Monday's Ten, Briefly ...

1. Spent Saturday looking around K'zoo for apartments. A couple possibilities, two hell-no's, one where I felt like I had to scrape the schmooze and schmaltz off of me when I left -- the leasing agent even dropped a "I love your purse" by way of parting.


2. Submissions counter for the month of June: four.


3. WALL-E is super cute. It's like they recycled Short Circuit into something even more wonderful. Oh and the voice of "computer" is Sigourney Weaver which is hilarious if you follow movies well enough -- and if you follow sci-fi to the point that my father does you'll catch the red ship's wheel / HAL reference from 2001 A Space Odyssey (I'm still clueless on that one).


4. The invite for the next wedding of a college friend arrived this weekend. I'll have to work on my hand-eye coordination for the bouquet toss.


5. Been splitting my time between stalking online literary journals and stalking apartments. The literary journals prove more fruitful as I really need to see the silly apartments.


6. Going to go see more apartments Tuesday.


7. Still haven't called to set up the appointment to set up my class schedule for that whole MFA thing. Hmm ...


8. I researched crows today. While at Kenyon I was swarmed by crows. Not physically attacked but the birds were just constantly present. I even collected a crow feather, which I was then told by the Shaman-like Sue Spirit was a lucky thing. Now my poet roommate from the week tells me that I'll obviously have to write about them. ... Seven crows for the secret never been told ...


9. I picked up both She Drove without Stopping by Jaimy Gordon and then Storm Watch by Jim Butcher. The first because I'm likely to be in her class this fall and the later because it's a popular piece of paranormal fluff, so popular they turned the series of novels into the TV show "The Dresden Files" and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.


10. I've been writing, but there are too many characters and stories running around in my head. So instead of running free they're running into each other. Thud. And that kind of hurts.

Ad of the Week

"Woosh"

Bridal Bouquet

I forgot to mention that at the wedding last weekend I caught the bouquet! Me! Of all people! Me who gets on her little soap box and rails against the institution of marriage. Me.

Marriage is all well and good for some people, but for many people it's just another manifestation of their stupidity, one they can't return to the store, can't sell on eBay, and have to live with for a long time either in the form of a living breathing spouse or in the form of ridicule from every acquaintance who loves to utter those four little words I told you so. And none of that has anything to do with the economic atrocities women commit in heaps when they get married, particularly: putting everything in his name. Sure things are wonderful now but even if you never get divorced what happens if you need to get at that money quickly and he's not around (or unconscious, etc)?

See? Soap box.

ANYWAY, I caught the damn bouquet. And by "caught" I mean that I reached for it, it bounced off my hands smacked into my forehead and landed at my feet. I claim the bouquet right as damages. It was an unbound fistful of gerber daisies so they separated in midair thus my inability to catch ... which means that each of the five or six flowers was picked up by a different girl (including the eight year-old flower girl).

I still think I deserve it.

Addendum: I did get one of the flowers from the bouquet. And I'm not completely against love and marriage as I might have appeared by the above. I am however against stupid people. And stupid people getting married and/or breeding. [insert lyrics of flag pole sitta here]

Embrace the Inner Creepy

So I was flipping back through my Kenyon notes and now that I've accepted that I am capable of creepy I found this snippet hilarious:

I struggled. I really did. I wrote three beginnings that I ditched because I didn't know what happened afterwards and they seemed to ominous to me. They say this really happened to Melanie Kirowitz. After she married the man from Ishpeming. Or was it Oscoda? Well, that doesn't really matter but the two of them moved down state to Bloomfield hills (he was a doctor) and kept a lake house up in Black River. ... And then there were a couple others and all of them felt that with the kind of opening I had given them someone needed to die. Or if a character didn't die that they found a dead body. And ... well ... I'm not Stephen King.

Now when I read that opening that's in italics I'm like
hmm, I see potential there. LOL! When did this happen to me? Obviously it was sometime between Sunday night and Wednesday night. Then it took another couple of days before I embraced my inner Joyce Carol Oates. Argh. Maybe Oates is pushing it too far. Maybe I need to think of it more as the eeriness of poets James Tate and Thomas Lux because the two of them intrigue me but never cross over that line to truly upsetting me or just plain freaking me out.

On that note, I have a problem. I've introduced a switchblade into a story. But I have no idea how to bring it back. It's like Chekhov's gun: if you introduce a gun in act one, the damn thing needs to be fired by the end of the play. But what happens to this little switch blade? I've already figured out how to kill off every one who needs going ... *sigh*

Suggested Reading from KRWW and Beyond

As promised long ago by my still scattered brain, I am posting the reading list I garnered at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, along with some other links.

N.B. Some of these stories were required reading for the workshop (the first four short stories) and the rest came up in conversation as examples, suggestions for specific workshop participants or recommended reading for everyone.

• "Twenty Minutes" James Salter, from the collection Dusk
• "Mlle. Dias de Corat" Mavis Gallant, from collection Across the Bridge
• "Lady with Lapdog" Anton Chekhov, from Lady with Lapdog, and Other Stories
• "Wigtime" Alice Munro, from Friend of My Youth
• Ester Stories (collection) Peter Orner
• Child of God, Cormac McCarthy
• Poetics, Aristotle
• Patty Jane's House of Curl, Lorna Landvik
• Tales from Morocco (connected shorts) Tony Ardizzone
• Eats, Shoots and Leaves (guide to grammar)
• Underworld, Don Delillo
• You Must Revise Your Life, William Stafford (although there was some contention as to the usefulness of this book on the list)

Should you be interested in a more poetic (and less self-centered) version of the events check out Parts I and II blogged on the Kenyon Review website by Kirstin Ogden.

Among other reads I feel are worthy of checking out is Barrelhouse online magazine -- and not just because I submitted something there just last night and they have the nicest, most succinct online submission form a mortal could conceive of -- because they have quite a bit of good online (read: free) content. Namely voice driven pieces of short-short fiction. Funny, brief, and to the point. Nothing long enough to bore you or make you click the back button. If you remember the name Barrelhouse, it's because they showed up in my suggested lit magazines post as a new-ish market highlighted by Poets & Writers - which oddly enough wasn't how I found them and their remarkableness.

Oh! And I came across a snippet of dialog I had written down from workshop betwen the workshop instructor and the workshop fellow. I could give the context, but it's almost more amusing without it, just imagine two people engaged in a very sincere conversation ...

Instructor: It might work better if you do gay.
Fellow: I can do gay.
Instructor: You don't have to do gay.
Fellow: No, I can do it.

I miss those people. Also priceless was Brad Kessler talking about how he has to sell his seven kids before he moves to Rome. He raises goats.

Random Fact

Fact: 2 out of 3 Americans think I look like Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched. If I had asked 4 Americans instead of just 3 the statistic might have been more compelling.

While at Kenyon several people told me you look like some actress, you remind me of her so much I just can't put my finger on it ... your mannerisms too. But it was the 22 year-old at my friend's wedding that blurted out Elizabeth Montgomery. She then had me wiggle my nose and about flipped out because it was an eerie moment. I was asked to leave the table or stop wiggling.

Also Random: Gawker has a contest going for 2008's hottest guy in publishing - go vote because this is books meeting pop culture in the best [scariest] way possible.

Writer's Group ...

Psst ... so you know how I said they were starting a writer's group aound here that was going to meet every two weeks? Well, after a week at Kenyon I don't think I can go back.

I can't do it.

After a week listening to the fabulous instructor readings, the fellows' readings, the participants' readings ... I don't think I want to listen to the lovely, but unknowing old women's readings. I need to stay in my cocoon of wonderfulness and let it seep in. More importantly, let the wonderfulness seep into my own writing projects.

After sitting in workshop with Brad Kessler (author, Birds in Fall)can I really listen to the woman who wrote a Star Trek novel refer to herself as "your fearless leader" and talk about how she dislikes books on writing?

After the lovely (light and slightly eerie) stories of Melanie Haney, can I deal with the clunky work of sweet but senile women?

I heartily believe that 90 minutes of my morning would be better spent rewriting "Cake" so that it is firmly placed and doesn't give you that disjointed medicine-head feeling than if I went to the "writer's group."

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WTF?

I Made It Here!

Day One (ish) at Kenyon Review Writer's Workshop

I've made it this far. Got down here with no problems and gorgeous weather. Seriously, this country is beautiful in mid to late June. I've got oodles of pictures on my phone already but I forgot the cord to get them off of my phone to share with you. I'll have to do a "photo tour" when I get back.

Met the other people in my group and sat for my first workshop/class today. We're not really working over people's writing in these workshops but we're reading to find what the value is. We're working very closely with prompts to produce small pieces that can then be used as teaching tools. Really, I think it is so much more effective learning this way. Because you go and try it, and then you are introduced to the big picture concept that you're looking at and then you get to hear examples of how each person managed to balance the prompt and the narrative as well as see how the concept you're focusing on for the class plays into it (or distracts, or messes you up or enhances the whole thing silently to WOW! status).

Today was about form. The assignment we were given last night (shortly after arriving -- and yes we were the only ones to be assigned homework on such short notice) was as follows:

1. Write a story in exactly 26 sentences.
2. The first sentence will start with the letter A, the second with the letter B, and so on through the entire alphabet.
3. One sentence must be exactly 100 words long.
4. One sentence must be exactly one word long.
5. Play with punctuation as much as you need to make it work.
6. Paragraph breaks may be placed at your discretion.

I challenge any- and everyone to do the same prompt. Either leave it in the comments section for me or post it on your own blog and drop me a link in the comments because I'm curious to see more of these "now infamous Alphabet exercises." Why now imfamous? Because last year Ron Carlson came to Kenyon as an instructor and brought this exercise with him for the same purpose (a lesson in form for fiction writers) and during the participant readings at least four people read theirs.

Give it a try and let me know how it goes! It sounds simple but is harder than it looks.

For satisfying your curiosity (not saying that this was the creme of the crop) my fiction response:

As preparation for leaving my father, my mother would iron. Because she could not leave with unpressed slacks. Clothes were whisked from the basket, piece by piece, while my mother rattled off the offenses against her. During this time my father’s shirts were never touched, that’s how I knew she was serious, how I knew this complaining was different from the every day complaining she did. Even dresses she didn’t wear anymore were ironed along with her slacks and collared shirts, each one pressed and hung on a hanger.

Frantic as I was to make her stay, I didn’t realize until years later that she never packed a single garment into a bag or a suitcase. Given my age at the time I doubt I would have even figured out what was going on if she hadn’t walked into my room and announced it to me.

How it started between them each time I never knew, but it always ended the same way.

“I’m leaving; you can live with your father.”

Just that.

Knowing nothing else but her, I would trail her to her room, watch her iron and beg her to stay.

Lighting does it for me sometimes: if there’s a room with just one lamp on and the night trying to creep in through the cracks and the windows I remember the ironing; I remember the crying; I remember trying to take up as small a space on the carpet as I could because I equated smallness with something that made me more livable, likable; that if I was compact and appropriately remorseful that she would take it back and say she was staying, or if she insisted that she was going that she would at least take me with her.

Maybe, in retrospect, her leaving my father wouldn’t have been such a bad thing.
Now when I must iron, I iron by daylight. Only when in desperation, or because of Peter’s forgetfulness, will I iron after dark. Perhaps it’s stupid of me to be afraid of it, but I think I am.

Quixotic dreams have me telling Peter about it, have me elaborating to him about how I want things to be better in my life than they were in hers; he would tell me that he understood, and he really would, and he’d prove it by always remembering to take his damn shirts to the drycleaner.

Reciprocal sharing would then occur.

Sure.

There are better things to waste my time thinking about, so instead I wonder what happened to her, what her reason was. Under what circumstances did she crack to that point? Verbalizing the departure, but never making good on the threat. When you think about it the other way it’s easy to see why she stayed. Xenophobia, fear of change, and money.

Yet, why the declaration, why the pale room, why drag me into it?

Zoom forward to the present and I know I’ll leave Peter, I’m just waiting for a good enough reason.

Ad of the Week

Grab Bag

Word Count: 12,853

I'm getting myself ready to go to Kenyon!

Okay, the going is much more exciting than the list making and the packing ... or is it? I've always enjoyed getting ready to go places, I think it's part of building anticipation, but I don't enjoy how much of my "normal" time it eats up. Right now it's hurting my generation of new words. *grumbles*

I've made the list of things I'll need to take but haven't really thought about clothing yet. I'll get down to that once the laundry is clean and dry. Speaking of which, laundry, hair cut and an oil change are all on the list for the next 24 hours.

24 hours and I'll be on the road!

Which brings me to the fact that my odometer rolled over to 60,000 miles not long ago. Not bad considering it's an almost eight year old car, but still I don't like it that my baby's growing up and getting older.

I've been in to the poetry of Pablo Neruda lately. I love how simple and forceful it is. He really does write for the common person and says as much in his "Ode to Criticism" which is among his Odes to Simple Things (which are awesome). That his words are but simple material that you can eat or do the wash with, build a roof out of, until they're taken up by the critic and "trapped and tricked/ ... drowned in ink/ ... spit on it with the suave benignity of a cat" and though the critics nearly killed it, it was not yet dead and the simple people ...

men and women
came to live
with my poetry,
once again
they lighted fires,
built houses,
broke bread,
they shared the light
and in love joined
the lightning flash and the ring.
And now,
if you will excuse me
for interrupting this story
I'm telling,
I'm leaving to live
forever
with simple people.

I'm also a big fan of the "Ode to the Artichoke" which reminds me a great deal of James Tate's "Young Man with a Ham" in that they have a sort of absurdity of heightened conflict centered around food. (You can find a full copy of the prose poem Young Man with a Ham at the above link, as it appeared in the American Poetry Review.)

Found the lengthy article about division of labor in the American family interesting. It's not the usual cramming of numbers down your throat, instead this article focuses on couples that have actually achieved balanced schedules and the reasons why others don't achieve it even when they think they want it. Parts of it reminded me of the novel I Don't Know How She Does It where the protagonist is the mother of two with the high profile job, earns more than her husband and still feels like society expects her to bake for little Susie's class potluck, which is why in the opening scenes the protagonist is awake at 3:00am taking a rolling pin to two store bought pies to make them look homemade. Of course, there's a lot more cooking in that story than just a handful of social expectations but you don't know that when she's bashing the pies. Other parts of the article spoke specifically to bargaining for alternative work schedules and different negotiating strategies parents have taken to help balance out work and time with their kids.

I think that's all for now, I will be blogging from the Kenyon Review Writer's Workshop once it starts, and once I've broken into their computer system. ... Not really break in, but they don't let strange laptops link up with their system so I'll have to get computer lab access to post, which I guess is a much milder form of breaking in, one that really doesn't involve much breaking.

Up Next: Ad of the Week

Graphic Novels? Chick Lit?

Word Count: 11,591
Notes on Craft (and Market)

Tanya recently brought up graphic novels on her blog and wondered why they're somehow more acceptable/prestigious than chick lit and other commercial fiction.

My first thought was chick lit is dead (at least in the eyes of the people who have to try and sell it). It's now considered "humorous women's fiction" -- so long as it isn't "snarky" -- and I'm all for the title change. "Chick lit" just sounds so demeaning, like it's "good enough for women but not good enough to be considered literature" ... anyway, I'm certain that whomever came up with the title was more impressed by the catchy slant rhyme than the potential connotations found by people trying to determine the entomology of it.

But graphic novels?

Apparently their day has come. Which is amusing the crap out of the comic book artists who've been doing this for years and still refuse to call themselves graphic novelists. And I don't blame them. It's kind like when pulp sci-fi of the mid 20th century suddenly found itself in canonized leather bound volumes of "The Classics" and Philip K. Dick rolled over in his grave.

I still haven't read one. At least not a novel one. Anime hit the scene big when I was an adolescent so I read comic books in that genre when I was 14 or so, but haven't picked one up in years. Although much of my generation got hooked and stayed hooked on the comic book.

I think it's because of that continued eagerness to embrace the comic book in people now considered adults by the market that has lead to the publishers taking a good long look at graphic novels. For one, there's artists out there doing great and serious and wonderful things with the form. But there's also a market out there ready and eager to buy, a market that has grown up understanding the form and now old enough to embrace any level of subject matter.

But don't despair if you can't draw. Now among the secondary rights that your agent holds on to and can sell for you after traditional print publication is the rights to develop your original creation as a graphic novel. And they'll even hire a comic book writer to do the illustrations for you.

In the news

Word Count: 9355

BEA and writing industry in general as covered by the NYTimes. First they beat a dead horse, and then they proceed to scare the shit out of writers.

Although as far as an "ancillary market" Krugman writes about, I say it's going to be in the teaching because writing is becoming a far more prevalent hobby. The internet is chock full of hobby writers and you don't have to look far for them. People writing for pleasure, uncaring if they finish or not, people writing fan-fiction they know will never have a shot in hell to publish because of copyright infringement, people who just want to write down their life story for their friends and family, not to mention *ahem* bloggers. I'm finding most of these people would love writing advice and instruction, sometimes one on one or as part of a writing group.

Because of this, I think paid instruction, conferences and writing retreats will be the part of the market to grow. Writing vacations for hobbyists is a rather untouched market. And could be quite interesting assuming the retreats find teachers that aren't so into academia that they choke when they're classes all write fanfic. (I've had teachers that were cool with it and known others who would have been somehow offended, always interesting.)

But that's just my thought. Hopefully there will still be at least some kind of money in paper copies, advances and royalties for a while longer. Or at least I hope the ebook price bubble won't burst because right now it's good for both buyer and seller although the 99cent download would change that drastically.

So they're starting a writer's group ...

Word Count: 7087

So someone in the home owner's association here has decided she wants to start a writer's group. She moved to town in the past year or two and finds being a working writer lonely so she's making time and effort to bring together people to discuss and work on writing. Sounds lovely. She is former military and now a working writer; I get the impression that she wouldn't be able to live off of it if she wasn't married but bully to her for publishing at all.

Again, I am the youngest person in the group. At least this time there doesn't seem to be someone over sixty looking to scapegoat me for that reason.

Two of the older women want to work on writing their life stories and another woman is looking to write her family's stories so that's kind of all in the same bag. The woman putting this all together seems to write anything commercial and she's leaving everything else wide open for choice and interpretation. Right now, I have no idea what I'm going to bring to this group when we meet again in two weeks.

Although, I suspect that I'll take in something I started at the Kenyon Review Workshop and say hey where should I go with this? Maybe I'll even take in my bit about cooking and garlic from last year. Although that distinctly needs more dialog.

Or any dialog.

No, that's a lie, I think people talk. Twice.

Anyway. I didn't know what to expect when I replied to the advert in the home owners association newsletter, and to be completely honest I still don't know what to expect. At best (or worst) I'll probably only be in town for six meetings. This group will be one more thing to keep me writing. One more thing to scatter my word count wildly over a dozen projects and make me wonder if I will ever finish a decent novel.

Craig's List

I've come to realize that every city that has a university has Craig's List.

This weekend I had my glass of wine -- okay several glasses of wine -- took a deep breath and launched into the semi-scary world of online roommate hunting.

Why are we so gung-ho to share an apartment where we have to sleep and eat with strangers met on the internet but as a society we find having dinner with an online date creepy?

Ad of the Week

Summer Car Wash for Subaru. Ad runs in Canada.

Book in Review: Sweet Ruin

I'm getting excited. My trip to the week long Kenyon Review Writers Workshop happens in a little over a week. And today I got an email to let me know that my workshop instructor will be Brad Kessler. Yea! He was there last year (I was working with someone else) but I appreciated his personality and really liked his reading. I'm wondering if I can't get my hands on a copy of Birds in Fall and finish it before next Saturday. But until then I have a different book up for comment: Sweet Ruin by Cathi Hanauer.

I picked up Sweet Ruin on a whim. A whim that involved struggling with the fact that it had a "book club" label on the front and "suggested discussion questions" in the back. I love books and will gladly talk about them, but I'm not big on the whole notion of "book club approved" books. What that little sticker is telling me is that somewhere there's a committee of people who sat down and decided that should I have some spare time I should read this book to enrich my life. That this book is more important than others. That this book is the kind of book women of a certain affluence in America should be reading. And that just sticks in my craw.

Perhaps elevating these piddling committees to some sort of Orwellian ministry status is taking it a bit too far, but it's a comparison that I'd like marked in the books before I continue any farther.

The protagonist is a young creative woman in her early thirties. She epitomizes the strong young working woman who lived and breathed New York City in her twenties and now works part time from her home in the suburbs where she raises a five year old daughter.

[Yes, this is the book that sparked one of the infamous "discussions" with my father's girlfriend. The one where she cooed -- yes, cooed -- "that must be so hard for you to imagine." No, actually I have a great imagination. Funny that I get this reaction when I read a book about a woman who has a kid but not when I read The Diary of Anne Frank. I think living in a half attic while holding your breath hoping that the Nazi's won't come haul you away would perhaps be the harder thing to imagine. But I didn't struggle reading that one either. Good. Imagination.]

Once you get into the novel, you come to find out that the protagonist had two children not long ago but lost an infant son. At the beginning of the novel she's emerging from a period of depression surrounding his death which sparks an "awareness of nature" soliloquy. A tact that will be repeated every time the author begins a new "section" of the novel, and a sure sign for me to take a nap.

But once we got out of the woods (literally) we get into a really interesting inner conflict: her husband still has the high power job in the city, and she has ... one child that she takes care of, one child too few, one child that's off to school full time that fall. And the protagonist starts wondering about what she gave up and what she could still have. Thoughts that are further fueled by the arrival of the cute young art student moving in across the street. And so begins her flirtation with temptation and what could have been.

Not a bad summer read. It's somewhere in the area between post-chick lit, beach reading, and the commercial end of literary fiction. As per usual, the "book club" sticker comes to mean it deals with unearthing revelations about potential childhood trauma of a sexual nature. Apparently that kind of stuff makes book clubs go ape shit. Ever read an Oprah book? See my point? That content matter makes it a little dark for the beach but still light enough to eat with a summer salad.

Ticker Tape Parade

Word Count: No further progress to report

There's a good short sweet little video recap here so I won't bore you with details.

Last night I cooked dinner, baked bread from scratch and watched the Wings win the Cup. Read a bit then tumbled into bed.

Suggested Lit Magazines

Word Count: 4593
Notes on Craft

After a previous post, Taggie7 left me a question that I've been thinking on trying to come up with as good an answer as I could find. The post was about which literary journals were best suited for submissions from undergraduates or recent graduates, and you can read my answer here. Taggie asked me if there were any magazines that I highly recommended and I told her I'd have to get back to her on it.

I've really been struggling with an answer because I'm just as much of a learner as anyone else. And according to Poets & Writers there were over 600 literary magazines and journals last count, so needless to say, I couldn't possibly have a finger and the pulse of the market.

Speaking of P&W, I highly recommend their May/June 2008 issue, about a third of which is dedicated to something they call "Project Lit Mag." They interview editors of lit mags and then profile 20 new lit mags that they recommend you send your work to now. Given their urging, I'm certain that Alehouse, Alimentum, Barrelhouse, Bateau, Cadillac Cicatrix, Cave Wall, Coal Hill Review, Ecotone, Five Chapters, Fringe Magazine, Grist, HoboEye, Lumberyard, Make, Marginalia, One Less Magazine, Palabra, Quiddity, Slice, and Subtropics are now swamped with more slush then their volunteer editors can deal with. Said editors have kissed their spouses and children goodbye and have little chance of seeing them again until Christmas.

I know nothing about the 20 above mags other than they're new and recommended by P&W.

Personally, I always give Glimmer Train first crack at my work. They're yet to be as impressed with me as I am with them, but I'm keeping up the tradition nonetheless.

Some people start off by submitting their short story to The New Yorker first and then go from there. I'm yet to try this tack although I see the merit in trying to break into the undeniably most powerful short story market in America. BTW, finding the submissions guidelines and appropriate address for The New Yorker is something of a task, a first (if small) hurdle to discourage the lazy and half hearted. But back to Glimmer Train.

GT does everything online so turn around time is good and they reassure everyone that they really do read the entire story every time. They run a contest a month as well if you're willing to pay the entry fee. The magazine is known and sold across the country, and the stories have a decidedly upbeat tilt to them that makes them a pleasure to read. Not that they're all rainbows and peppermint waterfalls, but I was reading a story about a guy who had just had a heart transplant and the anti-rejection drugs he was taking were eating away his other organs and I wasn't depressed by the story. That's the kind of tilt I'm talking about.

For some reason, I've always placed some sort of mystique around The Kenyon Review. It is a very well known magazine and I think some of it's stories got nominated for Pushcarts this year. They've recently launched the Kenyon Review Online which is a supplement, not a replacement, to the print version of the KR. The KRO is free, and therefore an easy way to familiarize yourself with the type of material the KR staff seeks out. And there is a certain aesthetic to the KR (one David Lynn keeps a thumb on as Editor in Chief). The stories they print have a certain gritty edge to them. Where GT leaves me feeling hopeful, KR leaves me feeling slightly horrified. It's a thrilling, mind racing feeling, but not one I think my own work invokes. I've yet to submit anything to them because of this.

I'm a fan of the Southeast Review. Their staff has a decidedly light, playful side to them. The SER also hosts the WBSSSC (World's Best Short Short Story Contest) which comes out every year in their spring issue, which, coincidentally, is when the WBSSSC opens and closes for the next year. Winners are announced in June and, darnit, I'm not one of them this year.

I'm in love with the notion of One Story magazine, and will probably get a subscription once I move and get my new address. The idea is that you always have time for just one story; so every three weeks they send you one new short story. While they only publish one author an issue, they will never repeat a writer. So, for once in your life you can be certain you are not competing with Ron Carlson (he already had his one story).

The Michigan Quarterly Review is the one magazine which sent me a personalized rejection letter (for poetry). This is perhaps because I studied all the online offerings for the MQR and really thought about what pieces I was choosing to submit.

The Alaska Quarterly Review has been keeping itself in the news of late. I'm always impressed to see far off presses that are regularly sold at book stores here so kudos to them. The stories I've read from them did sort of suffer from the "not much happens" syndrome of undergraduate workshops, not that this makes it that much easier to crack the market.

Which brings me back to the real point of the question: I don't know which ones are the "easiest" to crack. I just know what I've read and then I apply a couple of strategies to that.

There's a struggle to find a balance in submitting. You want to be accepted by the biggest market possible, but you also want to increase your odds by submitting someplace that isn't getting a lot of gems sent to them. But more importantly, you want those magazines to be reliable: not author traps, and not going to fold before your story goes to print.

Some people approach this problem as I mentioned before: they start with The New Yorker and make their way down the list. If you're me, you're looking for magazines you know exist. Magazines I can find on the shelves of the bookstore. (On the bottom shelf of the magazine section under food and wine). But that's not a bad strategy. All the magazines I've listed I know are reliable journals. I've seen them in print and (most of them) being sold in my home town.

Short of that you can pick up a copy of The Writer's Market and start thumbing through it. It costs about $30 retail and a new edition comes out every November or December and most libraries carry multiple copies. Right now I've got a 2007 copy checked out from the library because I figured that there would be fewer hold requests placed on last year's copy while the information is roughly the same. And it's paid off. I've successfully kept my copy checked out for six months now.

If what you want is publishing credit and want it now, keep your eyes open for local contests and presses. Occasionally a newspaper will run a poetry contest. There is a publication called "eCurrent" around here (they focus on food/entertainment/culture) that runs a poetry/short story contest once a year open to people who live in the county and I won an honorable mention one year for a poem.

If you're writing in genre that changes the game entirely. Everything I just mentioned is for "literary" fiction. In genre, again, go to the book store and see what magazines they have. What you see there are the heavy hitters. "Asimov's" or "Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine" or "Science Fiction & Fantasy" or ... I don't know a romance mag off the top of my head but I'm certain they're there, although Harlequin now e-publishes short stories if you meet their "line" guidelines. These are all big, well paying publishers. If you're looking for $20 and some spiffy cover art try ElectricSpec and it's brethren - which will take some hunting to find and some more hunting to find out if they're credible.

Right now I'm trying to get as good a feel as I can for magazines by reading them, but every time I'm ready to submit (simultaneously) I always throw in a couple markets I haven't read that I fit the guidelines for. They claim that if you read the magazine, and truly follow the guidelines (right material, right format) that you're already ahead of 80% of your competition.

Hope there's some sort of help in there. I'd love to hear anybody else's take on markets, so leave me your blog address if you've done a similar diagnostic.

Edit: There's also FAWLT magazine which is new and advertising on the MFA Blog. Obviously odds are better at someplace that's just starting up and targeting MFA candidates and applicants.

I Smell Stanley

Word Count: 3936

Last night was life interfering with writing. How dare it! I only accomplished 1000 new words in the entire day (almost 700 off "daily quota").

First there was my aunt and uncle being in town. We all went out to a nice dinner and by the time we were done and they were driving out of town game five of the Stanley Cup Finals had begun. My dear Red Wings were scheduled to bring the cup home. Scratch that, they were at home. The cup was in the building. They just failed to score enough goals for all the confetti and four decades worth of pop music to play while they each took a lap around the ice holding the thing up in the air. We did this in 2001 and 2002, we know the drill. See photo for visual confirmation.

But the third period rolled around and the Wings were up 3-2, they're basically on the ice to kill the last minute of play when the Penguins pull their goalie and throw another man on the ice (what else can you do?) and score. Argh!!! This late goal wouldn't have mattered,however, if one of the Wing's own players hadn't tipped the puck into his own freakin net to score the second goal for the Penguins.

What followed were three overtime periods that I was way too tired to stay up for. I was asleep by 11:30 and the game rolled on until past 12:30. I'm turning into such an old lady. However I will admit that I skipped out on the second period to do some of that illusive writing, which was more like note taking because my mind was getting blurry.

Stanley's still in the air. And I can pencil in some time for confetti on Wednesday. Wednesday would be a good day to win the cup.I could do that.

Hello June

Words in Novel: 1714

In the United States, Memorial Day Weekend marks the opening of Summer. Like small woodland creatures, something stirs inside of us telling us, yes, this this is it; this is the time to clean the grill.

Everyone has been wandering around grill cleaning and grilling. Barbecuing and generally carrying on in a summer-ish manner. Except me. What did I have? Food poisoning and no grill.


As I have no grill to clean and use, I am instead writing a novel. Perhaps because of my lack of grill I feel the need to start two novels simultaneously. Scary and stupid, I know, but I'm an American without a grill: I feel the need to compensate.


I'm hoping to post all of my June entries with increases in the novel word count at the top of the entry, with a bare minimum of 50,000 words achieved on at least one of those novels by June 30. And if I slack off majorly then 50,000 combined between the two of them.

The little counter with the kiwi bird on it in the right hand bar tells my percentage of progress toward 50,000 new words of novel.

Yes, I did this before and, no, that novel is not fit for reading at this point. What it was, was a learning experience. Maybe it can yet be salvaged. Don't hold your breath. I'm much more passionate about these two projects and now that I know I can sustain this kind of pace and progress I feel pretty good about things.

It's really not that crazy at all. Ian Fleming obsessively did 2000 words every morning and turned out a new Bond novel every two months. And after his four hours of "doing the words" were done each day he continued to lead quiet the lifestyle.