Fragile Things is a collection of short stories and verse from multi award winning author, Neil Gaiman. Originally, I was going to give a brief review of each piece in the collection. However, as there are twenty seven stories and poems in total, I shall limit my review to what I consider the highlights of this collection, as well as some general observations. The introduction to the book is written by Gaiman himself, and explains the origins of most of [...]
photo credit: dmott9 Mark Twain once said, "If I had more time, I would write a shorter story." And how true it is: the lower the word count, the more daunting the task. It's not really any different than conversation; give me the floor and I can rattle on for hours without ever making a point. Confine me to wrapping up and delivering the central aim or purpose of my verbiage in a sentence, maybe two, and what follows is [...]
photo credit: TheTruthAbout… First Step Press is always looking for ways to show our appreciation for the authors appearing in our publications. We're not a paying market, but that doesn't mean that we can't find other ways to compensate writers. That's where this announcement comes in. For the past two months, I have been working with a voting system on the SSM: ALMIA and CRM websites. I have been experimenting with things like how many votes a post would need [...]
Beginning in October, FSP will be giving away desktop backgrounds for readers to download for their PCs. Art editor, Ashlie Pollard, will create the backgrounds. There will be a general writing background, as well as backgrounds for Stepping Stones Magazine and Crimson Rivers Magazine. While we're all waiting to see what Ashlie cooks up, I uploaded a few backgrounds that I created for myself. If you're a desktop minimalist like me, then these text-based backgrounds will give you a clean [...]
Writing-World.com's Guide to Paying Markets for Fiction and Poetry by Moira Allen, is more than just a book of data for writer's submissions. The author includes only paying markets of periodicals (E-zines, magazines and a few newspapers). The author created a highly valuable section entitled "About this Guide", that explains what each section of details listed under the publications means. She even goes as far as describing the various rights that are often required by periodicals. I learned within the [...]