ravenelectrick
specficmarkets

Cinema Spec: Tales of Hollywood and Fantasy is a planned paperback anthology of speculative flash fiction and poetry about movies, television, and Hollywood. Pieces about national cinemas of other countries ("Bollywood," etc.) are welcome, as are present and future/imaginary extrapolations of moving-picture technology (YouTube, holograms, etc.), but the stories and poems must relate to moving pictures in some form and must contain an element of science fiction, fantasy, or supernatural horror. If it's not speculative, I'm not interested.

Payment rates are as follows:

New fiction: 3 cents per word (rounded to the nearest 100 words) for stories to 1000 words, $5 minimum and $30 maximum. Flat rate of $30 for stories 1100 words to 2000 words.

Fiction reprints: 1 cent per word (rounded to the nearest hundred words), $3 minimum and $20 maximum.

New poetry: flat rate of $5.

Poetry reprints: flat rate of $3. 

The maximum word count for fiction is 2000 words and the maximum line count for poetry is 49 lines.

Of course, you'll read the complete guidelines for more details on submission formats and other important info:

http://www.ravenelectrick.com/cinemaspec.html

The Cinema Spec guidelines page isn't "hooked up" at Raven Electrick yet, but there will be a link in the news section by the end of the week. The submissions e-mail address won't go live until Tuesday, August 5, 2008, which is the day the anthology opens to submissions. Feel free to ask questions at the query address listed at the bottom of the Cinema Spec guidelines page.

I hope to see your subs!

jewell79

1)  I still haven't come down from my Wimbledon high yet.  What made it great, for me, was not that Nadal won (although I did want him to win!), but that, despite the pressure of Federer's comeback, Nadal simply refused to lose, and in doing so forced Federer to choose not to win.  It was the best piece of sport I've ever seen, a story I could not stop reading until the end.  

Still trying to get P. to understand it, too.  To him, it was a great match, entertaining enough for a Sunday evening.  For me, it was no sleep before and no sleep afterwards, a compelling narrative, an illuminating, confirming, nearly-religious experience.  I think, with sport, either you have the faith that it means something, in which case it can be a metaphor for everything, or you don't have the faith, in which case it is just a waste of time.  

Going to buy the DVD, anyway.

2) Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn is out in 9 days.  The first chapter was included in an Eclipse Special Edition, but you cannot read it online, as all the places that originally posted it seem to have been served with DMCA notices.  Now, I appreciate that an author wants sales.  Needs sales.  Deserves them for all of her hard work.  But this seems to me just a little heavy-handed, an attempt to get people to splash out more money on top of what has already been spent.  The first chapter is out there; why not let the internets spread the word and hype it a little more? What's the harm?

If people were posting the second chapter, I could understand it.

I already have Eclipse (in hardback, too) and I am not going to buy it again.  I wish I had the strength not to buy Breaking Dawn, but I can't resist the story.

3) I wonder if Henry James read any William Blake?  

Thel's Motto:

Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole:
Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?
Or Love in a golden bowl?

Might be an interesting connection between that and The Golden Bowl.  There must be a reason why James chose that Golden Bowl, and I'd love to know it.  I wonder if there might be some nearly-lost folk meaning to it, an old story with meanings that we no longer know popularly?

4) Moving neatly on to Robert Graves...I wonder if the White Goddess is really just an elaborate self-justification?  Because today I have the Furies, the anxiety, that empty feeling which must somehow be chased away, and I've been thinking about my family, about the particular woman in that family who had two men vying for her affections, and I can't see any poetic meaning in that situation.  Which is a lie.  I just want to see it.  Because Graves never talks, when he mentions particular instances of that relationship, of the effects of that mythological urge on the real people who are fulfilling it, or who must suffer the consequences.  Which makes he think he was either very lucky, or very guilty indeed.

5) I am not fundamentally a rational creature.  My brain works on lurid flashes of inspiration and ideas that might be either right or wrong.  But there is some element of rationality that stops me fully believing or committing to such things.  Bah.