Third Coast Magazine Wants You!

And we want your submissions!

The 2011 Third Coast Fiction & Poetry Contests have extended their submissions!!!

New postmark Deadline: January 15, 2010

Fiction Prize: $1,000 & Publication

Poetry Prize: $1,000 & Publication

Reading fee of $15 also gives you a year subscription (at $1 less than usual).

Please pass on word of this great opportunity to support a literary magazine, get a discounted subscription, and submit to a much smaller pool of writers than in the normal slush pile!

Final Judges

  

Fiction: Brad Watson     

Brad Watson, born in Meridian, Mississippi, on July 24, 1955, published his first work, a collection of short stories called Last Days of the Dog-Men, and won a Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A new book, a novella and stories titled Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, will be published by W.W. Norton (also the publishers of his first two books) in March 2010. These stories have been published in The Oxford American, The Yalobusha Review, Greensboro Review, Idaho Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.

Poetry: Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966. She earned an M.A. in poetry from Hollins University and M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. Her first collection of poetry, Domestic Work (2000), was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Trethewey's honors include the Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She is Professor of English at Emory University where she holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry.

Ad of the Week

This if fabulous, if for no reason than Delta knowing precisely who their target audience is.

Sometimes you just need to get off the net

I did work on Thanksgiving ... I just didn't accomplish anything other than my modified-NaNo goal.  Which reminds me:

13,843 / 20,000 words

Yep. I'm not going to make it to 50k this month.  But I tried and I like my project and I like the process so I don't want to give up, I want to keep making progress.  Thus the modified goal.  And along with the modified goal, the promise that I'm going to write 75k between December 21 and January 31.  There's just too much that I have to do as a composition instructor and as an overloaded grad student before December 21 for me to sit down and crank out that additional 30k this month.  I knew it was going to be a long shot when I started, but like I said, I like the spirit of the thing.

This makes me 1 for 3 on attempted NaNo's completed.  Then again, next semester I think I might have to do four NaNo-style months in a row all things considered ... but that doesn't bear more discussion at the present moment.

So I spent all this time on Thanksgiving -- between the turkey and the application writing and the writing -- reading about writers using social media. Particularly Kristen Lamb's blog.  And so I changed my twitter account from @SpeakCoffee to @EileenWiedbrauk and I tinkered with a bunch of other stuff.  In general, I spent way too much time thinking and reading about this stuff.  Yes it does feel "too early," but really I'd rather know this stuff too early than too late.  Yes, I chalk all of it up to "professional development and education," but it still can feel like a waste of an evening.

I also consider scouting the bookstore (using my new Odyssey workshop taught bookshop-scouting-skills-for-understanding-the-market) to be a professional development and education activity ... and yet somehow that seems to be more productive than exploring and teaching myself new forms of social media.  Perhaps because learning social media doesn't directly relate to writing and publishing.  Yes, it's a marketing thing.  But I don't think I'm one of the people who grows pale at the mere mention of "marketing."

I'm an okay public speaker.  I get up in front of a score of students and speak for my regular pay check.  I've done public readings of my own work--the largest crowd was probably at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and about 80 people--and I know I can do that.  I, if the need arises, can make twenty minutes of conversation with a complete stranger even if they say almost nothing (this is not a desirable situation, but hey, it's better than complete silence). I blog, I have facebook, I like computers.  ... I think my aversion to writerly-social-media-platform-building activities is based in humility.

Having a facebook "fan" page does not mean that you'll (a) finish a novel, (b) sell a novel, (c) ever have anyone read your novel and "like" your official facebook author page.  Yet there's advice out there that says someone in my position (that is, doesn't have a novel out on submission but is working on one and would like to have it published someday) should have a facebook page already.  As in Page not just Profile.  And that just strikes me as ... hubris.  Or at least vanity.

I completely believe the behave as if you're going to succeed mantra, because of course if you behave as if you're going to fail then success is nigh impossible.  But while I believe in the power of positive thinking, I also believe that while occasionally tempting fate might work, baiting her with a giant ham bone will come to no good.

What are your thoughts and opinions on such things as writer social media personae, platforms and presences?  I understand that "getting the blog" is big in terms of discussion (as is the big discussion about how if you hate to read blogs because you find them uninteresting then you shouldn't write one because you'll only write hateful, uninteresting entries).

For me, if I stopped submitting work for publication tomorrow, I'd still blog.  I like my blog. *hugs blog*  Okay, that was a corny moment.

Um ... cat?

Hey cat.  Whatcha doin up there?

Ash has of late taken to sitting on top my desk chair's head rest.  Yep.  Above my head, while balancing on a 14" long by 2" wide chunk of plastic and cushion covered with blue canvas.  And she's not one of those skinny, spry little jumping cats that only weigh ten pounds.  No, Ash is a built-for-comfort cat who weighs a bit over 13 pounds.  The only way she can stay up there is by sinking her back claws into the side of the cushion and hanging on.  

The chair is none the worse for wear -- another reason to recommend IKEA and it's nearly indestructible fabrics -- but I have bled on several occasions.  She was getting better with the dismount (sigh) but then she saw a squirrel out the window and nothing mattered but speed.  

I'm really glad right about now that I didn't pay the extra fifty-bucks to get this desk chair in leather.

Ad of the Week

Story published in SWINK today!

"The Apology" was published today by SWINK online magazine as part of it's Dead Letter Office.

Finally, the piece I wrote and performed as part of my senior thesis project has found a home.  (Read now)

National Book Award Winner

So this is cool. My professor just won the National Book Award in fiction. Majorly cool. And therefore totally acceptable that she had to cancel class this week to go accept her award for Lord of Misrule.

NPR article on the awards ceremony.

A Hunger Games party?

10,969 / 50,000 words


from a recent facebook conversation with two of my friends and fellow grad students:

Friend One: in possession of Mocking Jay and can't wait to read it! All I gotta do is conquer these portfolios first.

Me: your will power is greater than mine. I got mockingjay on Sunday afternoon and finished it at 3am. Screw grading.

Friend Two: It is sooooo good! We should all get together and have a Hunger Games party.

Me: ... and what would make it a Hunger Games party? all of us attempting to kill each other?

Two: well, maybe something slightly less depressing than that?

One: No no. I think we should kill each other :-)

Two: Kill with kindness? Come on! Or maybe, and this would be awesome. We go to someone's house. Turn on room of the house into the arena where two of us have to fight. And then we can be your supporters and throw things at you that might help you. Honestly, I'm imagining a wrestling match where I'm pelting you with yeast rolls.

#HungerGamesMadness

November Doldrums

10,359 / 50,000 words

November slogs on. The MFA process slogs on. Recently, while wishing for Christmas -- the sparkly joy of the season as well as the break it entails -- I was reminded to not wish days of my life away. Good point.

So I refined my wish: I wish that Christmas was now and that I wouldn't have lost any days of my life by having it come early.

Hey, if we're wishing to impossibly manipulate time, why not be specific?

I have roughly two weeks to get a short story into shape for workshop and a week after that I have another short story due for a "forms" class (as in, theory of the form of fiction). Ug. Neither story is particularly, um, written at the moment.

I'm so close to being done with degree, and yet so far away. Big sigh. I'm going to bed early tonight. Just thinking about the damn degree and all I have to do is making me sleepy.


But like I said, I'm tired and being cranky. And I'm in the November Doldrums. And way behind on NaNoWriMo novel as well as everything else. So I've been pouring all my time into escapist reading. Mockingjay marked the 52nd book I read and finished in 2010, therefore completing my New Year's resolution.

Mockingjay

8,889 / 50,000 words

I get it now.

Back at the end of summer there was all this hype, particularly on YA writer blogs, about Mockingjay coming out.  At the time I'd never heard of it.  I knew it was a YA dystopia triology so I requested the first book, Hunger Games, from the local library and waited for it to become available.  

I liked Hunger Games -- it was great.  Well done, and if I ever taught it I think that it would make for a fascinating discussion about the role of reality television in our lives as well as in the novel and how people behave on reality television not just the behavior of watching it.  But when I was done, I didn't feel the need to rush out and get Catching Fire, the second book.

So, a couple weeks ago, Catching Fire shows up as my library request and I go and pick it up.  It sits on my stack of books for a while.  I'm hesitant to read it because -- spoiler alert -- I'd read a blurb for Mockingjay and I knew that Katniss goes back into the Hunger Games for a second time.  I was like really?  Really? You're gonna do that twice?  Isn't that like ... writing the same novel again?  But I finally read it and yes, Katniss goes back into the Hunger Games arena, but the circumstances are different enough from the first trip that it's really intriguing and does feel like "the same novel as last time."

So I started reading Catching Fire at 10:00 PM on Saturday and I finished it at 6:30 AM.  But hey, it was a Saturday and I could do that.  Except now I really wanted to get my hands on Mockingjay.  Really, really, REALLY wanted to get my hands on it.

That's when I got it, when I finally understood all the hype around the release of the third book.

So -- no longer willing to wait on the library for a copy -- I called my friend who'd offered to loan me the trilogy and got Mockingjay from her that very afternoon.  I started reading at 6:00 PM on Sunday and finished at 3:30 AM.  Which I really shouldn't have done because it was a Sunday and I had stuff I should have been doing.

Oh and I pretty much bawled my eyes out from 1:00 until 3:00 AM.  Sheesh.  And for the whole next day I could make myself cry just thinking about it.  Yeah.  Damn.  I was invested.

But the thought that still nags at me is the epilog of Mockingjay -- and I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying this -- where Suzanne Collins focuses on the notion of "how will we ever tell our children about what we did and the way the world was?"  The scary feeling in that sentiment is that the children are somehow being intentionally kept oblivious of the way the world used to be.  Maybe I'm the only one to get that feeling.  Maybe it's in question only because of the relatively young age of the "future generation" at the time of the statement.  

It's almost like the question of the first book is "What are we willing to do to survive?" the second "What can we do to change the world?" and the third is "How can we live with what we've done?"  Considering how much time Katniss spends passed out, sedated, hiding, etc., it's reasonable to say that she spends the bulk of the third novel's timeline attempting to cope.  So maybe then it's not so odd that the epilog is "How can we ever tell our children?"

And ... it's back!

Realms of Fantasy Magazine has once again been saved from the brink of destruction.  (My previous post on the subject here.) This is beginning to feel a bit like one of those Bugs Bunny spoofs of Hamlet where he's dead, then he's back to deliver more instructions, then he's dying again, then there's more speech to be made, then he's really dead ... except he has one last line to deliver.

Good news ElizabethTwist! That subscription you ordered won't be canceled!  They're switching owners without a break in production.  Although you can still get the December issue free as a PDF off their website.

I was recently reading the introductory material in a Best of anthology that spoke of Realms as one of the "big four" fantasy magazine.  This was a new distinction for me but I can see where they're coming from.  The "big three" of speculative writing are Analog, Asimov's, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.  But Analog and Asimovs slant toward sci-fi, though they do occasionally publish things I would consider fantasy.  So if you want to look at the top fantasy magazines, you really need to broaden out to Realms which might publish science fantasy but not science fiction.

Behold!

5,184 / 50,000

Behold the fingerless glove!

I've looked high and low for these and now, finally, they are mine!

Okay, that's not entirely true.  I decided I wanted some so that I could type without freezing my digits off this winter and my first thought was to take the tips off the tops of a pair of cheapy-cheapy black knit gloves that I have.  So I did that, but because the ends weren't finished, they shed little black fluff all over the place (and into the keyboard) and it was distracting and uncomfortable.  So then someone told me they had fingerless gloves on Etsy.  And they do.  But they're expensive.  Then, this weekend, I came across these at Target for about 40% of what they cost on Etsy--sold!

Now I type in style and warmth.

NaNo Check In

It's been just over a week--how are you doing on your NaNoWriMo novelling endeavors?

Me? I'm ... not so good.  As of last night, an "on-track" person should have 13,334 words written.  I have about 4,000.

My NaNo veteran friends say that it's not a NaNo*fail until the last days and hours of the month--a rally is always possible.  And, as someone who wrote 15K in the last three days of November 2009, I have to agree with them.

Aging, Changing and Dialog

NaNo: 3,974 / 50,000 words

This weekend's Ad of the Week sent me scrounging for my copy of  When Harry Met Sally.  Turns out I don't have one.  Bummer.  But, Netflix had it in their "Watch Now!" stream-on-demand selection, so I watched now.  Happiness.

I was a teenager when I first saw that movie.  Probably thirteen or fourteen.  I followed it.  Pretty much.  Mostly I was amused with the very 80s-ness of Meg Ryan's wardrobe.

Watching it again this weekend, I have a brand new appreciation for the writing.  What I think is really amazing about the writing is that Nora Ephron managed to capture the conversations you have when you're in college and the conversations you have a few years after you were in college.  That the dialog stayed true to the characters, and the characters didn't change drastically, they just grew up a little bit.

I don't think I'm properly expressing my awe.  Let me put it this way: I was watching the first 15 minutes and I was like this is such a stupid and narrow minded conversation that they're having and then I shook my head but it's exactly the kind of thing you discuss when you're 22 and you think you know everything there is to know.  And then I was hooked.

And it got me thinking about the difference between a character changing and a character aging.  Because I don't think the characters change as much as they age--aging being a kind of character change that's less drastic, slower ... glacial.  And how comparatively difficult aging is to write well without seeming inconsistent.

Ad of the Week

Vote.

Today's the day.  Go do it.

NaNo Nested

245 / 50,000

Congratulations to @llison, Michael, ElizabethTwist, Zoe, Sam and everyone else who's doing NaNoWriMo or some variation thereof! The journey has begun!

I spent the weekend nesting like a pregnant woman. Not nesting for a baby, nesting for a novel. I cleaned, washed sheets, vacuumed. I went shopping. Made several trips to the grocery store. And then, most notably, this weekend I cooked. I now have meals for a week in my fridge and about seven TV dinner options chilling in my freezer.

With the domestic things taken care off -- I even put my clothes away after I washed them! -- there should be nothing distracting me this week while I write.  Nothing but school, teaching, grading, lesson planning, and the great unknown which is my novel.  Nothing much at all in the face of the toilet having been cleaned.