Speculative Fiction Online: Short Stories

Lovers of speculative fiction — elf watchers, sorcery buffs, space nerds, zombie huggers, apocalypse prophets — fantasists and science fiction lovers of all stripes — can find plenty of fiction online to sate an appetite for shorter works at a low price, or no price at all. Short fiction is one of the best ways for new authors to be published and recognized. You can feel the thrill of discovering talented authors before they’re well known. Online publishing has lowered the cost for a writer to reach a reader, and while there is a great range of quality in the fiction available online, I think you’ll find that the sources linked below have a lot to offer the discerning reader.

The idea for this post had its genesis in my happy discovery of Torque Control’s Short Story Club, mentioned by Yet There Are Statues, Matt Hilliard’s intelligent, articulate blog of reviews of science fiction and fantasy books. Torque Control is the blog of the editorial staff of Vector, the journal of the British Science Fiction Association, and it has a lively, thoughtful, active following of writers and sci-fi enthusiasts who engage in respectfully pointed discussions. It’s a pity that the site design is barely adequate; I discern a limited WordPress theme that is not being used to full advantage. On the other side of the pond we have the glitzier Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association, but unfortunately, for the purposes of this article, there I did not find links to free and inexpensive online writing, although I did find an interesting link to online fantasy and science fiction writing workshops at Odyssey.
The Torque Control Short Story Club selections link to a glorious plethora of online sci-fi and fantasy journals, and for the benefit of our readers here, I’d like to share these discoveries and more. Please add links in the comments to recommend additional resources, or comment on these selections.

Knife of Dreams

Knife of Dreams is much better than Winter's Heart or Crossroads of Twilight. Stuff happens in spite of Jordan’s usual foot-dragging, boring mental landscapes, and scene-killing clothing descriptions.

My favorite scene: Egwene mastering the situation as a prisoner of the Tower, converting the novices to her side, coping with the pain of punishment, drawing on her considerable inner resources, defying expectations, using her Aiel education. I thought that part of the book was especially well-paced and dramatized.

I’ve become more tolerant of Nynaeve, and more appreciative of her role as a source of amusement. Elayne, however, is an idiot, who succeeds in spite of herself. The Perrin/Faile separation was a trial in ways the author didn’t fully intend, and in the end the reader is relieved that THAT’s over. I was disappointed at the way RJ disposed of Rolan, but what would one expect from the Forsaken (e.g., Jordan.)

The buildup to Perrin's attack on the Shaido was a dreary, dull, drawn-out affair (as are most scenes.) I'm sorry, but that's not how one builds drama and tension, that's "frittering the time away and annoying the readers" or something like that.

I'm very much looking forward to seeing what Sanderson does in The Gathering Storm.

Shameless promo of Adonalsium.net

Stooping to brutal marketing tactics, Adonanalsium.net promises Brandon Sanderson fans that social networking promotion of Adonalsium will improve their chances to win Sanderson books. I'm happy to oblige, although I draw the line at Facebook.

Note that you do have to register for their Drupal forum in order to fill out the giveaway form.

Cool stuff: free download of Warbreaker! Kindle owners can convert this PDF to Kindle format, hooray! (Sigh... I already bought a paperback.)

It's easy to follow them on Twitter, too.

I wonder if the discussion forums are worth reading?

Altering CSS for every nth element of a class

I wanted to improve on my previous jquery fix to remove the left padding for the 4th floating div.widget on the Rabbit Software homepage. If I add more widgets, the rows won't align correctly unless I can remove the padding from every 4th one. Because of the fixed width template and fixed width of the widgets, there are always 3 widgets per row.

The index of widgets counts up from 0, so I needed to fix every child whose index is a multiple of 3.

Even floated div columns: equalHeights

When you are floating a bunch of divs inside a container, it is a design problem when the divs are of different heights depending on their content, because they tend to wrap funky. One can, by brute force, make them all the same height, but that approach is fragile and can create problems with the content contained in each div. (Why is there a flower photo? Just because it looks nice.)

A better approach would be to measure the tallest div and force that height on all the remaining divs. Alas, although there exist some CSS methods for doing this, they're not adequately cross-browser compatible, so a javascript method is the only effective approach.

I found a very nice jquery plugin called equalHeights, and implemented it in the SimpleFolio theme for rabbitsoftware. Thank you again, Filament Group, a great resource for JQuery plugins.

Rip an Audiobook CD to an IPod

I have been spending time with audiobooks lately. Managing and navigating audio book CDs, which can have up to 99 tracks per disc, can be a nightmare on the IPod unless you build playlists before syncing.

This CNet post, How to rip an audiobook CD to an iPod, was very helpful.

Join tracks in ITunes

If you imported an audiobook CD to ITunes but didn't join the tracks when you imported, there is a solution.

Doug's Applescripts for ITunes will allow you to select a set of tracks (AAC or MP3) and join them into a single file. This is a great help for audiobooks, because there's no reason to have 99 tracks in an audio book. If you have several audiobooks in this condition, they're a holy mess to navigate in your IPod: 26 CDs of 99 tracks each? Try scrolling to the end or beginning of that list and see what I mean. This is a nightmare because my IPod Nano doesn't have a convenient album cover style browse feature for books.

New logo for Rabbit Software

I made a new logo for Rabbit Software:

Richard loves the Barry Flanagan leaping hare, but we don't want to infringe on creative copyright. We've seen one of these wonderful sculptures at the Virginia Museum of Art.

Wheel of Time Online Resources

This material was first published on Dreams & Speculation: Winter's Heart Mid-month Discussion.

Here are some valuable Wheel of Time online resources. My list is necessarily incomplete, because there is so much material available. Please add links to your favorite sites in the comments.

Can't keep up with a Wheel of Time read-through?

Not to worry! Hop on to one of the read-through summary sites below, to get acquainted with the books you missed, and you’ll be ready to start on this month’s book, and join in the discussion. I assure you, you’ll be just fine. Only those masochistic enough to want to savor every word — you know who you are — will feel that they’ve missed something. Many of us are eager to find out what Brandon Sanderson does with the completion of the Wheel of Time. If you can read a few of Jordan’s novels, you’ll be able to better appreciate Sanderson’s accomplishment.

Please note that websites are ephemeral. Wheel of Time fan sites are disappearing faster than they are appearing as the series nears completion, and as fans move beyond their enthusiasms. Many of the sites, even if they exist, have broken links and server errors because they are no longer maintained.

Read-throughs and synopses of the Wheel of Time novels

Foremost among these, for its depth, wit, and authority:
Leigh Butler’s Wheel of Time Re-read on Tor, the WoT publisher
Superbly, entertainingly written. Relatively spoiler-free if you don’t read the comments.

If that’s too long for you, try the solely plot-focused Wheel of Time Summary
Click the characters in the right column to see where they appear in the books and chapters. When I checked, the rest of that site had gone offline just days ago. Thanks to Google cache you can still see some of the other pages, but the summary is the meat.

If you want just a little more detail, try the Enyclopaedia WoT chapter summaries for each book
Warning: To avoid spoilers, do not read the notes, just read the summary.

Some small modifications of the SimpleFolio Wordpress theme

I'm using the delightful SimpleFolio Wordpress theme for the Rabbit Software website. I made a donation; it's nice to support good opensource work.

I found a few issues with it that I have addressed.

1. The single post view was incorrectly showing the excluded "Portfolio" category in its Recent Posts sidebar widget. In this theme, you can select a specific category to populate the homepage slideshow. One doesn't necessarily want those posts to appear as normal blog posts. Unfortunately, the exclusion function wasn't working on the single post view page. This problem is easily addressed by editing the sf_portfolio_filter function in the theme's functions.php file.

Change line 50,

if(!is_archive() && !is_admin() && !is_single()){

to

if(!is_archive() && !is_admin() ){

2. I'm using more than 3 homepage widgets, and they weren't wrapping nicely. While the first one had a proper margin-left:0, the fourth one had the default margin-left:30px. I realized there must be some javascript at work behind the scenes, inserting the inline styling to adjust the left margin. Indeed, I opened custom.js in the js folder, and found this line:

$(".home_widgets .widget:first").css("margin-left", "0");

A bit of snooping on the JQuery site clarified this usage for me, and I added this line:

$(".home_widgets .widget:eq(3)").css("margin-left", "0");

to make the 2nd line of 3 widgets line up with the first batch.


3. Of course, I've made a few custom tweaks to the stylesheet so far, such as adding more space below the unordered lists in the .home_widgets .widget class, and adding underlines to the links in the .home_widgets .textwidget.