Twitter Competition: Juliet E. McKenna

To celebrate the arrival of a crate full of her new fantasy novel, Dangerous Waters, on her doorstep, Juliet E. McKenna has organised a Twitter giveaway this week, ending on Thursday! Head over to her account to enter.


Don't forget that you can still download a free short story by Juliet Mckenna, The Wizard's Coming, in ebook or pdf form when you click on the banner below:-


And if you're in Oxford this week, Juliet will be in conversation with two other Solaris authors, Ian Whates and Ben Macallan, at a signing at Waterstones this Thursday.

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Solaris Books hits 1000 twitter followers!

We hit one thousand twitter followers today, hooray! We regularly update twitter with recent reviews, news stories concerning Solaris, competitions, and we also answer questions from fans, too. You can find us here http://twitter.com/SolarisBooks if you're not already one of our loyal followers.

There are several Solaris Books authors also one twitter, including but not limited to:-

Rowena Cory Daniells, @rcdaniells, author of last year's bestselling King Rolen's Kin triliogy, and more!
Gary McMahon @GaryMc_Author author of the upcoming horror novels The Concrete Grove trilogy.
Jonathan Strahan @JonathanStrahan, editor of the recent Engineering Infinity anthology of hard SF.
Tim Akers @TimAkers author of Heart of Veridon, the upcoming sequel Dead of Veridon and recent winner SciFi Now magazine's Rising Star Award.
Gail Z. Martin @GailZMartin who writes fantasy series The Chronicles of the Necromancer.
Gareth L. Powell @GarethLPowell whose innovative SF novel, The Recollection, Solaris will be releasing this year.

And let's not forget our own Editor in Chief, Mr. Jon Oliver! @JonOliverEditor

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BONUS Vlog Post!

Hey all,

If you've been reading the Twitter feed, you'll know Solaris just hit 700 followers.

Now, it's traditional on Twitter to make a fuss about reaching 100-follower milestones, and we've done so in the past by giving away free books to our 500th and 600th follower.

This seemed arbitrary and unfair, however (although this does not preclude us doing it again in future), so we have decided to instead create a bonus vlog for all to enjoy.



See you for tomorrow's regularly scheduled vlog.

Cheers,

David

Outre Anthologies!

Wotcher all,

In a moment's distraction this morning I put the following request out in Twitterland:

Right, let's hear outre ideas for an anthology. #outreanthology

I gave a couple of examples as well:

Heartbeet, a collection of short stories about beets and beet-farmers.
Giraffe City, a noir anthology of crime stories told in Giraffe City, the fictional city built for giraffes, by giraffes, from giraffes.

And we got some replies. Thought I'd share them with you. Some of them are funny, some of them are silly, some of them could even be interesting books.

Bloodfeast, a collection of stories about black pudding (ian_sales)
The Wax Museum, an fantasy anthology where wax figures have their own world and the relationships between them. (MihaiDarkWolf)
Stories about ants. (David_Heb)
Ponytale, an anthology about girls with hangups about horse riding ;-) (pattyjansen)
Typing Pool, a collection of stories about underwater stenographers. (ian_sales)
The Moon is Made of Cheese, an anthology of recipe-based SF stories. (KaaronWarren)
Unhappily Ever After, an anthology of stories with unhappy endings. But if that's too obvious, ...And Everybody Died. The End. might be fun. (davedevereux)
x = y+1, an anthology of stories told entirely in mathematical notation. (David_Heb)
How about a follow up to Shine called Dim, an anthology of pessimistic SF? (markchitty)
A collection of stories about drunken Norse gods putting on a musical. High Skol Musical. (warpcoresf)
Sultanas of Araby, a collection stories about raisins from the Middle East. (ian_sales)
Hard Drives, a collection of stories about trips in cars with flat tyres, (ian_sales)
Out of the Frying Pan, a collection of stories about grease spatters on the cooker top (ian_sales)

If you have any ideas, comment or chuck them up on twitter with the tag.

Cheers,

David

Life Imitating Art...

Hi all,

So here's a turn-up for you. As you may or may not yet know, Jetse de Vries' upcoming anthology Shine (and here's that sexy cover by Vincent Chong again) features a story, "Twittering the Stars," by the talented Mari Ness.

"Twittering" tells the story of a group of astronauts who travel to the asteroid belt to harvest lithium and of the tragic accident that occurs while they're out there, and tracks the narrator's reaction to what happened. The twist? It's told entirely in the form of Twitter posts, or "tweets."

Now, in a classic case of life imitating art, astronaut Soichi Noguchi (@Astro_Soichi) is sending pictures from the International Space Station via Twitter. This is Mt. Kilimanjaro. Neat, huh? Check out his tweet feed for all the pictures.

Shine update and competition!

Hi all,

We've already blogged about Jetse de Vries' upcoming Shine anthology, and about the fantastic Daybreak Magazine blog in support of the book, which will publish an optimistic short story every two weeks until the book's release next year.

So far, the magazine has published "The Very Difficult Diwali of Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram" by Jeff Soesbe on October 16th, and "Horrorhouse" by David D. Levine on October 30th; we're waiting with bated breath for this weekend's third instalment.

In case you missed it, the @Outshine project on Twitter is publishing 140-letter prose poems on the subject of the future (along with quotations, soundbytes, and similar stuff for those who are interested); you can submit your poem by emailing shineanthology@gmail.com, or go here for submission guidelines.

Finally, Jetse informs us that he will be running a competition on the Shine website, starting on November 20th this year. He will be posting an excerpt from each of the sixteen stories in the anthology and challenging readers to guess which of four alternative endings is the correct one, and who wrote which excerpt. So jump on there and take a look, next Friday.

Cheers and stay hopeful,

David

Outshining the competition

Although Shine (our anthology of optimistic SF) is planned for release by Solaris Books in April 2010, readers can whet their appetites until then over at DayBreak Magazine, where a 'positive, forward-looking SF story' will be featured every second Friday until the Shine anthology is released. Daybreak magazine was launched last Friday.

You can find out more about the Shine project here, and follow them on twitter, too, @outshine.