Tuesday, June 26, 2007

OSC's Writing Essay

Having been out of town for the past ten days, you can imagine the pile of catching up I have to attend to. So I'll bore you with the details of my trip a little later. In the meantime, I wanted to direct your attention to an essay written by OSC. Since I've taken over here as editor of IGMS I've been posting essays by the authors of the stories we publish about the creation of those stories. I'm pleased to say that we'll also be including those kinds of essays in the anthology Tor is publishing next year. Well, as OSC was writing each of the essays to accompany his four stories in the antho, I guess he got into the spirit of the thing because he wrote a great essay about the creation of the Ender story we recently posted to issue four. It can be found in the magazine.

How One Story Can Give Birth to Another

The essay can be accessed for free, whether or not you've bought that issue. If you want to read the story and you've already bought issue four you can simply log in with the same password you already have. If not, individual issues are only $2.50, or you can buy gift subscriptions for multiple issues at a nice discount and use them to access any issue of your choice (past present, or future issues; you can even skip over issues if you want to, you're not locked in like with other magazines).

Happy reading.

4 comments:

Maria said...

question:

I started reading the essay, but noticed it is in very light gray type. Several paragraphs in, I can't continue (I have problems reading small text, white on black or faded colors.) If I pay for this issue--will the text be the same light text or does it darken?

I've purchased single issues before and don't remember a problem with the text being light. And I will go back and read more of the essay, I just have to do it in small batches, but I wondered if the text wasn't in black for some reason...

Thx,
Maria

Edmund R. Schubert said...

Maria,

When I look at the page with the essay after logging in it is black, but if I log out and then go back to the page it is gray. So I guess the answer is, Yes, if you buy the issue it is easier to read. I rarely look at the issues without being logged in, so I was unaware of that happening.

Maria said...

Thanks for responding! When I logged into one of the issues I had already read, it was black (I didn't think of checking that before!) Anyway, the new stuff, like the essay on Mr. Snape is lighter text so I guess that is the way it is meant to be. It's probably worse on my old laptop than on a newer screen also. I probably need newer eyes, a newer machine...

Anonymous said...

Writing an essay story is never that easy because you have to come with an issue that will surely click. Remember you don't just write to impress but to make the readers understand your story.