Wordcraft -- Hot off the presses -- live & local in Texas

The 2014 SMU LitFest opened last week to a full room in the DeGolyer Library as five local editors discussed the state of literary publishing in North Texas. The participants were Matthew Limpede, editor of Carve magazine; Will Evans of Deep Vellum, a press publishing English translations of foreign authors; Ronald E. Moore, a poet and composer whose Baskerville Publishers is expanding its repertoire from biographies of opera stars to poetry; Mark Allen Jenkins, editor of the newly renamed Reunion: The Dallas Review, arts and literature magazine of the University of Texas-Dallas; and Joe Milazzo, co-editor of the experimental literary journal (out of nothing).

Dallas Writer’s Garret co-founder Thea Temple opened the discussion with a question to the panel about the role of technology in the future of publishing. The revolutions spawned by the Internet, print on demand technology and electronic publishing, all agreed, have made a wider variety of literature available. But in themselves, these won’t keep small presses running unless they can provide the quality of writing communities of readers expect.

“We started (out of nothing) as an ezine because there was no overhead,” Milazzo said. “But that was not a good enough aesthetic reason.”

“When I took over Carve in 2007,” Limpede said, “I decided to go to a quarterly format,” seeking quality of writing over quantity. And although still publishing online, Carve has taken the retro-seeming step of publishing a paid subscription premium print edition with added content, in the hope of nurturing an emerging literary community. Make that, a twenty-first century print edition also available on iPad.

For Evans, whose Deep Vellum press is sponsored by the Writer’s Garret, being able to communicate with translators over the Internet has been key to his dream of establishing a Dallas-based literary press. “Previously, I would have had to make contacts at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Now, Frankfurt is a place to get together, after signing rights to texts. Independent publishers have much more power than they used to have.”

And what about the logistics of getting volumes printed and in customer’s hands, Temple asked?

Goodbye to the worries of not only publishing thousands of copies, but of finding warehouses to store them and locating distributors to get them into readers’ hands, Moore said, the worries that previously forced his Baskerville Publishers out of the literary fiction market. Now with print on demand publishing, he only needs to order copies he already has distribution orders for, enabling him to broaden his press’s niche.

So what does the future look like, Temple asked. How do small presses, which by definition don’t have larger readerships, expect to grow? And not only grow but engage in the larger issue of restoring reading as a respectable activity?

“We have to think about things like branding, aesthetics as much as text,” Limpede said. “Social media has turned out to be more powerful than I expected. Every press has to make their own definition of what’s okay for them.”

“What’s your definition?” Temple asked.

“For me, doing okay is getting my first book out,” Evans said.

“For us,” Limpede said, “okay (may) mean having a part time job, even a full time job, but it’s about finding your own community. For literature there’s no easy formula.”

“What ‘okay’ means,” Milazzo said, “has everything to do with readership. The reader completes the artistic endeavor.”

For more about reading--and writing--for these publishers, see http://carvezine.com/, www.baskervillepublishers.com/, www.outofnothing.org/, http://deepvellum.org/, and www.utdallas.edu/ah/reunion/.

Will Evans (l) & Matthew Limpede

(Next Monday, Dallas does readership, reaching every high school student--and more--during April’s Dallas Big Reads. But don’t wait until April 1--stay tuned for guerrilla early bird book distributions at local transit stations.)

Wordcraft -- Writing contests fast and furious

Writing contests aren’t what I expected to blog about today. But while going through my notebooks and inbox, I found a slew of contests with looming deadlines. Readers, you won’t get rich or famous from winning any of these, but they look like great fun and they cost little, sometimes nothing. Besides, I found what has to be the most dramatic picture ever of a writer at work for illustration. Click on the image from wikimedia commons for a look at the whole painting by Ilya Repin.

January 15 -- That’s right, the day after tomorrow. DFW Writers’ Conference “celebrating the classics” query contest. Choose a classic novel (for this purpose, at least twenty-five years old and still in print), write a query letter for it, and email your entry by midnight, January 15 to editor@dfwcon.org/.

No entry fee or membership required. Finalists will get to submit a query letter for their own work for critiques by Donald Maass of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. If you need help finding examples of classics, try the Adventure classics preview at this site (although not all of my examples meet the age and other criteria of the conference). For examples of what to include in a query letter, see 
http://dfwcon.org/2013/11/25/celebrating-the-classics-query-contest/.

January 15 -- Houston Writers Guild “Judge a Book by Its Cover” contest. This is for romances (in several sub-genres) published in 2013. Fee is $15. Winner gets a full-page ad in the April 2014 Romance Writers Report.

Also from HWG, 2014 manuscript contest for unpublished manuscripts in several genres, including literary fiction and memoir. Fee is $20 for first entry from guild members, $30 for nonmembers. Additional fees for multiple manuscript submissions. Deadline is March 1, 2014. Cash prize and meeting with editor for first place winner in each genre.

And finally from HWG, the Guild is taking submissions for science fiction stories of not more than 8,000 words for an anthology. Top entry receives $50. For information about contests and the anthology, see http://houstonwritersguild.org/.

February 1 -- The First Line magazine lists the opening sentences for all of its 2014 quarterly editions. The first: “Carlos discovered (fill in the blank) under a pile of shoes in the back of his grandmother’s closet.” Due date is February 1 for the spring edition. No fee to enter. For more information, see 
www.thefirstline.com/.

February 21 -- Writers’ League of Texas manuscript contest offers writers in nine different literary categories chances for professional feedback and publication. Fee is $55 for League members, $65 for nonmembers. Entries accepted via www.writersleague.org/.

Also from the Writers’ League, entries for the Texas Book Awards (formerly knows as the Violet Crown Awards) are open through April 25. Entry fee is $45 per title for WLT members, $55 per title for nonmember authors, $65 per title from agents and publishers. For online entry form and information, see www.writersleague.org/112/Book-Awards-Contest/.

February 28 -- The Red Line lists two themes for its remaining editions of 2014, Bodies (February 28) and Escape (April 30). No fee for entry, 50 pound prize for the best in each category. For more information, see Duotrope's Digest or
http://overtheredline.com/.

Finally (for now) Carve magazine editor Matthew Limpede asked me to mention its creative writing workshops in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, offered through the Creative Arts Center of Dallas. Readers made Limpede's discussion, “An editor’s take on short stories” (May 13, 2013) one of this blog’s most popular posts. And yes, Carve will open its annual Raymond Carver short story contest April 1, running through May 15. For information about the magazine, classes and contests, see
http://carvezine.com/.

There will be more posts later about upcoming summer and fall writing contests. Feel free to let me know about anything else I’ve missed.

Wordcraft -- The short and the short of it

“I had my first story published in the seventh grade,” author Lou Antonelli told his audience at the recent DFW Writers’ Conference. “The trouble was, I did it instead of my French homework.”

Possibly chastened by the story’s reception, Antonelli concentrated on journalism until ten years ago when he started writing short stories again. By the time the program for this spring’s DFW conference was printed, he’d sold seventy-six stories. By the first day of the conference, that figure got updated to eighty.

You’ve seen a lot of his stories if you read Daily Science Fiction. Or Asimov’s Science Fiction, Andromeda Spaceways In-Flight Magazine, or Greatest Uncommon Denominator, etc., etc. And the number is probably higher by now, since he’s listed new sales on his blog.

After last Monday’s post on short stories from the perspective of an editor, I wanted to give readers a take from the standpoint of an author, although I’m finding it hard to do a straight job of writing without tossing in Antonelli anecdotes, like the bait and switch he pulled on his homework assignment.

Or witticisms like “a short story has all the things a novel has -- beginning, middle and end -- and that order is important.”

I’ll attest to that, having once written a story in flashback, with the end at the beginning. It managed to get published (actually, twice) but the fact is, I’ve never tried it again.

Which is one of the great things about writing short stories -- we can try out a lot of different things. As Antonelli said, this time in apparent seriousness, “If you got to learn your writing craft, the short story is the place to do it.”

He echoed editor Matthew Limpede’s advice from last Monday about the need to hook the reader, in “An editor’s take on short stories,” May 13, 2013.

Some of us might think the first challenge in writing a story might be to have an idea, but Antonelli discounted that. “Ideas are the easiest part. Don’t fret over the originality -- there’s only so many plots in the world.”

The real first challenge for a writer, he said, “is to get the reader to turn the page.”

And for that, “humans have to be at the center. It’s the relationships that are important -- why should I care about this guy or this girl?”

Incidentally, Antonelli often used the term “conceit,” in the sense of an arresting metaphor, instead of “idea.” Despite his insistence on the human element, “conceits,” he mused, “have a way of getting a story going, like the grain of sand in the clamshell.”

And once we, the writers, have formed pearls around our grains of sand, “don’t give the editors an excuse to kick you out,” he said. “It’s better not to send a cover letter than to send a stupid one with a typo,” especially since your contact information should be on the story copy itself.

For more about Antonelli and his writing, see
http://louantonelli.blogspot.com/.

And oh, you wanted to know where to find story markets? Since his writing is usually somewhere on the edge of science fiction or fantasy, he likes the free site, www.ralan.com/.

(Next Monday, I’ve got room for one more DFW con post before moving on. The con had something new this year -- forensics experts who love to talk to writers. But you tell me which you prefer -- writing craft or knowing what really happens when somebody stumbles across a corpse?)

Wordcraft -- An editor's take on short stories

I don’t usually dabble in literary fiction, but recent words from Matthew Limpede, editor in chief of Carve magazine, and prolific science fiction writer Lou Antonelli have made me think more about the importance and influence of short fiction, whatever its genre.

Once, churning out short fiction was something even great writers did as a matter of fact. Entertainment was scarce, paper cheap, and large format periodicals, even nonliterary ones, were hungry for words to fill their space.

Try earning a living now at the U.S. professional rate of five cents per word for short stories. Paper publications are shrinking faster than the real estate bubble. Worse, none of the agents I researched for the recent DFW Writers’ Conference expressed any interest in representing short story collections.

So why write short?

Two words -- internet and craft. On the internet, nobody charges a publisher for paper -- the single biggest cost for print publications. And short fiction lets us hone aspects of our craft at a fraction of the time and effort we’d spend writing novels. So I listened to what Limpede and Antonelli had to say.

This week, I’ll take Limpede. His magazine, Carve, is currently hosting a contest with a guest judge, so apply much of what he said at the recent “Editor’s Perspective” of the Dallas Public Library International Book Fair to the magazine’s day to day operations rather than the contest, closing this Wednesday, May 15.

Major caveats for submitting to any magazine, he said, are knowing what professional publication standards are, and following the particular publication’s guidelines.

After than, “what will really make your story stand out?” Limpede said. “A really good first line (but) less is usually more.” And although “it’s really important to read the
magazine you want to submit to, so you know if it’s going to be a good fit for you,“ he also wants writers to “show us something we haven’t seen before.”

(As in movie magnate Sam Goldwyn’s dictum, “Give me the same thing, only different!”)

Stories without a strong plot are a turnoff and the “all a dream” stories are “a huge no-no.” He also avoids father-son stories, military stories, and, conversely, stories with “office cubicle” settings.

And although his tastes have changed over the course of his editorship, he has a preference for “stories that surprise and have arresting images.” He illustrated “arresting images” with a story in which raindrops hit the protagonists “like quarters.” He also is open to violence, more so than some of his listeners, as long as the violence is intrinsic to the story and not overly graphic.

In the end, he cautions, “don’t take it personally if you’re not accepted. Sometimes I’ll read a great story that just doesn’t meet our MO. Do what feels right for you. Find a magazine that you like and can call home.”

For help with standard manuscript formatting, check with Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (although advocating the Courier font may be out of date) at www.sfwa.org/.

The non-copyrighted Turkey City Lexicon of too-often-seen story ideas is available at www.critters.org/.

And for those interested in submitting to Carve, see http://carvezine.com/.

(Next Monday, science fiction writer Lou Antonelli has 80 published stories to his credit at last count. And he has a few things to say from an author’s side of the short story business.)