summer pages

Welcome to summer! When a writer's fancy turns to ...pages. ;)
Summer can be filled with opportunities for writers. Yay! Summer can also be filled with distractions for writers. Boo! One writer friend of mine recently completed some pages while on vacation. Kudos, to you, writer! Another of my writer friends has to deal with her kids out of school in the summer. She has to be very organized to get her pages done. Kudos, to you, writer!

Whatever your personal situation, good luck producing pages!

The submission deadline for the next issue is fast approaching: July 15, 2017. Send us those summer pages.

summer reading

It feels like summer here in the U.S. Rocky Mountains and in summer my thoughts turn to ...reading. It's probably a legacy from having summer vacations off of school, but I've always done extra reading in the summertime. How about you?

I made a list of books I'd like to read and consulted my local library. Lo and behold, they had most of them. I picked many of them up and have been happily reading ever since. (And, yes, libraries are awesome--but that's a post for another time.)

If you are frugal like me, there's another excellent source of free fiction. Yes, you guessed it: Electric Spec. We have twelve years of super stories posted! They are all still there. For example, one of our first stories, ever, was "Stanley Kubric Channels Cheech and Chong" by Bruce Golden.
Check out the archives! (And let me know of any bad links.)

Send us your story, and who knows? Maybe someone will read it online in summer 2029!

toot toot!

We aren't ones to toot our own horn, but Electric Spec is pretty popular. (Okay, so now, apparently, we are ones to toot.)
We've had a few different hosters so I don't have stats for our entire run of the ezine. But, so far this year, we've had approximately 29,183 visits and 95,989 hits. W00t! This is neat because it means authors and artists get eyes--and we're all about getting recognition for our authors and artists. And sharing awesome creative content, of course! We love our readers.

As an indicator of the ezine's popularity, I do have the stats for the blog's entire run. And they're pretty nice:
Pageviews all time history: 586,531.
I also love that we're international. Check out the graphic below:

Send us your stories!

issue zeitgeist

I'm still enjoying the marvelous May 2017 issue of Electric Spec and I hope you are, too. :)
Even after twelve years, it's a little remarkable to me that each issue seems to achieve its own unique zeitgeist. I'd say the zeitgeist of this new issue is competition. We have two stories "Northwest Regional" and "Corporate Robo Renegade Piston" which are explicitly about competition. The other three stories also have competitive elements of the 'good versus evil' variety. Even Nikki's review has a 'love versus hate' dichotomy.

Of course, art isn't created in a vacuum... Is competition in the air in our human zeitgeist? I think it is. I'm happy that authors can capture that zeitgeist and use it in constructive ways.
And I'm grateful that we at Electric Spec can share the results of that creativity with the world at large.

We're accepting submissions for our awesome August 2017 issue. Send us your stories!