Submissions and Games

Hello Lovelies,

Allow me to apologize for my absence. In short, there are several things that have proceeded to eat up my free time and, in turn, I have not been paying attention to social media. In retrospect, I feel I should share the wealth on the why not only for explanation purposes but for my fellow writers to utilize.

To begin, I've started looking around for options for submitting stories and works where you might actually get paid for them.

I know. Crazy, right?

One of the pages that I am now following on Facebook is a group called "Authors Publish". For those of you that are unfamiliar with them, they're a very simple little page that posts helpful advice, story inspiration and, most meaningful to me recently, lists of potential groups and magazines that are taking story submissions. I'd encourage you to check them out, but I'm also going to post links to some of the respective entries below so you can investigate for your own purposes.

3 Lists of Paying Sci-Fi Publishers
24 Open Calls for Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror Submissions
Chicken Soup for the Soul Needs Submissions for 5 Upcoming Books

Again, I'd like to encourage you to check them out. They are not limited to Sci-Fi stuff (as I'm sure you can tell with the Chicken Soup one) but those are just the ones I was actively playing with. And, before you say anything, my wife encouraged me to try the Chicken Soup one to challenge me as a writer since my comfort zone is drama, sci fi, and horror.

NOW! The next problem I ran into stems from a wonderful little website called HumbleBundle. For those that haven't heard of this website, they are a group that create bundles of games for both standard game consoles and mobile devices along with books in both e-print and audio. The bundles are generally extremely ridiculous and contain hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of really GOOD content but they take donations at extremely low prices. Normally the donation categories are $1, $10, and $15 with the higher tiers getting everything below them. They of course take more than that and you can pay what you want...everything goes to charity!

This site can be wonderful for a gamer on a budget, but what REALLY caught me is their 'GameMaker' bundle. Once in a grand while they do useful technologies and GameMaker is exactly what it sounds like...Game Development software. Market price runs upwards of $2000. So when I was able get that technology for $15, I had to jump on it.

I have since been playing with it, figuring out how to make it work, and brain storming on what I could actually do with that technology.

When all is said and done, I haven't been attentive, but for a relatively good reason. I intend to dig back in and finish Birthday promptly along with starting up the next bits within the Infested series. Check back shortly (as I will also need to check out what I've missed in the last week on YOUR sites).

Love you all!

- RB