- Stories must involve issues that the human race will likely face in the near
future. A tiny set of examples are:
- climate change: The short story Warm Spot in a Cold Place is about a group of people struggling to survive just ten years after an ice age has started.
- new energy sources: The short story Sea of Energy is about a group of people who've discovered a new source of energy but disagree about how to release it to the world.
- diseases, asteroids, space travel, undersea living, ...
- The stories must be stories and not just short descriptions of some idea.
For example, I have stories I wrote when I was much younger where the whole
thing is just an eleven page description of a novel type of space ship taking
off. That's not much of a story.
- Stories should be no longer than 2500 words (around 12 pages of double spaced
type.)
- The story must belong to you. It will be formated as copyrighted
to you.
- If at any time you want the story removed from rimstar.org then just
ask and it will be removed. For example, you might sell the rights to a
magazine in which case it should no longer be on rimstar.org.
- Your story may not be used. However, if you follow the above guidelines then that's
not likely to happen.
- It will be used solely for the purpose of displaying under the
http://rimstar.org/stories webpage.
- If you have any illustrations that belong to you to go with it then
all the better!
- Send your stories to stevend at rimstar dot org. The text of the story must be supplied in a format that can be copied and pasted into a webpage to be formated like all the others under http://rimstar.org/stories. So don't waste time on formatting. i.e. a pdf file where the text cannot be extracted from it in some way is no good. Simply including the text in the body of an email works great!
Thank you! I'm looking forward to your stories and with sharing them with everyone else!
A few pointers for struggling writers to help get started
A few pointers are included below to help new writers struggling to write something... Feel free to ignore them.
A good trick for coming up with a science fiction story idea, for example, is to start out with a simple idea, an ice age happens, and then add a situation, a group of people are living in the ice age just ten years after it started and are getting ready to leave. Add a few characters likely to be in the situation and all of a sudden obvious issues arise. The stories people most likely will read are ones where you can complete the sentence, "This is a story about..." and the remainder of the sentence involves some conflict or a situation where someone discovers something about themselves or has to make a descision.
In the story Warm Spot in a Cold Place the wife of the main character gets sick at the start of the story. All of a sudden the main character has to figure out how to save her in a land without medical facilities and where people are focused on leaving. In the course of this you get to describe life in this ice age, something which if simply described would be an essay but not a story. And since there's now a human struggle involved most readers will not be able to put it down. Also, in the course of writing it you'll have had fun fleshing out your ideas more by colliding with issues such as where will they get medical equipment, where will the operation take place, how will they keep the operating room warm and clean, how will they produce sufficient light for the duration of the operation, how will they power the lights, ...
Thinking of a beginning, middle and end to the story will also help make sure you've covered clarifying the situation (beginning), developing the story (middle) and resolving it (end.)
