. Spinning .

I recently took part in a 24-hour Arts Marathon on the campus of Tunxis Community College (Farmington, CT) and learned quite a bit about artists, people, and myself.

When you close people together up in a room, particularly if those people are writers, they may come out of their trances long enough to interact with each other. That is, if they were putting effort into a project and had the strong winds of the muse at their back to begin with.

I came into the room with the best of intentions to get something accomplished but alas, without a shred of concept of story in any form or format. Nevertheless, I plugged in the laptop. Very shortly thereafter a sentence appeared and from there, a story spit itself out. Took eleven friggin’ hours, but it did.

I’m sort of an introvert, easily intimidated by crowds–that’s two people or more–and find myself unable to really make small talk, tell jokes–or find anyone else’s funny when I’m concentrating on a story–and have always been eloquentially dysfunctional though I find it easy to write in a more or less semi-intelligent manner. Whereas I am stymied by the simplest of queries in conversation, if corresponding via a keyboard I can hold up my own. Therefore, if centered within a group, I listen.

You can learn a whole lot by listening (though I do hope that anyone listening to my recitations under these same conditions allow me the same leeway I hope to extend them). The revelations, the contradictions, the habits that are observed can teach one not only about the person with whom one is incarcerated but about people in general, and more so, about one’s own self. Did you never notice that the most annoying things you find in others are most often sins you yourself commit on a regular basis?

In other words, I do apologize for being, well, human. And I must add, thank you for teaching me that and adding to my storehouse of information on characterization in writing.

I was recently asked by a friend to take part in a college Job Fair at Trinity College (Hartford, CT) to offer students some insight on writing as a career. Now far be it for me to claim this status and that for the very reason I would state as my first writer’s fact of life: It’s a non-profit job for almost all but the few, the celebrity, or the journalist.

In line with my previous post on online literary magazines, it is even harder to get anything but satisfaction and credentials from fiction writing in particular since few offer payment, and the “two copies of the issue” which was the standard offering no longer is a viable incentive.

Writing is an intensely demanding user of time. Not just in the writing, but in the editing process (and you damn well better spend time here), the reading of contemporaries’ work and the journals themselves to understand what they’re looking for in the work, the submission process itself which includes some timesavers like Duotrope but still involves a lot of juggling and meeting deadlines and writing to spec or theme, keeping word count in mind, changing language sometimes to suit, meeting the process requirements of double/single spacing, name on or not on pages, attachments or within the body of an email, font, margins, bio yes or bio no, etc. and then changing all to the standards of either .doc, .rtf, or plain text (.docx and anything Mac are still verboten) and then remembering (or using the spreadsheet) of who got what.

I put a lot of time into this. Not even counting the ten years of diddling around. For the past six months it’s been an almost non-stop venture of writing, reading, submitting, and all that entails. On top of that, there’s a certain amount of investment needed in supporting other writers. Yes! We’re not a vicious group of sneaky competitors, we try to help each other out. I personally tend to be nurturing and encouraging and so there’s a lot of time spent here as well. But that’s just a part of my nature (Scorpio) to do something either 100% or don’t do it at all. I’d say then that if writing is something that you love to do, you have to make that commitment–even if you’re simply allowing yourself some given period of time to publish or bust.

Then again, I’d not encourage anyone who gets enjoyment from writing a short story, a bit of poetry, but does not have the ambition to go through the process of publishing or getting paid for writing (which as I’ve noted, are not necessarily one and the same) to lay down their pen or stay away from the keyboard. There’s just as much satisfaction and joy in the doing.

So in summary, you don’t have to take it seriously. Writing can be as enjoyable or therapeutic as any chosen pastime. But if your intent is to share your work amongst a larger audience than your mother and your best friend, you really must take it seriously. It takes persistence and it demands dedication. It’s too much effort in both time and emotion to make only a half-ass hopeful stab.

Rather dated, but just recently brought to our attention is this article by David Lynn of the Kenyon Review on “Print vs. Internet: An Ongoing Conversation.”  Mr. Lynn questions–as all writers have at some point–the sponge-worthiness (my own standard–you’d have had to see the Seinfeld episode to figure this one out) of online literary journals as opposed to their more (considered) austere brethren (and parents), the print journal. He does this not as editor alone–though he offers some great insight by way of his discussions with other editors–but as a writer seeking a home for his own story.

Another possibility would be, as I’ve mentioned, to send the new story to any one of the dozens of electronic journals burgeoning on the Internet. But what would it mean for me to abandon print? Less status? Not least foregoing the tactile pleasure of holding the printed thing itself in my hand? How much is that worth?

As one of the comments (Barry, of Dogzplot) indicates, this is a 10 year-old argument:

very good literature has been published online for at least ten years now, this conversation is so old i wish people who engaged in it now would offer something new to the discusiion. necessity caused from economic decline? prestige? holding print artifacts? all old news.

what should come next in this discussion? lets talk about whats at stake for print publishers and larger publishing houses once people realize online publishing is here to stay and the quality of material being published, can be, in many cases, just as amazing…

This reminds me of the same old, same old we’re having still regarding hypertext and other new media literature since I’m trying personally to break down some barriers and add to the growing number of venues willing to realize that they have the facilities to offer hypertext easily simply by virtue of their being an online publication.

As a writer I’m more than willing to bend over backwards to go beyond the simple “does this story fit the tone of the particular magazine?” to produce a submission that is set to the format somewhat of that publisher, changing presentation–including colors, images, fonts, etc.–so that it is less restrictive or demanding for an editor to visualize it as part of his production. I’ve always offered as well to change all internal story links to reflect whatever the url arrangement would be should the piece be accepted. In other words, marketing of the medium is a biggie.

So with the consideration of publishing online versus print still a question in many minds, perhaps because of the nature of hypertext and its dependence upon the web for its very life I’m more openminded towards the concept of having my work published online. That, and the realization that 1) there are already tons, and I mean tons, of online only literary journals that are of the highest quality; 2) many of the formerly snooty print only journals have come to the necessary decision because of financial pressure to either go online or go under; 3) more and more people are reading short fiction online; and 4) the publications that were dependent upon writers and libraries alone as subscribers are often losing their audience (/revenue–meaning that many had turned to requiring fees from writers to submit and we all know how that idea went over) and limiting their readership without offering at least a companion online piece. In this last point, Mr. Lynn does offer his on feelings on the difference between the print and online version of the Kenyon Review.

So to sum up, Online Literary sites are coming into their own and forming a new and stable community of both producers of exquisite writing and a loyal readership that are going to be established well after the dust has settled.

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.

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.

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.

While I’ve had the best of intentions, it’s obvious that I’ve little time to read the past couple of months. But what’s better than reading? Only writing, and that I’ve been doing dawn till hours after dusk.

We’re at day #51 in the 100 Days Project and I’m working on that fifty-first short story in hypertext form right now. Over at Hypercompendia I’ve posted some thoughts as we reach the midpoint of the effort. To be more personal here about my own work, I’ve found that I can respond to deadlines; I can come up with a new idea every day; I can follow prompts or be inspired by outside forces; I can write humor, mystery, contemporary, poetical prose, change voice, braid stories, and most importantly, learn something new every day both about story form and hypertext.

Though I am still reading as much as possible, possible seems to be near zilch with gardening, housework and job all screaming for attention. I’ve been really tempted several times to back out of this 100-day project deal for lack of time, lack of group support, and lack of being able to bend my left ring finger. In the end, this is more than an important exercise for me, it is a step forward in a plan to create a website dedicated to hypertext fiction for all ages. A free site where there will be a library of short stories, poems, and visual graphics all in the hypertext format that will be added to on a regular basis by writers and artists willing to share their work in order to generate more interest in the hypertext form by example and instruction.

So that’s were I’ve been. Not lazy, not dropping out of sight here on Spinning, but dedicating my creative energy and time to a project I think will blossom into more than just some summer stories.

I did a whole presentation on this at Hypertext 2008 in Pittsburgh last year: story wants to be laid out not according to the writer’s whim, but rather where it wants to go on its own. Of course, before the web and hyperlinks, we didn’t have the choice of hypertext versus traditional linear story. There were the options of form however in prose, poetry, etc.

With the 100 Days Project I am writing a story a day in hypertext form. Neha is doing story in poetry. Mary Ellen is doing writing character sketches, others are contributing photography, watercolor, script, and meals.  Steve is doing linear text story.

Now there are many times I’m writing something that seems to want a straight linear–and it’s hard to use the term linear here because non-hypertexted story needn’t be linear–and I either have to stop and think about it or squeeze it out as best I can. This is forcing it into a form which the story doesn’t necessarily need to be.  There is a third option that I’ve taken a couple times: dump the story and start a new one.

I’m guessing that just as I come upon stories that want to be straight, Steve imagines a few that want to be hypertext. He’s proficient at either and once you have the tools, it’s always a part of the initial conception of story. One thing that’s helped me keep in a hypertext frame of mind is creating a base map of story in Tinderbox with writing spaces based on the average (about 16 with a half dozen smaller links to inspire intersections). This serves as a blank piece of paper or monitor in the hypertext version of writing.

It does get easier as one becomes immersed in the style to maintain that style of story; I find myself reading a paperback novel looking for links.

Been spending most of my waking hours writing hypertext short stories and often there’s a need to remind myself I’m a writer–or at lease I’m supposed to be writing down stories. There are several methods I use to bring myself back into the black depths of writing, but one of them is to read one of the previous hypertext stories–up to #34 done out of 100 planned–and get myself back in the mood as well as copyedit what I may have missed before. I’m noticing a lot of double “a” or “the” and I laugh because it usually comes prior to an adjective or an action verb where I either don’t know what’s coming or I’m trying to think of a better way of saying it. Then when it hits, the fingers automatically type the article before the word.

In going back over yesterday’s story and comments, I realized that in rereading I had completely forgotten a line of the story and thus didn’t even answer the question of what was in the pastrami. So I came upon this, and maybe found out:

He went home not wanting to believe she’d been taken. He would never be able to eat anything again.”

After fiddling with a new theme and layout in css, I finally am getting down to the business of writing out today’s flash fiction hypertext. There’s a pretty specific starting point for the story because in this case (for the 100 Day Project) we read Steve’s story and float away in different directions from there. I read the story once quickly and note down what might get me going, from today’s story:

PLOT
Pushing the envelope
Gullibility
Mob mentality
Social Networking communication methods
Morality/social norms
Protagonist changes in facing 1st conflict

Plot made the biggest impression on me in this since one thing led to another in the typical cause and effect manner. But this guy was outrageous, and his actions escalated until someone questioned him–the hair being a metaphor certainly for more meaningful actions.

It would seem that the underlying themes of the story might also be mob mentality, and the public’s willingness to believe any b.s. they read or perhaps just how the media influences us, the ignorant public. How mistakes are forgotten, how far we can be pushed. So it may be a moralistic tale as well. One meant to provoke into looking at one’s own reality as pointed out in fiction.

I may read the story a couple of more times if something doesn’t scream out at me to be written. Then I find it and go from there.