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Angel Martinez

Announcement: Travels Through the Scarlet Equinox anthology

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Travels Through the Scarlet Equinox

Mischief Corner Books has a new anthology out, and it features four QSFers: The Autumnal Equinox—when the trees dress in their formal scarlet and gold and the crisp air whispers of chance and change, when bright days turn into sudden storms and the veil between reality and imagination thins. Join the Mischief Corner authors as they share stories evoking this often unpredictable time of year. A Bear’s Bear by Toni Griffin Matthew Warner’s been a Chicago Bears fan as far back as he can remember. What other team was a young bear shifter from the Smokey Mountains supposed to root … Read more

Angel’s Bits – How Not To Anger the Acquisition Deities

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Getting that story finished is important. Beating it into the best story you possibly can even more so. But guess what? You can have the perfect story and still be chucked off the acquisitions table without ceremony if you’ve ignored your formatting. Way back when we all still used typewriters, formatting was more difficult from a technical standpoint, but more standardized. There was only so much you could do with even a fancy-schmancy typewriter. We all learned one way, and that’s how we did it. Even some of the younger peeps who learned to type on computers were still being … Read more

Angel’s Bits – Who Are You?

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QSF membership has a large percentage of authors. My acquaintances online, friend lists, contacts, are in large part authors. I know a lot of authors. Except that I don’t. All of these names in lists and feeds and such don’t always have any associations for me. I look at posts in my Twitter and FB feed and think, who are you? This is bad. So bad. Not necessarily for me (though I do worry about my memory some days) but for the authors I can’t place. Authors get a lot of advice thrown at them about branding and, yes, this … Read more

Angel’s Bits – You Asked for Queer Cons…

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convention

Not too terribly long ago, QSF’ers on the Facebook page were asking for a list of queer friendly conventions. We thought that was a fabulous idea. This first stab at a list is by no means complete. It’s far too US-centric, for one thing, and is most likely missing some great local cons that don’t make the national press. Criteria for inclusion on the list were: A) queer focused or queer friendly B) some flavor of spec fic focused or friendly C) event where authors have opportunity (large or small) to promote Now we need you guys. Using the criteria … Read more

Announcement: Books, Bulls and Bacchanals, by Angel Martinez

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Books, Bulls and Bacchanals

QSFer Angel Martinez has a new urban fantasy book out: A party god and a reclusive librarian – the last people anyone would pick to solve a murder. Everyone assumes life’s one big party for Dionysus, but even the god of wine and orgies has problems. His anger management issues are out of control, and his siblings suggest a visit to the Eternal Library to find a cure. The library of the gods is a strange and confounding place, though, one that Dionysus has avoided for centuries, and his certainty that the library hates him is confirmed when a killer … Read more

Angel’s Bits – Genre Matters

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There’s a piece of advice I see tossed at authors a lot lately. Don’t worry about genre or tropes. Write what’s in your heart. Okay, setting aside the somewhat treacle-y nature of this advice, I’d never tell an author to discard their writing passions. If you’re not writing from your core, your passions, the whole thing becomes a cold, unhappy business. But throwing out genre? That’s a different kettle of Antarian singing blood eels. Sure. It would be lovely to say go nuts, write whatever! Writers should be free! Free, I say! Which is great, in theory. Thing is, writing … Read more

Angel’s Bits – Avoiding Author Leg Traps

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I confess – I used to think about this a lot more, publishers preying on authors. Finding ethical publishers has made me more complacent until a request for information from one of our QSF’ers brought the subject roaring forward again. Are you self published? Lovely! It’s a viable option these days, though not without its own pitfalls. But that’s a subject for another day. This post is geared toward the author submitting to publishing houses and the dangers lurking in the process. Anyone with a few years of publication under belts, skirts, or kilts has run across author leg traps, … Read more

Angel’s Bits – The Pod People

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It’s quite possible that I was the last person on the Intertubes to understand what a podcast is. Tech and I have an uneasy relationship and anything new sends me backing away and snarling. But podcasts are simply an old friend in a new medium – prerecorded radio shows on the digital highway. Once I figured this out, I sent the luddite in me packing and downloaded an app. Wonderful thing – since know I can see the podcasts I like in one place. The one that convinced me that podcasts were not another evil plot by Skynet was Welcome … Read more

Angel’s Bits – From Famine to Feast

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A few years ago, when I was starting out in this genre, finding safe convention space for LGBTQ+ fiction was difficult. Sure, there were cons who said we could play, there were even some who welcomed us, but it still had that feeling of being the odd man out, the oh, and also those part of the weekend. Now we’re trying to decide which conventions to attend next year, and we’re finding we have to choose, that we can no longer attend all the LGBTQ specific events out there. The last convention I’ll be attending this year was one we … Read more

Angel’s Bits: It’s not Science Fiction, but…

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In regard to Queer Sci Fi, you have no idea how many times I hear this. Someone posts to the group, the page, or comes to Scott and I, and says, “I know it’s not science fiction, but I’d like to share this (fill in the genre in question) story.” While we love that people want to check first, we want to be clear that we don’t want to limit the discussion to science fiction. Queer Sci Fi has science fiction in the title, but we’re all about the speculative fiction. Sometimes I wonder if we should have called it … Read more