Finding Your Slot at Moozvine
This is how the pitch goes:
Moozvine is a publishing platform where readers pay what they like for stories on their website. Some stories are immediately released for free. Others have two weeks to hit a pledge target. If the story hits the target, the pledges are collected then the story is release for free to everyone. Writers like Nancy Fulda, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Lawrence Schoen, and Will McIntosh have placed their stories on their website.
Finding Your Slot is original to Moozvine. It has a funding target of $820 and a deadline of November 6th. Since it’s such a hard SF story, I’m weirdly amused that the deadline will hit during World Fantasy Convention.
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if I sat down to write a classic hard SF problem story that actually makes use of my PhD in Computer Engineering, this is the story where you find out. Augmented humans! Failed network nodes! An accidental generation ship!
You can read a sample (from the middle of the story) at the above link.
I also have two reprints on the site that are free to read now:
Incomplete Proofs This was originally published in Bloody Fabulous, an anthology of urban fantasy stories about fashion edited by the fabulous Ekaterina Sedia.
In this story, the great designers are mathematicians and wearing their proofs is the height of fashion. Two of them have to work out both their relationship with each other and a proof of whether P=NP.
Best of All Possible Worlds This was originally published in Asimov’s, edited by Sheila Williams. I saw the production of the musical,Candide, directed by Mary Zimmerman and instead of writing a review, I wrote a short story.
Candide has been revised it seems non-stop since its original production in 1956. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) its brilliant score, no production has ever really worked. The genesis of my story was “Say you know cold all of the material ever written for the musical, can you put together a satisfying version of the show if your life literally depended on it?” The story then went from there to some place weirder…
So that’s it. Two of my early works and one work so new practically no one has read it yet. If you’re even remotely curious about “Finding Your Slot”, please think about pledging. Thanks.