New Post on Beyond the Margins

Good morning all. Check out my new post over at Beyond the Margins this morning where I give the skinny, the 411, the lowdown on where to find all the best online resources for writer's.

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.

Patience

Last week I was contacted by Fiction Magazine. They accepted a story of mine for publication. This is, of course, great news. Fiction magazine is carried by better independent bookstores, such as Brookline Booksmith, has been around since the early 70s, and backs up a wonderful history of supporting "new, emerging voices."

The story behind getting into Fiction is worth telling. I sent them my story almost three years ago, in February 2007. The story was fashioned from an outtake of a novel I was working on at the time. It was a stand-alone chapter that dealt with the second love experience of my teenage protagonist, and it didn't fit, so taking it out didn't upset any balance.

Separate from the framework of the novel, and after some revision, the piece stood on its own. Except for the ending. The original ending trails off. The stand-alone version couldn't trail off, it needed a concrete finish. This is the toughest part of shaping novel excerpts or outtakes; you must rework them so that they still make sense outside of the context of the novel. Because this was an outtake, I wasn't worried about maintaining the original spirit of the novel and could make it into what ever I wanted.

I reworked the ending to summarize the bittersweet end of a summer-long teenage relationship. I wasn't sure it worked, so I kept the ending brief; not overwriting, hoping not to call attention to any shortcomings. I sent the story out to Fiction. I must not have been confident with what I had written because I didn't send it elsewhere, and I never revised it.

When I opened and read the acceptance email, it took a couple minutes to realize what I was looking at. Most magazines/journals today will tell submitting writers that if they are not interested in your submission, you will not hear back. So it's heartening to know that us writers are not sending stuff out into an anonymous event horizon. That time waiting for a response isn't time wasted. And that if you sent a story out last year, the year before, or even the year before that, there's still hope. That somebody is spending late nights and weekends reading submissions from the slush pile in hopes of finding an unsung story, an unsung writer, another emerging voice.