It’s actually two prizes, C$50,000 each. One prize is for the best collection of Canadian poetry published in the previous year, and the other is for the best international collection.
Poets: was your book published in 2008? Does it have forty-eight pages or more? And an ISBN?
Check out the details and enter, fast!
This monster is known to have been described in print just twice, in each case in an improper riddle. Its sole appearance in this spelling is in the 1785 first edition of Captain Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: “A monster with six eyes, three mouths, four arms, eight legs, five on one side and three on the other, three arses, two tarses, and a *** upon its back”.
The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue is fascinating. Gutenberg has a free copy, but there really ought to be a dead-tree version for bathroom reading.
Tarse is almost worthy of its own post. According to World Wide Words, it’s an old Germanic term for the penis.
A free, randomly selected book from my bookshelf to anyone with the answer to the riddle (put your guesses in the comments)! The answer is on the above site, so you’re on the honor system. And if I think you cheated you’re liable to get Turkey Tracks. You’ve been warned.
Tomorrow, we climb out of the gutter with an upcoming deadline for a poetry prize.
Last year Amazon and the Penguin Group (USA) unveiled an interesting new contest, the Breakthrough Novel Award. They accepted 10,000 manuscripts, largely from unpublished authors, and over a period of several months whittled down this list to a group of 2,000. Amazon Vine users were encouraged to vote on excerpts from this batch, narrowing it down to a group of 500 novels.
The 500 were evaluated by Publishers Weekly editors, and Penguin’s editors used those evaluations to pick a group of 100 semi-finalists, which were voted on by the hoi polloi to choose three finalists. A panel of guest editors picked the winner, the mystery novel Fresh Kills, by Bill Loehfelm. Last year TWS alumna Gurjinder Basran made it to the semi-finals.
Amazon just announced that they’re doing it again. The prize is a publishing contract with Penguin and a $25,000 advance. The submission deadline in February 2009. Here’s what you need to enter:
Entrants must provide a full Manuscript (Between 50,000 and 150,000 words), an Excerpt from the beginning of your novel (Between 3,000 and 5,000 words), a novel Pitch of up to 300 words and accompanying contest and biographic information such as title, genre, book description, and contact information. (as well as an optional author photo).
So polish that novel that’s been wedged between Fallout 3 and that folder of Facebook messages to your ex- that you write but never send because she won’t accept your friend requests.
And then check out how to enter for more information. Be warned that submissions are rolling and they only accept the first 10,000, so the earlier the better.
Meridian, a semi-annual literary publication from the University of Virginia, is holding a pair of simultaneous contests:
The Editors’ Prize Contest is now accepting entries, with $1,000 awarded in each genre. The entry fee is $16, which includes a reading of your work, a subscription to Meridian, and a chance at the $1,000 prize.
Poets can upload four poems per entry. Fiction writers may submit one story of 10,000 words or fewer per entry.
And…
We’re also excited to announce our second Prose Poem Postcard Prize Contest. Entry fee: $3.50. Entries should be 1-2 prose poems, each of which must be able to fit onto a standard-size postcard.
The prize for the second contest is publication. Submission is electronic and the eligibility requirements are either that you’re an alumni of U of VA, or a subscriber to the magazine (US$16). Gory details here.
Ack! I just stumbled across Narrative Magazine’s Fall Fiction contest, deadline November 30. If you’ve got something ready to rock, why not send it in? Submissions are electronic, you’re already sitting at your computer… I’m just saying.
As always, we look for works that have a strong narrative drive, with characters we can respond to as human beings—works in which the effects of language, situation, and insight are intense and total, and whose authors have the ambition of enlarging our view of ourselves and the world.
Cash moves everything around me, is what you’re thinking. And you wouldn’t be wrong. The prizes:
First Prize is $3,000, Second Prize is $1,500, and Third Prize is $750. The prize winners will be announced in Narrative and will be eligible for publication. Additionally, ten finalists will receive $100 each. We’ll announce finalists in the magazine as well. All entries will be considered for publication.
See the contest page for submission details. Entry fee is $20. Dolla-dolla bill y’all.
Riffing off Hemmingway’s classic, Wired got some famous science fiction authors together to write some very short stories. Six words each.
One of my favorites:
God to Earth: “Cry more, noobs!”
- Marc Laidlaw
Litfarm out.
Done with that book but can’t bring yourself to chuck it? Register it at BookCrossing, write the id number on the inside cover, and leave it in a public place. Someone else gets a good book and you get to watch it travel the world. Fun!
(Thx, John Mavin!)
Have a good weekend, litfarmers. On Monday we’ve got some very, very, very short sf stories for you.
This interview with Yann Martell from the Sydney Morning Herald has been sitting in the queue for a while. It’s a good one. He talks about Life of Pi, Stephen Harper and why we need more Holocaust comedies.
In an era of declining sales, declining readership and shrinking marketing budgets, publishers are looking for authors with a “profile”. Or better still, a small following. Podcasts are yet another way of getting the word out about your book, without spending a penny on editing, printing or design.
Ask Scott Sigler. He offered his first novel, Earthcore, as a free, serialized podcast on iTunes and his personal site. By the time he’d released his second and third novels, he had 30,000 listeners and publishers lining up to take his books.
Sigler, 38, likens his distribution method to that of public broadcasting, adding that giving away content pays off even if fewer than 10 percent of the samplers ultimately make a pledge.
To me, this is very exciting. Not only can you have a hand in pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, it’s a remarkable chance to connect with your readers. Once I was involved with a highly successful, albeit niche, video game and I can tell you: we didn’t get rich, but there was a tremendous amount of satisfaction meeting our rabidly devoted fans.
(apparently, bookninja!)
Like a lot of guys who were pushing thirty when it came out, I had a slightly embarrassing obsession* with Fight Club, and the homo-erotic, visually stunning piece of awesome that was Fincher’s movie.
Well, say what you want about the book, you have to respect Chuck Palahniuk for really, really embracing the web. Check out that site! He’s got paid memberships, author news, a staff of contributors and ads by American Apparel. That’s not just an author site. That’s not just a brand. That’s a cult. In a good way.
Worth a look to see one way of doing it, though probably too extreme for me. I reserve the right to change my mind if I ever become a best-selling multimillionaire.
* C’mon, I know I’m not the only guy out there who wanted to punch out my boss and bang Helena Bonham Carter. (I left out the bit about having a falling-down house in an industrial wasteland because in 1999, I’d already achieved that impressive milestone, thank you Mr Kawakami.)