The Live Journal of James Stevens-Arce

My First Published Nano Story

2009-07-10T11:08:11Z

My first nano story -- or maybe I should call it a twitter tale -- was just published online.

According to their submission guidelines, Nanoism is a paying market that publishes twitter fiction: stories no more than 140 characters in length.

As it turns out, I had written a two-paragraph story a couple of years ago, but had no idea where to attempt to market it. When I checked, I discovered it contained 227 characters (spaces count as characters), but in about half an hour I managed to trim it down to exactly the maximum length permitted, submitted it via e-mail, got an acceptance back a little over five hours later, and saw it published ten days later.

Space limitations do not allow room for titles, so you'll find my story under the date July 8, 2009, and the number 41. If space for a title had been available, my story would have been called Gitmo: The Ride.

Spam Folder Poetry #6

2009-02-08T02:27:53Z

[This poem was composed entirely from the subject lines and openings of messages found in the spam folder of my gmail account]

Don't you look upon your diminutive willy as worth worrying about?
Short pennies make men less attractive
Do not waste your time!
Make a massive bulge in your pants
Power up your love making gun
No stupid exercises, just a miracle tablet
They are blue, they are little and they will make your shaft stay super hard
Destroy the physical borders between your couple and all-night powerful drilling
Women go crazy over huge mansticks
Denise loves the bulge in my pants?
Make your man's carrot grow
She'll like your new longer hose
Realize all of her dreams with our help for short time
Never let others call you toothpick again
Doctors Use This Too

Fight Exhorbitant Credit Card Interest Rates

2009-01-29T23:23:35Z

It's been some time now since the Fed lowered the Prime Rate to 0%, yet I still have some credit cards charging me as much as 17.95% interest.

Given the Zero Prime Rate, the bailout money the government has given banks from taxpayer funds, and the current harsh economy, don't you think the government should take immediate steps to get banks to drop high credit card interest rates?

If you're as annoyed as I am at this situation, spread the word through your blog and e-mail your congressperson and senators in Washington about it.

Maybe we can get a grassroots movement started.

If it's of any help, here is the text of the e-mail I sent to my senators and congressperson:

--o0o--
Dear [name of representavie]:

It's been some time now since the Fed lowered the Prime Rate to 0%, yet I still have some credit cards charging me as much as 17.95% interest.

Given the Zero Prime Rate, the bailout money the government has given banks from taxpayer funds, and the current harsh economy, don't you think the legislature should take immediate action to get banks to drop high credit card interest rates?
--
Thank you,

[name]
[address]
[phone number]

--o0o--
Feel free to adapt my message or compose your own original version.

Spam Folder Poetry #5

2009-01-28T00:47:00Z

[This poem was composed entirely from the subject lines and openings of messages found in the spam folder of my gmail account]

Everyone wants to look and feel classy
Don't embarrass yourself in the locker room again
Make an impression of successful person
Be a man with a monster tool

Growth is so simple with this
Become the owner of exquisite and stylish thing!
Women look at the bulge in your pants
You can use it as a lovely gift for your friends or relatives

Excuse me for bothering you
Don't suffer in silence from a small tool
Real men have big sticks
Get the longest schlong in two months

You know she wants this
The solution to low libidos
You must be The Real Man with huge dignity
We offer a free gift box

A New Way to Get Your Novel Noticed at HarperCollins

2009-01-28T00:28:49Z

I've just placed my 19th-century historical novel Blind Man, Preacher Man on the HarperCollins authonomy website.

# # #
The following quotes are taken from the authonomy Home Page and FAQs page:

authonomy is a brand new community site for writers, readers and publishers, conceived and developed by book editors at HarperCollins. We want to flush out the brightest, freshest new literature around - we’re glad you stopped by.

If you’re a writer, authonomy is the place to show your face – and show off your work on the web. Whether you’re unpublished, self-published or just getting started, all you need is a few chapters to start building your profile online, and start connecting with the authonomy community.

authonomy invites unpublished and self published authors to post their manuscripts for visitors to read online. Authors create their own personal page on the site to host their project - and must make at least 10,000 words available for the public to read.

Visitors to authonomy can comment on these submissions – and can personally recommend their favourites to the community. authonomy counts the number of recommendations each book receives, and uses it to rank the books on the site. It also spots which visitors consistently recommend the best books – and uses that info to rank the most influential trend spotters.

We hope the authonomy community will guide publishers straight to the freshest writing talent – and will give passionate and thoughtful readers a real chance to influence what’s on our shelves.

Will HarperCollins be reading my work?
Once a month we’ll be pulling out the top five books from the Editor’s Desk Chart, and passing them on to our Editorial Board. HC editors will read from the first 10,000 words of each manuscript, and will feed back their comments to the appropriate authors, who will be able to decide whether or not to make these comments available to the community at large.

Will HarperCollins be publishing books from authonomy?
We’ve set up authonomy in the hope of finding new authors for our various publishing lists, so we’ll certainly be looking for promising books – as will other publishing houses and agents.

We only buy books we really believe in – as such, we’re not guaranteeing to publish anything submitted to us. In this way, you can be sure that any books picked off authonomy will have been chosen because we really love them.

The terms of any publication deals arising from the site would be negotiated as and when such opportunities arise – there is no fixed ‘boiler-plate’ offer specifically for authors who come to our attention via the site.

# # #
And this quote is taken from their blog:

WEDNESDAY, 21 JANUARY 2009
Here at authonomy, we always hoped that our site would help people get spotted and get published, and today we’re really pleased to pass on the news of several publishing contracts coming through.

We’re fit to bursting with pride: not one but three different authonomy authors have been signed up to HarperCollins. Each one has a very different story to tell of the journey to acquisition, which we hope is an encouraging sign. World rights have been acquired in all three cases.

# # #
The logline for my book Blind Man, Preacher Man is:

In brawling, sprawling 19th-century America, a blind Wild West show trickshooter must square accounts with a resurrected traveling evangelist who swindled the woman he loved.

Should you care to take a look at it, just click here.

And should you decide to post your own book, do let me know in the comments to this post.

Writer's Block: Peevish

2009-01-27T23:39:01Z

Too many LJers to list have submitted this question—what is your biggest pet peeve?

View 500 Answers

People who ask what my biggest pet peeve is.

From the Desk of Sleezy Snicklehump

2008-10-31T21:59:51Z

A Quick Plug for "The SFWA European Hall of Fame" - Part 2

2008-04-28T17:27:41Z

Some of you may recall that I translated a couple of stories from Spanish into English for the recently published The SFWA European Hall of Fame: Sixteen Contemporary Masterpieces of Science Fiction from the Continent , a well-received collection of top genre stories from Europe edited by James Morrow and Kathryn Morrow.

Below, Jeff VanderMeer interviews Jim and Kathy, along with one of the authors, about the origin and contents of the anthology at the 2007 Utopiales Science Fiction Festival in Nantes, France.

Closing Day - 2

2008-04-18T11:50:26Z

My thanks to all of you who left encouraging words and/or advice in the comments section of my previous post.

Following a long day of lugging heavy stuff and unpacking furniture, we slept in our new house for the first time last night. Unfortunately, we didn't get to bed till around 2:20 A.M. and I woke up around 6:15 A.M. and couldn't get back to sleep.

While we managed to move all the furniture we shipped from Puerto Rico last November and had had in storage since then, we still have many boxes of books, china, clothing, and sundries to cart over here and unpack, which we will be doing over the next week or so (our storage rent is paid up through April 30).

Today, I return the 24' truck we rented from Budget, the piano movers come, and our breakfast nook table and master bedroom dresser and nightstands should be delivered -- plus Tita wants to bring over a Jeep Cherokee-full load of boxes, including the good china, to unpack and put away.

Tomorrow, the office furniture for my studio is scheduled to arrive -- and possibly the sofa and armchair for our family room, although it's more likely they won't be delivered until early next week -- and we're supposed to entertain the father of our son's fiancée at dinner.

I will post some pictures of the house soon.

Closing Day

2008-04-17T00:32:48Z

Today, after almost six months of house hunting, we closed on our new home in Wake Forest, North Carolina.

Tomorrow, we start moving in.

First Novel Contest for UK and Republic of Ireland Residents

2008-04-12T12:38:45Z

FIRST NOVEL CONTEST
---
NO ENTRY FEE NOTED
This competition is open to anyone aged 16 or over who is a resident of the UK or Republic of Ireland.

All Entries must be original, previously unpublished works of fiction on any subject or genre, including but not limited to romance, crime, science fiction, adventure, and thriller.

The Publisher will offer the winning entrant a publishing contract with Transworld Publishers, a division of The Random House Group Limited, and an advance in the sum of £30,000 (Prize).

The Publishers will publish the winning work in the spring of 2009.

Entrants must submit a complete work in the English language of not less than 80,000 words and no more than 150,000 words and a synopsis of the work in the English language of no more than 600 words.

Entrants must not have written a novel published under a valid ISBN.

Deadline: July 2, 2008.

=====

SOURCE

FUNDS FOR WRITERS
Editor: C. Hope Clark
Mailto: Hope@fundsforwriters.com
Website: http://www.fundsforwriters.com
Newsletter: ISSN: 1533-1326

All Hail Karin!

2008-01-17T12:56:03Z

Happy Birthday, battle_of_one!

And many happy returns. :-)

A Christmas Message

2007-12-25T11:53:55Z

From me and mine to you and yours.

A Quick Plug for "The SFWA European Hall of Fame"

2007-12-15T11:12:23Z

For those of you who are curious about the kind of genre fiction that is being written in the non-English-speaking world, The SFWA European Hall of Fame, a collection of top genre stories from Europe edited by James Morrow and Kathryn Morrow for which I did the two translations from the Spanish, makes an excellent Christmas, Newtonmas, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, or Belated Hanukkah gift.

EDITORIAL REVIEWS
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review.

Wondrous worlds await U.S. SF fans in this sensitively chosen, impeccably translated anthology of Continental European science fiction stories, ranging from 1987 to 2005.

Offering "emotional satisfaction and cerebral excitement," as James Morrow puts it in his introduction, highlights include Johanna Sinisalo's "Baby Doll," a Finnish denunciation of materialistic exploitation of children; Romanian Lucian Merisca's "Some Earthlings' Adventures on Outrerria," an excruciating political satire; Valerio Angelisti's "Sepultura," which offers a neo-Dantean Infernoscape; and W.J. Maryson's "Verstummte Musik," a Dutch near-future Orwellian nightmare. A French twist on human-machine interface lifts Jean-Claude Dunyach's "Separations" into a meditation on the nature of artistic creativity, while Elena Arsenieva's "A Birch Tree, a White Fox" exquisitely illustrates the quintessential Russian soul.

These "disciplined speculations" by European writers and their painstaking translators not only excite the mind, they move the heart. (June)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

--o0o--

From Booklist
Except for Stanislaw Lem, contemporary European sf and fantasy writers aren't well represented in English translation.

The Morrows, husband and wife, address this long-standing sad situation by teaming top-notch translators and some of today's best European sf and fantasy hands in a superlative anthology.

Leading lights of French, Polish, Spanish, and 11 other literatures show their writing chops while employing a very broad range of genre motifs, from time machines to space travel. Jean-Claude Dunyach contributes "Separations," the multidimensional story of a zero-gravity choreographer on an unforgettable space ride with a tormented captain. In "The Fourth Day to Eternity," the Czech Ondrej Neff recounts the fate of a frenzied physicist caught in a confusing time loop.

As James Morrow underlines in a witty and literate introduction, a truly representative sampling of European speculative fiction would span volumes.

Under the attention-grabbing banner of the SFWA Hall of Fame series, this book tantalizingly introduces English-language readers to Europe's riches and may incite them to clamor for more.

Hays, Carl
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.

--o0o--

BOOK DESCRIPTION
This is the best book of its kind in at least two decades. It is a literate, intelligent book of powerful SF stories from across Europe.

These tales are representativeof the best writers and stories of the last twenty years, written in most of the major contemporary European languages.

The SFWA European Hall of Fame includes some of the biggest SF names in Europe, including Joanna Sinisalo, Andreas Eschbach, Elena Arseneva, and Jean-Claude Dunyach. The appeal of this anthology rests first upon the venerable SFWA Hall of Fame imprimatur, and secondly on the sterling reputation of co-editor/writer James Morrow.

Morrow and his wife Kathryn spent years arranging for translations of the best in European SF, and working with translators to achieve sharp, polished, and entertaining English versions of the stories.

James Morrow has written a thought-provoking introductory essay, as well as informative story notes throughout the collection. This anthology joins the canonical SFWA Hall of Fame books that have sold hundreds of thousands of copies over four decades, and belongs in every library of SF, personal or public.

Yuletide Wishes

2007-12-10T15:19:07Z

Here's wishing you Happy Holidays!

For Sale - Part 5: SOLD!

2007-11-21T16:20:22Z

Tita and I arrived in Raleigh to stay yesterday around noon in company of two dogs (Kobe and Rookie) and one cat (Mischa Barton).

Our daughter Tara is flying in tomorrow from Miami, so since we're temporarily sharing a rented townhome with our son Ian, we'll have the whole family together to celebrate our first Thanksgiving in our new home state.

Our furniture and other household goods should arrive sometime in December, at which time most of the stuff will go into storage until we can find and buy a house. We've got a 6-month lease on the townhome, so we'll be able to shop around for a good deal without a lot of pressure.

Our Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo shipped from Puerto Rico on Monday and is scheduled to arrive in Jacksonville, Florida, tomorrow. I plan to fly down to pick it up and do the 6-hour drive to Raleigh next week.

Monthly Exercise Results - October

2007-11-03T09:33:57Z

OCTOBER
Push-ups = 490
Dips = 490
Curls = 0*
Lifts = 0*
Walking = 9 miles

YEAR-TO-DATE
Push-ups = 7,840
Dips = 7,360
Curls = 5,880
Lifts = 6,050
Walking = 229.5 miles

*The drop-off in these numbers was the result of a five-week trip I took during which I had no access to free weights.

FOLLOW-UP: Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting - Quarterfinals

2007-11-03T09:27:50Z

Got a request for a 50-word synopsis of my Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting quartefinalist screenplay Sins of the Heart last night from Peter Samuelson the guy who produced Arlington Road, Wilde, and Tom and Viv, among a number of other pictures.

This is what I sent him:

--o0o--

When a bungled contract killing results in a violent quadruple murder, a rogue homicide detective must catch the killer before he strikes again, but finds himself partnered with his estranged CSI ex-wife, for whom he still carries a torch, and struggling with his cancer-stricken father's pleas to be put out of his misery.

--o0o--

If that whets his interest sufficiently, he says he'll request a copy of the script.

For Sale - Part 4: SOLD

2007-11-03T09:08:02Z

We closed on the sale of our home of 26 years here in Puerto Rico on Halloween night, which turned out to be both a treat and a trick.

Due to the depressed state of the real estate market, the house unfortunately appraised considerably below what it would have a year ago, but our realtor says most houses here are selling at 10% below appraisal, so we were lucky to get that.

We're now in the hectic packing and moving process and hope to be in our new temporary home in Raleigh, NC, sometime within the next two weeks.

We've got a 6-month lease on a 3-bedroom townhome there we'll be sharing with our son Ian while we settle on what house to buy in the area.

I spent most of the month of October in Raleigh trying to drum up work in the local advertising community and was able to begin what look to be long-term freelance relationships writing, producing, and directing commercials for a local television station and doing copywriting and design work for a local advertising agency.

Hopefully, this client base will grow.

FOLLOW-UP: Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting - Quarterfinals

2007-10-16T02:59:19Z

Sins of the Heart failed to progress beyond the quarterfinal round of this year's Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting (top 254 scripts out of 5,050 submitted), but I did receive two requests to read the screenplay this week, along with two other requests to see a synopsis of the script.

For Sale - Part 3

2007-10-16T02:42:35Z

We finally got our first offer on the house last Monday the 8th. We made a counter-offer on Tuesday, which was accepted, contingent on the appraisal, the buyer's obtaining financing, and the house's passing inspection.

The house inspector came by on Saturday. Tita tells me that he limited himself only to structural matters, as he apparently forgot to bring his testing equipment for the electrical system, which he said he'd be back to check at a later date.

That will have to be after the 24th, since I'm currently in Raleigh, NC, where I've been since September 25th, and Tita is joining me day after tomorrow (the 17th) for a week's stay.

If all goes well, we hope to be back in Raleigh for good in time for Thanksgiving.

Monthly Exercise Results - September

2007-10-04T13:20:05Z

SEPTEMBER
Push-ups = 930
Dips = 900
Curls = 570
Lifts = 570
Walking = 11 miles

YEAR-TO-DATE
Push-ups = 7,350
Dips = 6,870
Curls = 5,880
Lifts = 6,050
Walking = 220.5 miles

Monthly Exercise Results - August

2007-09-01T13:40:56Z

AUGUST
Push-ups = 900
Dips = 900
Curls = 240*
Lifts = 240*
Walking = 31 miles

YEAR-TO-DATE
Push-ups = 6,420
Dips = 5,970
Curls = 5,310
Lifts = 5,480
Walking = 209.5 miles

*The drop-off in these numbers was the result of a three-week trip I took during which I had no access to free weights.

For Sale - Part 2

2007-08-04T17:15:06Z

On July 24, we switched realtors from a two-person operation to one of the largest realty agencies on the Island, figuring that since the former had managed to bring less than a dozen prospects by to view the house in five months, perhaps the latter would provide us access to a much larger pool of potential buyers.

They've brought two people to see the property, so far, and the second prospect is coming back this afternoon to show it to her husband.

Monthly Exercise Results - July

2007-08-01T04:39:41Z

JULY
Push-ups = 600
Dips = 600
Curls = 600
Lifts = 600
Walking = 26.5 miles

YEAR-TO-DATE
Push-ups = 5,520
Dips = 5,070
Curls = 5,070
Lifts = 5,220
Walking = 178.5 miles