. Spinning .

Been meaning to spread the word here about Dorothee Lang’s latest project, The Daily s-press, a place that showcases books daily with the focus on new books from small presses (+ indie presses): paperbacks, chapbooks, and e-books,
presented by authors and small publishers that could benefit from the exposure this site can offer.

Dorothee runs The Blue Print Review and as a writer of fine prose and poetry, she has the foresight to know what the public is seeking in the literary arts, and is gracious enough to publicize those authors.

Go check out the site, see what’s hot, and spread the word to others who might wish to submit their own published pieces for Dorothee to showcase at the Daily s-press.

Loved this article by Kirsty Logan at the Pank Magazine Blog on her experience with joining the Fictionaut group:

Some of it is genius, some of it is crap, and some of it is probably amazing if I could only understand it. I read Fictionaut more avidly than I read any other magazines or websites, and I feel more connected to it; maybe because I feel like I know these writers.

It’s a lonely calling, this writing business, and it’s ego-bruising more often than it sets you flying, but the support of other writers is something that keeps one going sometimes. Kirsty says it well:

Because that’s what I love best about all this social media – the blogs, the status updates, the trackbacks. I love when people comment on one another’s words. I love dialogue. I love that people are responding to the thoughts of others.

On top of this, I found two messages today in response to my own commenting on there:

“Thanks for your comments on my story. I always look for your picture in the comments column, and if I don’t see it in a day or two, I delete the story!”

and

“Susan, your comment makes writing the story so worth it!”

That for me, as a fellow writer, is one of the best comments I could get back.

Good article at Outsider Writers on the purposes and personal needs and uses of communities founded around a common interest: What is A Writing Community, Anyway?

Yes, I’m STILL reading Confessions of Nat Turner and will post on it soon, but it’s obvious that I haven’t been the twice-a-day poster girl here for a while. Well, there are some good reasons for that. I’m writing. And, I’m getting quite a few stories published.

So in this age of me-me-me, I’m focusing on my own writing more than reading someone else’s–though I am reading about fifteen stories a day on the writers colony site fictionaut. There’s a sense of enthusiasm and support from the writers gathered here that I’ve not found elsewhere at this high a level of quality writing. These people aren’t wannabes, they’re for the most part, published authors and editors so they have that burning fire and unrelenting drive that makes writing a big part of their lives.

In the past few months, I’ve realized my own ambitions of being published or forthcoming in literary journals such as The Blue Print Review, elimae, Bewildering Stories, The New River Journal, fourpaperletters, metazen, Litsnack, Istanbul Literary Review, and others. A Valentine’s Day Challenge turned into a group of 25 stories and poems that will be published in chapbook form and I’m glad to say that my story is included. But it’s taken me a long time to get to this point and I can’t sit and rest on my laurels. What pleases me very much is that a couple of the stories were written in hypertext and that I’m finding publishers willing to work with me on this and include it in their journals.

So that’s where I’ve been and that’s where I’ll be for a while, particularly now with many of the submission deadlines closing before the summer. I’ve got a whole batch of new stories that need endings, and a long way to go before I can rest, but Spinning and its sister Hypercompendia are not dead, just holding their breath while I play on the railroad tracks.

I wrote this one a while ago, as part of a series on the 7 Deadly Sins. I read it at the Wesleyan Writers Conference back in ‘05 during a student reading program but it was waiting for just the right voice, physical voice, and I found that in Finnegan Flawnt.

Click to listen to:  Lust

Fictionaut’s a great colony of writers and between yesterday and (ongoing) today, there are at least 20 hastily written great Valentine’s Day stories by writers that rose to the fun challenge. This group is just one of overwhelmingly good writers, well-represented in the literary journals, and best of all, the most supportive and helpful bunch of artists I’ve ever encountered.

Here’s my contribution to the challenge: A Gift of Love

But do read them all, the poetry and flash fiction would make a great anthology!

I use twitter as the person next to me that’s available for a passing thought but isn’t there right now. I just tweeted: “Uh-oh. I’m beginning to be irked by “moments” that want to pass for flash fiction story.”

Flash fiction is usually at maximum 1000 words, usually less than 500. I’ve just started getting into it and was happy to see that my writing could compress into that form without losing story. I love the concise quick kill, the clean stage with a few obvious props of painted trees and a bench that signifies a park. It is a form that goes for the jugular, and it reaches it first try. It’s a heart-thumping, gut-wrenching, jaw-dropping scene that envelopes a lifetime in a moment. But it doesn’t always work just for its lack of verbiage.

In amongst the jewels I’m finding a lot of cut glass. The writing is superb, but frankly, the story isn’t there at all. While leaving much to the imagination of the reader is fine, leaving the reader to write the whole story is (Barthes be damned) presumptive and ridiculous if one still wants to use the self-designation of story writer.

A moment captured properly can indeed be the representation of a life story. Then again, it could just be an interesting moment and not a story at all. After all, I can look at you and say, “Hey!” and where’s the story in that? But if forced to make something of it because that’s all that’s been presented, you will. Am I angry at you? Did you do something wrong? Do I need help with something? Do I have a knife hidden somewhere?

More on this later. I like to keep it brief–but informative.

This is an interesting article by New Pages on the importance of the 2-Year College Literary Magazine (thanks to Dorothee of Blue Print Review for pointing this out).

There are as many reasons to publish a topical magazine as there are reasons to write. For some larger institutions, it may bring in some bucks–though nowhere close to what a good ball team can bring in. Then again, editors aren’t paid college coach salaries either. Then again, the article doesn’t overlook the small college as a source worth scouting:

“Maybe it’s time we started paying attention to what’s going on outside of the literary bubble, so we can see some of the raw talent of writers who aren’t afraid to experiment.”

There is the real and honest effort to showcase literature and the arts as a path of cultural and intellectual excellence. There is a purpose to simply encourage students by showcasing their work and firing an interest that may have lain dormant or repressed. And sometimes, it’s used as a handout to impress alumni and others in hopes of donations.

“Community college students are non-traditional – so you have this whole crop of writers from incredibly diverse backgrounds,” says John Dermot Woods, faculty advisor for Luna, the student-run literary magazine published at Nassau Community College in New York. “The possibility of finding something there, something raw, something that isn’t out of a polished school of literature or thinking, is a really wonderful thing.”

I went to a small community college, Tunxis in Farmington, CT, and encouraged by a faculty member, planned, edited, and physcially published a small, hot off the xerox, literary magazine called “otto” that was eventually brought to the board and given some funding to allow production of a slick, color-photo magazine published annually. Community colleges are not luckily taken up by the strict focus on sports and are more open to all aspects of learning, English and grammar being an important element of that learning.

And some grow to become a very important element of the college:

“We weren’t content to be a small literary journal and just publish our students,” says Bart Edelman, the editor of Eclipse, a Glendale College literary magazine that went national in 2000. Eclipse reserves about 15-20% of the magazine for student work. “I thought it was really important to do something greater and to allow our students to have that unusual opportunity to be part of a national literary landscape. We wanted to see if we could have the best of both worlds.”

The article goes on to note that small college publications face the same problems of other publishing houses and large university presses, looking for a readership supportive enough to justify the expenses when cost-cutting comes around.  It’s an excellent read and I’m happy that New Pages and writer Jessica Powers took the time to delve into this.

I was directed to this by a fictionaut tweet, “The Death of Literary Fiction” at Mother Jones. It does give an historical account of university MFA Creative Writing programs and the decade by decade changes in the reading and subsequent funding of the college literary journals.

“Last summer, Louis Menand tabulated that there were 822 creative writing programs. Consider this for a moment: If those programs admit even 5 to 10 new students per year, then they will cumulatively produce some 60,000 new writers in the coming decade. Yet the average literary magazine now prints fewer than 1,500 copies. In short, no one is reading all this newly produced literature—not even the writers themselves. And with that in mind, writers have become less and less interested in reaching out to readers—and less and less encouraged by their teachers to try.”

By some theories, there will be a rise and decline in any trend so that while the online publishing formats may have put a dent in the hard copy journals–and produced some very interesting changes–there is also the move towards reading in short form and online with laptops, notebooks, netbooks and of course, Kindle, etc. versus the fact that many paper journals have hopped onto the web wagon for narrative display.

Another thing I found interesting is the move on the part of magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Redbook that I remember grabbing every month and reading the stories first, have banished fiction for the most part from their pages. Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to help the university publications:

“But the less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion. Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.”

As a suggestion, the article would like to see literary journals take on hardcore stories with more than navel-gazing as subject matter:

“I’m saying that writers need to venture out from under the protective wing of academia, to put themselves and their work on the line. Stop being so damned dainty and polite. Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood. And for Christ’s sake, write something we might want to read.”

I would tend to agree to a point. While we as writers could certainly help society by focusing on some of the current events–and do so in a literary manner that focuses more than journalism could on the human aspect of these events–there still should be a place for interest in answering so many of our own personal and much less distant and earth-shattering parts of living in today’s world.

What the article did not touch upon was something that in my own ten years of beating on editorial doors I’ve seen far too much of–the tendency to “name-drop” by the lit journals as a sales tool, thus keeping out many terrific writers who don’t have that MFA or list of publishing credits to their name.

One of the exercises in Creative Writing as I remember it was to write a story, cut it down to 600 words, then again in half to 300. 

I sputtered and sulked. A writer has barely set the stage, just touched on the characters, hinted at conflicts within that limited space, I argued. Shall we not let the reader see the newly ironed crisp curtains blow in the breeze of the open window that lets in the scent of the lilacs?

The answer is, of course, no. Not unless the lilac bush is holding a gun or its branches are spotted with bloodstains or it can sing Ave Maria backwards in perfect pitch.

I’m finding my stride with the under 500-word story. It can hold a lifetime because a lifetime is merely a repetition of moments sometimes shattered by change. Whatever those moments, there is either expected or unexpected reaction and that, my friends, is all there is to a story.

Then again, sometimes there is reason for more; and anyplace from the six-word-story of Hemingway to the giant 1000 pages of some great historical tome makes a story. It all depends on the time, the tone, the writer, the reader, the medium, and the next thing waiting to be written or read.

. . .or any other excuse I can come up with to explain my relative absence from this weblog as compared to my previous six years of blogging.

In truth, some good things are happening. I am looking forward to announcing the publication of a few of my short stories and a hypertext story towards the end of this month or in early January. So, my writing is going well…

My reading, well, obviously, after blowing through a few books this past summer as not grabbing me I’m just about finished with The English Patient. Just haven’t been reading as much since I got involved in the 100 Days Project that had me writing a hypertext story a day for, well, 100 days. From there I wrote some more hypertext, then got involved with an online writers community that whipped my brain into creative force mode and started submitting some short stories again after getting some good feedback from the members of the group. That’s what you kind of need as a writer; unless of course you’re so self-absorbed and cocky you think you’re great without some validation of your peers.

And the reality of my life is still seeking a higher paying employment even as I freeze my bones in the frameshop handling the Christmas rush.

But I’ll be back in force after the holidays; back, I hope, to my more prolific if not eloquent daily postings.

Tim Clare has, I must admit, outdid our 100-Day Project participants 100-fold. Our output? A single piece–story, hypertext, drawing, photo, poem–a day. Tim’s? 100 in a single day!

Check them out–they’re damn good and I particularly love and understand #98:

#98 – 8 Minutes In The Life Of A Poet

I’m exhausted.
Delirious.
I’ve acquired a sort of palsied rocking motion.

Any desire to create, wrung out of me.
I feel like I’ve stood wanking
on a plinth for fifteen hours

expecting approval.
I want some broth. A hot bath.
A break from line breaks.

Two more.
Two more.

For
fuck’s
sake.

Feeling good with an acceptance of one of my short stories at an excellent online literary journal and that gets me geared up for taking advantage of this submission season.

Joining Fictionaut has put me in the groove with some really great writing that inspires and keeps me in the right voice and tone for some flash fiction in text style as well as hypertext work.

It seems that stories need be only as long as  necessary, and all that rereading, rewriting, and vicious editing has helped me to say it in less words than my usual rambling manner. Poetic prose is great, but the idea is to use the imagery and brevity of poetic device to shape a world that still leaves much to the imagination.

Boy, I read a short story today that just totally freaked me out it was so good. The concept, the pace, the skill with magical realism, the language, everything about it was so good that I cannot help but be…dis-inspired to write.

Sometimes great writing gets you moving and sometimes it stops you dead in your tracks as the realization of an unachievable goal. Today I feel that all I’ve done up til now is worthless and the time would be better spent decorating cupcakes and eating them all in a day.

I’d just about given up on writing groups. Locally, there just didn’t seem to be any number of serious writers. Internetally, the groups were mainly genre fiction and stuck to the rules of writing as if they’d be struck down by the hand of some god if they didn’t. Edgy was misunderstood. No, edgy was downright frowned upon.

Of course that doesn’t mean there aren’t great writing groups out there, but I just hadn’t come across a group before with the high caliber writing, the support of literary journals, the honest critique as well as the support and appreciation that I’ve found just recently at Fictionaut.com.  So like a stray cat, I’m drinking the milk of some great short story writing, being not afraid to comment and getting some nice comments on my own humble offering of stories.

What’s nice is that so many people will bother to read the stories. Many have even braved my hypertext story and I hope to present more of those at their site, maybe encourage more writers to try the hypertext form. These are strangers and they’ve shown more interest in the work presented than I can scare up among friends and writer friends in the flesh.

Maybe it’s the level of commitment that these particular artists are at, or maybe the novelty of the site will wear off eventually for many here too, but in the meantime, I’m really feeling the movement of ideas and the creative force that one only read about in artistic community.