My poem Things in my Stuff Drawer is going to be posted on w5RAn tomorrow. W5RAn is an independent collaborative content site whose people I met down at SXSW last year. This will be my second poem to be featured by them. The poem will be up starting at 6:00 – I assume that means AM, not PM, but I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.
1 CommentTonight I was plugging away at some submissions/future rejections, and I noticed something both disturbing and embarrassing. It has been over 3 months since I moved, and I got tired of manually typing my new address, and I figured it was probably time to give the query letter templates the once over anyway.
The query letter for The Redheaded Stepchild misspelled protagonist. The query letter for Two Steps Forward misspelled Forward. Twice. And it’s in the title. It also referenced The Other Dentenia Zickafoose when it should not have. It’s no wonder these magazines have dismissed without a second thought. That, and “I’m not what they’re looking for.”
There are few things I hate worse than writing query letters. I’m sure many of my fellow writers feel the same pain. We’re writers; we want our work to speak for itself. I have part of marketing degree, and I still hate marketing myself. So I spend some time trying to say what I want to say, and save it to a template so I don’t have to think about it every time. Apparently, I’ve been too lazy with this as of late, and as much as I hate, I know that a good query letter is important and a necessarily evil on the route to being a novelist. I encourage all you writers out there to spend 15 minutes to take a look at your query letters, just to make sure they are in tip-top shape. And that the title of your piece is not misspelled.
I am equally annoyed when I see outdated or incorrect information on a publisher’s website, or worse, a 404 or a bounced email. Since most literary journals are run by colleges, I know they don’t accept submissions during the summer. News flash – it’s back to school time, so you’re probably accepting submissions again. And if your submission banner reads “We are currently not accepting submissions. We will begin accepting submissions in July 2010” and it is now September 2010, there is something wrong with that. If you say your next edition is coming April 2010, it should be posted by April 30, not still hanging around as a “coming soon” in November. You want me to not be lazy, do my due diligence, see what kind of work you typically publish and then craft my query letters accordingly? Do yours. Update your goddamn website.
Leave a CommentI’ve been struggling with killing a lot of my less-than-stellar ideas for the last few weekly writing challenges. Sometimes, no matter how many ways you try to look at and change a piece of crap, it’s still a piece of crap.
But this week, it was all inspiration and just an eesny bit of motivation and perspiration. I write best when it comes like that. Not to say that this new flash fiction piece is my best work ever, but I give it the stamp of approval instead of the wadded ball in the trash.
This was inspired by an album released early last week by artist who is part of my favorite band, and a word I have hated ever since an unfortunate incident in college. Enjoy 🙂
Leave a CommentI’ve been battling iliotibial band issues with my marathon training, and I’ve been going through a whirlwind of emotions about it. Runner’s World had an article the other day about how dealing with running injuries is a lot like the normal grieving process (DABDA) and I think I am finally reaching acceptance, so I felt it was crucial to write this flash fiction piece, just to help me get that much closer to healed.
Enjoy!
Leave a CommentMy recent writing challenge product Manifesto of an Angry Chipmunk is being featured on the Rose City Sister’s flash fiction online anthology today. Take 5 minutes and check it out!
http://www.rosecitysisters.com/
1 CommentFor the second week in a row I have honored the sacred weekly writing challenge. This week, I looked to twitter for inspiration, and I had two suggestions that caught my eye. One was simply “chipmunks” and the other was to write from an animal’s perspective. I killed two birds with one stone in this flash fiction piece I wrote in my head while swimming laps tonight.
This was without a doubt one of the most fun things I have written, and I am sure this neglected toy of my dog’s has just as much trouble getting into her head as I do. We’ll see what the Rose City Sisters think of this one 🙂
2 CommentsI recently (read: two days ago) decided to start giving myself weekly writing challenges to keep cranking out new stuff to pimp to publishers. For some reason, I decided to make this week’s challenge “Finding love during Shark Week”. I am pretty damn amused by Shark Week, and it stuck.
So, I took some creative liberties with an actual story and adapted the facts to fit my little writing challenge. The result is here, a new poem called “Meeting Hokey.”
Got a writing challenge for me for next week?
1 CommentThe “I Write Like” phenomenon has been certified viral on the interwebs this month. In case you’ve been living under a rock, it’s a site where you post a few paragraphs of your writing, click a button, and then it tells you which famous writer your writing is most like. It claims to analyze your word choice and your writing style and compare it to that of famous writers.
I am typically far behind the curve when it comes to trying a fad. Case in point: I only recently discovered what sticky bands are. Case in point: a TV show usually has to be on for about 3 seasons before I will watch the first episode. So in internet time, I am just about in the third season of I Write Like, and this is what it said about me…
First, I uploaded the first 3 paragraphs of Two Steps Forward.
I’d never heard of Raymond Chandler, so I Write Like took me somewhere that I could become familiar. Once I read his title list, I realized some of the titles sounded familiar and I was sure I’d seen some of the covers before, but when I went to read the first pages of a couple of his major titles, I didn’t see the resemblance to Two Steps Forward whatsoever. Maybe it’s just me.
Still, they recommended trying it a few times, so then, I tried it with the first 3 paragraphs of The Other Dentenia Zickafoose.
Well, I certainly know Stephen King, but I don’t think I have read anything of his besides On Writing since I was in junior high, and what I remember of Steven King most is the terrible movies like Cujo and Pet Sematary that used to frighten the hell out of me when I was a kid and later disappointed me as an adult. So I sought out the first few pages of The Gunslinger, one of his later works, and sure enough, it was pretty similar in both structure, syntax, and word choice to The Other Dentenia Zickafoose. Maybe I should put that in my query letters.
Finally, I analyzed the first three paragraphs of my novel, The Redheaded Stepchild:
=I’d never heard of Cory Doctorow, so I searched the Amazons (the site, not the geographical region) for a book that I could search inside to see if I Write Like was full of shit, or if it was accurate enough to pass. I landed on Little Brother, and perused the first couple pages. Lo0 and behold, it sounded a lot like the beginning to The Redheaded Stepchild, but from a male perspective. If only “teh suck” had been a known phrase when I first starting writing this thing in the before time.
I still find myself thinking: Really? 3 different people? A friend of mine tried 4 different works of hers and got the same result 3 of the 4 times. Of the people that I have compared my work to, none of these three has been one of them. Maybe I just adapt my writing style to the type of story I am crafting. Then again, I could just be a random spaz. Also, I apparently write like a dude. Maybe someday some dude will find out he writes like Kelly Hitchcock.
1 CommentI’ve been deeply entrenched in the process of moving, and had an adventure on moving day that is definitely short story-worthy, but slightly before that I received the 2011 edition of the Writer’s Market for my birthday. I have only perused it a couple of times since I took it out of the Amazon box, but two things in particular struck me about what I have seen:
Let’s face it, the editors of these publications know they are not going to be financing anyone’s lifestyle by paying for their work. Sure, your New Yorkers and Atlantic Monthlies are going to keep paying writers because they want the gourmet stuff and because they have the readership and subscriptions to pay for it. But your Northern Oregon Literary Reviews know that writers have options. They can post their stuff for free anywhere. It’s the prestige of being an author published in an actual literary journal that writers are really seeking, not the money. So why pay for it? Here’s a short list of jobs at which you could make more money than poet submitting to literary magazines:
But the ways writers get noticed and make money is changing fast, and these journals are starting to pay attention, which means some of them are running scared, while others are rising to the challenge. Anyone want to take bets on whether there will be a Writer’s Market in 2021?
Leave a CommentAt the risk of sounding like a literary snob, I must admit publicly that I have not read many of the series that have become more popular than Molly Ringwald’s characters in 80s movies.
The Twilight Series I have not read this because I have no interest in vampire fiction for teens, and it stuns me that something so contrived could become so successful in such a short time.
Harry Potter Again, I always saw this as a series for children and fantasy is not a genre I enjoy. Still, when’s the last time people waited in line for a book?
The DaVinci Code and similar ilk by Dan Brown. I never got into this because mystery thrillers have never really done it for me.
But the more I think about these wildly popular series that I have never troubled myself to read, the more I think there may be another reason behind the self-important one I believe is me fighting against perceived mediocrity. I think I am jealous of the success of these books in spite of their literary value.
Granted, I don’t know if they actually are devoid of literary value, because I have never read them. For all I know, they could be highly visceral works filled with sardonic wit. I doubt it, but it’s possible. I’m also not trying to imply that if it’s not Tolstoy or Milton I won’t read it. In fact, the opposite is true. I try to sandwich my classic reading with something lighter and more mainstream. Love in the Time of Cholera was like a Dagwood sandwich whose contents I thought I would never finish devouring, but was bookended with a Judy Blume novel and something equally as light and enjoyable. I’m also definitely not trying to imply that anything I write equals the literary value of Updike or Vonnegut, but like it, it doesn’t fit into a nice little genre like Twilight, Harry Potter, or The DaVinci Code. I think that’s something that literary fiction writers struggle with a lot – trying to answer the question “So what kind of book is it?”
I have therefore resolved myself to read the aforementioned works to try and figure out what makes them so ferociously popular, instead of seething at them. Be warned – I will likely be reading these very conspicuously.
1 Comment