eftychia: Spaceship superimposed on a whirling vortex (departure)
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posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 03:22pm on 2006-02-11 under

In that not-sure-whether-I'm-falling-asleep betweenness, I imagined what signal SETI may someday find and decode, reaching us from some distant star:

10903-400-13-05 30:15
Mood: frightened
Music: The Qizmorphs, "Death of an Age"

I'm not sure why I bother to write this blog any more, now that I've verified that I am the last of my race. I guess it beats twiddling the thumbs I no longer have, but I don't know whom I expect to ever read it. Is there a point to writing for an audience of zero? If a tree falls gracefully in the forest and nobody is there to see it, is it art? At least it gives me something to do while I wait to find out how long these machines can keep my brain alive. Not that I'll ever be able to write up the final results of that experiment, of course, or that anyone will ever read it. And if some alien species discovers this planet after I am gone, will they even care about medical information about a species that no longer exists?

When the cancer destroyed my body and they hooked my brain up to these machines, I never thought the result would be that people like me would outlive the doctors and everyone else. But one by one the other brains-in-jars have fallen silent and I am alone, apparently not immortal after all. Maybe if I switch the old communications antennae onto the network that carries these thoughts to the blogging system, I can pretend that some distant race is reading this. Perhaps imagining that will keep me sane a little longer in my loneliness. Or perhaps imagining that means that I have already gone mad.

Dear interstellar readers; today I beat my old high score in Hong-Ex. Since you're not from my culture, I guess I'd better explain how the game is played. You start with a grid of squares, and the computer designates some of the squares as having bombs in them...

There are 7 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
 
posted by [identity profile] elynne.livejournal.com at 11:18pm on 2006-02-11
... that's awesome. :D
 
posted by [identity profile] flaviarassen.livejournal.com at 11:27pm on 2006-02-11
If you don't submit this somewhere professional, I may have to kick you when I next see you :-)
 
posted by [identity profile] dglenn.livejournal.com at 01:19pm on 2006-02-12
Eep! I guess I'd better go find out how one does that then ... (and hope that having posted it here doesn't count against it).
 
posted by [identity profile] flaviarassen.livejournal.com at 06:26pm on 2006-02-12
Are you kidding me? How many science fiction conventions do you have to go to before you figure out something like this??

Seriously, you coud get into a quality fanzine *easy*, but I'd try professional stuff, first.
 
posted by [identity profile] dglenn.livejournal.com at 08:35pm on 2006-02-12
Admittedly, it didn't take long for Google to find me a few magazine web sites where I looked up what I would have flipped through a copy of the magazine for back in my could-afford-subscriptions days, so now I have snailmail addresses and formatting instructions ... but does one include a cover letter, as for a resume? Just "gee-I've-never-done-this" stuff like that.

And, of course, I could use suggestions for magazines to send it to beyond the few big names I can think of on my own, just to save a trip to the library to look at that big book of magazine titles and their requirements that I know exists but am momentarily blanking on the name of, but that's not the "how do I do this" part, that's just laziness.

And yes, in my head "find out how" implied "ask my pro author friends". That'll include, "do I send it just like this, or should I try to lengthen it from a vignette (more like a scrap-of-an-idea) to short-story size?"

Basically, I have to get over my "never done this" insecurity. I've thought about trying to get fiction published before, but most of my thinking has been about how/what to write, not what happens next. (Which makes the fact that this was something I just dashed off before a nap kind of ironic, but hey, God is an iron. Wow. I think I've spent more time writing this comment than I did the piece itself.)

So yeah, in fandom as long as I've been, and never submitted anything to a magazine before. Late bloomer, I guess?
 
posted by [identity profile] vvalkyri.livejournal.com at 11:55pm on 2006-02-11
I like.
I think you should submit it to Analog or something.
 
posted by [identity profile] madbodger.livejournal.com at 05:47am on 2006-02-12
Yow. Right on target. And this right after I rewatched Contact, and finally got
the other part of the film's meaning.

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