Servusamanu.com

Glimmer Train, the literary magazine, has contests every month.  This is a link to their list of contests.  Good luck to anyone who submits.

As I was going through my bookmarks, looking for things that I thought might be useful tools for writers, and I came across the notes I had scribbled down after reading The Cimarron Review. Published quarterly out of Oklahoma State University , each issue is approximately one hundred pages and features three or four short stories and about thirty or so poems. While a few stories have a slight supernatural or eerie bent, The Cimarron Review is mostly filled with stories of cultural exploration, conflicts with society, and “slice of life” vignettes. While my interests tend to lie more towards genre fiction, I’ve found it to be an excellent source of ideas. The Review also allows short story and poem submissions!

Subscription Information can be found here.

Before there was Servusamanu there was…well a lot of things, but also The Secrets!

The Secrets is both a few seasons worth of (free!) podcasts and a series of pdfs dedicated to becoming a better writer, getting published, and, perhaps most importantly, having a career as an author. Both are written and presented by Michael A. Stackpole, perhaps best known for his Star Wars novels. Personal instruction from a highly regarded and highly successful author is usually hard to come by, The Secrets is easily the single most complete resource I’ve found for all aspects of writing from designing worlds, creating characters, pacing a novel, getting it edited, finding a publisher, negotiating the world of agents, and having a…career…doing the whole process over. The podcasts do tend towards fantasy and science fiction writing (No surprise there), but I’ve found the advice invaluable even outside of so-called genre fiction.

As someone interested in the future of writing and reading, Stackpole’s opinions on trends in the industry are especially noteworthy. I intend to post in the future on using technology like facebook/craigslist/twitter/ipods-iphones-Kindles as a means of delivering writing. In the mean time I suggest listening to the fifth series of podcasts: on the future of publishing .