Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2019 i The Writer

In an age when publishing budgets are stretched thinner than ever before – and when news outlets are cutting more and more book coverage – having an online presence is about so much more than guaranteeing publishers a set number of book-buying fish in a barrel. It shows industry professionals that you are willing to do the work. Because you will have to do the work. Gone are the days of cushy book tours, lavish promotional materials, or a multi-month marketing window. Unless you publish with a small press, your average imprint has more products than time and more titles than dollars. If you want sales, expect to roll up your sleeves and hit the ground running. That’s why your online presence is so important. That’s why we say you…

“The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies.”—Neil Gaiman SHERLOCK HOLMES CONSULTING DETECTIVE Strap on your deerstalker, grab a magnifying glass, and get ready to tap into your inner Arthur Conan Doyle in this mystery game set in Victorian London. The game is unique in that there’s no board; rather, sleuths read clues, interview witnesses, and track suspects via a written casebook of vignettes. $50, amazon.com GREAT SHAKESPEARE DEATHS CARD GAME Which Shakespearian suicide was more dramatic: Juliet’s dagger or Cleopatra’s asp? Is “Et tu, Brute! Then fall, Caesar!” more effective than Brutus’ own “Caesar, now be still: I kill’d not thee with half so good a will?” The Bard’s most epic deaths square off in this beautifully illustrated card game. $15, theliterarygiftcompany.com WORDSMITHERY Do you…

Over razzleberry smoothies a few years ago, a mega-famous author said to me: “You have 20 published books but only 20 followers on Twitter? Huh.” At the time, I thought she was just needling me. After all, any one of her books outsold all of mine combined by a 40 to 1 margin. But some time later, I realized that this social media master/best-selling author was clueing me in: Social media is the No. 1 PR tool writers have. Period. Full Stop. Literary Amen. Since that realization, I’ve done everything I can to jumpstart a viable social media presence. Along the way, I’ve pretty much hit every digital pothole possible, from sending overtly self-promoting tweets to having an ugly profile page to misusing hashtags to sending from the wrong account.…

She had read that the worst torment for the prisoners of Alcatraz was seeing and hearing the people living in freedom across the bay. But even though the tower block had essentially become a prison for her, Magnea still cherished the view. When she and her husband had become some of the building’s first occupants 40 years ago, it was the view that captivated them. Now, it was its only merit. Since the TV’s menacing behavior stopped it from being a source of entertainment, they spent their evenings looking at the sprawling city outside the vast living room window. Now Magnea sat there by herself, watching the houses below and taking comfort in the notion that they were occupied by happy families who were not captives in their own homes.…

“Summer School” was one of the shortest pieces we received in the competition, yet it still told a vivid, complete story in less than 500 words. What do you think is the most important thing to remember when working in such a confined space? In a lot of ways, writing flash pieces is akin to writing poetry. Flash forces you to prioritize – not just regarding which descriptions to include but which feelings it’s most important to provoke. In, say, a novel, a five-page scene and a 20-page scene might carry the same weight, but in flash, you can’t afford to dawdle. Every word has to serve a purpose, and the physical space a paragraph takes up speaks to its importance. Some writers use the flash format to tell especially…

Author and editor Randall Brown has always been fascinated with very short forms in writing. “To me, compression is a mindset; it is that desire to make the most minute of movements matter,” he explains. “It is fiction that cannot tolerate uncertainty for but a moment, and so it rushes to its ending before it loses nerve.” The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, which he founded in 2010, focuses on very short poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Staff feature one piece a week on the journal’s website. Some are traditional. Others are prose stories arranged as multicolored triptychs or poems within illustrations. A list of Pushcart Prize nominations from the journal includes a piece that’s just 338 words long. Tone, editorial content “I think compression mainly happens within the writer…

When it comes to getting published, there are many spinning cogs. Here are some of the resources you’ll need to take your work from inside your brain to in front of the eyes of readers. The following listings are a sampling of what the industry has to offer. For a complete guide, visit writermag.com. Information in this section is provided to The Writer by the individual markets and events; for more information, contact those entities directly. F = Fiction N = Nonfiction P = Poetry C = Children’s Y = Young adult O = Other AGENTS C Y ADAMS LITERARY Represents children’s and YA authors and artists with picture books, middle grade, and YA fiction. Submit via online submission form only. Contact: Adams Literary. info@adamsliterary.com adamsliterary.com F N Y ANDY…

I have this dream. We’re on a road trip, out in this house in the country, and I’m trying to talk to my wife. But this hog gets in the house. It stinks and it’s slick to the touch and I can’t keep it off me. I push it away but it keeps plowing back and I see tusks. I finally shove it out the door. Now I’m in bed. Here comes the hog again. I can barely stave it off with my hands. It’s all over me. I get to my feet and kick it and ram it with my shoulder and we tumble out into the yard. My mouth is coated with hog-slime, and I reach in and scrape it off my tongue. I’m half-dressed, stinking, miserable. Suddenly…

What inspired you to write “The Tower Block: Apartment 1307?” I’m fascinated with horror, and I wanted to write an Icelandic haunted house story. Iceland has a long history of ghost stories but not haunted house stories, presumably because of our lack of old estates. But we have plenty of big apartment buildings, and they creep me out. Dark concrete hallways and the anonymity of such housing do for me what Victorian mansions do for other people. I was generally inspired by my two favorite novels, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Stephen King’s The Shining in the way that I wanted to write a book about a house that was inherently evil. For each particular story, it’s enough for me to grab at a simple idea from…

All his pets were black. No matter what he planned, no matter how many times he drilled his catchphrase, “I’ll take the brindle mix,” he always came home with “Ebony” or “Midnight” or most recently, “Inky.” Inky lived for almost 18 years, and Bruce regarded her as his spirit guide made feline. Her ashes were entombed in the lavender-scented box he built for her. Six years after her death, he still felt unwilling to scatter her anywhere. So there she sat, purring from the other side, reminding him of all the things he imagined he would solve someday. When and if he ever had the confidence to release his beloved spirit girl. I loved that he could not let her go. He loved his telescope. When he had been in…

As a full-time freelance writer who works from home, I consider Twitter my second office. I can connect with writers and editors for fun and networking, plus devour great writing for free. The social media platform has been a boon to my career. That love comes with a fair amount of hate. Twitter tends to suck my soul dry. I’m not just talking about the misogyny, racism, and mansplaining that dot the landscape like leaky garbage piles in front of epic Manhattan brownstones. It’s the small stuff. Daily, I must blind myself to reading stories that derail my momentum or inspire me to enter a more established field, like cobbling or blacksmithing. Ferreting out the fearful from the useful required a lot of energy, until I discovered an amazing trick:…

WRITER AND SALESMAN Most writers are, by nature, a reclusive bunch. They sit at their computer, their typewriter, their notepad, and they scribble away at their own version of brilliance. The phone rings, they ignore it. The sun rises and sets, they don’t notice. They have to be this way: In order to be a writer, you have to spend a significant amount of time in your own head, with your stories, away from distractions and prying eyes. So when the conversation shifts to promotion and marketing, a lot of writers clam up. They can write the book, no problem. But the average writer is not a salesman, and that’s essentially what they are being asked to do – to sell themselves. And if they struggle with confidence in their…

We asked writers from around the world to submit their very best work in any genre. The catch? Each entry had to be less than 1,000 words. We’re no stranger to running writing competitions, but the response from the writing community shocked us: We were treated to more than double the entries we typically receive. The following three winners represent the best of the best in both flash fiction and nonfiction, and all leave a startling impact in an incredibly short space: The longest among them is told in just 941 words, while the shortest clocks in at 375.…

It wasn’t a good shade of blue, like Robin’s Egg, or even one of my classmates’ favorites, like Teal or Periwinkle. Still, I always knew my mom’s car by sight. Often, it pulled up when my hands were still spackled in clay, or before I had removed my safety goggles. This time, she wasn’t there early. I tightened my backpack over both shoulders and dropped my cupcake wrapper in the trash bin by Miss Newbury’s desk. There was something exotic in the way I had memorized a school I did not usually attend, how I had infiltrated these classrooms that remained locked when I rode my purple 10-speed by on spring weekends. Outside was so bright that I didn’t feel like I had been indoors all day, only in the…

This piece is so wonderfully stylized, with vivid imagery and a unique storytelling structure. What made you choose this particular structure and style for this work? I think the work itself chose the structure and style! My best days at the desk are when I get out of the way and let my impulse to write instruct my writing. You’ve worked as a dialect coach for both film and stage productions and boast a background in phonetics. How does working with the spoken word affect your writing? The short answer is PROFOUNDLY. The experience of how it feels to speak a word exists for the reader whether the word is spoken aloud or not. I am always tracking the sensation of language in relation to the definition of the word/image/story.…

Acclaimed writer Tommy Tomlinson has an impressive array of credentials: a columnist for the Charlotte Observer for more than 20 years, a Pulitzer Prize finalist (in commentary), a sportswriter, magazine contributor, and a Harvard Nieman Fellow. Tomlinson has a gifted sense of storytelling. Across a wide range of subject matter, his work grabs you – better still, it connects with you. Now Tomlinson is using his skills to tell own story. In his new memoir, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man’s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America, Tomlinson explores his longtime struggle with weight in the context of modern American culture, in a work that best-selling author Curtis Sittenfeld called “genuinely unputdownable.” Transitioning into writing a book Over the years I’ve written longer magazine pieces that…