A couple of science fiction and fantasy writing workshops to tell you about: one in Ottawa, the other in Montreal. The one in Ottawa takes place on February 26 on the University of Ottawa campus. It’s a day-long affair led by local authors Derek Künsken, Matt Moore and Hayden Trenholm. It costs $40, with proceeds going toward Can-Con, the local SF convention. Here are the details. I’m going to this one. The one in Montreal, which I can’t attend, takes place on Tuesday evenings from April 3 to May 22. Called Sense of Wonder: Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction Stories, it’s led by Claude Lalumière. It costs $175 (less if you’re a Quebec Writers’ Federation member).

A couple of things about how writing about writing has turned into writing about the writing business. Catherynne M. Valente is sick of talking about ebooks: “But remember how when we were all kids and wanted to be writers and a big part of that was sitting around with other bookish people and talking about literature? Yeah, me too. Nowhere in there was a deep longing to talk about epub vs MOBI until I can’t remember which one makes techno music.”

And Paul Jessup says that he’s “sick of the focus, always the focus, on the business side of things, on the making the money side of things.”

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Realms of Fantasy editor Shawna McCarthy says her magazine, one of the last genre magazines to require paper submissions, will be moving to online submissions soon. “Not just yet, mind you, so don’t start sending files until we announce it on the website and on our Facebook page. But it will be soon, we promise!” (That still leaves F&SF.)

Noting for future reference: Ten Terrific Resources for Writing Space-Based Hard Science Fiction, a guest post on the SFWA website by Mike Brotherton. Some of them I’m already familiar with; I already have one of the books. One resource I might add to the list is Celestia, the open-source space simulator application: because you can position your point of view anywhere in the universe, I’ve used it to figure out what the nearest stars are to a given star system, which is useful for building a spacefaring civilization, and what the constellations look like from that system, which is handy if you have an astronomer among your characters.

A couple of interesting posts from Mary Robinette Kowal, whose novel Shades of Milk and Honey has just been nominated for a Nebula, about the use of language in 1907, and the resources she uses to figure out whether or not a word or phrase was in use in 1907 and how somebody would swear in 1907. Obviously the novel she’s working on right now takes place in 1907, but this sort of thing is interesting for anyone who’s trying to find the mot juste for a work of fiction set in any historical period.

Deanna Hoak is a freelance copyeditor who specializes in science-fiction and fantasy novels; her blog is full of entries about copyediting that offer interesting insights into that line of work — which I have to admit I’m more than a bit curious about. (No surprise: I’m both a science-fiction fan and someone whose government work usually involves copyediting in some form or other, though editing draft regulations isn’t quite the same thing.) Posts of hers that stood out for me include Proofreading vs. Copyediting, The Copyediting Process, The Importance of Style Sheets, My Start in Publishing, and Understanding Your Copyedited Manuscript.

Further reading: Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s Making Book, which I read back in 2005.

Analog is accepting electronic submissions as of next Tuesday, SFScope reports. I think that leaves F&SF as the only major SF market that still insists on paper submissions from its contributors.

At this rate I won’t need any of the U.S. stamps I bought several years back to use for return envelopes.