onomatopoetic
I write, and then I blog about it.Archive for updates
On Being an Editor
Excuse my absence, a new semester has started and I’m making a valiant try to, well, be around again. We’ll see how long it lasts.
This past month I’ve been busily making selections with the rest of the staff (of five) of The Laureate, WMU’s literary magazine. Technically I’m the Fiction Editor, but we’ve all been reading all of the around 150 submissions, including prose, poetry, and plays. Going into the job I wasn’t remotely sure what to expect – I’ve never been on the editing end of things. Being rejected so many times, at first it was exceedingly hard to say no to anyone on a first readthrough. Unfortunately many of the submissions deserved exactly that – although they were for certain broken up by some gems, and the outlook for the finished magazine is a positive one. Being an editor is an odd experience. On one hand, you feel entirely qualified to dismiss or laud the work of any given writer, and on the other hand, you’re constantly reminded that you are really in the same dire straits as them regarding being published, especially when many of the submitters were the same age and class-level as most of us on staff. It’s been a great experience so far, weeding the good from the less good, and even just hanging around talking writing with the rest of the staff (Who are entirely poets, save me – which has been a completely different perspective. Weirdo poets! Kidding, kidding, hi Jen.).
Meanwhile I’m now enrolled in a workshop led by Kellie Wells, which I already have faith will be much more productive than this past semester’s. I’ve been working on some flash fiction and still plodding away at my thesis…and of course getting more rejection letters. I also revamped the site a bit (okay, okay, fine, really all I did was add some nice praise from people I’ve worked with to one of my sidebars so that when I land here putzing around the main page I can see nice things and feel good about myself…) so all six of you who frequent (uh, what’s the antonym of frequent?) can enjoy…or something.
More Rejections and an Excerpt
It’s been a while again – I’ve been keeping busy with a fiction workshop taught by Robert Eversz and of course working on my thesis. I decided to forgo NaNoWriMo as I did last year (I won in 03, 04, and 05!) to concentrate on those things. I think I’ve in some way outgrown the frantic 50k in 30 days quantity over quality pacing of the whole project – it was great for me when I started, it really taught me how to buckle down and accomplish something and not worry about precision (as proof I am a great english major, I just attempted to write that word as “precisity”) and being perfect the first time around. Since then I’ve learned to work shorter, tighter, and have been much more focused on editing and drafting, which I never really intend to do with the fruits of my NaNo works. Still, it’s a great project and I wish the best of luck to all of my friends currently competing!
In the past month or so, I’ve finished several drafts of a piece of flash fiction, and I’m working on a slightly longer fiction piece that will be part of my thesis. I got a rejection letter from 580 Split that told me I made it to the third round of selections (to which I immediately went out and celebrated with lots of beer), and I was named Fiction Editor of The Laureate, Western Michigan University’s undergraduate literary magazine which I was published in last year. We’re waiting for all our submissions to come in, at the moment, but it promises to be a good – if harrying – time. It’s going to be interesting to be the one handing out rejection letters this time.
The piece I’m focusing right now is unnamed yet, and in early revision stages, but here’s a sample:
I know we’re moving when everyone starts asking how much we’d like warm weather and summers on the beach. Our mother starts complaining about the negative degree wind chill and the Eye Heart Alberta Beef bumper stickers and pretending that she’d love to be anywhere else, and it works on Liz, who has already sorted out all her sweatshirts, overcoats, mittens, and put them in garbage bags in piles behind her bedroom door. She wears sandals and tank tops around the house while thick Albertan snowflakes fall in waves past the windows and she gets away with it.
Dad comes home late from practice looking tired, his longish hair damp and sticking to his neck, curled across his cheekbones. The heavy sound his hockey bag makes as he drops it unceremoniously to the floor echoes in his voice, in the sigh that escapes before he says hello.
“Don’t worry,” Liz says, shivering in her pink flowery flip-flops and taking his hand, “it will be warm and we can go swimming when there isn’t ice.” He smiles at her, ruffles her dark hair and unhooks her small fingers from his as his phone rings O Canada. I wonder if dad likes swimming as much as he likes skating and think of course he must not. Mom takes out leftovers and he tries to smile at Liz as he moves out of earshot. I can hear his voice over the slow murmur of the microwave. We’ve had his favorite three days in a row.
Work In Progress; 2007
I’ve been writing a lot lately, but not necessarily the things I should really be focusing in on. Despite this, I have ideas and I think I’m going out East for my next project, which should be interesting – it’s been a while since Asia’s cropped up in my writing and I could stand to leave Canada behind for a while. Here’s to hoping Thanksgiving (wow…four hours of sleep is starting to get to me in a way even the espresso can’t help – I just wanted to call it Easter break) vacation gives me a bit of breathing room to work.
Rejection Letters!
I’ve been missing for a while – I got really busy with school this (almost last!) semester and despite having a fiction workshop course right now, haven’t really been doing much to warrant updates.
That said, a week or so ago I received my very first literary magazine rejection letter! I know a lot of writers get down on themselves over it, but that really just isn’t the way to get through all this tedious submitting we have to do – it’s just a way to end up discouraged. And at online twenty-one and still honing the craft, I’m not expecting a whole lot of immediate success anyway, so just to be recognized at all, even if it’s for not being quite up to par, is a huge step in my eyes. Not to mention my first rejection letter came from Redivider, Emerson College’s (which is at the top of my list of potential grad schools) lit mag – and the editor left me honest to goodness specific comments:
Dear Stephanie,
While I really enjoyed the backdrop of this story (Toronto during a
heatwave), I often found myself wandering during the story itself. So
we’re going to have to pass. Best of luck placing it elsewhere.
Editors
Along with a couple other story-specific comments. I’ve since also gotten less interesting rejection letters from Alaska Quarterly and Caketrain. And now that it’s past September 30th, a million more magazines are accepting submissions – time to get back to it again!
Updates: Lit Mag Submissions Part 2
I made my way through another set of lit mag submissions a few days ago, actually – while watching Mighty Ducks 2 with Jordi, inexplicably. At any rate, I had a nice list kept of what I submitted where so when I inevitably get picked up by one of these brilliant literary magazines who can see my genius through the thin veneer of my eloquent prose (kidding), I’d be able to let the rest that I’d simultaneously submitted to know that they hadn’t moved fast enough and were just out of luck until the next time I go throwing submissions around, and weren’t they sorry now (kidding again).
And then my computer’s powercord fritzed out on me, the whole thing crashed, and I’d never saved the notepad file. So dragging myself through the M-Z listings of Newpages I managed to figure out where I submitted (er, mostly), but not necessarily which piece got submitted to where. Folks, don’t be me. I’m an idiot. Keep better track of these things. Anyway added to my previous list are:
I feel like there were at least a couple more – Marginalia being one that sounds particularly familiar – but I have no way of being sure. From now on I fully intend to either save my files right away, or to have a hard copy of all of this stashed somewhere that I can’t accidentally lose because my computer is a piece of junk. Or maybe what I really need to do is just not let myself get so distracted by Gunner Stahl. Hmm…
Edit: Mostly for my own records, this afternoon I sent out another three; Fever to the first two and Chinook to the third:
Updates: Lit Mag Submissions Part 1
After spending a very listless and uninteresting afternoon watching the Tigers lose another baseball game and whining about lacking the money necessary for a good therapeutic shopping trip, I got a call from Finny which, although it didn’t really even consist of much writing discussion, served to remind me that I was being a lazy jerk, and that all those lit mags I’d intended to submit to at the beginning of the summer (and had then been infuriated to learn that most of them had closed submissions until August) were taking works again. So I buckled down and worked my way through A-L section of lit mags at Newpages. I was stymied in my efforts by only having five stamps on hand (SASE’s are a bitch!), but in the course of two hours I got through eight submissions (the last three of which were electronically submitted) and bookmarked a good 7-8 more that I’ll finish up with once I acquire stamps, before I move on to M-Z, and 4-5 more that aren’t taking submissions yet but will be soon. So far I’ve covered:
I sent Fever to the first five, and another short piece called Chinook to the next two. The final accepted up to two submissions at once, and thus I sent both. Originally I intended to split the two more evenly, but for some reason Alberta likes having lit mags I could see myself getting accepted to – and Chinook is set in Calgary, where I have never been and yet presume to know all about thanks to things like Wikipedia entries about freeways and national parks. Needless to say, I do not feel ballsy enough to try that quite yet.
The turnaround on most of these is about 4 months to a year, and the acceptance rate is somewhere around 3% – but I feel good about both of these pieces and the feedback I’ve gotten on them, so here’s hoping!
Current Projects: Pack of Lives Update
Quick update: Mike has created an information page re: the cigarette project I mentioned to yesterday, now being referred to as Pack of Lives. For anyone who’s interested, the information can be found here.
I’ve talked to a bunch of people and gotten quite a few commitments already, but we’re still quite a ways from twenty, so if you have any inclination toward participating, go for it!
Current Projects!
I’ve been spending most of this summer, well…the way a lot of people wish they could spend summers, until they actually are spending them that way, at which point they realize how much it really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be (oh damn, there’s a stock phrase). Which is to say, doing nothing. That’s right, the employment gods of Kalamazoo have not smiled on me (at least not until the end of August), and yet I have also been too lazy and preoccupied with such things as, oh, NHL07 and the burgeoning love I have for Tiger baseball, to write much outside of blogs. My trusty moleskine, though, is ever being stocked with ideas that I will someday force myself to become prolific enough to use.
That said, I have a few things going on right now:
- Finny (and by association Jordi) has convinced me to partake in the Seventy Days of Sweat challenge. Having done NaNoWriMo for three years (and finally saying no to it last year), 60,000 words in 70 days sounds like something so remarkably easy I shouldn’t have a single bit of problem with it. Except that this would require me to have a plot on hand, which I don’t. Jordi gave me suggestions involving Prague, hot Czechs with names suspiciously similar to a certain NHL player, and chinchillas, but I’m not quite sure how likely I’ll be to go down that road. I would like to keep the Prague setting but I think I’ve switched over to a slightly disgruntled travelog writer as my protagonist. Let’s see where that goes! Finny checked in with me tonight and it sounds like she’s prevailing gloriously (and hilariously) on her piece – I, on the other hand, solemnly swear that I will start for real tomorrow. I will, however, be cheating, because as fun as spending 70 days writing only a light-hearted, fun novel would be, I also have to contend with…
- Lit Mag Submission time! Most magazines I’m looking at don’t start accepting submissions for the year until August or even September – but my goal for this academic year is to rack up some publications, and with only two pieces properly put together, edited, (“Fever” and “Chinook”, both of which I’ll probably post excerpts of in the next few days, and both of which, I have realized, shamelessly steal the names of hockey players) and ready to be sent out, that might get tough if I don’t get back to work on my current two projects in the short story (which, for the record, is my current favorite medium) department. So um, I won’t tell anyone I’m quite possibly counting words I shouldn’t if you don’t!
- And lastly, my Honors Thesis, which is posed to be a collection of short fiction, is due at the end of this academic year. I’m hoping I can overlap this with the lit mag submissions some, as I can hopefully draw all of those pieces together with some form of theme that is strong enough to defend so I can properly graduate. However, this also entails a bunch of work the likes of writing about writing and from what I hear it is more work than you think it’s going to be.
This Friday sees me going in for jury duty – I can only hope that winds up as boring and thus potentially good for writing as I imagine it will be, because with a list like this, I might need to hide away in seclusion to get it all done.
