Kooneiform

Courtesy of a link at Fair Game, a simple Proppian fairytale generator. I’ve been thinking about joining things like this, the Abulafia generator, and IF in some way.

The second lo-fi recording experiment: “Game Writing 101″, InPrint at Richard Hugo House.

About the Panelists

New York Times best-selling writer Eric Nylund is the author of “Halo: Ghosts of Onyx” and other novels; he also writes for games such as “Gears of War.”

John Sutherland has written for games including “Mind Aerobics,” “Go” and many Microsoft games such as “MechAssault 2,” “Asheron’s Call 2,” “Shadowrun” and the “Mass Effect”; he also writes poetry, fiction and screenplays.

Panel moderator Melanie Henry’s first video game was “Pong.” As an editor at Microsoft Game Studios for the last seven years, she’s worked on such games as “Gears of War” and “Counter-Strike” for the original Xbox.

[InPrint at Richard Hugo House]

Thanks to Leslie Howell of InPrint at the Hugo House for putting together this group of Microsoft game people, who threw down an informal introductory rap about what it’s like to write for games in general, and AAA titles in particular. There’s ongoing Q&A during the discussion, with Melanie Henry posing questions every so often. Eric Nylund answers first in part one.

I haven’t got around to annotating the tracks yet but hope to do it soon — almost two hours of discussion! All I did in Audacity was amplify the tracks between 10-14 db., and go through with the envelope tool to bring down some of the spikes from coughs, knocks, laughter, etc. I need to find some way to quickly do that without losing the dynamics of the live sound.

Highlights were the 12 year old (? — hope I guessed your age close enough man!) who owned the Q&A, the man with the Q&A buzzwords (who managed to work in auteur theory, ludology, and agile development into I think four questions), and the title of this post, courtesy of a quote from Eric Nylund in reference to a certain film.

Each part is about 30 minutes.

Game Writing 101 (part one)

(part two)

(part three)

(part four)

I’ve been poking around lately to see the extent of the SF magazine world. This will get redundant I’m sure.

Here’s an oldish list of SF small press stuff and webzines at suddenlypress.com.

The SFWA list.

Yes, the Wikipedia entry.

Found “An Open Source Speculative Fiction Magazine Model” (though I don’t know how open source figures into that, honestly).

That got sparked by Paolo Bacigalupi’s posts on the subject, which you can find through the article linked above.

A half-fluff piece at Speculations, good enough to skim.

Anyway, so the point of this post — here is what I think would be cool: a paying online SF magazine that included IF. Call it a monthly, 1-3 IF works a month, 2-3 short stories and serials, and a weekly column of something, say around 25k words total (let’s be generous and do .05 a word, so $1250, and IF gets a flat rate of $100. Annual budget is $18k — hahahaha).

Maybe the column rotates, first week is editorial, second is SF, third is IF, and fourth is craaaaaazy.

Notwithstanding I have no technical experience to get something like that running, I would like to read something like that. And hey, this is why I get to post it on this thing and not spray it across a forum somewhere.

The magazine gets funded by general donations, and throw in a tip jar for individual stories.

It would need a web-based interpreter, so people could read it anywhere — I wonder how well a web interpreter works on a mobile device.

(and another page to post)

Frankly the world of market lists, e-zines, fan zines, pro markets, semi-pro markets, 181 day response times, the SFWA pro list, and everything else baffles me. So in an effort to simplify I’m just going to troll pages of writers who seem to know what they’re doing and collate a list of sf markets it would be worthwhile to submit to. We’ll see how useful this becomes. Think of it as a market list in larval form, drenched in pus.

Courtesy of (as in, copied from) Jay Lake

Realms of Fantasy
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
Apex & Abyss
Strange Horizons
Ideomancer
Revolution SF

Courtesy of David Levine

Darker Matter
Infinity Plus
Aeon Speculative Fiction
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Asimov’s Science Fiction
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Interzone
Black Static

Courtesy of Ruth Nestvold

Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine

(special note: Mary Soon Lee basically rocks the world here)