New Story in J Journal

To help me ring in the new year, on New Year's Eve two copies of the fall issue of J Journal arrived via the USPS. In it is my story, Younger Things. Arriving a couples weeks prior was an email from the editors of J Journal alerting me that they had nominated my story for a Pushcart Prize. Amazing. It's well into the first week of 2010 and I'm still pleasantly shocked that they chose Younger Things to help represent the journal for the Pushcart.

Each year editors of small presses can nominate up to six pieces of writing from their year's publications. Winners are published in the The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, which features fiction, poetry, memoirs, and essays selected from hundreds of little magazines and small book publishers. I think this is one time when saying it's an honor just to be nominated is spot on. I know I'm in great company no matter what happens.

Younger Things is the story whose editing process I discussed on this blog late last summer (Publishing 101) when the J Journal editors made revision suggestions during the story's acceptance process. The experience of making these kinds of edits was a new one, but was well worth it, helping the story transform for the better and see publication.

Based out of CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, J Journal is a specific breed of lit mag that offers new writing on justice, and "examines its subject through creative work, directly and tangentially." I'm not sure how my story, about a young man in love with a wild, at times dangerous older cancer patient, fits into this description. I'm just happy the editors found a place for my story in their journal. A special shout-out to my writing group from last year under whose eagle eye Younger Things first passed, and whose comments and suggestions helped shape the manuscript before I sent it out for publication.

Writing Group Plug - Autumn Edition

Short notice (especially if you live on another continent), but tomorrow night get yourself over to Porter Square Books to hear novelist and poet E.B. Moore read from her latest book, New Eden. I've taken Grub classes with E.B., and earlier this year enjoyed the benefit of her calming, practical commentary during our writing group discussions. She's a wonderful reader, and she writes in a vivid, evocative, concise style.

Porter Square Books is located at the Porter Square Shopping Center, 25 White Street, Cambridge. Reading starts at 7 PM. Christine Tierney the opens the reading.

My So-Called Writing Life

Work’s busy, evenings I’m beat, and there’s always a lot to do on the weekends. I write for about an hour each morning before work on weekdays, and for a few hours on weekend mornings. So it’s easy to let slide an aspect of writing life that’s imperative to moving forward: getting published.

It takes an entirely different writing muscle to send out material for publication or agency placement. It doesn’t matter if you’ve attended the most prestigious MFA in creative writing program ever, all that learnin’ won’t help you place your brilliant writing. (Okay, an MFA can get agents’ and publishers’ attention more easily, but that’s another story for another blog post.) It’s after you finish your poem, story, or novel that a new sort of dogged creativity gets tested. Now it’s time to write the perfect query letter, research the agents and/or publishers that seem the best fit for your manuscript, and target the literary mags that best suit your stories. This is a full-time job. It can get immediately disheartening and even the small stuff can throw you off your game.

Recently I looked at my Excel spreadsheet where I keep track of my query activity on the novel front, and submissions on the story front. For "A Little Disappeared," the novel I worked-shopped at Grub with Ms. X, I have about five or six queries still out to agents and publishers. I have about eight or ten instances of stories or novel excerpts out to literary journals. Some of these have been out for over a year.

I realize, looking at the sent dates, that there’s a new publishing biz practice. No longer will an agent, publisher, or lit mag guarantee a response. If the answer is no, you may never get a response. I suppose I understand this behavior, as they are getting more and more queries and manuscripts, and have fewer and fewer employees to handle the slush piles. Still, that great big NO meant closure, allowed me to move on to try again somewhere else. Now, with no real NO to work with, I need to remind myself to move on myself after, say, three months.

I always try to stick to a self-imposed schedule: send out a story or query once a week. But, after a few weeks I always fall off the wagon, either because my writing isn’t going well or the rejections become overwhelming. I recently showed a new story to Liz. She had some good ideas, and I rewrote the story. Then had my writing group critique the story. I got a good response and also some great ideas on how to make it better.

So, for the first time in a few months, I’m excited about sending out writing again, and this is bleeding over into trying to again place "A Little Disappeared", and getting back to my so-called writing life.

Muse and the Marketplace Update

I was alerted this week to the workshops I will be attending next week, and I’m happy with the choices:

- Marketplace Panel: The State of the Industry
- Eternal Rocks Beneath: the Relevance of Setting, with Lewis Robinson
- Building Character, with Stephen McCauley

Here Goes Something

This week I’m writing a review for The Review Review website. I finished reading a book I plan to review for this blog. For the last couple weeks I’ve been working on five or six stories, trying to narrow them to three, and getting those three into shape to hand out to my writing group. And I’ve been working on this here blog. Not that the blog takes a ton of time, but everything adds up and so I wonder when I’ll get back to what I need to be doing: writing a novel.

Saturday night Liz and I attended a movie night at Rex Art’s crib. Rex was one of my gracious and honest and encouraging readers of "A Little Disappeared". When we were leaving (after a heady cocktail of Cadillac Records and The 40 Year Old Virgin) he asked me when I’d have something else for him to read. It took me years to finish "A Little Disappeared" (and if you’re one Ms. X, would argue there’s more work to do). So the chance of another novel popping out any time soon is nil. I shrugged off the question, grateful that a past reader wants to be a future reader.

It also means it’s time to get off of my ass. Since the first of the year I’ve done some outlining and planning on a proposed new novel, although that’s currently stalled. I also came up with some good revision ideas for the last novel I workshopped with Mr. X, called "American Standard". The plan for the next six months or so is to start working in earnest on a novel to 1) hand out to the writing group and 2) eventually workshop in Ms. X’s upcoming summer session. That means I only have a few months to kick it up a notch, to go from 0 to 60 in under six months. Here goes something.

Writing Group Redux

Which means that I’ve joined a writing group. It’s been about ten years since I’ve been part of a group that met consistently. In the mid ‘90s I joined my first one. We started out at the Barnes & Noble in Burlington (the old location). We met every two or three weeks. Eventually they kicked us out because one of our members started answering their phone when the employees weren’t quick enough (hey, it was annoying!). We continued on, meeting at a member’s house in Belmont. We would all bring in something to hand out each meeting, if we had something ready. A short story or a chapter—nothing very long. Also, one person’s work was read aloud by another member of the group. I really liked this as it was insightful to hear somebody read your words, your dialogue, infusing your sentences with their own cadence. Writing mistakes and awkward phrasings are easier to pick up when interpreted aloud.

That group lasted for a few years and at the time I was very prolific, writing almost one new story for each meeting. Not all gems, but it was a great exercise. One of the stories was published in a small literary journal out of Los Angeles, Lynx Eye Quarterly and recently republished in the Grub Street 10th anniversary anthology Hacks.

A few years after the demise of that group, I started a group with some fellow writers I met at my first Grub Street class, Ten Stories in Ten Weeks with instructor Rusty Barnes. We got along well and felt we were at the same writing level. (This is clutch to forming a strong group—you don’t want to constantly hold a newbie’s hand; conversely you don’t want to be constantly left behind, feeling out of the loop. You need to find a comfortable middle ground.) Hours before our first scheduled meeting, two of the five members bailed. The three remaining writers met. It was a relaxing, productive few hours, but we were never able to decide on a good time to meet again and it fizzled out before it really got going.

My new group contains a revolving 12 members, all current or former acolytes of Ms. X. She remains with us in spirit, tenor, and good humor. One or two people will hand out at a time, for a total of a hundred pages every two weeks. This is fine as it gives me time to come up with something to bring in. We plan to not just read and critique work, but also hold informative discussions about real-world publishing topics such as how to market yourself, how to target the right agent/publisher, and write a memorable synopsis. Some of us may go in on a collective blog together as well.

My goals for the group are to add to my ever-growing database of publishing information and writing and revising knowledge. For my critiques I will bring a revised chapter, a finished short story, or possibly the beginning of a new novel if I have anything decent by then. I have a couple months to pull something together.