Daily Science Fiction

[littlerdog.livejournal.com]

Every day, a story from Daily Science Fiction appears in my inbox. Every day, Thunderbird tags it as possibly a scam. Every day, Tbird gives me two options: Disable all warnings or Ignore this particular one. There's no halfway house. I have to be warned every day or never.

Rest assured, Daily SF is not a scam. You sign up for a free SF story every day and that's what you get.

Thunderbird is just over-enthusiastic, I guess.

The reader is invited to rate each story on a scale of 1 to 7 rocket dragons (yeah) and to leave comments. I think I did leave some ratings and comments in the early days, but so many of these authors seem to be newbies making their first professional sale that tearing their story to pieces in a place they were sure to visit eagerly and with hope in their hearts felt mean. So I stopped doing it.

The correct place to destroy an author's dreams and break their hearts is, I've always felt, the slush pile.

However. It is very tempting to write 'Why I Liked (or Didn't Like) Your Story' somewhere. Maybe somewhere the author will never know, unless they obsessively search on their own name like nobody I know. Ahem. And some of these stories are so bad that they could be asking for it, if you believed in the concept of asking for it, which our society does and I don't. Well, I try not to. But really. Sometimes they are very bad.

Different standards, different editorial tastes, subjectivity, publish the best of what you get, yada yada.

Or just bad.

It's my blog (okay, it's Monissaw's blog) so I can be as grouchy as I please.

And YES I did submit to them in the early days and YES they did reject everything I sent, including 'Snow Cat', which eventually found a home with ASIM. So you can attribute spite and envy to me as well. Eppur si muove.