writing.today.com

Wow. A professional, easy-to-read, and understandable website that makes me want to weep in relief. And they pay well. A++ compared to some of the websites we’ve been looking at this month.

Who: Realms of Fantasy
What: Fantastic short fiction. (But isn’t that what they all want?

How: They want fantasy. Any area in the realms of fantasy: heroic, contemporary, traditional, feminist, dark, light, and the ever-popular “unclassifiable.”

And no SciFi. No alien worlds or super-high-tech.

How long: Up to 10,000 words.

How much: Under 7,500 words, you get five cents per word. Over a total of 7,500 words, that drops to three cents per word. A new writer with a 10,000 word story will walk away with $400. That’s a nice chunk of change.

Is there a catch? Not really. Three cents per word isn’t horrendous. Five cents per word is perfectly reasonable.

Where: Snail mail city. Typed submissions, double-spaced, SASE. You can read all about it here .

Send your story to:

Shawna McCarthy
Realms of Fantasy
P.O. Box 527
Rumson, NJ 07760

Today, I’m giving you a link to a great FREE story that the author and editors make much more complicated than it really is.

The story is A Little Mischief by Kasey Michaels.

Okay, follow closely. “Sunshine sisters….” (Sunshine is their last name.) “…Jade, Jolie and Jessica are out to prove that their ex-cop father did not murder anyone and then take his own life.”

Rose: All right. I’m with you. Three sisters, father innocent. Gotcha.

“Their stories are told one by one in (so far) Dial M For Mischief (Jolie’s story) and Mischief Becomes Her (Jessica’s story, available now from HQN).”

Rose: Lots of J-names, and lots of “mischief”. A little confusing, but I’m holding on.

“Still to come will be 24 Hours of Mischief (Jade’s story) next spring, and the last in the series, Mischief Old/Mischief New, in which we’ll all travel back to Becket Hall, scene of the seven Kasey Michaels bestselling historical romances for HQN about the Beckets of Romney Marsh.”

Rose: I’m confused by that last part. Why go to the fictional world built in another series?

“Whew! That’s a lot, right?”

Rose: Yes, it is, honestly. It’s a lot to take in at once. For me, it’s still a blur of J-names and “mischief”.

“There are always stories within stories, little snippets, additional characters, and two of these people show up—just peek their heads in and wave, really—in Mischief Becomes Her. Kasey thought it might be fun to give them A Little Mischief of their own. Enjoy!”

 Rose: Okay, readers, you only need to know two things–

1. This is a matchmaking story. A woman named Jessica is trying to get a man and a woman she works with matched together. It’s a fresh change so I wanted to link to it on this blog.

2. It’s a FREE story from HQN, which is an imprint of Harlequin.

See? It’s not that confusing, after all.

In the book (and the film), Twilight, a seventeen-year-old girl falls in love with a very, very handsome 107-year-old man. Yes, he’s a vampire, but he’s still been alive for about 107 years.

The complaint I’ve read over and over in reviews about the book (and the film) is that it’s too “sweet”. That could have two meanings, and reading further through the reviews, I have found both complaints.

1. The reviewer is complaining that the story centers too much on the romantic aspects of gazing into each other’s eyes, holding hands, talking for hours, and the sexual tension that comes at the very beginning of a relationship before anything physically intimate has occurred.

That criticism I could understand. This is a matter of personal preference in storytelling. I will never forget walking out of the movie and seeing a father who was forced to go went with two teenaged girls. The girls were smiling and talking a mile-a-minute. The father looked seriously pained. Fine. Funny, and fine.

2. Then, there is the other kind of review where the reviewer is criticizing the story because Bella and Edward do not have sex in the first novel. They’re in love, therefore, it is “unrealistic that they wouldn’t have sex”.

Garbage. As a society, if we have reached a point at which a 17-year-old is required to have sex when she is in a relationship, then we are in serious trouble and there are a lot of people who need to get their minds out of the gutter–and this is coming from an erotic romance writer.

Unless the word “erotic” is printed on the cover or the spine of a story, sex is not compulsory in a story.  And the day when sex is required of a 17-year-old girl will be the day our culture has failed.