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.

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.

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!

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:

• Natural Bridge
• /nor
• Passager
• Permafrost
• Rainbow Curve
• Redivider
• The Salt Flats Annual
• Watchword

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:

• Artful Dodge
• First Intensity
• Ellipses 

•  580 Split
• Alaska Quarterly
• Caketrain
• dANDelion
• Filling Station
• Black Clock
• Compass Rose
• Fence

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!

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!

The project is really my good friend Mike‘s idea, but I love it and immediately agreed to contribute. So here’s the deal: you commit to write one of what will be a total of twenty vignettes, no more than a page in length, about anything you want so long as it centers around the idea of one cigarette. Once we’ve compiled all twenty, each will represent one cigarette from a pack – clever I know, right? You don’t have to be a writer, hell, you can be someone who’s never written a thing in your life, so long as you’re motivated enough to finish something and contribute.

In terms of prompt, the things we’ve discussed are the oddly communal aspect of smoking (how people are always willing to let someone bum a cigarette, etc., how it’s a sort of connection between people who otherwise might never so much as speak to each other) and the interesting dynamic of it – but your contribution can be anything you can think of; no rules or regulations other than the center of each piece has to be one cigarette.

I don’t honestly know what’s going to be done with the manuscript afterward – it’s something we probably won’t think about until we actually get it off the ground and have contributers – nor the time frame, but if you’re interested at all I’ll keep you up to date as best I can as we go forward. Comment or drop me an e-mail; ninja_breakfast@hotmail.com.

The piece I ended up working on (one of two I currently consider almost done) is called Fever, and was written this past spring for the writing workshop I was taking at the time. I really wanted to do something utilizing the theme of brevity, the idea of the makeup of a city, and a sort of surreal, floaty sort of setting (which was what I particularly wanted to focus on), so I started with those, and the idea of bathroom stall graffiti. When I was younger, my grandparents lived in Toronto, and as I’ve always loved the city I took this opportunity to write about it in a sort of different light. It was nice not having to do as much setting research as I usually do – you know, things like having to wiki highways in Alberta. I’d just read Liza Ward’s Snowbound, and without even realizing it, I actually took a lot of inspiration from the piece. It was pointed out to me by my workshop leader Jaimy Gordon (whom I love and give unending credit to for helping to shape my writing thus far, seriously check her out) that I almost inverted some of Ward’s themes – and as a writer who takes pride in pulling inspiration from the (spoken, written, hell, scribbled on a bar counter top) stories around me, that made me particularly proud of this piece.

I don’t intend to post full-length pieces here, especially in the case of something like this where I hope to soon find a source of publication, but I like the idea of posting excerpts, both of what I’ve done and of what I’ve been working on, so here is a section:

The hockey year, daylight savings time, and the Toronto Police strike all started with an Indian summer that refused to let go of the city even at night. October was miserable, a sticky, insufferable month of soggy Reuben sandwiches at Shopsie’s and a lingering static haze of heat that suggested we would never make it to winter at all.

The Leafs started off the season five and six by the time daylight savings took away one extra muggy hour of evening, but the arena was full every game even so, just because this was Toronto, and the crisp, sterile chill of the ice reminded us that there was an opposite to this maddening summer.

It was almost November, but the city issued a heat alert and handed out manuals on dealing with Excessive Heat Events and studies done in the United States on heat mortality and successful media-based warning systems. It felt like it would never rain again, let alone snow. Just walking around downtown you started to think you could honestly hear people sweating around you, or at least you could smell it, the heavy, noxious moisture hanging in the air, slowly suffocating the city. Midway through the month, Aleš said he would go crazy inside with the air-conditioning on for one more minute, and even though it was hot and sticky he turned it off and left the windows open for the non-existent breeze. We went driving with the windows down, even though Aleš hated taking his car out of the narrow, crumbling cement parking structure, in hopes that if we went fast enough we could break through the oppressive stagnance of the air – and it would work, sometimes. Sometimes, we’d just stand on the busy street corners and let the cars passing by too fast do the work for us.

The police force wasn’t legally allowed to strike, so instead they dressed down in blue baseball caps with the Union insignia, aviator sunglasses and mock turtlenecks and stood by, ticking off boxes on crossword puzzles and ignoring their radars while cars blurred past them at double the speed limit. Between the heat and the police, the city existed in a sort of otherworldly miasma, like our own sort of Vegas. What happened there wouldn’t count when we came back to reality, when the heat melted away and the cityscape remained behind.

Everything flowed to Toronto. Power, immigrants, money, hot air masses, and twenty-three years of my life; it wrung the days out of me and still latched on, determined to resonate through, past, the last few meager weeks.

Fever; 3421 words; 2007

If you’re curious about the rest of the story I’m more than happy to e-mail it to anyone; contact me at ninja_breakfast@hotmail.com, or leave a comment with your e-mail address.

And no. It has nothing to do with Hemsky.

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.

In the meantime, I started to think about how much I like the concept of blogging vs. the sort of rambling tales of my daily exploits that pop up at my actual livejournal. I have two others, namely NPI, a hockey blog I share with my co-conspirant and ruiner of Oilers, Elly, and that cooking blog that HG, Jordi and I remember to update every once in a while. But while I’d thought about the idea of making a blog to stash my writing, I never considered one where I blog about writing. After a conversation with Finny earlier I realized that I talk enough about it when I have someone to talk to, that it would make perfect sense to chronicle it blog-wise. And it isn’t like I can’t post excerpts and pieces and things like that here, too. I’m willing to be it will devolve into a chronicle of just how badly I can’t find a job, but you know.

So here goes. I’m 21, I’m a senior at Western Michigan University, finishing up my creative writing major, and I’m fully confident I will never get a job. You know. Typical writer things. I sometimes think I like coming up with things to write more than I do the actual writing. I keep a moleskin on me at all times, full of notes and quotes and authors I’m supposed to read but hardly ever get around to. And silly doodles that don’t generally relate to anything. I’ve finished two pieces (short stories, which is what I mainly write) in the last couple months and started god knows how many.

Last summer I went to Prague via the WMU Prague Summer Creative Writing Program, and I’ve loved the city ever since. It’s probably been one of the best things I’ve ever done for my writing – the environment as well as the workshop I was in – and I’ve referenced it a lot ever since – so I make no promises that you won’t get sick of hearing about it if for some reason you decide to follow this blog.

So that’s that. Um. Welcome?