Category: stories

No comments

New issues of Polar Borealis!

  By , ,

Numerous SF Canada members have work in the two most recent issues of Polar Borealis, edited by SF Canada member Richard Graeme Cameron.

Issue #9 (Feb-Mar 2019) includes cover art by Akem, a poem by Andrea Schlecht, and stories by Robert Dawson, Geoffrey Hart, and Robert Runté.

Issue #10 (Apr-May 2019) features poems by Rhea Rose, Neile Graham, and Colleen Anderson. Stories include works by Ron Friedman and Matthew Bin. And there’s an article by Robert Runté.

Download both issues for free at Polar Borealis and show your support of this Canadian SF magazine via the GoFundMe.

No comments

“Safebuoys” by Wes Smiderle

  By , ,

SF Canada member Wes Smiderle recently had his first piece of flash fiction published. “Safebuoys” appears in Flash Fiction Online, the long-running, professionally-paying online monthly magazine specializing in short stories told in 1000 words or fewer.

Wes writes in a variety of genres. His short story “Maisie’s Safehouse” was nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award for Excellence in Canadian Crime Writing, while his story “Alouette” was nominated for an Aurora Award. His short story “Shriek Season,” published in the 2015 Spring edition of On Spec, is set in a world where families resort to living in hovering ‘mag-rez’ houses to avoid catastrophic weather. Tangent Online called it “a fascinating read.”

Smiderle is a former reporter and editor and has written for daily and weekly newspapers. His three-part feature on youth mental health earned an Ontario Community Newspaper Award. He is currently working on a novelization of “Shriek Season.”

He lives and writes in Ottawa, Ontario with his wife, Amanda, and their three children, Gwendolyn, Samuel and Griffin.

No comments

Douglas Smith Rights & Reprints Workshop

  By , , , ,

SF Canada member Douglas Smith will be offering an online workshop via Cat Rambo’s “Rambo Academy” on selling reprints and other ways to leverage your short fiction. The workshop is scheduled for Saturday, July 21 and registration information is available here.

What do you do with a story after it’s been published? In this workshop, multi-award-winning Canadian writer Douglas Smith, whose work has been published in twenty-six languages and thirty-two countries, discusses story rights and licensing, including language, geography, media (print, electronic, audio), and occurrence rights (first rights and reprints), and how to sell reprints to markets you may be overlooking, including audio and international foreign language markets. The author of Playing the Short Game: How to Market & Sell Short Fiction, Smith will give you the vocabulary and knowledge you need to make more from your short fiction.

In other news, Douglas’ shapeshifter story “Out of the Light” will be reprinted in the upcoming antho “Crazy Town” from Rogue Blades Entertainment.

No comments

“Bear #178” wins in True North conference

  By , , , ,

SFC member Holly Schofield’s latest story stems from reading about a famous grizzly bear around Banff known as Bear 148. The grizzly was in and out of various news stories after several close encounters with humans. As this article says: When grizzlies mix too freely with people, the grizzlies usually lose.

According to Bill Hunt, a Parks Canada resource conservation manager, this particular bear “…showed a very moderated response…tolerating less than ideal human behaviours time and time again.”

Despite this, she didn’t last long. Bear 148 was shot and killed by a hunter in 2017 when she wandered outside park boundaries. She was one of the last few bears legally killed before British Columbia ended grizzly trophy hunting last November.

As we hurtle toward a tech-driven future, we need to figure out how to be better stewards of our little blue planet. That was the impetus for Communitech ‘s True North conference last week. This international conference focused on issues at the intersection of society and technology, as a force for good in the world. Part of the initiative was a story contest to highlight that worthy endeavor. “Bear #178” was Holly’s winning entry.

No comments

9 Tales of Raffalon – Matthew Hughes

  By , , , , , ,

SFC member Matthew Hughes is offering his collection, 9 Tales of Raffalon, in a multiformat ebook for just .99US for a limited time.

In an age of wizards and walled cities, Raffalon is a journeyman member of the Ancient and Honorable Guild of Purloiners and Purveyors. In other words, a thief.

His skills allow him to scale walls, tickle locks, defeat magical wards. He lifts treasures and trinkets, and spends the proceeds on ale and sausages in taverns where a wise thief sits with his back to the wall.

But somehow things often go the way they shouldn’t and then Raffalon has to rely upon his wits and a well calibrated sense of daring.

Here are nine tales that take our enterprising thief into the Underworld and Overworld, and pit him against prideful thaumaturges, grasping magnates, crooked guild masters, ghosts, spies, ogres, and a talented amateur assassin.

The collection includes seven novelettes that first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, plus “Inn of the Seven Blessings,” from the bestselling anthology, ROGUES, and “Sternutative Sortilege,” which appears only in this collection.

Find out more and grab your copy in the Bookstore at Matthew’s website, www.matthewhughes.org.