Hey everyone,
Baycon, a convention which I've long been associated with, is doing a nice thing for new writers. Specifically, they're starting up as a professional-paying SFWA-qualifying market. Full details may be found here:
http://baycon.org/guidelines.html
They'll be buying one piece of flash fiction and one short story for their 30th anniversary, that being this next year, 2012. Original fiction in the science fiction or fantasy field set in your own original world.
Check their website for minimum and maximum requirements, but it looks to be a good market for folk with professionally paid and published game writing but no professional fiction sales as of yet.
Best of luck to everyone who submits.
Sounds interesting... But some of the minimum requirements seem to be rather... Unnecessarily stringent. I can understand wanting someone who has been published previously (but if you're looking for up-and-coming writers, they likely won't have been), but the rest of the requirements seem a tad overkill - a degree in writing? Workshopped a story previously? Attended one of a very small number of workshops?
I'll probably still try to enter something into this, even though I don't meet any of the requirements, and hope for the best (I know I can do some rather fun short story work, and the theme sounds interesting), but I really think they're being overly stringent on the submission requirements.
Magius out.
You don't have to have all of the requirements, just one. The workshops listed are all highly respected in the SF industry. And if you've had one professional sale, you may be looking for a couple more to qualify you for SFWA membership.