Free money for sf writers over 50

Corie sez, "The Speculative Literature Foundation is offering a grant of $750 to any writer of speculative literature of 50 years or older at the time of application who is just beginning to work professionally in the field. There are no restrictions on the use of the grant money."

SLF Older Writers Grant (Thanks, Corie!)

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Community Manager]

  Lionelmandrake @5:
  

  Call me a cynic,

  Sure, no prob. Anyone can be a cynic.
  

  but in this new era of “free and open community” rights to published works,

  Say what? “Free and open community” is neither a pertinent concept nor a part of the vocabulary of copyright, license and distribution. Published works are under copyright unless they belong to one of the classes of material specifically excluded from that status. They can be published under a variety of licenses. As far as I know, “free and open community” has nothing to do with it.
  

  I see a dark-side.

  I don’t understand why you left out the dark possibility that this could be a malign plot hatched by intelligent bees from Venus.
  

  For an outlay of $750,

  No. It also requires that you invent the Speculative Literature Foundation, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Nalo Hopkinson, Graham Joyce, and Farah Mendlesohn. Not only is this not cheap, but anyone who’s capable of doing it doesn’t need to swipe ideas.
  

  this could be a cheap way to troll applicants’ works for original and new plotlines.

  Any publisher’s slushpile would be a cheaper mechanism, not that it matters. As Cory says, nobody trolls slushpiles for plot ideas. You should believe him; but if you don’t, believe me.

  Fiction isn’t primarily about zippy new plot ideas. If it were, publishers’ submission guidelines would ask for plot outlines, instead of the first few chapters of the work.

  What fiction is about is what you do with the ideas you have. As Lawrence Watt-Evans has observed, there’s no idea so old and hackneyed that a good writer can’t make a passable story out of it, and no idea so staggeringly new, hot, amazing, astounding, and fantastic that an inept writer can’t screw it up.

  I’ll add that if you gave the same idea to two different competent writers, you’d get two different stories.
  

  Whether I won or not, a writer more gifted and/or energetic could refine my idea,

  1. A refined idea is a different idea.

  2. If you can come up with ideas, so can a “more gifted and/or energetic” writer.

  3. Have you ever noticed that writers tend to come up with characteristic ideas? You could write “A postmodern mythopoeic multi-part DC Comics epic that draws on everything from Hesiod’s Theogony to Prez” on a dozen index cards and give them to a dozen writers, but it wouldn’t make them Neil Gaiman, and they wouldn’t write Sandman.
  

  publish “my” novella,

  Their novella. Source isn’t work. This is why we credit writing to the writer.
  

  and I would be on the outside looking in. No thank you.

  If you don’t want to write for publication, just say so. “Someone might steal my ideas” makes a lousy excuse for taking yourself out of the running. That way lies a submission I once saw, in which the author explained that his story idea was so hot that he couldn’t reveal it in his letter, since we’d immediately steal it. The only way we could get to see it it would be by sending him $10,000 plus a publishing contract.

• [Cory Doctorow]

  You are suffering from a common misconception: namely that successful writers need to hunt down great ideas because they lack their own, and that beginning writers need to jealously guard them.

  Out of all the hundreds of professional sf writers of my acquaintance, I’ve never heard of a single one who wanted for ideas. Rather, every sf writer I know has *too many* ideas and not enough time to write them.

  It’s common for non-writers who have this misconception to write to pro writers and say, “I’ll give you the idea, you write it, and we’ll split the dough.” No one ever takes anyone up on this offer. Writers don’t suffer from idea-shortages.

  As Andre Torrez once said, “Ideas are easy. Execution is hard.”

• [buddy66]

  I’ve heard the equivalent a few times: “I’ve got a great idea for a play; why don’t you write it?”

  My favorite is Joseph Wambaugh’s fellow LAPD officer who said, after reading The Blue Knight, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

• [lionelmandrake]

  No further questions, the prosecution rests.

• [Church]

  Jeebus. I should have held off another eight or nine years…

• [lionelmandrake]

  Call me a cynic, but in this new era of “free and open community” rights to published works, I see a dark-side. For an outlay of $750, this could be a cheap way to troll applicants’ works for original and new plotlines. Whether I won or not, a writer more gifted and/or energetic could refine my idea, publish “my” novella, and I would be on the outside looking in. No thank you.

• [Anonymous]

  note only one award given annually. Not very good odds. Nice gesture, though. Jim Terr

• [fltndboat]

  Words have more power when they are seldom used. The best writers apologize to their readers for what they are about to read. Makes us part of a conspiracy.

• [NicoNicoNico]

  Ha. My mom’s done some non-published writing on her own, so I just told her about this. It’d be cool if she won it.

• [JonKimmel]

  Free money for A sf writeR

• [airship]

  My first work of fiction? My application for this grant…