This is golden, I just don’t have time to write it:
Victorian-age retelling of Homer’s Odyssey using a cat as the protagonist, who is accidentally left to make the long journey home alone after falling out of his spinster’s carriage. Magical cat powers and epic animal battles optional (but encouraged).
You’re welcome.
I say this now in part because I have three short (nontraditional-ish) pieces in the December issue: two Craigslist stories and one 21st-century epistle (aka email). I originally thought these would appear in the January issue, so it’s a final 2009 surprise.
There is something I really like about these forms, but I have a hard time articulating it. Part of it is the familiar, almost casual “realness” of using a an everyday medium to tell a story. Another, more subtle quality is the sense of a narrative within the narrative: there is a story within the ad/email itself, but then the piece can also allude to a larger story concerning the writer (i.e. what kind of person wrote this? what can I tell about their life from what they have written?). Go on Craigslist, especially the personal ad sections, and just read. You’ll see what I mean.
Nonetheless, I think a lot of publications probably have very little interest in emails and personal ads as fiction, so thanks to Roxane Gay and the other fine folks at PANK for putting these up.
This month’s edition of Monkeybicycle‘s “One Sentence Stories” is up and includes quick fiction from yours truly + Nanoism contributors Ethel Rohan and Brendan O’Brien, among others.
Also, some bonus Thaumatrope bits from November: Veteran’s Day, Thanksgiving, and (oh, I don’t know, let’s call it) 2012.
So Electric Literature just serialized a Rick Moody story on Twitter over three days and 150ish tweets. Unsurprisingly, people simultaneously applauded the “experiment” while poo-poo’ing all over it. I don’t have the energy to treat the topic with the gusto it deserves, but—in short—I both applaud the effort and enjoyed the story. I do wonder though about serialization in the 21st century:
What is the impetus to serialize a story? After all, we don’t have the tangible, real-world constraints that necessitated the serialization of many early 20th-century stories in the first place. Do readers really digest serials bit by bit as they’re fed, or do they wait until the end to feast? My gut feeling is that the easy access to instant gratification in all forms of entertainment makes serialization (at least in terms of the storytelling itself) about as antiquated as watching live TV with commercials.
The question then becomes, what are reasons to serialize that can transcend the gimmick? I posed this question on Fictionaut.
November is a good time to share some itty-bitty poems that have been popping up here and there.
And that’s that. As an added bonus, I also have three pieces in Thaumatrope this month to keep an eye out for, including a very special Thanksgiving tale.
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I’ve been fascinated recently by what I think of as authentic stories: writing that—while fictional—uses everyday forms to tell realistic, might-as-well-be-true stories. Now, there’s nothing wrong with the traditional narrative. It’s familiar and effective. But still, there are true stories everywhere, hidden within the innocuous interactions of the 21st century for anyone who cares to pause and consider. While many people familiar with Hemingway’s (apocryphal) famous six-word story (“For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Worn”) note its brevity, I focus on its form: the personal ad.
I’ve been calling these types of stories “Craigslist Fiction.” A story that uses an authentic form (personal ad, email, etc.) should 1) be read convincingly as an actual example of that medium (i.e. an actual Craigslist ad) and 2) must still relate a story. Like “hint fiction,” some of the details are merely hinted at (i.e. omitted), but it’s my view that Hemingway (or the person who probably wrote these long before him) was on to something. Because how often do you read something on a site like Craigslist and think: what kind of person would write that?
My first published very short piece of Craigslist Fiction, “Iranian Food,” appears in this month’s elimae. There are more on the way, soon to be available from where fine writing is read.
I’ve written some new things. A subset of these will appear in Matchbook, PANK, Writers’ Bloc, Four and Twenty, A Handful of Stones, Outshine, and elimae. I now have a bunch of half-started things that I would like to finish but probably won’t. I have however ruled out urology and nephrology as future specialties.
Matchbook, PANK, and Writers’ Bloc won’t happen until 2010, which is probably a good thing as now I can already consider 2010 a creatively productive year. Matchbook in particular has a really unique take on publishing where they place stories side-by-side with critical pieces. A few sites (PANK among them) interview writers about their stories, but I can’t think of anyone who puts the nonfiction thoughts of their contributors in the forefront like Matchbook. It’s refreshing and exciting.
I also really wanted elimae, and it took me a while to land. Few places accept submissions of literally any size and fewer still consistently publish nano/hint length pieces. elimae has been in the super-short game longer than anyone.
In other news, my vision of the future appeared in Thaumatrope a few days back.
When it comes to getting information from people, we use email. If you need to organize a lot of it (as if, say, you ran a lit mag) and you have money or the right friends, you might get your hands on a submission system to compile and organize all that good information. Or you might be out of luck. Dale Wisely over at Right Hand Pointing mentioned this really interesting idea to me the other day: use a combination of Google Apps’ forms and spreadsheets to put it all together in one easy to use location. This idea may seem obvious to those who regularly use Google Apps or surveys to collect data, but I was shocked at how clean this functionality is.
You can see it in action at Nanoism’s December Serial Contest and year-round at the short-form poetry journal Four and Twenty (the form is here).
Some disclaimers: This idea accepts plain text only (no boldface or italics) and organizes everything into a spreadsheet. This is not the best way to read large blocks of text but it works for poetry, flash, or any kind of micro. Acceptances/rejections still require a manual email, so if you run something like elimae and you’re firing off responses in three hours flat, you’d probably waste more time copy-and-pasting email addresses than it’s worth. But say you run a quarterly mag or a one-time deal where you’re sitting on pieces for a while and it’s easy to lose track of them—this is a nice way to keep ’em all in one place. Not just one folder, like with email filters, but literally one document. It’s also handy for doing your own Duotrope-style stats. Sure, you can do this all by hand in excel (or you could code your own system), but this definitely has its uses.
If nothing else, say you’re trying to collect addresses or contact info for writers to include in an anthology. You could send a big email (BCC’d, of course) and manually amass the responses. Or you could use Google Forms to collect the responses into a spreadsheet for you (which is what @nick did for Twitter Wit).
Outshine is a science-fiction “twitterzine” (there, I said it) notable for its focus on near-future optimistic SF prose poems or “flash-forwards” of 140 characters or less, this being Twitter after all. No nuclear apocalypses appear in Outshine’s twice-weekly pieces.
Outshine is awesome for many reasons (including paying $5 per poem, which is about a quarter per word, way above “pro-rates”) but most notably to me for how perfectly it handles short-form science fiction.
One of the shortcomings of the vast majority of super-short stories is that these dribbles are often not really stories or— even when they are—aren’t best suited for the nano-form. Some stories try to do too much to be effective when short. One of the best parts about the genre of science fiction is the premise. The ensuing exploration is what makes the story, but an interesting premise is where a lot of the fun lies. By calling for prose poems instead of stories, Outshine sidesteps the nagging constraints of trying to shrink traditional storytelling elements down and instead focuses on premise and language. By promoting certain elements over others (and not trying to be everything to everyone), Outshine gets the job done more consistently.
As evidence for this claim, my third flash-forward, “No money, no problem,” appeared in Outshine yesterday. My first two pieces (“Surgeon airships…” and “Footfalls…“) were published in May and June.
Last week I was fortunate enough to be featured in PicFic; this week I find myself with five stories in Seven by Twenty, another twitter-based ‘zine for stories and poems and brief awesomeness. This five-part set includes a healthy mix of older Midnight Stories and some fresh material:
In other news, Folded Word nominated my seven-tweet-sized short story “Moving On” for Best of the Net. So, thanks!
Lastly, the great and newly-public literary community Fictionaut just posted a short interview with me about Nanoism and Adam Robinson of the very cool Publishing Genius.