E-mail the first 150-200 words of your novel, along with links to two social media announcements you’ve made about this contest — yes, this blog post is one of mine! — for a chance to win a critique of the first ten pages of your work and a year’s subscription to WritersMarket.com.

Entries will be judged by literary agent Roseanne Wells of Marianne Strong Literary Agency.

See the Guide to Literary Agents blog for more details.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter, finding out more about publishing, writing, markets, and agents. I’ve also been sending this information to my Twitter followers.

For those who use Twitter, you can follow me at @BJMuntain. For those who’d rather not, I’ve now set up Twitter here on my blog. If you look to the right of this blog, you’ll see my 5 latest tweets, under the heading Writing and Publishing news from Twitter.

Now, not all my tweets will be about writing or publishing, but most will. I post about 20 tweets per day, so there will be a lot of information.

I will, of course, still update this blog — I’ve actually been updating it more since becoming active on Twitter. It’s a lot easier to find the types of news I like on Twitter.

I hope you find this new source of news useful!

My current crusade is to make sure creative people have wills. Read the blog post about it, and see a sample will.

Well, since my parents have been bugging me about making out a will (since they’d have to deal with all the crap anyway), I checked it out.

There’s some very good advice there, and a lawyer-drawn sample will. Very useful. I thought I should share.

Thanks, Neil, for this great resource. I’m sorry about your father. He must have been a wise man to have raised such a wise son.

Tangent Online – which has published reviews of short genre fiction for 14 years – is “closing shop permanently March 1, 2009, unless someone steps forward to host the site.” This notice was given on a SFF newsgroup.

The website itself says they are on sabbatical “while we give the site a new look”. This was posted September 2007.

So, is anyone interested in hosting Tangent Online?

Keep an eye out for his new publishing venture, Tir Na Nog, which will bring out a reconstituted Fantastic Stories.

• It is helpful when submitting a story to include a professional cover letter.
• Don’t send submissions directly to the editorial staff – please send submissions to the e-mail address listed in our guidelines.
• Please do not paste your story into the body of your email. It is an instant rejection and not helpful to anybody.
• Plausible story lines and science also go a long way.

“GORDON VAN GELDER’s _The Magazine of Fantasy & SF_ is switching to
bimonthly publication. ‘Rising costs — especially postal costs — and
the economy put us in a position where we either had to raise our rates
severely or cut back somewhere. Given the state of the economy, I decided
a cutback on frequency made the most sense. We’ll lose a little more than
10% of our content this year, but publishing on a bimonthly schedule
should put us in a great position for the coming years.’ (2 January)”

Of course, me being me, I had to confirm it. This from the F&SF forum, posted by Mr. Gelder himself just 23 hours before this little post of mine:

“I thought I’d better start a new thread for this subject, but as mentioned in the “thin December issue” thread, F&SF is going bimonthly.

The March 2009 issue will be the last monthly issue. Starting with the April/May 2009 issue, we’ll be publishing one issue every two months. Each issue will be 256 pages (16 pages longer than our last Oct/Nov issue) except for this year’s anniversary issue, which will be a jumbo.

Subscribers don’t need to take any action. If your current sub expires with the April 2009 issue or with the May 2009 issue, your sub now expires with the April/May 2009 issue.

We’ve made the change because rising costs—especially postal costs—and the current economy put us in a position where we either had to raise our rates severely or cut back somewhere. Given the state of the economy, I decided a cutback in frequency made the most sense. We’ll lose a little more than 10% of our content this year, but we should be in a great position for the coming years.

I know it’s a big change and it will take a little while to get used to it, but I think it will work out fine. Thank you all for your support.”

If it keeps them in business, I say Best of Luck to Mr. Gelder and The
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction!

Here’s what they’re looking for:

“Beneath Ceaseless Skies publishes “literary adventure fantasy”: stories with a secondary-world setting and some traditional or classic fantasy feel, but written with a literary flair.”

They go into more detail in their guidelines.

Under 10,000 words, pays 5 cents per word. E-mail only. Aiming to reply in 4-6 weeks. They also have a forum, where the editor — Scott H. Andrews — posts Slush Updates.

“We get a whole lot of stories from people more interested in experimenting with form than telling about interesting characters. I think everyone is pretty sold on ‘fantastic elements’ so while we wouldn’t consider something hard enough to be in, say, Analog, the kind of stuff that shows up in F&SF or Strange Horizons would be great.”

The general submission period is Sept. 15th – Feb. 1st. The guidelines say, “The editors welcome submissions of poems, stories, and essays. There are no limitations on form or subject matter.” Maximum length 9000 words or 3-5 poems. No electronic submissions. Pay: as funds permit.

“This is an open invitation for any author who has a book coming out to write up a short piece about one of the building blocks of their upcoming book. It can be about the characters, the plot, the theme, the actual writing structure, the idea behind the novel (or non-fiction work), the worldbuilding, etc.”

It looks like it could be both interesting and educational – and possibly profitable.  Let’s watch and see how it goes.  With Jenny in charge, we know there won’t be any really lame entries! I also encourage others to read Jenny’s blog, and the blogs of other agents.  You can really get an education on the writing business this way.

Thanks, Jenny!  And good for you!