m. c. de marco

Locus Online posts a brief obituary for Kage Baker, who died of cancer yesterday.

The editors of Fantasy Magazine bring us more steampunk links, including eye candy, an overview of steampunk, a web comic, and a forthcoming novel from Pyr.

Charlie Jane Anders reveals 12 Secrets To Being A Super-Prolific Short Story Writer at io9. Unnumbered but still lurking there in the introduction is the classic story-a-week advice. Also of note are secret #6, share one of your worlds with yourself, and #12, write to different markets.

Via @sfwa on twitter: Strange Horizons now has a blog where contributors can read status, stats and advice from the fiction department.

I found the Wall Street Journal article on The Death of the Slush Pile that’s making the rounds, via a mailing list. As an aside in a very long thread about agents, Dean Wesley Smith pans it. The whole thread is worth reading, but here’s the short version: agents should not be used for marketing, only accounting.

My shortest story yet was published today at Thaumatrope, an sf/f/h twitter fiction magazine. I dimly recall submitting it, apparently in response to a call for steampunk and/or holiday stories, but I figured Bad Elf had killed little Timmy and buried his body in the slush pile.

To submit your own 140 characters of immortal speculative prose, all you need is a twitter account.

I mean, women writing fantasy. Via a mailing list: Doug Cohen announced a female-themed issue of Realms of Fantasy for August 2011. The deadline for chick-written content is November 15, 2010.

… submissions dealing with gender, sexism, and other areas important to feminist speculative literature are particularly welcome.