If you haven’t read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, like me and my wife, the movie is a long two and a half hours of suck. Characters lurch around doing things for absolutely no reason, and generally being complete morons. They end up finding a magical sword that is literally at the bottom of a random, unmarked lake in the middle of nowhere that they just happen to stumble upon,

At one point Harry is zapped with a disguise that is the equivalent of covering half of his face with his hand and none of the bad guys seems to recognize him, despite the fact that he’s in the company of his two friends when they apprehend him.

There’s a long boring part in the middle where they’re just teleporting around the countryside for no reason, until they suddenly decide to go in search of the hawkcruxes, and hey, like all Potter movies there’s a great big Deux Ex Machina at the end. Without others solving Harry’s problems for him, he would long ago be a smear on the wall.

About the only good part of the movie was the mini-movie that described the creation of the Deathly Hallows. It was your standard Brother’s Grimm Fairy Tale, but animated with enough style that I was thoroughly entertained.

If you’ve read the book, you’ll probably enjoy this movie. Otherwise you’ll be totally clueless (as were we, in spite of seeing the other movies).

Returned the Kinect and bought a Playstation Move instead. There were several deal breakers with the kinect. First, the camera it uses in infra-red, and I have a south-facing house with single-pane windows. Whenever there was a significant temperature difference outside, I would “lose an arm” in the game. Brutal. Also, while i have a pretty big house, the “family” room, while reasonably sized, had an overstuffed sectional in it. The Kinect couldn’t seem to realize that this was not “walkable” so there were certain parts of the screen that I couldn’t reach. This is a big reason the Kinect is getting savaged online by apartment dwellers. Finally, of course, there was the lag.

The Move is much more responsive, but while the Kinect games were innovative (including an anti-gravity room), the game that came with the Move seemed like just a port of a Wii game (albeit it a much fancier and better responsive one). However, the advantage of the Move is that Sony can reverse-integrate it into their existing games, whereas the Kinect can’t (or certainly not easily). I’ll have to play around with the Move a little more (it works best with two controllers, but there was only one in the box and they were sold out of additional controllers), so I’ll keep you in the loop. As an added bonus, the PS3 plays Blurays, and is a much more powerful machine than the XBox.

If you have ideal, lab-like conditions, maybe the Kinect is for you (though I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve fully tested the Move). If you don’t the Move is your only option. Either of these leaves the Wii in the dust.

I got a copy of the Time in a Bottle anthology edited by Paul Wittine, and published by Altered Dimensions Press, headed up by good friend Kelly Christiansen. I was flattered to be invited to submit a story, and even more flattered to find that I’d landed the coveted “Anchor” position. I’ve heard from a few editors that shoppers will often read the first story in an anthology and tell themselves they’ll buy if the second story is as strong as the first (and you want to wow them by having it be BETTER). Finally, this reluctant buyer will flip to the back of the book, thinking that if the first and last stories are good all the ones in between must be of the same caliber. Thus, your three strongest stories should appear 2nd, 1st, and last, in that order. Seeing as how the 2nd and 1st stories are written by K.C. Shaw and Jim C. Hines respectively I’m in some pretty august company!

As an added plus, the antho’s already been reviewed on Amazon, and my story got a mention. I had been worried about this piece appearing in a Time Travel anthology, because it’s written as a kind of rejection of the standard, poorly thought out time travel story, but Wittine saw the merit in the piece and took a risk on it. It had originally netted me a Semi-Finalist placing with Writers of the Future, so I’m glad to see that it’s a hit with readers.

All right. You’ve just had your first story appear in Cherished Magazine’s hallowed (e)pages. What do you do next? Well, if you’re a novice writer, you should promoted the hell out of it. Remember, the more people read your work, the better chance there is that someone influential will, if not “discover” you, at least remember your name, or better yet, give you a favorable review.

Part of a publisher’s job is making sure that your work gets read, but there are some things you can do as the author to help them do just that.

• Post a note to Facebook–This one is a no-brainer. Your family and friends should be among the first to help celebrate your success.
• Post a “Brag” in your local writing forum. Almost every writing forum has a “brag” section specifically designed to brag about your latest sale (and often a Shameless Self-Promotion forum for when your piece goes live). EDF has one. Use it!
• Write about it on your blog, or update your bio on your website. Don’t have a web presence? You should. How else are you going to get fan mail (it happens even to us novices)? More importantly, people know how to get a hold of you for interviews. When the computer Shaun Farrell from Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing uses to edit his interviews ate the one he did with the 1st place winners of WotF 25, he had to reschedule. Unfortunately, he could only contact me and Matt Rotundo, because the others didn’t have a web presence.
• Stumble it! There are a bunch of social networking tools you can use to help make sure your story gets read. StumbleUpon is a great one if you write flash fiction. Digg is great if you’ve written something the technical set might like, and there are certainly others. EDF gets a huge percentage of its traffic from StumbleUpon. We had a story read nearly a million times by their users. Can you imagine your work getting in front of a million users?
• Set up a “Google Alert” for your story name, your name, and common mis-spellings of your name. This will tell you when reviews start to show up (good Lord, don’t respond to them, especially the negative ones). When the reviews do show up, brag about those too. Remember, you’re not just an author, you’re a publicist, and people will expect a little self-promotion from you as long as you don’t get in their face about it.
• Offer yourself for interviews. This one is a little dicey for newer writers. If you’re on a first name basis with a magazine editor AND your the publication is especially prestigious,  it’s considered okay to send them a note alerting them of your success, and letting them know you’d be cool with answering a few questions from their readers. Often, editors are short of non-fiction, and your interview might fill a few pages.
• Write another story!  This is the beginning, not the ending. Keep pumping out those gems!

Tags: The craft

Writers of the Future XXV got a starred review from Publishers Weekly a while back, and I’d always intended to save it here for posterity, but by the time I got back to it, it had scrolled off the net.

I ended up finding it again after a couple of minutes Googling, and I thought I’d preserve it here in case it gets taken down again.

Bryerman, um, has a kind work or two to say about my piece:

L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future: Volume XXV
Edited by K.D. Wentworth. Galaxy, $7.99 (540p) ISBN 9781592124367

Previous recipient of the award, K.D. Wentworth (The Course of Empire, Stars Over Stars) returns to edit this top-notch anthology of this year’s winners in the contest’s 25th year. The collection offers a dozen strong stories that range from well-conceived fantasy to classic science fiction reworked. Standout stories include Donald Mead’s touching “The Shadow Man,” with its lingering postwar ghosts in Hiroshima; Matthew S. Rotundo’s exploration of the ethical boundaries of military intelligence in “Gone Black”; and Jordan Lapp’s portrayal of the short, fiery life of a phoenix in “After the Final Sunset, Again.” Other featured writers such as Emery Huang, Fiona Lehn, and Mike Wood depict the rise of mega-corporations with paramilitary patent enforcers, for example; or competition for government financing turned into a dangerous sporting event; and computerized risk management taken to dangerous extremes. Each of the 12 stories is paired with the work of one of the winning illustrators from L. Ron Hubbard’s companion contest. Several essays round out this volume, complimented by noted author and perennial judge Robert Silverberg’s piece on the history of the contest. Always a glimpse of tomorrow’s stars, this year’s anthology is definitely a must-have for the genre reader. (Nov.)

Cevin Bryerman
Associate Publisher
Publishers Weekly

Tags: Starred Review, Writers of the Future