(date: 2024-12-15 07:05:11)
date: 2024-12-14, from: Locus Magazine
Lightspeed 9/24 Small Wonders 9/24 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 9/5/24, 9/19/24
Gabriela Santiago returns to Lightspeed in September with the metatextual “Reconstructing ‘The Goldenrod Conspiracy,’ Edina Room, Saturday 2:30-3:30”, which is framed as a presentation at a fan convention dedicated to the Doctor Who–esque television show Backwards Man. The presentation is on a lost episode that has been remade by fans based on what people could remember …Read More
date: 2024-12-14, from: Locus Magazine
The Lost Souls of Benzaiten, Kelly Murashige (Soho Teen 978-1-641-29574-1, $19.99, 304pp, hc) July 2024.
Debut author Kelly Murashige mixes a tender coming-of-age story with the unexpected antics of a bored Japanese goddess to give readers the highly original fantasy The Lost Souls of Benzaiten. The author’s clever plot and thoroughly engaging characters manage to make all too relatable the protagonist’s wish early on to “become one of …Read More
date: 2024-12-14, from: Locus Magazine
The 50th World Fantasy Convention was held as a hybrid event October 17-20, 2024, with the in-person portion held at the Sheraton Niagara Falls and Niagara Falls Convention Center in Niagara Falls NY. Guests of honor were Scott H. Andrews, Galen Dara, and Heather Graham, with toastmaster Michael Swanwick. P. Djèlí Clark was a special guest, and Life Achievement Awards winners were Ginjer Buchanan and Jo Fletcher. The theme was …Read More
https://locusmag.com/2024/12/2024-world-fantasy-convention-report/
date: 2024-12-13, from: Interesting, a blog on writing
Boys II Men - End of the Road.mp3
https://inneresting.substack.com/p/228-meetings-and-partings
date: 2024-12-13, from: Locus Magazine
The Speculative Literature Foundation (SLF) has announced an open call for “original artwork combining fantasy and science fiction themes to be featured as its 2024 Illustration of the Year.”
The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2025. The winner, to be announced in February 2025, will receive $750, and the winning artwork will be featured on the SLF website and social media “and used as a visual element of SLF’s …Read More
https://locusmag.com/2024/12/slf-illustration-of-the-year-call/
date: 2024-12-13, from: John August blog
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week. This week, we ring in the FYC season with all the screenplays that have been released (so far) as part of studio award campaigns. We’ll be updating this collection as more scripts are made available! Our […] The post Featured Friday: Awards 2024 first appeared on John August.
https://johnaugust.com/2024/featured-friday-awards-2024
date: 2024-12-13, from: Final Draft blog
James Mangold has carved out a fascinating place in Hollywood as a
director and writer who really can do it all—he’s elevated genre films
into compelling character studies and tackled everything from Westerns
to hard-hitting dramas to romantic comedies to comic book
adaptations.
He made one of the best superhero films in history
(2017’s
Logan),
then a couple of years later told a true motorsport story in the
brilliant Ford v Ferrari. He’s
twice Oscar-nominated, once for each of these films, but fans will also
recall the much-feted
Walk the Line, which in 2006
captured a slew of awards across acting and technical categories. We
could go on and on.
It’s fitting that Mangold has come back
around to music with this year’s Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. Starring Timothée
Chalamet as Dylan, the film follows the musician’s early years—his
arrival in New York City, finding his place in music, and then turning
the Newport Folk Festival upside-down when he chose not to play
acoustic.
Mangold and his lead actor just received the Visionary
Tribute at the 2024 Gotham
Awards, not to mention a couple of Golden Globe nominations. Final
Draft chatted with the writer/director the day before those nominations
were announced, and Mangold laid out some vital writing wisdom for us.
https://blog.finaldraft.com/james-mangold-talks-a-complete-unknown
date: 2024-12-13, from: Locus Magazine
Good Night, Sleep Tight, Brian Evenson (Coffee House Press 978-1-56689-709-9, $19.00, 256pp, tp) September 2024.
The best horror fiction is about dislocation, the growing feeling that something is askew or lopsided with the world and only you, no one else, is aware. Brian Evenson gets this. In a recent article for Lit Hub, he points out that:
Writing Horror is about tapping into something that resonates for you, something …Read More
https://locusmag.com/2024/12/good-night-sleep-tight-by-brian-evenson-review-by-ian-mond/
date: 2024-12-12, from: Locus Magazine
Uncanny 9-10/24 Nightmare 10/24 Apex #146
I found three stories in Uncanny’s 60th issue to be standouts. “The 6% Squeeze” by Eddie Robson will appeal to anyone who has ever designed for a corporation with a strict “bible” or even anyone who has experienced such a corporation’s need for a scapegoat. Tananarive Due’s engaging “A Stranger Knocks” is set in 1926 Washington, DC, where newlyweds …Read More
https://locusmag.com/2024/12/uncanny-nightmare-and-apex-short-fiction-reviews-by-paula-guran/
date: 2024-12-12, from: Interesting, a blog on writing
Buzz on the streets, but questions in the spreadsheets.
https://inneresting.substack.com/p/per-screen-average
date: 2024-12-12, from: Locus Magazine
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024, Hugh Howey & John Joseph Adams, eds. (Mariner 978-0063315785, $18.99, 384pp, tp) October 2024.
There are a lot of different ways of assembling an anthology, but none seem quite so programmatic as John Joseph Adams’s The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series, now in its tenth year. Adams describes his methodology with admirable clarity: As series editor, he compiles a list …Read More
date: 2024-12-12, from: Final Draft blog
“You’re reading these interviews [in the book The Bikeriders
by Danny Lyon] and they’re all interesting, but Kathy’s are just
fascinating. You could just tell she was a character, meaning she was
just this interesting, dynamic person, a person that was trying to
figure out how she found herself in this world because she really talks
about walking into this bar and meeting this charismatic young bike
rider. And so, it was a really beneficial crutch for me to kind of get
into this world. And then before you know it, by the middle of the
script, I’m writing words for Kathy that never existed. It didn’t hurt
that, in my research, I reached out to Danny and he turned over hours
and hours of recordings. I would drive around town just listening to
Kathy talk. I mean, I had this woman in my head and I felt pretty
confident midway through the script that I could write in her voice. It
just gave this perspective to a very masculine, aggressive subculture.
It gave this feminine point of view, but to me it was just a really
interesting point of view,” says writer/director Jeff Nichols about
writing the character Kathy, played by Jodie Comer, in his film The
Bikeriders.
In this episode of the podcast, we speak to
Jeff Nichols about his departure from Southern Gothic storytelling and
going deep into the world of a 1960s motorcycle club for The
Bikeriders, starring Austin Butler and Tom Hardy. We also discuss
some of his other films like Loving, Take Shelter and
Mud, starring Matthew McConaughey – a film Nichols thought
would never get released.
“I thought Mud was a
failure. We had taken Mud to the Cannes Film Festival, and
although we had a really nice reception there, you know, standing
ovations and whatnot – no one bought the film. And we went an entire
year with no one buying that film. In fact, no one ever did buy that
film. The financier put up half the money to market and distribute that
film and luckily, Roadside Attractions came in and put up the other half
and then it became the film that everybody knows,” says Nichols.
To hear more about Nichols’s writing process, and his advice for
building stories around “emotional impact,” listen to the podcast.
https://blog.finaldraft.com/write-on-the-bikeriders-writer/director-jeff-nichols
date: 2024-12-11, from: Final Draft blog
Directed by Marielle Heller, the new film Nightbitch stars Amy
Adams as a stay-at-home mother who’s losing her dang mind. After giving
up a fulfilling (though not necessarily lucrative) career as an artist,
she now focuses fulltime on her husband and young son. “Mother” (Adams),
as she’s called in the story because her identity, including her name,
has completely faded away, has lost her sense of self along with her
grip on reality. Based on Rachel Yoder’s novel of the same name,
Nightbitch uses metaphor to dig deep into the female psyche to
expose the animalistic nature of being a mother. In this case, the
metaphor is a mother who transforms into a dog.
Movies about
humans becoming canine aren’t new. There’s a long history of werewolf
films including a whole string of them in the 1980s: The
Howling (1981), An American Werewolf in London (1981),
Wolfen (1981), The Night of the Werewolf (1981),
The Company of Wolves (1984), Silver Bullet (1985),
Teen Wolf (1985), and Night Shadow (1989). (Not sure
why this one decade needed so many werewolf movies, perhaps it has
something to do with societal changes, but that’s the subject for
another article).
Typically, the transformation of a human into
a werewolf is symbolic of our primal instincts getting the best of us,
our repressed desires coming to the surface, and the way civilized human
behavior rightfully clashes with our animalistic impulses. But Mother
doesn’t turn into a wolf, she turns into a dog. Why? It allows the story
to take a much more domestic turn and bends the metaphor into something
more relatable to suburban family life. Also, if she became a wolf, the
audience would worry for the safety of her son. Let’s delve into three
clever ways Nightbitch uses the dog metaphor in the film.
https://blog.finaldraft.com/surprising-ways-nightbitch-uses-dog-metaphor-to-explore-motherhood
date: 2024-12-11, from: Locus Magazine
The Enchanted Lies of Céleste Artois, Ryan Graudin (Redhook 978-0-31641-869-0, 544pp, $30, hc). Cover by Lisa Marie Pompilio. August 2024.
Paris, 1913, saw the first public performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and it caused a sensation – indeed, some have said it caused a riot, but there seems to be disagreement over that interpretation. Whatever the historical truth, it probably didn’t happen because of magic, which is …Read More
date: 2024-12-11, from: Literature & a Latte blog
https://www.literatureandlatte.com/blog/use-scriveners-writing-history-to-track-your-progress
date: 2024-12-11, from: Locus Magazine
The New York Times published lists of the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2024 and the Best Horror of 2024, compiled by critics Amal El-Mohtar and Gabino Iglesias respectively.
El-Mohtar’s top ten picks are:
https://locusmag.com/2024/12/nyt-best-sf-fantasy-and-horror-of-2024/
date: 2024-12-11, from: Locus Magazine
The 2025 George R.R. Martin Screenwriting Grant is accepting submissions until December 15, 2024. Organized by the New Mexico Film Foundation, with support from the George R.R. Martin Literary Foundation, the competition is open to screenwriters from New Mexico.
The winning grant award for an individual screenplay is $5,000 and includes a mentorship introduction with a seasoned screenwriter. Two additional writers will receive a foundation membership and developmental mentorship with …Read More
https://locusmag.com/2024/12/g-r-r-m-screenwriting-competition/
date: 2024-12-10, from: Locus Magazine
The Otherwise Fellowship is open to applications until December 15, 2024.
From the organizers of the Fellowship:
The Otherwise Fellowship (formerly Tiptree Fellowship) was established in 2015 to support and recognize new voices who are creating work that is changing our view of gender today. The Fellowship program seeks out creators who are striving to complete new works, particularly creators from communities that have been historically underrepresented in the science …Read More
https://locusmag.com/2024/12/otherwise-fellowship-applications-due/
date: 2024-12-10, from: Locus Magazine
We’re back with a somewhat shorter, but no less awesome, video for you! Come by our YouTube channel to keep up-to-date on the top new releases for the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres!
date: 2024-12-10, from: John August blog
John and Craig welcome Brian Jordan Alvarez & Stephanie Koenig (English Teacher) and Jac Schaeffer (Agatha All Along, WandaVision) to join them for a live holiday benefit for Hollywood HEART. They discuss constructing Agatha All Along from blue sky to the Witches’ Road, “protagonizing” a villain, breaking in through YouTube and maintaining a working relationship […] The post Holiday Live Show 2024 first appeared on John August.
https://johnaugust.com/2024/holiday-live-show-2024
date: 2024-12-10, from: Locus Magazine
Cuckoo is an indie horror creature feature, relying heavily on its isolated location and small cast to effectively create an atmosphere of paranoia and dread. A teenager named Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) moves to a German mountain resort town with her father, stepmother, and stepsister where she meets an eclectic collection of characters—including the owner of the hotel, Herr König; a physician at the nearby hospital, Dr. Bonomo; several half-dressed, vomiting …Read More
https://locusmag.com/2024/12/check-out-any-time-you-like-josh-pearce-and-arley-sorg-discuss-cuckoo/
date: 2024-12-10, from: Locus Magazine
On December 10, 2024, the African Science Fiction Society (ASFS) released the following statement:
In light of further revelations in the case of the allegations made by Erin Cairns’ against ASFS member Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, the specific allegations of appropriation and non-disclosure have been investigated by a third party and no longer stand, and a public retraction has been made.
As an urgent response, we have now published a new …Read More
https://locusmag.com/2024/12/asfs-clears-ekpeki/
date: 2024-12-10, from: Locus Magazine
Darkome, Hannu Rajaniemi (Gollancz 978-1-47320-332-7, 245pp, £18.99, tp). September 2024.
Mind you, better an ending that fades than no ending at all. I’ve had a good run recently, but it turns out that I was overdue an encounter with that frustrating species, the unmarked Book One that cannot be read as a standalone. Hannu Rajaniemi’s Darkome is the offender: After 250-odd brisk pages of biohackers vs. capitalists it ends …Read More
https://locusmag.com/2024/12/darkome-by-hannu-rajaniemi-review-by-niall-harrison/
date: 2024-12-10, from: Locus Magazine
Anderson, Kevin J.: Fantasy Stories, Volume 2 (WordFire Press 9781680577129, $17.99, 316pp, formats: trade paperback, hardcover, ebook, 12/10/2024)
Collection of 18 fantasy stories, one new; four are collaborations. Each story has an introduction by Anderson. Ten stories were previously collected as part of Selected Stories: Fantasy (2018). This is part of the seven-volume Kevin J. Anderson Short Fiction Library series funded through Kickstarter.
Boey, Eliane: Club Contango (Dark Matter …Read More
https://locusmag.com/2024/12/new-books-10-december-2024/
date: 2024-12-09, from: Locus Magazine
The Locus Selected Books by Author list has been updated on our Forthcoming Books page, with information from the December 2024 issue covering upcoming titles from genre houses slated through September 2025. Find out about your favorite authors’ upcoming books!
For the complete list of books by publisher, subscribe to our print magazine or purchase the December issue in print or digital editions, available December 1, 2024.
While you are …Read More
https://locusmag.com/2024/12/forthcoming-books-through-september-2025/
date: 2024-12-09, from: Locus Magazine
Ruoxi Chen has joined Putnam as executive editor after seven years at Tor. She will report to editor-in-chief Lindsay Sagnette, who told Publishers Weekly,
Ruoxi will draw on her deep experience in the speculative fiction space to bring exceptional crossover fantasy, romantasy, and science fiction titles for the general reader to the Putnam list… I look forward to watching her bring a new generation of talented storytellers to Putnam.
Chen …Read More
https://locusmag.com/2024/12/chen-joins-putnam/
date: 2024-12-09, from: Locus Magazine
Gregory Maguire’s Wicked returns to fiction hardcover bestseller lists in a Collector’s Edition with green sprayed edges (William Morrow), ranking as high as #10 on the NY Times list. Two other books return to lists in similar special editions: R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War Collector’s Edition and Harley Laroux’s Her Soul to Take: Deluxe Special Edition (Kensington).
Title Debut / #wks on any list NYT 12.15 LAT 12.08 USAT 12.01 …Read More
https://locusmag.com/2024/12/weekly-bestsellers-9-december-2024/
date: 2024-12-09, from: Final Draft blog
British writers Chris and Michael Mul, known as the Mul Brothers in the
screenwriting world, have some fantastic news: their Big Break-winning
screenplay,
Faster
Than Horses, is in pre-production with director James Erskine (Shooting for Socrates), producer Bear
Grylls (Running Wild with Bear
Grylls) and starring Ansel Elgort (Baby Driver).
Faster Than Horses is a
survival-thriller about a former Olympic runner, Mauro Prosperi
(Elgort), who attempts a comeback in the grueling Marathon des Sables
across the treacherous Sahara Desert. Based on a true story, the athlete
disappeared for nine days in a sandstorm that left him fighting for his
life.
We sat down with the Mul Brothers to find out about their
writing journey and hear how winning the Big Break competition helped
progress their career to the next level.
The Mul Brothers have
always been fans of survival stories and are obsessed with movies like
127 Hours. But when they read
an article about
Prosperi’s
harrowing journey in 2017, they knew the shocking endurance story
had particular cinematic appeal.
“The amount of things that
went wrong for Mauro while he was in the desert – you couldn’t believe
it!” says Michael, adding, “A missed plane that went past and then he
just so happened to not be in the right place when they sent out a
rescue team, it was one thing after another. And then right at the end
of the story, he tried to take his own life but somehow survived because
the blood just congealed. He saw that as a sign of divine intervention
to keep going.”
After that, Prosperi faced down the guns of
Algerian soldiers when he accidentally wandered from Morocco into
Algeria. No wonder survival expert Bear Grylls signed on to produce the
movie!
But a great true-life story doesn’t always translate
easily into a great movie script. Beyond just the true events, the story
must also include a highly emotional and cathartic journey for its
protagonist. The Mul Brothers were able to craft that journey by
focusing on Prosperi’s deep need to reclaim his former athletic glory –
something the judges of the Final Draft Big Break competition
recognized. Faster Than Horses
was awarded the prize for Best Feature Drama in 2021.
“Every
screenplay competition has a different caliber and it took us a little
while to figure out who the big players were. So with the Final Draft
submission, we were just like fingers crossed!” says Chris, who admits
he was thrilled to find out they’d won considering they had entered the
year before.
The prize package that came with the Big Break win
made all the difference.
“Mike and I say, 100 percent, one of
the best prize packages we ever received was the fellowship that we got
as a result of Final Draft. It wasn’t so much about the money. It was
more about the opportunity that led to us writing more material. I think
it was 10 weeks and over that time, we wrote an entirely new TV pilot in
one of the classes [as part of the New York Film Academy, included in
their prize package] which was a really cool experience. The guy who was
running it, George McGrath, who we’ve stayed in contact with and was
super lovely, shared it with a friend of his at HBO just off the bat and
he’d never shared anything with anybody before, but he just felt like
the color of the writing was great. So just off that, it was like,
‘Okay, this is why Final Draft is that much higher in caliber.’ For us,
it was one of the best experiences we’ve had when it came to placing or
winning in contests,” says Chris.
The Mul Brothers want to share
this advice for emerging writers: “Keep writing. I think that that is
the best way to find your voice as a writer. The more Chris and I wrote,
we started to find that we would continually revisit the same themes in
our work. And ultimately that’s what really grounds you as a writer in
terms of the things that you like to explore,” says
Michael.
Chris’s advice is to read produced screenplays for this
reason: “A lot of writers starting out don’t realize how important the
first 10 pages of the screenplay are because sometimes that’s all a
producer is going to read. You see in those opening 10 pages of a lot of
produced screenplays, they’re almost perfect in how they’re delivering
character and introductions to the world and themes, and the economy of
those pages.”
For more information on Big Break visit
https://www.finaldraft.com/big-break-screenwriting-contest/.
https://blog.finaldraft.com/big-break-winners-sell-true-life-adventure-script-faster-than-horses
date: 2024-12-09, from: Locus Magazine
Sleep Like Death, Kalynn Bayron (Bloomsbury 978-1-547-60976-5, $19.99, 368pp, hc) June 2024.
As she previously did with Cinderella, author Kalynn Bayron turned another classic on its head this year with Sleep Like Death, her smart and scary reimagining of Snow White. There’s a temptation when an author revisits a famous tale to assume they will simply modernize or dress it up a little, all of which can be …Read More
https://locusmag.com/2024/12/sleep-like-death-by-kalynn-bayron-review-by-colleen-mondor/
date: 2024-12-09, from: Locus Magazine
VAJRA CHANDRASEKERA was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he still lives. He began publishing short fiction with ‘‘Pockets Full of Stones’’ in Clarkesworld (2013), and has since published scores of stories in genre magazines and anthologies. ‘‘The Translator, at Low Tide’’ (2020) was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Prize.
Debut novel The Saint of Bright Doors (2023) won Crawford, Ignyte, Locus, and Nebula Awards, and was a …Read More
https://locusmag.com/2024/12/vajra-chandrasekera-the-mythic-and-the-modern/
date: 2024-12-08, from: Locus Magazine
A Hunger With No Name, Lauren C. Teffeau (University of Tampa Press 978-1-59732-207-2, 156pp, $28.00, hc) September 2024. Cover by Madeline M. Eisele.
Lauren C. Teffeau’s novella A Hunger With No Name might take place on a far-future Earth, or in a similar secondary world; regardless, it’s told by a people who have survived some vast disaster, a ‘‘Great Scatter’’ that has receded into a mythic past. The Astravans have …Read More