Posthuman Studios is seeking new-to-Eclipse Phase authors for our upcoming serial-style sourcebook project, Your Whispering Muse!
(February 1st: the Your Whispering Muse submissions period has closed! Thank you to everyone who submitted a proposal!)
Your Whispering Muse Introduction
The first series of Your Whispering Muse will be eight installments, each of them 4-6 pages (roughly 3400 or 5400 words). Your Whispering Muse will cover material that is "slice of life," "off the beaten path," and "you can drop this into your game/riff on it to make an adventure" — things that we don't get to cover in detail in major sourcebooks.
We want to work with many writers who are new to us on this project, as we're always looking for new authors but sometimes find them hard to integrate on more complex books. Your Whispering Muse is partly designed to get people's foot into our door and see if we like working together! We are especially interested in submissions from people who are often marginalized in tabletop gaming and publishing: people of color, women, transgender people, and those from other marginalized backgrounds or situations.
Potential Styles and Article Ideas
To juice your brain up, we have compiled a number of article ideas, and also three potential styles of articles. Use the list as inspiration, match it with an article style, and apply; or bring your own idea and apply one of the styles to it! Include the style information in your 100 word summary. Each eight-issue series of Your Whispering Muse will contain multiple articles in each style.
Style 1: Traditional Eclipse Phase — meshes main body text with a couple sidebars. It starts with in-character information and ends with a Game Information section.
Style 2: A listicle! — presents a number of items on a similar topic in an in-character voice. This style is best used for "slice of life"-style topics.
Style 3: Tables — a series of random-roll tables, grouped around related topics.
Ideas: Meathab, Space Fashion!, A Cool Specific Derelict Spaceship, A Swarm That Isn’t Anarchists, Sports, Bizarre Artificial Intelligence Mysteries, Scurrier Homeworld / Haplopelma, Ten Most Beautiful Sights in the Solar System, the Galactic Map project (Argonauts), Average Transhuman Days, 24 Births, 144 Overheard Conversation Snippets, Help Wanted Ads, Interactions with Everyday “Smart” Objects, Tragically Lost Keepsakes, Points of Etiquette in Microgravity.
We are not seeking submissions that include: alternate rules, additional equipment/morphs/ware/etc, plots with universe-altering scope, or that are prose fiction.
Include Important Details: This is a proposal to us, not a teaser. So if your pitch is about, for example, "a habitat that has a dark secret known only to a few," you need to explain the secret in the proposal!
Important Dates
This Open Call launches on January 17th 2018 and closes on January 31st, 2018, at 11:59PM, Pacific Time. This Open Call is closed.
We will contact accepted writers shortly after that and writing assignments will be sent in mid-February. First drafts will be due in late February, and second drafts in mid March. If these dates will not work for you, please do not apply to this open call.
Behind the Scenes
We'll be anonymizing all of the submissions before reading them. Submissions will be evaluated based on creativity, general interest to Eclipse Phase gamers, writing quality, publishing a variety of styles/content throughout the series, and that quest for the elusive perfect vegetarian space BBQ sauce.
We'll probably assign more than eight installments, to provide a little bit of padding against delays. Those additional assignments will be released sometime in the future.
Each Your Whispering Muse assignment pays a flat fee of $200USD via Check or PayPal upon our approval of the second/final draft.
Please address questions to info@posthumanstudios.com.
Fine Print: You'll be asked to accept this disclaimer: "I agree that by submitting to this Open Call that this idea is my original creation within the Eclipse Phase universe created and owned by Posthuman Studios LLC. This submission includes no transfer of rights and creates no business relationship between Posthuman Studios LLC and myself. All submissions will be kept on file for future projects and you may be contacted in the future if we decide we want to use your proposal."
