriel moves in, Kristjan leaps from the window. He hangs in the air, twisting for a moment like an autumn leaf, before falling thirteen floors to the hard, hard pavement.
Patient Diplomacy
Reading Time: 4 minutes A first contact story about the idea that before anything else, perhaps they have to test for biological compatibility.
The Songstress
Reading Time: 2 minutes In the small town of Nowhere, / on a swampy river shore, / appeared a young woman, / covered fully in gore. / She danced through the streets / with a twirling step, / blood dotting the ground / wherever she leapt.
Confederate Cavalry on a Plane
Reading Time: 15 minutes A physics professor and his student on a plane argue about the possibility of infinite alternate universes, while being robbed blind by a bratty kid. The professor bets the student that even the most unlikely event possible must happen, leading to three very confused Confederate Cavalry charging down the aisle.
Gods and Monsters Installment 4: Club Vamp
Reading Time: 5 minutes Gabriel arrives in San Francisco at dusk. He’s dropped off in the Tenderloin by a man desperate to be rid of him. Gabriel’s presence in his car is like the scent of mortality.
Talent & Culture
Reading Time: 4 minutes A distant relation is bequeathed to someone whose tenuous employment on the outskirts of humanity makes him a less than ideal custodian.
Stone Cold Beauty
Reading Time: 4 minutes Totally narcissistic, Electra loved admiring her herself in the mirror. One day a wish turned her to stone gazing in a mirror at herself for eternity. She was mostly happy with this situation, until her old, dying husband visits her and gets a wish of his own.
The Power We Give
Reading Time: 4 minutes Azabelle pulled the pins that held up her hair. Dark curls tumbled around her face. She felt Shadow’s presence, of course, but she’d felt it so long she barely registered the danger.
Home Delivery
Reading Time: 10 minutes Desperate for cash, Nick and his friend plot a home invasion. They picked the wrong house.
Gods and Monsters Installment 3: Music and Moths
Reading Time: 7 minutes At eighteen, when Gabriel leaves the orphanage, the sisters breathe a sigh of relief. He has never been any trouble. Never talked back; indeed, rarely talked at all. He is obedient, clean, and scentless. The nuns can find no fault in him, but neither can they feel affection. He makes them forget Christ and contemplate Gabriel. He induces guilt. His very silence screams for attention. He is a shadow in the soul.
Táltos
Reading Time: 4 minutes A Hungarian folktale about young girl seeking to rectify injustice done to her sisters.
Affordable Resurrection
Reading Time: 6 minutes Lightly amusing modern-feel fantasy mashup about an unlikely partnership between a budget-price necromancer and his student locked in an unusual business model.
In the Fire of Her Eyes
Reading Time: 4 minutes She kept her eyes shut. She ran deep into the wilderness. And as the sun flickered out, and the sky went black, and she held all the light of the world behind her eyelids, she tried to pretend she could bury her pain, and she wouldn’t die alone in the cold of the mountains.
Why the Sea is Boiling Hot
Reading Time: 21 minutes A serial killer is playing havoc in the city-state of Sheebatiya. Can Allii uncover the killer before fear pushes the city into anarchy?
Gods and Monsters Installment 2: Beginnings of River and Gabriel
Reading Time: 8 minutes Gabriel is much more unusual than a virgin birth. Granted, human virgin birth is miraculous, but in many species of fish, lizards, insects, and sharks, virgin birth is the norm. It is helpful to remember that a miracle is not necessarily good, it is simply unnatural.
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.
Gods and Monsters Installment 8: Sweet Dreams are Made of These
Reading Time: 6 minutes He has found a gift. The kitchen, which at home smelled of disappointment and lost hope, is now a place of amelioration. But when the full moon rises, he hears the night call his name. It sounds like fear. It smells like nightmare. It tastes like death. He departs with the sun.
A Darker World
Reading Time: 6 minutes Technology allows us to revisit the most cherished moments of our lives. But is that a good thing?
The Fool’s Fiddle
Reading Time: 18 minutes Dragons can’t lie, right? That’s what the legends say. So, when Guy finds himself at the wrong end of a failed heist, he puts that knowledge to the test. Compatriots dead. Hope gone. And his last chance at life is convincing a dragon to let him go.
Souls
Reading Time: 4 minutes We went to the funeral. It was a little awkward, since we hadn’t been around for a while. His parents were grateful to see us, though. In their grief, they seemed to take our presence as some sort of affirmation of their son’s life. We didn’t do anything to disillusion them.
Willow Prentiss
Reading Time: 5 minutes Guilt, melancholy, and the lost soul of a love form the basis of this twist on the paranormal/magical romance.
Gods and Monsters Installment 7: Heaven Can Wait
Reading Time: 8 minutes Chip, Tom, and Brian are never found, or at least not most of them. There are only remnants: a stray finger, a discarded shoe with a foot still inside… Only one entire body is discovered amidst the carnage. It is that of an unknown man, naked and unmarked, save for a hole through his heart.
The Wreck of the Lorelei
Reading Time: 21 minutes Trapped in an experiment in faster-than-light space travel, the captain of the ship searches for what went wrong.
Best Friends Forever
Reading Time: 4 minutes Branch by flexing branch, Mike climbed higher. Powdery bark stained his fingers green. At the top, he laughed and drank in the view, from his family’s tiered concrete blockhouse to the river’s patrol boats. “Come on up here, Sim—” Mike almost fell when a freckled face appeared beside him. “This is dangerous,” Simon said. “We should go home.”
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REVIEWS
Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus and Butterfly by Toge Productions
Reading Time: 2 minutes Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus and Butterfly is the sequel to the critically acclaimed Coffee Talk by Toge Productions. In this game, you serve drinks to magical patrons which impact the outcomes of the stories they tell you.
5 Upcoming Fantasy Books Inspired by Wuxia, Xianxia, and East Asian Mythologies
Reading Time: 6 minutes Check out Melissa Ren’s most anticipated fantasy books inspired by wuxia, xianxia, and east asian mythologies!
NightBirds by Kate J. Armstrong
Reading Time: 3 minutes I’d say that anyone who enjoys well-written feminist fantasy should jump on this series now.
Threadneedle by Cari Thomas
Reading Time: 2 minutes Mix the dark academia of Victoria Lee’s A Lesson in Vengeance with some anti-witchcraft hysteria and a little dose of secret curses and magical communities, and you begin to have a grasp of Cari Thomas’ debut YA contemporary fantasy novel, Threadneedle.
Learn the story of the founding of Valdemar in Lackey’s new series
Reading Time: 4 minutes Two new Valdemar books have just been released — perfect timing for holiday gift-giving for the fantasy fan on your list.
Tiger and Del Return in Jennifer Roberson’s Sword-Bearer
Reading Time: 3 minutes The adventures of Tiger and Del continue!
Into The Broken Lands: Where Magical Radioactivity Forges Leaders and Liars
Reading Time: 4 minutes Family pride and power draw Ryan and his great-uncle Garrett into the Broken Lands — a land ravaged by magic that lingers like radioactive waste.
BookTok’s Top Fantasy Romance Books for 2022
Reading Time: 8 minutes Get the skinny on Booktok’s most highly recommended Fantasy Romance books from 2022!
Writing Advice of the Week
Writing Advice of the Week: Love Your Imperfect Creation
Reading Time: 12 minutes I ask authors to let their imperfect scenes and chapters lie, especially until the rest of the story is on paper. And 100-plus links to best writing advice, videos and podcasts from around the web!
Writing Advice of the Week: Don’t Write Yourself Ragged
Reading Time: 12 minutes The writerly life isn’t as perfect as some would have you believe. Writing takes hard work, but you don’t need to burn out to put out.
Writing Advice of the Week: Find Your Writerly People
Reading Time: 12 minutes When writing, it’s easy to isolate and disconnect from the passion the work used to bring. Plus: over 100 brand-new advice feeds from around the web!
Writing Advice of the Week: The Craft is in Drafts
Reading Time: 11 minutes When you write your first draft, you’re telling yourself the story, as you need to hear it, to make the best sense of it. That first draft is typically when you learn about your main character’s goals and motivations, the barriers or villains that hinder their success, and what the ultimate stakes are if they don’t succeed. You also meet the rest of the cast and get to know them, understand them, see them moving about in your story world. But when you tell your story to your reader, you begin to uncover what the reader needs.
ESSAYS
Distant star TOI-700 has two potentially habitable planets orbiting it – making it an excellent candidate in the search for life
Reading Time: 5 minutes NASA recently announced the discovery of a new, Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of a nearby star called TOI-700.
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.
NEWS
AI work can be copyrighted, if human creativity was involved
Reading Time: 3 minutes The US Copyright Office issued a ruling today that AI-generated content can, in fact, be copyrighted — as long as a human being has contributed work to the end product.
Authors Guild proposes new AI training use clause
Reading Time: 2 minutes Authors Guild proposes contract clause to block AI training use without permission.
Flash Fiction Submissions Open March 1
Reading Time: 2 minutes The spring 2023 submission cycle for original speculative fiction begins on March 1 and closes at midnight on March 31.
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.
ON WRITING
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.
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.
Midjourney’s new zoom out feature great for book covers
Reading Time: 7 minutes Midjourney adds zoom out feature, which is great for creating art for book covers.
Adobe will indemnify customers against lawsuits
Reading Time: 2 minutes Adobe promises to cover any legal costs that companies might incur as a result of using their AI-powered image generation tools.
Claude AI can read and analyze an entire book at once — here’s how to use it
Reading Time: 19 minutes Claude can read a 75,000-word book and identify structural and style problems. It can also create outlines and character sheets.
Authors can now use WordPress to create newsletters — and get paid for them
Reading Time: 3 minutes WordPress.com now lets authors get paid for their newsletters.
Adobe adds Firefly’s AI image generation to Photoshop
Reading Time: 7 minutes Adobe has added Firefly’s AI image generation to Photoshop so that you, or your cover designer, can create book covers using commercially-safe AI image generation.
How to use the new Midjourney ‘describe’ function to create great book covers
Reading Time: 6 minutes A week ago, Midjourney, which is the best AI generator on the market today, added the “describe” function, which lets you upload any image and get some suggestions for prompts that could have created it. It’s a great shortcut for creating images for book covers — or anything else you need graphics for.