Sideshow

I’m pleased to announce that SpaceWesterns.com was recently featured in AMC’s SciFi Scanner Site of the Week.

SpaceWesterns.com is holding another poetry contest. This time we’re looking for your Space Western SenryÅ«! All submissions must be sent electronically via our contest form by July 15th, 2008. The winners will be published on August 6th, 2008.

This time the three celebrity judges are:

Alana Joli Abbott is the author of two fantasy novels, Into the Reach and Departure, the writer for the web-comic Cowboys and Aliens 2, the co-writer for Steampunk Musha RPG, and contributor to several gaming resources, including Serenity Adventures. Ms. Abbott lives near New Haven, CT, where she often partakes of the city’s famous thin crust pizza.

Mark L. Van Name is former Executive Vice President for Ziff-Davis Media, and the head of a technology assessment company in the Triangle. He’s authored or co-authored over a thousand computer-related articles and one technical book, co-founded the Sycamore Hill Writer’s Workshop, co-edited Intersections: The Sycamore Hill anthology, and has sold over a dozen SF short stories. His fiction has appeared in such places as Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, The Year’s Best Science Fiction (Ninth Edition), Jim Baen’s Universe, and multiple anthologies. He is the author of the Jon & Lobo series of novels: One Jump Ahead (2007), Slanted Jack (2008), and Overthrowing Heaven (due in June 2009).

Seamus Kevin Fahey was working as a Writer’s Assisant on Battlestar Galactica for two years before being promoted to staff writer. Meanwhile he helped create a story arc for the Battlestar Galactica: Origins comic series based on the show, and also won the Slamdance teleplay competition for his script “Ghost Town”. In 2007, after he was promoted to Staff Writer, he wrote his first script for the series’ fourth season, which is also his first professional screen-writing credit.

Visit https://www.spacewesterns.com/contest/ for more information.

I’m very pleased to announce that for a second month in a row SpaceWesterns.com has had high traffic. Personally I was expecting a big dip in the month of May, but the traffic didn’t fall-off nearly as much as I had anticipated.

• April: 20,279 page views/15,415 visits/13,529 unique visitors
• May: 17,012 page views/13,811 visits/12,023 unique visitors

From what I’ve been told that’s comparable to the major magazines… But don’t just take my word for it: Check out the Alexa graph comparing the traffic of SpaceWesterns.com to Asimov’s website and Analog’s website for the last three months.

Let’s just say that I’m entirely stoked by the fact that I can place SpaceWesterns.com on the same chart with Asimov’s and Analog.

Doug Goodman provided us with Ice Dwarves. It was the second original story the was run on SpaceWesterns.com. How can you beat a story about farm-raised genetically engineered beasties on Pluto?

The first interview appearing on SpaceWesterns.com was an Interview with Keith DeCandido, author of the Serenity novelization, Star Craft: Ghost: Nova, and Star Trek: Tales of the Dominion War, among other stories.

Ben Jonjak holds the special place on SpaceWesterns.com. His story, Threshold, is the first original piece of fiction that we published.

I was interviewed on SyFy Portal’s SyFy Radio about The Battlestar Galactica Code: The Last Cylon article.

evilrooster on Live Journal hath treated our minds to two minor vignettes from Joss Whedon’s Serenity as if drawn from the pen of William Shakespeare.

Verily, more of her, I do impeach!

In March of 2007, before the ’zine had even launched, I attended Lunacon 50. While there, I was on the Space Cowboys panel with Ernest Lilley, Marvin Kaye, and Keith R.A. DeCandido. On April 7th, 2007, this feature became the first audio file published on SpaceWesterns.com, and distributed through our podCast channel.

“I always considered [the Star Wars] films Westerns. What made the classic Westerns of guys like John Ford great was that the stories they told were so simple that they ended up being deeply resonant and inspiring.”