Reward in Daily Science Fiction’s Kickstarter! Also, Newsletters.
Daily Science Fiction is hosting a Kickstarter Campaign to pay authors for their short fiction published for the next six months, September 2013-March 2014. Among rewards including omnibus anthologies, gourmet chocolate, and a crocheted Cthulhu, you can also sign up for a critique from Yours Truly of a short story (they say up to 5,000 words, but I wouldn’t complain about longer, either)! See the details for Daily Science Fiction’s Fall 2013 campaign here. On the topic of...
Read MoreFair Trade Blogger Bragging
As a college sophomore, I first realized I was interested in international advocacy. A great goal but initially hard to accomplish in a small, friendly town smack dab in the middle of the North American continent. Except I was lucky, because I went to school in Waukesha, home of the Plowshare Center–an organization that hosts educational forums on social, economic, and environmental justice issues globally, and also runs Wisconsin’s first Fair Trade store. They welcomed me on...
Read MoreWe didn’t choose the Folklife, the Folklife chose us–and other updates
So I’ll start with the sad news, because the past two weeks have been tough: I got to visit Las Vegas for the first time, but under some of the worst possible circumstances. My uncle living there passed away and I went to attend the funeral and visit with my cousins (and also some immediate family members–we welcomed the chance to offer face-to-face support after certain recent events, which I might add are completely unrelated to this funeral. Troubles never come one at a...
Read MoreUpdate
It seems disingenuous to continue blogging as if life is going well when something horrible has happened. Yet sharing too many details in a public place seems disrepectful of the privacy of those involved, not to mention it forces casual readers to become witnesses to a situation they may prefer not to be involved in. This is a balance I always walk when a certain sort of family crisis recurs. It helps, perhaps, that I am not actually capable of writing about it in a fluent, pleasant, or even...
Read MoreWhat’s GetYeDone been doing lately? Glad you asked!
You might be a writer if your to do-list goes:-talk to X about aprt-Pay credit card balance (!!!)–Aurmid has never had a family or given her daughters one–there is only the Empire. Revisions of One Hundred Days are going very well after this most recent Staycation, and as I’m thinking more about the story I keep encountering new insights. But writer or not, most people have to-do lists, and if you have a to-do list, the odds are it’s near unmanageable. Back in...
Read MoreBlogging from the Writer’s Staycation
After my work with Zahara proved so rewarding last semester, I’ve continued as her assistant over this summer. This means I’ve been able to attend not only one but two Staycations–and this time as an apprentice Fellow, which means this Friday I’ll be an opening and lunchtime speaker. It also means that, with four weekdays dedicated to my own projects, I finally have time to ressurect some of the old draft posts for this blog. So what is the Staycation, exactly?...
Read MoreWhat does it say about me…
…that the instant Rusty the Red Panda disappeared from the National Zoo, my sister and I receive multiple emails to the effect of “Did you really!?” Just because we were in Washington, D.C. at the time. And an admitted affection for red pandas. Well, did we really?
Read MoreList: Everything That Can Go Wrong (a Mix-n-Match Adventure)
Storytelling is problem solving–to have a plot, you need a problem for your characters to confront. Then the plot needs a reason behind it, and you have to make clear what’s at stake if the problem isn’t solved, while having some idea how your characters are going to solve it. Over the weekend I started brainstorming problems-stakes-causes-and-solutions with a particular series in mind (another one!? Yes, another one). But as I went on I realized this list might serve as a...
Read More“An Honorable Aunt” at Silver Blade
Silver Blade Issue #18 is live, and includes my fantasy story “An Honorable Aunt”. This was one of those stories it was fun to write simply because I was getting inside the heads of people who view the world so differently from me, that it was a stretch of intellectual–and perhaps empathetic–muscle to show their thoughts and feelings. I think once you read the story it’ll be obvious what I mean, but I will say, just about every character in the story did something...
Read MorePrint Books that are *Good* for the Planet
Being surrounded by the printed word (and intending to remain so my entire life–much as I enjoy ebooks, I like to keep paper copies for backup), I remain acutely conscious that it’s called “dead tree”s for a reason. Also, ever since my trip to Ghana I’ve had a horror of plastic. It’s bad enough seeing litter at the side of the road in the US, but I saw bags and discarded packaging piling up in places I never would have expected–water canals, forest,...
Read MoreAbout Therese
Therese Arkenberg's first short story was accepted for publication on January 2, 2008, and her second acceptance came a few hours later. Since then they haven't always been in such a rush, yet her work appears in places like Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Analog, Daily Science Fiction, and the anthology Sword & Sorceress XXIV. Aqua Vitae, her science fiction novella, was released by WolfSinger Publications in December 2011.
She works as a freelance editor and writer in Wisconsin, where she returned after a brief but unforgettable time in Washington, D.C. When she isn't reading, writing, or editing (it's true!) she serves on the board of the Plowshare Center of Waukesha, which works for social, economic, and environmental justice.