DIVERSICON 16

bumping this to the top to show off the cool T-shirt designed by Marge Simon.











DIVERSICON 16

Oh, sweet mystery...


Where: Minneapolis, Minnesota
When: August 1 - 3, 2008
Who?
Guest of Honor: Anne Frasier
Check out the Diversicon website and click on latest update to download PDF file and registration form.




But wait! That's not all!


Diversicon 16 Flash Fiction Contest


Short stories up to 250 words on the convention theme of "Oh, Sweet Mystery . . ." Submit no later than midnight Central Time July 14 to diversicon16flash@gmail.com. No entry fee, but open only to attending members of the convention. Entries will be judged by the convention Guest of Honor, professional author Anne Frasier. Entries will be judged on the creative interpretation of the theme, the quality of the writing, and emotional/intellectual impact. Top prize is a cool certificate, the honor of winning, a round of applause, the opportunity to read your work to the assembled convention. For more information:

DIVERSICON 16

more about Diversicon




Special Guest: Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, PhD

Author, journalist, and professor Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu uses both her Nigerian and American backgrounds in her fiction: the novels Zahrah the Windseeker (Houghton Mifflin, 2005) and The Shadow Speaker (Hyperion, October 2007), the play Full Moon, as well as stories in the anthologies The Witching Hour, Mojo Conjure Stories (Nalo Hopkinson, ed.), Writers of the Future Volume 18, and So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction (Nalo Hopkinson & Uppinder Mehan, eds.) and the professional online magazine Strange Horizons. Her essay on author Virginia Hamilton appeared in Dark Matter II: Reading the Bones (Sheree R. Thomas, ed.).
Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

She holds a PhD in English (emphasis on creative writing) from the University of Illinois--Chicago; an MA in English, also from UI Chicago (thesis: The Legend of Arro-yo); and an MA in journalism from Michigan State University--East Lansing (thesis: Virtual Women: Female Characters in Video Games). She is also a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop.




Posthumous Guests of Honor:
Scheherazade, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jack Williamson

Scheherazade (ca. 800): Legendary Persian narrator of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, a compilation of Persian, Arabic, Indian, and other folktales, including "Aladdin and the Lamp," "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad," and "The Thief of Baghdad." A highly educated woman, Scheherazade distracted her misogynist husband from killing her by telling captivating stories. The various translations of these tales have influenced artists, composers, and screenwriters around the world.

Sir Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980): Director of many films over five decades in Great Britain and the United States, including the haunting Rebecca (1940), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and the SFnal The Birds (1963; guaranteed to make you nervous around flocks of crows!), Hitchcock worked repeatedly with interlocking themes of sex and death. He also featured female characters who were both glamorous and strong actors with their own agendas, and he dealt obliquely with homosexuality despite the Hollywood Production Code.

Jack Williamson, PhD (1908-2006): Author of Darker Than You Think (1948), The Humanoids (1949), a collection of short stories titled The Best of Jack Williamson (1977), and the autobiography Wonder�s Child: My Life in Science Fiction (1984, rev. 2005), Williamson traveled west by covered wagon in 1915, then went on to write imaginative science fiction over many decades. He first saw his work published in an SF magazine in 1928, he cowrote the first story of revolution on the Moon with Dr. Miles Breuer ("The Birth of a New Republic," Amazing Stories, Winter 1931), coined the word terraforming in his 1942 novel Seetee Ship, and saw his last novel (The Stonehenge Gate) published in 2005. Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) honored him with its second-ever Grand Master award in 1976 (the first recipient was Robert Heinlein). He won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards (for his novella The Ultimate Earth) in 2001, becoming by far the oldest author to have won these awards. He earned a PhD in English from the University of Colorado--Boulder (his dissertation focused on the works of H. G. Wells) and taught science fiction writing at Eastern New Mexico University from 1960 through the 21st century.

RITA

Romance Writers of America RITA Awards



1) By the time the RITA nominees are announced the books are often out of print.

2) How long has the RITA been in existence? Over twenty years. That means we have over twenty years of RITA titles, many of which were out of print before the awards ceremony.

3) The rights for most RITA titles have long since reverted back to the authors.

4) Somebody -- Harlequin seems the logical choice -- should put out a line of RITA books.


RWA should get behind this idea and push it to publishers. Good for RWA, REALLY good for the lucky publisher, and good for the writers.

short fiction contest!

from THE CLARITY OF NIGHT



The rumble of the engine beneath you.

The last colors of the setting sun, your invitation.

It's time to race away into the summer night. Welcome to the "Running Wind" Short Fiction Contest!!

This contest is the 9th in what has become a wonderfully fun series. Clarity of Night contest wins have been reported in agent query letters, served as inspiration for a soon-to-be-published novel, and helped to springboard writers to bigger success.

cross-post from my-my-my-myspace

Readers have been asking about my next book, and at this point there is no next book. Which doesn't mean there will never be a next book. I took some much needed time off, but I've been working on a project that is generating quite a bit of interest. We might submit 100 pages to publishers in September, or we might decide it would be best if I wrote the whole manuscript before submitting. If this project sells, it will be literary suspense and it will probably be written under another name. Ugh. Sorry. It's the business. If there is a new name, I'll definitely get the info to Anne Frasier readers. The big downside of this publishing house change? If everything goes as smoothly as it could possibly go, I won't have a new book out until 2011 or 20012. That's because of the way books are slotted. Slots are often reserved eighteen to twenty-four months out, so when a writer switches publishing houses there will be no slots with her name on them until the manuscript is turned in. It could be that if a person sells on a partial a tentative slot might be held, but I've never experienced that. Usually for that first book with the new house the clock doesn't start ticking until the manuscript is completed, read by an editor, and determined publishable.

anne's myspace

little eraserhead

100_2172,
originally uploaded by annefrasier2000.

this guy's mom was the most persistent swallow ever. i hung chimes. i taped hardware cloth over ledges. then i gave up because it seems i'm the intruder.

blabbermouth!

i deleted my last blog post. once again i'm running into the problem of wanting to share information, but feeling that it's unwise. so let's just say things are going well in my own personal writing world, and hopefully i'll have some good news to share in a few months.