I was so pleased when an editor at MicroLit Almanac reached out to me about writing a review of Sarah Freligh’s A Brief Natural History of Women. I love Freligh’s writing, have taken several of her workshops (and had several pieces published that started in those workshops!), and previously read the book several times for a Shorter is Better book club meeting.
I can’t believe that I forgot to log this submission on my spreadsheet, and therefore forgot to mention it in my 2023 Writing in Review post!
Last March, Gnashing Teeth Publishing posted on Twitter that they were tearing pages out of a book (Dead Girl Running by Christina Dodd) and sending them to anyone who requested one. Once you got a page, you’d create an erasure or blackout poem and send it back to be published in an anthology.
I love strange constraints and any type of project, so I requested a page. When it came in the mail, I think I was frozen for a week or two. I had no clue where to start. What if I blacked out a word I wanted back later??
I decided to take a photo of the pages and use the mark up feature on my phone to draft some poems. I’m really glad I took that approach, though I don’t remember changing a lot of the words. In fact, I kept taking away more. But it was nice to have the original page to look back on when I wanted. And once I completed my poem, I could carefully black out the right sections on the book page.
With that done, I mailed the page off and waited. And forgot about it, honestly! Then preorders were announced, so I preordered and forgot about it again! Which means I was pleasantly surprised by a book in my mailbox one day.
It was so cool to not only see my poem in this book, but to see how other people approached the erasure aspect of the project. There are some works of art in here! It’s also really interesting to see how many poems kind of fit together. Probably because the book is one cohesive work so it’s understandable there’d be some overlap in the poems, but it’s still fascinating!
This year felt like a slow one to me, but when I look at my submissions spreadsheet and publication track record, it was pretty great! I did take it a bit slower in terms of workshops. I love the prompts and feedback in workshops, but this year was a rollercoaster in terms of my paid writing work, so not having the pressure (or expense, yikes!) of many workshops was a necessary break. (That said, I took seven workshops total, though many were in the spring when my work life was still running smoothly!)
I like the goal of submitting to a certain number of places a month because I like marking accomplishments off my list. However, I don’t like the pressure of submitting just because. So for 2024, I’m going to take a small step back. I’m going to focus more on the ideas I have for collections and novellas-in-flash and strive to finish those instead of writing one-offs for submission. I think having a few bigger projects on my plate will be a nice change of pace from these past three years.
Anyway, my 2023 stats meet the goals I set for myself at the end of last year. I submitted 62 times, compared to 63 written in 2022 (I also submitted photography that year) and 44 in 2021. I had 16 acceptances, compared to 13 written acceptances in 2022 and 5 in 2021. Six stories are still out/under consideration.
I also wrote blurbs for two amazing collections: Winter Dance Party by Brett Biebel and Awakenings edited by Diane Gottlieb.
Two of my 2023 acceptances are for anthologies coming in the future from Reflex Press and Stanchion, but the rest are online and linked below:
Ladyfingers published by Visual Verse 9/2023
The Hand, The Remorse of Conscience in The Ekphrastic Review’s Lucky 8 Marathon 8/2023
Precarious Pile published by Visual Verse 8/2023
Nectar published by SoFloPoJo 8/2023
Waiting in the Rain published by Visual Verse 7/2023
Blue Monkey published by Ellipsis Zine 6/2023
Crosstown Traffic published by The Write-In 6/2023
Moving Day published by The Write-In 6/2023
Trick or Treat published by The Write-In 6/2023
She’s Where the Sky Meets the Water published by The Write-In 6/2023
Dreamless Reality published by The Write-In 6/2023
Close Your Eyes published by Visual Verse 5/2023
Midway shortlisted for the Brilliant Flash Fiction Contest 5/2023
Mother of Pearl published by Visual Verse 4/2023
501 published by Spartan 4/2023
Death of an Influencer published by Visual Verse 3/2023
Bank Balance published by Friday Flash Fiction 3/2023
“Shining Light” photograph in Rock and a Hard Place Issue 9 2/2023
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I’m an editor with Intrepidus Ink, a fantastic magazine that publishes stories featuring alarmingly individual and heroically-minded characters. Submissions include flash fiction (300 – 1,000 words) and short stories (1,500 – 2,500 words), so I bet you have a piece to send our way! Read our published stories to ensure you hit the mark in terms of a story that will keep the reader on the edge of their seat, rooting for your character to win it all.
Oh, did I mention it’s a PAYING magazine? And we promote your work like crazy, including interviews on publication day and nominations for all the literary awards.
If you want to submit, check out our published stories and interviews. Including mine with EIC Rhonda Schlumpberger.
Yes, I’m posting this right before the day officially ends in the UK, but I’ve been writing since The Write-In started posting prompts yesterday evening (my time)! I always love writing from a prompt, as evidenced by so many of my recent publications having origin stories in workshops.
Anyway, this year NFFD is doing a badge system, and I love collecting little trinkets that show where I’ve been and what I’ve done, so here are the pieces I’ve written and submitted so far.
Since the deadline to submit is tomorrow at 5:59p my time, I’m going to keep writing because this concept of time in the prompts is perfect for how I’m trying to push myself to go speculative, so I’m going to continue writing. Anyone else participating today?
I’m so excited to announce that my micro, “Midway,” was shortlisted for the Brilliant Flash Fiction contest and is published online!
Read it here, along with the other fantastic shortlisted stories and, of course, the contest winners!
This is the image that inspired the piece, written in a Sarah Freligh workshop. The prompt was to use an image to find “the poetry of prose,” and something about this photograph my paternal grandfather took at the 1939 Worlds Fair in New York was like a lightning strike. I wrote about it soon after the workshop (Bolt of Inspiration), and this honor of being shortlisted for a contest gives me fresh inspiration to work on the project mentioned in that blog post.
I haven’t been writing lately. I have three big projects on my plate but I can’t seem to dedicate any time to them. A friend and I talked about other creative outlets as ways to unwind, landing on tangles, which made me remember a folder I doodled on during a high school mythology class.
As I went hunting for this folder, I found a box that I had also doodled on – though not as long ago as high school. No, these were college doodles, best remembered as the peak of my LiveJournal period (2004 to 2007 for normal people).
Through an LJ art community, I discovered Artist Trading Cards (ATCs) and started making my own. You could post them on the LJ community and trade with others. I still have a ton of completed cards, plus supplies to make more.
I love the concept of tiny artwork, making something in a short time, feeling productive and complete. I hope to photograph them all to share on my (woefully long-forgotten) art Instagram and find other artists to start trading again.
I love using the constraints of the fixed size (2.5″ x 3.5″) to show a beautiful image that gives the viewer enough space to add the details in their mind… Wait, that sounds a lot like another creative outlet I enjoy, doesn’t it?
Anyway, this is probably my favorite card I made. A two-parter called Rock & Roll All Nite. Note the custom title/credit image I made to back my cards… Ah, youth.
My chapbook, Won’t Be By Your Side, has been out in the world for six months today!
If you haven’t grabbed a copy, you can get one right now from Amazon.
If you’ve read the book, please review it on Amazon and Goodreads!
If you have a copy and want an autographed bookplate, DM me on Twitter or Instagram and I’ll send you one for free!
I started 2023 with very few writing goals because too many start to feel like obligations, and that’s the last excuse I need to skip writing time. My main goals were massive projects to work on all year:
I also knew I wanted to take more workshops, and kicked off the year with two: one focusing on micros, one for sci-fi and speculative fiction.
I didn’t realize that, during those workshops, I’d get an idea for another massive project. The prompt was to use a photograph as your inspiration. I love ekphrastic work, so this was right up my alley. I even knew what photos to sort through to find the perfect concept.
When my paternal grandfather died, I spent a lot of time in his wood-paneled study. He had a box of prints curled with age. I loved sorting through them and trying to cobble together the true story of who took them, when, and where. No one knew. But I kept them and occasionally looked through them to get more clues.
I looked through the photos last week for this prompt and showed them to my dad. We searched each image for clues and then researched possibilities before realizing the pictures were from the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Now we’re just trying to unravel the mystery of who in the family took them, with two major contenders: my grandfather and great-grandfather. Of course, they could have gotten copies of the prints from a friend or neighbor, and we’ll never know.
But the truth behind the photos isn’t my main concern. There are several sets that tell stories when you put the images in one order, then a different story when you shuffle them. And I can’t stop shuffling them, which led to my newest massive project: a chapbook of ekphrastic stories with the photos at the top of each page. I’ve already scanned the images and started writing, so I guess my previous resolutions will take a backseat for a bit…
With everyone wondering what will happen after Twitter dies, I keep thinking back over my internet experience. It doesn’t hurt that I’m also in the middle of an extracurricular essay for March Fadness, which requires me to revisit my high school years in a way that completely consumes me, as the internet consumed high school me twenty years ago.
My family got internet when I was in 8th grade. I’d already experienced AOL via CD-ROM at a friend’s house, popping into chat rooms to lie about A/S/L and pretend we were interested in what strangers had to say. By the time our home desktop wired into Roadrunner cable, I was obsessed with Saturday Night Live, when Jimmy Fallon was merely a featured player and Chris Kattan ruled (shhh, let me have my delusions) as Mango and Mr. Peepers. There was a website, nbc.com/snl, which had bare-bones information about last week’s show and, amazingly, a strange hybrid of a chat room and message board. You didn’t need an account to post, which means anyone could use your screen name and pretend to be you, understandably causing much drama. But it was a fun community, and I made friends (and met my first internet boyfriend!, and just boyfriend-boyfriend!!) on that site.
I eventually found my way to diary-x, where I read so many cool journals that I needed to start one of my own. But since everyone seemed just as untouchable as the classmates I avoided at school, I couldn’t be myself. My time on diary-x marks a major instance of me being what you might call a “catfish” online, though I didn’t do it to try and meet anyone. I just wanted my life to sound more exciting than it was. I wrote about extracurriculars I didn’t participate in and parties I wasn’t invited to.
I found my way to LiveJournal when I was searching for Aerosmith fan sites. I found a user called “RagDoll13,” and, in my 13-year-old mind, I was sure she was a fan of the song from Aerosmith’s Permanent Vacation album. (At the time, I did not know what else rag doll could mean.) I excitedly commented on one of her posts detailing an experience she had with a man she met at her job as a drugstore clerk. She immediately posted about not realizing minors were reading her journal and went private. So I started a journal of my own, as myself. And another, when I needed a new username. And again. (It seemed easier to start fresh as opposed to spending money on a rename token.)
I made friends on LiveJournal, two that I’m still close to these days. I liked the sense of community, the way it was so easy to pour your heart out and people would comment kindly and that was that, you were friends. I also liked the literal communities, which you could find based on your interests. I met my two life-long friends on the Seinfeld and Mitch Hedberg groups.
I also connected with real friends on LiveJournal. It was almost our social media site before there was MySpace. A group of seven or eight friends all had LiveJournals and would post about our weekend plans. It was how I found out that no one liked my high school boyfriend, how I learned about privacy settings, how we grew apart. I remember posting on LiveJournal as late as 2008, even while I had a MySpace profile.
I remember trying to make a Facebook account like my new boyfriend had, but he went to a “real” university and I was in community college, so my email address wasn’t eligible. I eventually went to a “real” university and made a Facebook account and posted someecard memes to my friend and later roommate that still make me laugh today. That site was my distraction when I should have been writing papers, which I instead crammed into one all-night session and still got all As, so I’ve never learned my lesson.
Somewhere in the mix of leaving LiveJournal and joining Facebook, I created a blog that was more about writing, or attempting to be a writer. My roommate read it, and yet another boyfriend. Then I started to get more followers, over 100(!!!) at one point, thanks to blogging challenges and guest posts and Google Reader. It was during the time when you stopped using a screen name online and started using your real name. Sometimes I still miss creating a clever name that encapsulates my interests of the moment, but overall, it’s nice to be me.
I joined Twitter somewhere in this time, but I didn’t have a smartphone so I had to text tweets to a five-digit Twitter number while I was at work and hope it posted and made sense. I considered a group of friends there my “morning show” because we tweeted at each other every morning on our ways to work. Then I spent the morning drinking coffee and reading blogs on Google Reader, quickly clicking away when my boss walked by or a coworker poked their head into my cubicle. I spent the day thinking about funny things I could write about for a blog post. As I got more comfortable in that job, I simply started blogging at work—why wait until I got home? There’s something so comforting and cozy thinking about work life and blogs back in 2007-2011, isn’t there?
Google Reader closed and I never got the hang of anything else – Feedly? BlogHer? I can’t even remember now because they couldn’t compare. Some friends still blogged. Some started making podcasts. I got pregnant and didn’t want to be a mommy blogger, so I just… stopped. Stopped writing completely.
I’ve thought about using this space a LiveJournal/Blogger type situation before, when I first started it up. But I had a full-time job outside the home then, and was still healing from my divorce (as wonderful as divorce can be when you initiate it yourself, it’s still a major adjustment), so writing regularly, and personally, was a big ask. But more often than not I find myself thinking about my experience with the internet and the connections I’ve made.
I want LiveJournal again, though it will never be the same as it was when I was 16 and unafraid of spilling my personal life all over the internet. I want a Twitter morning show even though I don’t follow those people anymore. I want a blog where I’m not uncomfortably aware of the myriad ways someone could snark on everything I post about my trivial days. So I’m stuck in this weird limbo where I think this blog should be professional(ish) and only share serious updates and publication news. I go back and forth between treating Twitter like a networking site and a place where I can drunk-tweet every thought that crosses my mind. And I use Instagram to post pictures of books I’ve read and, of course, my cat. I’m left without an outlet to really spill my thoughts, which is probably best for everyone involved.
Allison Renner Writes 