Wizards of the Coast Open Call

Snagged from slwhitman:

Wizards of the Coast Discoveries, a brand new imprint debuting in January 2008, is looking for well-written speculative fiction. We will open for submissions September 1 and close for submissions January 15. Further guidelines can be found at http://www.wotcdiscoveries.com.

Agented submissions are welcome year round.

In January 2008, Discoveries will launch this exciting new imprint with Firefly Rain, a southern gothic ghost story by Richard Dansky. Further launch titles include Last Dragon by J.M. McDermott and Devil’s Cape by Rob Rogers, both first-time novelists who were selected from previous open calls.

Good Luck!

--

As it's adult fiction, I'm definitely not going to make this year's call. This is the third year they've done it, and it's probable they'll continue to do it in the future, though, so one of these years...

Stealth Geekery and FanSpeak

shanna_s has talked a number of times about the art of being a Stealth Geek: someone who appears to be a "normal" person to other non-geeks, but in actuality can speak geek just as fluently as he or she can speak pop-culture or sports or a host of other topics. I've always enjoyed this concept, though I suspect I'm a bit less stealthy than true Stealth Geeks.

Recently, however, willshetterly posted a link on FanSpeak as actual body-language dialect. I'm not sure how to think about this, as I suspect my linguistic usage tends to fall somewhere in between FanSpeak and Midwestern. (I catch myself using the past participle of buy not as bought but as boughten, which rhymes with gotten, which I either picked up in Iowa or Michigan. Also, I use cattycorner for... huh... I'm not even sure what the non-Midwestern word for that is. Just across, I suspect.)

So my new ponderance is this: is the difference between classic geeks and stealth geeks the use of FanSpeak (or lack thereof)? Of can stealth geeks just switch between the two? I'll have to ask shanna_s and see what she thinks...

Edit: According to lj's spell-check, ponderance is not an actual word. I think it should be, so I'm leaving it as is, which may somehow relate to the query I'm making.