Outer Alliance Spotlight #37: Lauren P. Burka June 4, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , 2commentsWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #37. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is Lauren P. Burka, writer and assistant editor at Circlet Press.
Lauren’s fiction debuted in 1992 with the collection, Mate: And More Stories from the Erotic Edge of SF/Fantasy. Since then she’s written several more pieces, both long and short. Most recently Torquere Books released her m/m romance, Wishbone, and her short story, “Double Edged Bomb” appeared in the collection of erotic superhero stories, Like a Mask Removed. As an editor, she works on single author projects and anthologies such as the transgendered themed Up For Grabs, the BDSM themed Kneel to Me, and the M/M SFF erotica collection, Wired Hard 4. She is currently editing the sequel to Up For Grabs, and writing a cookbook for people with Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome.
Lauren lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the Circlet Press headquarters. If you’d like to catch up with her in person, she’ll be attending Readercon in July.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #23: Catherine Lundoff February 26, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , 1 comment so farWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #23. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is author and editor, Catherine Lundoff.
Catherine is a lesbian identified bisexual, who married her partner of 16 years last September. She’s been writing since 1996, and has amassed a long list of queer speculative and erotic fiction sales, including the recent “Great Reckonings, Little Rooms” in Time Well Bent: Queer Alternative History, and “The Egyptian Cat” in Tales of the Unanticipated #30.
She received a Lambda nomination for the lesbian ghost story collection, Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades in 2008, and also won the Golden Crown Literary Award in the Lesbian Erotica category that same year for her short story collection, Crave: Tales of Lust, Love and Longing. She is currently reading submissions for a new anthology, Hellebore and Rue, which she is co-editing with JoSelle Vanderhooft.
Catherine is a regular at WisCon and Gaylaxicon, and she’ll also be appearing at MarsCon next week in Bloomington, Minnesota. If you can’t make it out to see her in person, you may find her online on LiveJournal, MySpace, Facebook, and GoodReads. She lives in Minnesota with her wife and two cats.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #10: Chris Fletcher November 20, 2009
Posted by juliarios in : interviews, publications, queer-friendly publishers , 1 comment so farWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #10. Each Friday the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is Chris Fletcher, editor of M-Brane SF.
Chris and his longtime partner Jeff moved from St. Louis, Missouri to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 2007, after the restaurant they’d run together failed financially. Chris took that failure as an opportunity to reboot his creative writing side, and in February of 2009, started the magazine, M-Brane SF.
As one of the very first people to join The Outer Alliance, Chris has been an active Outer Alliance blogger and advocate from the start. In addition to M-Brane SF, he also recently edited an anthology of queer speculative fiction called Things We Are Not, which contains several stories by other Outer Alliance members. On the horizon, slated for a June 2010 release is another anthology to be published by Hadley Rille Books called The Aether Age, which Chris is co-editing with Outer Alliance member, Brandon Bell.
Chris keeps a personal blog at mbranesf.livejournal.com and is active on Twitter as mbranesf. He has two cats names Maus and Jack.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #8: Bart Leib and K.T. Holt November 6, 2009
Posted by juliarios in : interviews, publications, queer-friendly publishers , 5commentsWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #8. Each Friday the Spotlight features an ally (or two!) who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. This week we’re celebrating November’s special LGBTQ themed anniversary issue of Crossed Genres with the editors, Bart Leib and K.T. Holt.
K.T. (Kay) and Bart are married, and both of them are bisexual. They started Crossed Genres together in 2008, and decided in the first couple of months that they wanted to do an extra large LGBTQ themed issue for the magazine’s first anniversary. The idea for Crossed Genres, which features stories that combine SF/F and another genre, grew out of Bart’s Genre Challenge community. Genre Challenge (which prompts members to write in a new genre each month) is still going, but has a new moderator now that Crossed Genres has taken off.
Kay’s love of speculative fiction runs deep. She wrote her first story (about a talking dolphin and his pet boy) at the age of six, and later got into college because of an essay on worldbuilding. Bart started writing poetry when he was in 8th grade, and took up prose fiction the next year. His non-fiction piece, “The Successful Hero’s List”, appeared in the April 2009 issue of Fantasy Magazine.
Bart and Kay live in Somerville, Massachusetts with their 3-year-old son, Bastian, and two cats named Romeo and Scout. In addition to writing and editing, both Kay and Bart take a keen interest in science. Kay works a day job in medical research administration, and is appalled at how little money brilliant researchers make. Bart’s particular scientific area of interest is sustainability, and people who use minimal resources to do amazing things. Kay and Bart encourage anyone with an interest in the future to blog about their favorite science news stories, and to fund research if possible.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #5: Nicola Griffith October 16, 2009
Posted by juliarios in : events, interviews, publications , 3commentsWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #5. Each Friday the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is author, editor, and Lambda Literary Foundation board member, Nicola Griffith.
Nicola’s first novel, Ammonite, won the Premio Italia, Lambda, and Tiptree awards. She went on to win the Nebula, Spectrum, World Fantasy Award and 5 more Lambdas before joining the Lambda Literary Foundation Board of Trustees in June of 2009. In addition to writing 5 novels, a memoir, and several shorter works, she also co-edited (with Stephen Pagel) the Bending the Landscape series of LGBTQ science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies. She keeps a blog at http://asknicola.blogspot.com/.
Originally from the UK, Nicola now lives in Seattle with her partner, Kelley Eskridge, with whom she recently started Sterling Editing (an editing, mentoring, and coaching service for writers). Both Nicola and Kelley will be appearing alongside futuristic heavy metal band, BloodHag, on October 24th at Olympia Washington’s first SciFiFest. (more…)
Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge Announce Sterling Editing September 9, 2009
Posted by Natania in : announcements, The Outer Alliance , 1 comment so far
OA members Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge have just announced the formation of Sterling Editing, an editing, coaching and mentoring service for writers. As Nicola says:
If you want to make your writing better, we can help you.
We’ve both done a lot of teaching (Clarion West, Arts Council of Great Britain, Emory) and have been mentoring and coaching informally with those students and friends, but now it’s time to codify and formalise what we do.
We love to teach. We love to share.
From the site:
Many people who offer editing services have never had a story, essay or book professionally published. They’ve never worked with an agent or publisher. They may have excellent theoretical knowledge — but we believe there’s no substitute for experience.
We are expert writers with excellent editing, teaching and coaching skills. We can help you both improve your writing and meet the challenges of a writer’s life, whether you’re trying to build a career, make a mid-career transition, carve out time from your busy life to work, or understand how the money works.
Serious congratulations are in order! Best of luck to you both. A truly wonderful resource for writers.