weirderary is an online literary magazine dedicated to high quality creative work. “We publish writing, comics, art, and hybrid pieces, favoring fresh and uncommon forms, subjects, and points of view. Over here, “weird” is a compliment, not a pejorative. weirderary comes out three times per year: March, June, and October 17th.”

Accepting submissions now and up to March 1, 2016.

The genius of weirderary: Jessica Thompson, TJ Murray, and Colleen Kolba.

“Send us your weirdest stuff, whether in content or form. We want the unusual. We want to be surprised. We appreciate humor, but that doesn’t only mean light-hearted and goofy. Feel free to go dark. Get serious, just do it in a form or from a perspective we don’t see very often. Cross genre lines and experiment. Send us the work you don’t know how to define.”

Submit by email: submit-at-weirderary.com. Put the category and title of what you’re submitting in the subject line. If you’re submitting more than one item, please send a separate email for each piece.

A partial list of  submitting guidelines:

In your email, please tell us the word count (if applicable) and whether or not the submission was previously published.

We prefer previously unpublished work, but will occasionally accept published work if it is an exceptionally good fit.

Categories:

FLASH (fiction or non): max 498 words

FICTION: max 2,976 words

NONFICTION: max 2.333 words

POETRY: bring it

COMICS: yes, please

ART: def go for it

Alaska Quarterly Review is a literary journal devoted to contemporary literary art, publishing fiction, short plays, poetry, photo essays, and literary non-fiction in traditional and experimental styles. The editors encourage new and emerging writers, while continuing to publish award winning and established writers.

Guidelines

FICTION: Short stories and novel excerpts (generally not exceeding 50 pages).

POETRY: Poems (up to 20 pages).

DRAMA: Short plays (generally not exceeding 50 pages).

PROSE: Literary nonfiction (generally not exceeding 50 pages).

PHOTO ESSAYS: Query before submitting.

All manuscripts must be typed and accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE).

Unsolicited manuscripts are read between August 15 and May 15.
AQR responds to e-mail queries, but cannot review electronic submissions.
Identify simultaneous submissions in cover letter.

“The Sun is an independent, ad-free magazine that for more than forty years has used words and photographs to evoke the splendor and heartache of being human. Each monthly issue celebrates life, but not in a way that ignores its complexity. The personal essays, short stories, interviews, poetry, and photographs that appear in The Sun’s pages explore the challenges we face and the moments when we rise to meet them.”

“We publish essays, interviews, fiction, and poetry. We tend to favor personal writing, but we’re also looking for provocative pieces on political and cultural issues. And we’re open to just about anything. Surprise us; we often don’t know what we’ll like until we read it.

We pay from $300 to $2,000 for essays and interviews, $300 to $1,500 for fiction, and $100 to $200 for poetry. We also give contributors a complimentary one-year subscription to The Sun. We purchase one-time rights. All other rights revert to the author upon publication.”

Submission Guidelines

POV = Point of view.

Point of view is . . . simply. . .  from the point of view of whoever is telling the story.

Writers get to choose who tells the story. It’s a very simple concept, made difficult by the many choice of who gets to tell the story: first person, second person, third person (limited, close, omniscient).

Here’s another point of view choice: The Free Indirect Style.

I’m posting about the free indirect style of point of view because I’m fascinated with learning new things and also because a friend, whom I admire and is an excellent writer said, “I have found that I use it [free indirect point of view] a lot in my writing, and always have, without even knowing that’s what it was.  It’s a very “natural” voice for me and, I think, one that’s easy to read.”

Ready? Here we go:

“Free indirect speech is a style of third-person narration which uses some of the characteristics of third-person along with the essence of first-person direct speech.”  Wikipedia

There are two kinds of indirect speech:  free and normal.

“What distinguishes free indirect speech from normal indirect speech is the lack of an introductory expression such as ‘He said’ or ‘he thought’.

Free indirect discourse can also be described as a ‘technique of presenting a character’s voice partly mediated by the voice of the author, or, in the words of the French narrative theorist Gerard Genette, ‘the narrator takes on the speech of the character, or, if one prefers, the character speaks through the voice of the narrator, and the two instances then are merged.’ Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction.” Wikipedia

Examples  (Wikipedia):

Quoted or direct speech:

He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. “And just what pleasure have I found, since I came into this world?” he asked.

Normal indirect speech:

He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. He asked himself what pleasure he had found since he came into the world.

Free indirect speech:

He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. And just what pleasure had he found, since he came into this world?  Wikipedia

Is your head spinning? Mine is!

Reading examples of the free indirect style of pov might help:

Jane Austen was one of the first practitioners of free indirect speech with Emma.

The Irish author James Joyce also used free indirect speech in works such as “The Dead” (see Dubliners), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses.”   Wikipedia

No matter what point of view you choose. . . just write!

The Write Spot Blog is part of the Festive Spirit Blog Hop, hosted by Francis H. Powell. To read posts by participating bloggers, click on Francis H. Powell’s Home Page. Scroll down, choose a name, click on one and you will magically be transported to creative blog posts.

Superstition Review  is the online literary magazine published by Arizona State University twice yearly (May and December), featuring art, fiction, interviews, nonfiction and poetry.

Their mission is to promote contemporary art and literature by providing a free, easy-to-navigate, high quality online publication that features work by established and emerging artists and authors from all over the world.

Superstition Review welcomes submissions of art, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry during their two reading periods in spring (January and February) and fall (September and October). Submission Guidelines.

Superstition Review maintains a strong year-round community of editors, submitters, contributors, and readers through social networks:

s[r} Blog
s[r]Facebook
s[r]Goodreads 
s[r]Google+
iTunes U
LinkedIn
Pinterest
Tumblr
Twitter
YouTube

The Write Spot Blog is part of the Festive Spirit Blog Hop, hosted by Francis H. Powell. To read posts by participating bloggers, click on Francis H. Powell’s Home Page. Scroll down, choose a name, click on one and you will magically be transported to creative blog posts.

Point of View (POV)- is the term to describe who is telling the story . . . or. . . who is narrating the story.

Point of view is the story told from the narrator’s viewpoint and what the narrator’s relation is to the story, or . . . the distance between the narrator and the story, as well as the trustworthiness of the narrator.

Involved narrator – the narrator is involved in the action as it unfolds

Detached narrator – narrator is an objective observer or witness to the action

Reliable narrator – a narrator whose account and perceptions we can trust

Unreliable narrator – a narrator whose own ignorance, mental or emotional state, age, prejudice, etc. may distort or limit his or her perceptions

Free indirect style – a lesser know POV, a style of third-person narration, using some of the characteristics of third-person along with the essence of first-person direct speech. More about free indirect style.

DESCRPITION OF POVS

First person: Autobiographies and memoir

POV can be any of the following in fiction and non-fiction:

First person narrator: Narrator is a character in the story and narrates the story using the pronoun “I.”

Second person narrator: Rarely used, the second person narrator uses an identified or unidentified ‘you’ throughout the story.

Third person narrator: This narrator is a voice outside the story and tells the story using the pronouns “he, she, and they.” Sometimes the third person narrator is defined, sometimes the third person narrator is unknown. That is, the reader doesn’t know who the narrator is.

The third person narrator can be omniscient or limited.

The omniscient third person narrator is all-knowing, able to move in and out of the thoughts of all the characters and to comment on events before and after the scene has happened.

The limited third person narrator is limited to knowledge about a single character, or one character at a time.

How third person narrator operates:

Narrative distance: Third person narrator can zoom in or zoom out to show narrative distance.

~Zoom in: Close, as if beside the character

~Zoom out: Objective and distant, observing in a general way, like a fly on the wall

Really close: Inside the character’s consciousness and skin: can describe sensations, perceptions, inner workings, and responses of the character.

Examples

It was the winter of 1993. A solitary figure walked through the snowy streets of Manhattan. Narrator seems to be floating high above the roofline, gazing down on the snowy streets = omniscient.

Edward Tollivar leaned into the wind. The cold sliced through his coat as he walked through the snow to Tracy Covey’s house on Jane Street. Camera moves closer. Narrator is striding alongside Edward and tells us where he is going.

A sick heat spread through Edward’s chest, though the snow whipped in sharp slices across his face coat. His fingers touched the letters in his pocket. He didn’t want to show them to his cousin. Everything he’d hoped to hide was there. Narrator’s voice inhabits Edward’s body, experiencing the sick heat in his chest and fingering the letters in his pocket. The narrator knows Edward’s thoughts and fears as intimately as the first person narrative.

Selections from Finding Your Writer’s Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction, by Thaisa Frank and Dorothy Wall, inspired this post.

Explore more about point of view in past posts:

POV Is Like A Photographer’s Lens

Scene One – Your Point of View. Prompt #108

And then . . .  Just Write.

“American Short Fiction publishes work by emerging and established voices: stories that dive into the wreck, that stretch the reader between recognition and surprise, that conjure a particular world with delicate expertise—stories that take a different way home.”

“Our goal here at American Short Fiction is to respect . . . involvement by offering consistently intelligent, engrossing, and beautiful reading, in print and on this website, and we appreciate your company. “Stories! Stories, stories, stories!” cried the narrator on the final page of that first Spring ’91 issue, in a work by W. D. Wetherell. Stories, indeed.”

American Short(er) Fiction Contest
The prize recognizes extraordinary short fiction under 1,000 words. The first-place winner will receive a $1,000 prize and publication, and the second-place winner will receive $250 and publication. All entries will be considered for publication.
Submission period ends: February 1, 2016.
Guidelines for contest.

Submission Guidelines for regular submissions.
In addition to its triannual print magazine, American Short Fiction publishes stories (under 2000 words) online.

Unsolicited submissions are accepted year-round. There are no set guidelines as to content or length. Anyone wishing to send a story to American Short Fiction should first become familiar with the work previously published by the magazine.

Short fiction must be original and previously unpublished. ASF considers work that has appeared online (including on blogs and Facebook) to be previously published.

All manuscripts must be typed and double-spaced, with the author’s name, address, phone number, and approximate word count at the top of the first page, and numbered throughout.

Send only your best work. Submit only one story at a time. Pay the $3 submission fee before submitting your work.

ASF will read and consider simultaneous submissions, on the condition that the author notify them immediately if the manuscript is accepted for publication elsewhere. Submitters must also withdraw the submission through the Submittable site.

Payment is competitive and upon publication. American Short Fiction purchases first serial rights. All rights revert to the author upon publication.

The Spring 1991 inaugural issue included an essay by Joyce Carol Oates.