Twelfth Planet Press is now open for submissions to the New Ceres webzine for Issue 3, due September 2009.
Editors: Alisa Krasnostein and Tehani Wessely
Queries should be directed to: twelfthplanetpress@gmail.com
Submissions will close July 31st 2009
Payment: AUD$50.00 per story
Rights: First International rights, and exclusivity for one year after first publication. We are not looking to reprint stories that have been previously published in print or online.
Submit to: Attached as .rtf documents, submit to ceressubs@gmail.com
Conditions of Use: For more information see: New Ceres Conditions of Use
During the war that left Earth uninhabitable, refugees from the doomed planet fled to the outer colonies. Many of them found their way to New Ceres, a planet that embraced the Age of Enlightenment almost two hundred years ago, and has not yet let go.
The water may be green and spaceships may be landing on a regular basis, but New Ceres is a planet firmly entrenched in Eighteenth Century culture. Offworld technology is strictly forbidden to anyone outside the government, and powdered wigs are in fashion.
The New Ceres project is set in a shared world where writers are free to play with genre, characters and worldbuilding. The shared world of New Ceres (and surrounding system) is copyrighted under Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5, some rights reserved. The writers and artists who contribute their works to New Ceres retain the copyrights to their individual works of art or writing, and must be approached individually for permission to reprint or otherwise use these works. The standard contract for the New Ceres webzine requires all writers to release the original characters, worldbuilding details and history contained within their individual works into the shared world of New Ceres, for common use.
New Ceres Issue 1 initially appeared in 2006. This issue of the ezine is free for download and always will be. Issue 2 of the webzine followed in 2007. New Ceres Nights and Angel Rising recently took the project to the printed format. Across these works, Tansy Rayner Roberts created the eyebrow-raising duo of La Duchesse and Pepin in her story “Scandal at the Feast of Saturn” in Issue 1 which Lucy Sussex picked up and ran with in her award-winning story “Mist and Murder” in Issue 2. This much-loved pair were back for more scandal, this time in print in New Ceres Nights. Dirk Flinthart introduced us to George Gordon in Issue 1 in “She Walks in Beauty”. We followed him to the Sunset Isles in the novella Angel Rising where he fought ninjas alongside nuns to fulfil his role as Proctor. And then we saw how he came to be so entrenched in New Ceres in the first place in “Debutante” (New Ceres Nights).
In 2009, the New Ceres Nights anthology took New Ceres to hardcopy for a second time. New Ceres Nights features thirteen exciting stories of freedom, debauchery, decadence, subterfuge and murder set against the backdrop of powdered wigs, coffee houses, duels and balls. Each writer has stamped their own claim on pieces of this world and its story.
Where will New Ceres go next?
Look out for the relaunch of the New Ceres website leading up to the release of Issue 3 of the webzine.