Girls & Birds

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Two fiction pieces, one fabulist & one slipstream, were lovingly accepted this morning from Gingerbread House and Gone Lawn. Both pieces were written in 2016, both speak of girls and birds, and both I lifted from dusty shelves, wiped off, and set free in hopes they would find a home.

Back Home to Lit Journals

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Since major publishers are hardly publishing literary novels these days (read about it here and here and here and here), I’ll soon be spending most of my writing time writing short stories–just like I was doing years ago. For the last six years, I’ve been writing novels in hopes I could get one published by a major publisher. I’m finally ready to let that dream die. I can’t fight the market. I can’t conjure readers into existence. Readers are doing other things now–they are scrolling and binge-watching. And the readers who are reading have so many choices, and most of their choices are driven to their view by careful and pointed Amazonian marketing and other big-money-for-few-books marketing tactics. But that is okay. I will still write the occasional novel and send it to small presses (one never knows), but it’s time to go back to my old friends, literary journals. I visited them a couple of years ago and was welcomed with opened arms as they swooped up my flash fiction, one story after another. All these years–almost three decades since I discovered them–and they are still there, still here, and we fiction writers need them more than ever.

A Good Editor

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“Ferry Men” was accepted and will be coming out in Black Denim Lit. I am obsessed with my flash fiction, obsessed with the writing and the sending and the accepting. I write about one story a week while commuting on the bus and ferry. I’ve sent out three more pieces to little, sweet mags, mags that turn around decisions quickly, mags whose editors might take the time to give personal and encouraging words to writers. One such editor is Elena M. Stiehler of The Sonder Review. Her appreciation for “Buffalo Girls” planted my unsteady feet firmly on the flash-fiction road I had just decided to take again after four years of silent novel-writing. Editors like Elena help writers write.

Two flash-fiction stories were accepted by other journals after “Buffalo Girls,” both written in the same voice. Three other pieces are out at other journals. I have a theme that connects the pieces, and I can see this turning into a collection.  None of this was on my writing map until Elena not only accepted my piece but also took the time to express her appreciation for it. I had been testing the waters, and I found the waters to be warm and inviting.

All editors of literary journals should take Elena’s lead. After all, editors and authors are in this for the same thing: the joy and excitement of communicating literary art to our little world of readers–a world that is often solitary and silent. Why not whisper a little praise to one another. Why not shout it.