Thoughtcrime Experiments submission deadline impending
Sumana mentioned Thoughtcrime Experiments in a comment this evening. I hadn't previously heard of it--I'm a little out of touch--but it sounds kinda neat, and the submission deadline is this coming Sunday, February 15, so I thought I'd take a minute to link to it.
The idea appears to be that Leonard Richardson and Sumana Harihareswara are putting together a mini-anthology. They'll be buying a total of five stories, probably all science fiction, at $200 apiece; that's about 2-6¢/word depending on length. It's an electronic anthology, but unlike most such that I've heard of, it won't be sold; instead, it'll be published for free online, CC licensed.
In other words, what they're buying (as I understand it) is the right to (a) be the first venue to publish your story; (b) publish it on the web; and (c) make it available for anyone to copy for noncommercial purposes, as long as the copies are attributed to you.
None of the individual pieces of that plan are revolutionary by themselves. But I don't think I've ever seen anyone put the pieces all together like that, and I think it's a pretty cool idea.
It's kind of like a one-shot online magazine. With a CC license.
So if this sounds interesting, and if you've got a science fiction story between 3k and 10k words long, set between 1959 and 2059--especially if it's light in tone and/or includes aliens--and if the terms are acceptable to you, then stop by the abovelinked guidelines page and give it a gander. (Also, the guidelines are not nearly as restrictive as I'm making it sound, and toward the end of the guidelines, it says "If you don't have anything that you think I'll like, send me something anyway." So go read the guidelines, don't just go by what I'm saying here.) But do it soon--only a couple of days left.
. . . Oh! Somehow it wasn't until after I wrote the above that I made the name connection. We just bought a story of Leonard's, forthcoming in a few months.
