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.

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

So I was in the movie theatre the other day with my wife, Alicia. We were buying popcorn and one of the bags had a woman in what looked like a prom dress on it, with the words “Carrie 2″.

I looked at my wife and I was like “Carrie 2″? How the hell can they make a sequel to that? Didn’t everyone die in the end?

My wife rolled her eyes and told me the bag was advertising “Sex in the City 2″.

“Oh”, I said, “That makes sense, cause Carrie, man, that movie ended with a period.” I paused for a second, thinking about what I’d said. “I guess,” I continued, “that movie started with a period too.”

Ba-dun-duh.

Might have some tremendous news for Every Day Publishing in the next couple of days. Intrigued? eh? eh?

If everything works out, we’ll get to help out a pretty tremendous group of people, and hopefully get the exposure in the Spec Fic community we’ve been looking for.

It’ll be a big win/win if it goes through. Keep your fingers crossed and your eyes on this space! Hopefully I’ll have something to report in the next couple of days.

Tags: Every Day Publishing, writing