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.
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.
The songbird called, and I answered. Thank you, Half Mystic, for including me in your literary realm. I am pleased to sing that I am the new journal editor.
I’m tickled to be a new reader of prose submissions for Longleaf Review.
