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parugi · 4 months

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so I’m looking at short story publishers (fantasy)

Tor, cream of the crop. 25 cents a word. Stories can be read for free (YES). Slowish response time at ~3 months. Prefer under 12k, absolute maximum is 17.5k. Don’t bother if it’s not highly professional quality. SFWA qualifying.

Crossed Genres. 6 cents a word. Different theme each month (this month’s is “failure”). Submissions must combine either sci-fi or fantasy with the theme. Response time 1 month. 1k-6k, no exceptions. SFWA qualifying.

Long Hidden, anthology from CG. 6 cents a word. 2k-8k, no exceptions. Must take place before 1935. Protagonist(s) must be under 18 and marginalized in their time and place. Must be sci-fi/fantasy/horror. Deadline 30 April. Response by 1 October.

Queers Destroy Science Fiction. Sci-fi only right now, author must identify as queer (gay, lesbian, bi, ace, pan, trans, genderfluid, etc, just not cishet). 7.5k max. Deadline 15 February. Responses by 1 March. You can submit one flash fiction and one short story at the same time. (My network blocks the Lightspeed site for some reason, so I can’t get all the submission details. >_>) Probably SFWA qualifying?

Women in Practical Armor. 6 cents a word. 2k-5k. Must be about 1) a female warrior who 2) is already empowered and 3) wears sensible armour. Deadline 1 April. Response within three months.

Fiction Vortex. $10 per story, with $20 and $30 for editor’s and readers’ choice stories (hoping to improve). Speculative fiction only. Imaginative but non-florid stories. 7.5k maximum, preference for 5k and under. (I kind of want to support them on general principle.)

Urban Fantasy Magazine. 6 cents a word. 8k max, under 4k preferred. Must be urban fantasy (aka, the modern world, doesn’t need to be a literal city).

Nightmare. 6 cents a word. 1.5-7.5k, preference for under 5k. Horror and dark fantasy. Response time up to two weeks. SFWA and HWA qualifying.

Apex Magazine. 6 cents a word. 7.5k max, no exceptions. Dark sci-fi/fantasy/horror. SFWA qualifying.

Asimov’s Science Fiction. 8-10 cents a word. 20k max, 1k minimum. Sci-fi; borderline fantasy is ok, but not S&S. Prefer character focused. Response time 5 weeks; query at 3 months. SFWA qualifying, ofc.

Buzzy Mag. 10 cents a word. 10k max. Should be acceptable for anyone 15+. Response time 6-8 weeks. SFWA qualifying.

Strange Horizons. 8 cents a word. Speculative fiction. 10k max, prefers under 5k. Response time 40 days. Particularly interested in diverse perspectives, nuanced approahces to political issues, and hypertexts. SFWA qualifying.

Fantasy and Science Fiction. 7-12 cents a word. Speculative fiction, preference for character focus, would like more science-fiction or humour. 25k maximum. Prefers Courier. Response time 15 days.

Scigentasy. 3 cents a word. .5-5k. Science-fiction and fantasy, progressive/feminist emphasis. Fantastic Stories of the Imagination. 15 cents a word. 3k maximum. Any sci-fi/fantasy, they like a literary bent. (psst, steinbecks!) They also like to see both traditional and experimental approaches. Response time two weeks.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies. 6 cents a word. 10k maximum. Fantasy in secondary worlds only (it can be Earth, but drastically different—alternate history or whatever). Character focus, prefer styles that are lush yet clear, limited first or third person narration. Response time usually 2-4 weeks, can be 5-7 weeks. SFWA qualifying.

Clarkesworld. 10 cents a word up to 4000, 7 afterwards. 1-8k, preferred is 4k. Science-fiction and fantasy. Needs to be well-written and convenient to read on-screen. Appreciates rigour. No talking cats. Response time 2 days. SFWA qualifying.

Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. 6 cents a word. Any length. Science-fiction and fantasy (along with fantastic horror). Good world-building and characterization. Clear straightforward prose. Response time three months. Yes, OSC is editor-in-chief. SFWA qualifying.

Interzone. Sub-pro rates if anything (but highly respected). 10k max. Short cover letter. Science-fiction and fantasy.

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parugi · 8 months

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we are in a media literacy crisis

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parugi · 8 months

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Every 21st century piece of writing advice: Make us CARE about the character from page 1! Make us empathize with them! Make them interesting and different but still relatable and likable!

Every piece of classic literature: Hi. It's me. The bland everyman whose only purpose is to tell you this story. I have no actual personality. Here's the story of the time I encountered the worst people I ever met in my life. But first, ten pages of description about the place in which I met them.

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parugi · 1 year

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LAYERS IN MSPAINT OUT NOW!!! 🎨

[check reblogs for links!]

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parugi · 1 year

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parugi · 1 year

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"One Sec Lol"

I worked on the fan game Bionicle Masks of Power for nearly 2 years. I worked really hard on it, learned many things, used a lot of programs I'd never done before, actually worked up the nerve to use a mic for the first time, etc. Over time I got promoted to the head of two departments, 3d art and level design, basically because I was around a lot and kept things organised.

Then one day, with a "One sec lol" I was completely demoted, in a dehumanising, buzzword filled message. It called working on the game a "Journey". Now the reason I was demoted I won't really dispute, I was under a lot of stress, and sometimes I'd get upset, but these things don't happen in a vacuum, I don't get stressed for no reason.

The team was for the most part a bunch of really good, talented people that I enjoyed working with immensely, but there were some who were more focused on the glory (of making a free fan game for a 20 year old dead toy line... look, getting 200k views on the teaser went to their heads) so there was this constant push to get things...not done, because that wasn't really their concern, it was get things in a state where they could be shown off. And not a "here's a work in progress asset" sort of shown off, a "2 Paragraphs of fluff about the game, talking like it's already done, not actually mentioning the assets we're meant to be showing off" sort of thing.

The image in this tweet was meant to show off the newly (semi) completed UI, you know, that thing on the edge you can't see?

The 80/20 rule seemed foreign to them, where 80% of the work takes 20% of the time, and the final 20% of the work takes 80%, so someone would get a quick rough draft of an asset done in like a day, and they'd start pushing us to get it complete so we could show off, even though it would normally be months for something to get there.

This image here, of Pohatu in the desert. Do you know what it was supposed to show off? If you guessed the desert, no! That whole scene was thrown together by one person in like a day, it's completely fake, no work had been done on the desert at all. It was supposed to show off the Toa, as we'd just reached a pretty big milestone of completing and texturing all the parts and most importantly the masks. You know, that tiny thing that's facing away from the screen?

Originally the idea was to just show off the Toa in all their glory in their biome, but it mutated in to that...thing. There was work on a second one, but everyone finally realised that it was just looking bad so it was cancelled, thankfully.

This constant push to get things done to show off was so pervasive, and always seemed to fall on my shoulders, being the 3d art and level design lead, even though the real bottle neck was programming. We only had 3-4 programmers of very limited availability. When I first joined the team as a 3d artist I was basically given makework tasks to do, things of no real consequence, most of which got thrown out. (why make random set dressing objects for Ta-Koro, a place that hasn't even been roughly sketched out yet, for example)

This only got worse when I was put in charge of level design. The levels themselves are the prime thing to show off things in, so there was this constant push to get the levels finished, which I always pushed back against because, and I need to really stress this, the game was in a suuuper early state, and still is. If you've played the stand alone game Trials of the Great Spirit, that area was initially supposed to be the intro to BMOP proper, but the gameplay evolved so much that it became unplayable. At one point there was even the suggestion of keeping the TOGS area with the old player movement. As this was supposed to be the player movement tutorial this was dire and shows the danger of putting work in to making a level look nice too early, you run in to the sunk cost fallacy. Making a level look nice takes a lot of work, it's very fiddly, moving around little decorative objects and getting textures right, and you don't want to have to redo it a lot, which is why most games are blocked out first, meaning that the basic level geometry is created with basic shapes, and once everything is refined then they move on to actually making it look nice. As level design lead I insisted that we do this, because most previous attempts at making levels had spent way too much time worrying about the looks.

One of the first things I was tasked with as a 3d artist was to make a series of modular tree bits:

youtube

I was given nothing but a pair of images as guides of what they wanted.

So I worked really hard to try and make a modular system that would allow some interesting level layouts. Once I made the rough version pictured do you know what I was asked to do? Texture it. Make them in to final assets. No testing at all, no time to see if they'd work for the levels they wanted, nothing. Just rough>final for platforming assets immediately.

Well I knew that if I did that it would just end up getting tossed out eventually so I refused, and guess what? These were made before the movement refactoring so they're completely useless now!

So now you see why making sure everything was finalized before doing final art was so important, which is why I would always fight against moving on to set dressing in the demo, because the demo wasn't and still isn't done, not even close. Having been put in that situation where I was told to work on something that would inevitably be tossed out later, I didn't want to put anyone in the teams I was responsible for in that situation, it's not like there wasn't a shortage of things to work on anyway.

Basically I was put in the situation where I had to constantly say no to all these, I'll call them what they were, marketing ideas, due to the game not actually being in the state it was being presented as. The video released on 8/10 this year was cobbled together from a bunch of unfished assets, barely functioning in an area that was designed just as a goal for set dressing to reach in a real level. It took the poor dev who had a computer good enough to run it hundreds of playthroughs until they got one good enough to show off, avoiding most of the bugs. And now seeing all this, know that I had to spend literal DAYS trying to convince everyone we should have that tiny disclaimer on the screen (every one else was worried about the aesthetics).

So this was the source of most of my stress, trying to focus on making a game while fighting against those that wanted instead to act like we had made a game. That's what lead to my stress and occasional outbursts, and me just in general getting fed up with working on the game.

After I was demoted, for the next week or so I was miserable. The way it was done just completely destroyed any sort of comfort I had in the team. I'm very shy and introverted, it takes me a long time to warm up to people or a place, and when something like that happens, it's all gone in an instant.

I didn't feel comfortable in the chats anymore so I left, I tried to explain myself to the person who demoted me and they just ignored me for several days at a time, leaving it to all spiral out of control in my head, another person said conflicting things that just made it worse. "It's not a punitive measure" "We appreciate your work" "You should be thanking me you didn't just get kicked off entirely" forcing me to grovel at their feet etc. It was all so much.

The final straw, and what got me kicked off, was do do with a document I had spent 9 months creating, that outlined a possible way of structuring the whole game. Before I started trying to get some structure in to it, the game design just seemed to be a big question mark. 6 playable characters needing to collect 11 upgrades, it's quite a complex thing that doesn't really track to any other game I've seen. The first version, Legacy, was simply a fully open map with the masks scattered about, but that wouldn't do with the level of detail and gameplay complexity we were aiming for. I eventually worked out something I thought would work, using a system of context sensitive gates, and I wrote and did many diagrams on the subject.

After I was kicked out of the leads, not a week later they announced big sweeping changes that were basically what I had been pushing for for months. There was something I was unclear on, a sort of gate for Kopaka involving wind, and I asked what it was. The new level design lead, the person who I had explained the concept of gates too, then proceeded to tell me what a gate was.

This was it. I was done. A week after I get kicked off the lead team and I'm treated like I didn't do anything. Then later I was confronted by another lead, and forced to post PROOF that I'd actually posted this document I'd spent 9 months publicly working on, that we'd had a whole meeting about with the story team, the document that got me promoted to level design lead.

This was too much for me, with everything going on with the game project and stuff in my personal life being stressful at the time, I genuinely didn't want to be around anymore, it was too much for me, I wanted to disappear. I tried to tell one of the leads this, and was ignored, I tried to speak openly to the team about it, I was censored, probated, then the next day, before I'd even woke up, kicked off the team. For being "negative". I was then told that if I didn't want things I'd made to be used I could ask them, but the only things they listed were the makuta totems and some jungle assets which I didn't even know what they meant.

So 2 years of work, and all I'd done for them by their account was a noodle and some wood.

Just keep working like a good little drone, no matter how much disrespect we throw at you. This is Team Kanohi.

I wanted to put this all behind me, but someone on the team had the gall to request the very document I was accused of pretending to have made (I mean who ever asked for it on the team, not who asked me personally, just to be clear) , so I'm just so fed up with them. I was paying to host the bulk of the parts and 3d assets out of my own pocket, and it took them like a month to bother moving things, by which time I got charged.

Here's a quick overview of some of the things I worked on, it's not comprehensive at all, it barely mentions the atlas system, but I'm so emotionally drained that I don't really want to bother with all that. It's also not just a noodle and some bits of wood though.

I want to reiterate that I genuinely enjoyed working with most of the people on the team, and I wish them well.

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parugi · 2 years

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refseek.com

www.worldcat.org/

link.springer.com

http://bioline.org.br/

repec.org

science.gov

pdfdrive.com

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parugi · 2 years

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parugi · 2 years

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serious post. start combating any misinformation you find. monkeypox is not an sti. monkeypox spreads through *any form of contact*. it is not exclusive to queer people, and it is *not* queer people's fault. we can not let history repeat itself. don't let flashy headlines take the place of medical facts and information.

conservatives are already itching to start a witchhunt against LGBT people and monkeypox is something they are going to latch onto.

don't let them. don't let this turn into a repeat of the AIDS crisis.

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parugi · 2 years

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Can you tell I made this in like less than 5 minutes

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parugi · 2 years

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parugi · 3 years

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Narrative Botox: Filler Words and Phrases to Look Out For

If you’re planning on publishing traditionally, chances are you keep a sharp eye on your word count. Literary agents and publishing houses are on the hunt for the best quality stories that they can print for the cheapest price (using the least paper and ink), so you have a higher chance of gaining representation if you can crank your novel out in the least words possible.

However, filler words and phrases aren’t only the enemies of aspiring traditional authors; every writer—fanfic, novelist, journalist, you name it!—should try to eliminate filler from their stories to assure more concise and high-quality writing. Oftentimes, filler contributes nothing but clutter, and without it, your narrative can flow smoother and in a more sophisticated manner.

But how do you know what’s filler and what’s not? Here are some tips on how to Ctrl+F and kick this narrative botox to the curb!

I compiled these lists with the help of Infusionmedia, BDR Publishing, and ResetEra !

Filler Words

1. Just

A writer’s worst enemy, and the bane of my manuscripts’ existences. Eliminating all the ‘just’s can cut down your word count by hundreds.

2. “That” as a conjunction

It’s an unnecessary addition to a sentence, which will be more streamlined without it.

Example: “He said that he wouldn’t do it again.”

Revised: “He said he wouldn’t do it again.”

3. “Now” as an adverb

“Now” is essential if you’re talking about the past and present, but when you’re using it to draw attention to a particular statement or point.

Example: “Now, I didn’t think it’d get so out of hand.”

Revised: “I didn’t think it’d get so out of hand.”

4. Redundant adverbs

These adverbs serve no purpose because the verbs they’re describing already imply the way the action is performed.

Whispering softly

Yelling loudly

Crying sadly

Laughing happily

5. “Telling” words

These words are redundant, especially when using first person, because in describing an event, we can already assume that the characters are experiencing it.

Seeing/saw

Feeling/felt

Hearing/heard

Smelling/smelled

6. “Clarifying” words used to portray definiteness or indefiniteness

Although these are meant to help out the readers get their bearings on a situation, all they do is come across as wishy-washy! Be concise and sure of yourself!

About

Absolutely

Accordingly

Actually

Almost

Basically

Certainly

Clearly

Completely

Entirely

Even

Exactly

Fairly

Highly

Hopefully

Literally

Maybe

Only

Often

Oftentimes

Perhaps

Possibly

Probably

Quite

Rather

Really

Reasonably

Relatively

Seem

Seriously

Simply

Slightly

Some

Somehow

Sometimes

Totally

Very

Filler Phrases

1.“Let out (vocal noise)”

Use the verb instead!

Example: “He let out a sigh.”

Revised: “He sighed.”

2. Using passive voice

Passive voice inflates your word count by including various “to be” verbs into the prose. Passive voice involves actions happening to a subject rather than the subject performing an action, and as a result isn’t as riveting to the reader as active voice; even if it wasn’t a matter of word count, you’d still want to get rid of it anyway!

Still don’t know what I’m talking about? Check out this article from Grammarly.

Example: “The boy was bitten by the dog on his arm.”

Revised: “The dog bit the boy on his arm.”

3. Describing the wrong noun

Many writers will be as specific as possible about what “thing” is affected by the event they’re describing, when it’s much simpler to take a step back and write about something more general.

Example: “The level of water rose.”

Revised: “The water rose.”

4. Phrasal verbs

Phrasal verbs are the combination of two or three words from different grammatical categories—a verb and an adverb or a preposition—to form a single action. Usually, these phrasal verbs can be replaced by a single-word verb.

“Ask for” can be replaced with “request”

“Bring down” can be replaced with “reduce”

“Come across” can be replaced with “find”

Etc.

5. Clarifying phrases

Same reason as clarifying words. Get to the point!

A bit

A little

A lot

In a sense

Kind of

Sort of

6. Remember your contractions!

Even if your story takes place in olden times, I can guarantee that if you never use any contractions ever, your story’s gonna be a clunky mess. But sometimes you’re in the moment, consumed by the poetic power of the muses, and forget that this isn’t a soap opera; so make sure you check that you’ve been using your contractions!

It is, it was, it would, she is, would not, should not, is not, does not etc.

7. Inflated phrases

These phrases can be replaced with more concise words.

Along the lines of (shorten to: like)

As a matter of fact (in fact)

As to whether (whether)

At all times (always)

At the present (now or currently)

At this point in time (now or currently)

Be able to/would(n’t) be able to (could or couldn’t)

Because of the fact that (because)

By means of (by)

Due to the fact that (because)

Even though (though or although)

For the purpose of (for)

For the reason that (because)

Have the ability to (could)

In light of the fact that (because)

In order to (to)

In regards to (on or about)

In spite of the fact that (though or although)

In the event that (if)

In the nature of (like)

In the neighborhood of (about)

On the occasion of (when)

On one/two separate occasions (Once/twice)

The/A majority of (most)

There is no doubt that (No doubt)

Wasn(n’t) capable of (could or couldn’t)

Hope this helped, and happy writing!

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