Carl & Jerry Fanfic and Fan Art
I am hard at work on the fifth and final volume of Carl and Jerry: Their Complete Adventures, and the last volume is a little different from the first four, each of which contained at least 24 stories. (The first volume contained partial year 1954, for a total of 27 stories.) John Frye did not write a story for every month in the years 1963-1964. Those two years show only 20 stories, with the last one appearing in November 1964. This leaves me a little extra room in a 200-page book, and I want to try something: Carl and Jerry fanfic. I've been asking around for new "classic" Carl and Jerry tutorial stories, and I received one not long back from George Ewing WA8WTE. I'm planning one myself, and I think there's space for yet another one or even two. By "classic" I mean a story written precisely as John Frye would have written it, set in the early-mid 1960s, and limited to technology that was present (if not necessarily uibiquitous) back then. I want the same characters, the same settings, and the same general length, at least 2,000 but no more than 3,000 words. If you're writer enough to do good pastiche, stylistic similarity is also a plus. (This may be tougher than it sounds.)
Above all, the story must present some sort of tech concept in a way that helps people understand how it works. People who followed Carl and Jerry when they were first-run will know precisely what this means; if you're much younger than I and unfamiliar with them, please download and read some of the free stories (all PDFs in the 1.5 - 3 MB size range) from my Carl and Jerry page.
This is a paying market, though it won't make you rich and I don't think it will get you into SFWA. I'm buying first rights only, and paying something somewhere south of $80; how much south depends on how much work I have to put into it to make it publishable. Again, we're talking a POD book with lifetime sales potential in the low (or maybe mid) hundreds, so there's not a lot of money on the table. It really is fanfic.
The new stories will need illos; again, done in a style that respects the original period art without necessarily duplicating it. I don't know how many artists I have in my readership (my stats tell me I get 12,000 - 15,000 unique visitors per month, excluding LiveJournal, so I hope there are some) but if you're interested, there are illos in the free stories to give you a sense for what I mean. The artists and art styles varied broadly over the series' 10 years; some of the art is realistic, and some borders on cartoons. The approach matters less than skill in execution. Again, I'm paying for the art, but I'm not sure how much yet.
Contact me if you're interested.