All of atb's Comments + Replies

I'm glad you both enjoyed it. I'm fine with people translating it for non-commercial purposes, so please do feel free to do this. If you end up doing so then it would be great if you posted a link here so that people could find the translation more easily (and, assuming I remember at the time, I'll edit the post to include links to the translations).

Some examples.

1. I've come across academic journals that allow you to post drafts pre-submission but a condition of acceptance is that you remove these before publication. But if these drafts were now CC-BY licensed, you can't be sure you'll have the power to do this. (In practice, you might get away with simply ignoring this, but that depends on your willingness to lie, and your willingness to do so in the context of a legally binding contract).
2. More generally, public sharing of drafts is pretty common in academia, but publishers often want exclusive commerci

I agree that there's a case for an opt out option here. Imposing a CC license on writers would effectively preclude certain sorts of material being posted to the forum.

For example, if CC-BY were mandated, it might be hard for academics to post paper drafts here, as they may need to retain the copyright of these papers in order to publish in certain venues. Likewise, it might make it hard to post drafts of things (fiction, nonfiction) that one later plans to submit to magazines (of course, a certain amount of this might already be precluded, but I think req... (read more)

Only a very boring one. No publications so far, though I continue to send things out.

Also, it's perhaps worth noting that it's unclear to me that people who enjoyed the story posted here will necessarily enjoy my other stories. I have different motives in writing different things, and I think that one consequence of this is that different stories I write might appeal to different audiences.

But in any case, if I do get something published I'll post a link here and people can decide for themselves whether they enjoy it!

Responses have now gone out, and I've notified both those who have been accepted and those who haven't. So if anyone hasn't received a response then feel free to get in touch via forum message.

(I'm not planning to do a detailed post on the application process right now, as I'm focused on preparing for the event, but I'm hoping to do a general reflection post after the event, in which I'll discuss the application process alongside other things)

(Shortly, I'll be away until the 18th. I'll do my best to check forum messages, but please expect replies to be somewhat slow.)

Great, it's currently unclear whether I'll run further events of this sort in the future (in part, I want to see how this one goes first), but I may well do.

The aim is to notify people who are accepted within a fortnight of the closing date (that's not an absolute guarantee, but it's the intention and I think it's likely to be achieved). 

Yep, you should definitely apply if you're interested. So too should people who have never written fiction before but who think maybe they'd like to start doing so (as long as they can pull together a writing sample by the deadline).

There are no expectations about prior work: if you're interested enough to put together a sample then I'll happily consider your application.

My guess is that when you factor in lead times on writing a book, this starts to feel a lot more plausible. The book could easily have been finished nine months before it came out. It could easily have been started a year before that. And its basic shape could have been mostly settled six months before that. So I think we could easily be talking about a book the shape of which should be dated to sometime in 2013.

Which isn't to say none of those threads were starting to emerge in 2013 (or, indeed, quite a lot earlier), but my sense is that they lacked anything like the prominence they have now.

You're right that there's something that doesn't work about this. Thanks for the helpful feedback.

That said, I'm not going to make edits here right now, because I haven't managed to figure out an edit I'd be happy with. I'll keep mulling, and perhaps I'll make edits at some future time.

Just to explain the intention of the line, "moving towards another's pain instead of away" is intended to ambiguously refer both: (a) to adopting a mindset that allows you to mentally grapple with someone else's pain without psychologically flinching away; and (b) to behavin... (read more)

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it. No other writing yet, but a few things are under consideration, so if they get accepted I'll try to remember reply to this comment with a link.

Thanks. Fixed.

Thanks for reading and for taking the time to write up your thoughts.

One thing to note is that there are presumably things that witch knows that the reader does not. So while the story itself might not give us enough detail to conclude that there is no afterlife in the story world, the witch may have additional information that allows her to reach this conclusion with some fair confidence.

Yeah, that sounds plausible. When editing, I find it really helpful to read my writing out loud. Listening to someone else read it might have many of the same benefits, and some additional ones besides.

Nice!  In many ways, a very different style to what I wrote, but I like to think it shares something of the same spirit (perhaps representing something of a logical next step).

Cool, thanks for doing this! I haven't  had a chance to listen yet (my writing time is currently being spent on writing something new), but I'm glad that someone is doing podcasts for forum posts. For me, at least, I find it a lot easier to find the time to listen than the time to read.

Thanks. Fixed (and I took the chance to also fix a few other minor bits and pieces). 

I'm really sorry about your father. Thanks so much for commenting, and I'm glad you found that image touching.

Thanks!

There are lots of stories where a magic user meets a representation of death. In some of the ones I'm aware of, death is presented very much as a thing to be welcomed. In others, resisting death is presented as being selfish (or, at least, deeply partial). One of the reasons that I wrote the story is because I wanted to see a version of the meeting-Death trope that presented a different way of thinking about death (a way of thinking that will be familiar to most readers of this forum but that I hadn't previously seen in the context of this trope).

I've only recently started trying to get my stories out there, so I'm afraid I don't have anything else online yet. Hopefully I will soon, as I have some stories under consideration at online magazines. If any get accepted, I'll try to remember to post a link in response to this comment.

I enjoyed this: the writing was lovely and I feel like you found a really evocative way of framing the point. Thanks for sharing the piece.

Thanks Bella. I'm glad the bit on compassion resonated. Growing up, sheer emotional empathy definitely came more naturally to me than a more directed form of compassion, so the importance of compassion, in particular, is something I've spent time reflecting on over the years.

Thanks for reading it, and for writing this comment. Critique groups aside, writing tends to be quite a solitary activity, so it's nice to know that someone enjoyed the story and that the words weren't just being written into the void!