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[Through the Worldgate] Below are the 10 most recent journal entries recorded in the "starshipcat" journal:

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May 2nd, 2012
09:00 pm [Link]	New Story! My short story Royal Steel is now up at Swords and Sorcery Magazine. Current Location: home Current Music: "Paperback Writer" by the Beatles Tags: writing (1 comment \| Leave a comment)
March 29th, 2012
05:49 pm [Link]	Reviewer praise for "The Damnable Asteroid" My short story "The Damnable Asteroid" in the Innsmouth Free Press anthology Future Lovecraft has received a starred review from J K Nielson's Haunted Eyeball. Current Location: home Current Mood: happy Current Music: "Paperback Writer" by the Beatles Tags: bookselling, reading, writing (1 comment \| Leave a comment)
January 19th, 2012
10:28 am [Link]	Don't Miss Your Chance to download Vera Nazarian's fascinating novel Dreams of the Compass Rose for free. This special deal ends today. Current Location: home Current Mood: hopeful Current Music: "Paperback Writer" by the Beatles Tags: reading (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
January 18th, 2012
06:54 pm [Link]	Poorly Written Laws Are Dangerous Burning down your house to kill a cockroach. Using a sledgehammer to kill an ant -- on a glass table. Treating a sprained ankle by amputating the entire leg at the hip. When the response to a problem is disproportionate to the actual problem, it destroys more than it saves. And that's what the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property act (PIPA) are -- in attempting to stop the actions of a relatively small number of bad actors, these two bills would place an unsustainable burden on anyone who provides a forum on the Internet for user-provided content. Whether it's a deliberate attack on free speech cloaked in concern for intellectual property rights in order to slide it past the public's radar or it really is a well-intentioned but poorly thought out attempt to protect creators' rights to their creations by means of gross overkill, it needs to be stopped. Learn more about how to prevent SOPA and PIPA from becoming the law of the land. Current Location: home Current Mood: worried Current Music: "Ignoreland" by REM Tags: computers, crime, economics, insanity, internet, internet communication, moral panic, politics
January 4th, 2012
09:11 pm [Link]	On the Blackboard of My Mind is a letter I won't be sending, however well its intended recipient might deserve it. Dear Editor of (DELETED): I am singularly impressed by your absent ability to distinguish between an abusive orphanage and an abusive juvenile psychiatric facility. Since you have already thoroughly impressed me by losing an earlier submission and failing to respond to my queries about it, I will be prioritizing my future submission strategies accordingly. Current Location: home Current Mood: annoyed Current Music: "Paperback Writer" by the Beatles Tags: humor, writing (Leave a comment)
November 18th, 2011
08:36 pm [Link]	It's Official! My short story "Tell Me a Story" has been accepted for Rocket Science, an anthology of hard sf. More information at Through the Worldgate. Current Location: home Current Mood: excited Current Music: "Paperback Writer" by the Beatles Tags: writing (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
November 10th, 2011
09:05 am [Link]	Story Coming Out I've just heard from Daily Science Fiction that my flash-fiction story "Daddy's Girl" will be sent to subscribers on Wednesday, November 23, and will be put on their website for everyone to read the week afterward. Fair warning: this is a fairly dark piece, so it may not be to everyone's tastes. Current Location: home Current Mood: excited Current Music: "Paperback Writer" by the Beatles Tags: writing (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
November 4th, 2011
03:36 pm [Link]	Women, Men and SF Reviewing kateelliott posted an interesting discussion about the continuing disparity between the number of reviews received by books written by men and women. Even when one analyzes the statistics in ways that compensate for the proportions of men and women writing in a given sub-genre, books written by men still tend to receive more reviews. Since I am also a science fiction book reviewer, I decided to take a look at the list of reviews by author and see how my own reviewing checks out against the average. Without doing an actual count and running statistical analysis on the numbers, it's all going to be subjective impressions, but I think that men and women are represented fairly equally in my list. That said, there are several other caveats: 1. I'm reviewing on my own time and dime, not as a professional reviewer for a major periodical. Thus my choice of books to review reflects my own preference rather than that of an editor. If I had to write to editorial direction, I might be told that I had to cover certain writers more, and minimize my discussion of other writers' works. 2. I'm reviewing almost entirely from my own personal library and the collection of the local public library. Although I do receive occasional review copies of small-press books, I'm not on the major publishers' lists of reviewers and do not receive advance reader copies from them. Again, this is a factor that probably skews my choices toward authors I'm already familiar with, and I tend to move in authorial circles particularly friendly toward women writers. 3. As an independent online reviewer, I'm not that influential a voice in the reviewing world. Yes, I get a fairly steady number of hits every month, but I'm certainly nowhere near the stature of The New York Times Book Review or Library Journal. So even if I have a good balance between male and female authors in my choices of book reviews, I'm unlikely to have that much of an effect in giving underpromoted women writers additional visibility. 4. Co-authorship of books makes it difficult to determine the proportion, because a single book may appear under the entries for multiple authors. However, it may be significant what proportion of co-authored books which are the result of a man and woman writing together are listed with the man's name first vs. the woman's. Generally publishers will place the most prominent writer's name first, even if a series was originally created by the other author, because the author who's listed first is generally the most significant draw for sales. 5. A number of the books I've reviewed are anthologies, and are listed under the editor, with no effort to provide indexing by the authors of individual stories. If anthologies were broken out by individual contributors, it might change the statistical distributions. All that said, I think it's even more interesting how a relatively few writers account for a large proportion of the titles reviewed, while there is another distinct group of writers who have a single book to their credit. This may just be a function of my reviewing largely out of my personal library and the collection of our local public library -- a person who's fond of a particular author, and especially a prolific one, will tend to seek out as many of their books as possible. If I were reviewing to editorial direction or were on major publisher lists for contributor copies, my patterns of reviewing might well show a broader variety of authors being reviewed. Current Location: home Current Mood: contemplative Current Music: "Paperback Writer" by the Beatles Tags: culture, reading, reviews (9 comments \| Leave a comment)
October 26th, 2011
08:24 pm [Link]	Sheesh Four rejections in a single day. This has got to be some kind of a record. Current Location: home Current Mood: disappointed Current Music: "Paperback Writer" by the Beatles Tags: writing (4 comments \| Leave a comment)
October 25th, 2011
10:58 am [Link]	Nail-Biting Time According to Amazon's new rules for sellers, in order to be able to sell in the Toys and Games category during the Christmas season, we have to have 25 items sold during the 60 days previous to November 1 (the rules used to be 25 sales on your sales history, period, no specific window of time). Thanks to generally slow sales and two in-person sales events which necessitated turning off our Amazon listings during that timeframe (cumulative loss almost two weeks of sales time), we are currently at 23 sales since September 1. Which means we need at least two more sales between now and the end of the month, and I'd really prefer three or four just to be on the safe side (since October has 31 days, I don't want to be caught in the trap that a sale on September 1 doesn't really count toward the total and end up one sale shy of the mark I need to hit). So now I'm sitting here hoping that somebody out there will buy some more stuff from our stock on Amazon. Given that sales seem to come in spurts, with two or three in one day and then droughts of two or three days, it's really hard to be so close but still not quite enough. Current Location: home Current Mood: anxious Current Music: "Taking Care of Business" by BTO Tags: amazon.com, business (3 comments \| Leave a comment)

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