The Write Spot Blog by Marlene Cullen

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American Short Fiction Magazine

“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Short fiction must be original and previously unpublished.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.

December 13, 2015
Rewrite Your Holiday Scene . . . Prompt #210

‘Twas the night before the party and all through the house, everyone was hurrying with too much to do, even the mouse!

Sound familiar? I was frustrated with too much scurrying before I learned strategies about how to manage holiday stress. As I gathered ideas, I felt calm and at peace. Let’s create an enjoyable holiday season. It does involve list making. So get some paper and a pen. These lists will help you focus on making your holidays less stressful and more enjoyable.

The six key steps to reduce holiday stress are inventory, decide, accept, choose favorites, enlist and manage.

Take inventory. Make a list of all the extra activities you do during the holidays. Be sure to include baking, making crafts, decorating, cleaning, helping at church, attending parties, shopping, wrapping, making travel plans, driving around to see decorations and meeting guests at the airport.

Next: Go through your inventory list and cross out the activities that have little value to you, or that you don’t enjoy.

Decide what you value about the holidays. Make a list of what is important to you during the holidays. Take a look at what works for your family and what no longer has meaning.

Decide which activities are realistic and cross off the ones that are difficult to achieve. Decide which traditions are truly meaningful and which are merely habitual. Choose one activity you can skip this year. After the holidays, if it felt wrong, you can always reinstate that activity next year.

Acceptance will help you create a celebration that meets your unique needs. As you evaluate your list, look at what you don’t like about your holiday celebration. Decide if it’s changeable, or if you need to accept it. Sometimes compromise is an acceptable solution.

Choose favorites. Ask family members what they liked best about last year’s holiday season and what they would enjoy doing this year. Sometimes the simplest activities get the highest ratings. Try to pick one activity or food to please each person. Rather than making twenty different kinds of cookies, make only one or two favorites.

I used to think I had to have homemade gifts for everyone and participate in glittery crafts. When I admitted I don’t like craft-making, I felt lighter and more energetic to do the things I enjoy.

There is no one right way to celebrate. Take control of the celebration and shape it to conform to your wishes and values.

Enlist help from family members and friends. Show them your to-do lists and ask for help. We invited several families to our house last year for a holiday celebration. I absolutely needed help. I made a complete list of everything that had to be done, using such categories as furniture (rearranging), drinks (arranging glasses and chilling bottles), tables (setting up extra tables), cars (making room for guests’ cars), food (preparation and serving), miscellaneous and laundry (yes, I even included this on the to-do list). When family members saw all that had to be done, they were very willing to help.

Manage holiday stress by taking care of yourself. The obvious is to eat well, get enough rest, avoid sugar and alcohol. The not so obvious is to remember to release stress through gentle stretching, brisk walking, listening to soothing music, practicing yoga or whatever helps to de-stress and relax.

Many of these ideas are from Unplug the Christmas Machine, by Jo Robinson and Jean Coppock Staeheli.

The main components of a successful holiday season are to be aware and choose wisely.

Make conscious choices about how you want to celebrate the holidays. Decide what is important and what no longer works.

If we follow this plan, our new story could be, ‘Twas the night before the party and all through the house, everyone was sleeping peacefully, even the host and hostess.

Writing Prompt: Write a magical, whimsical, unrealistic, impractical, not-gonna-happen holiday scene.

Then: Write a practical holiday scene. . . using ideas from your lists: Take inventory, decide, accept, choose favorites, enlist and manage.

With new ways of thinking and some planning, you will create a holiday you can enjoy.

December 11, 2015
Does failure weigh more than success?

Guest Blogger Rachael Herron writes about successes and failures.

It’s December! I know this for a fact (I just rechecked the calendar). No matter which hemisphere you’re in, regardless of season, this year is getting ready for her final bow. It’s completely impossible that 2015 is almost over because about seventeen minutes ago the year was just starting, full of potential and wonder and pale spring-green hope.

I’m prone to doing what everyone else does at the end of a year: weighing the past year’s successes and failures against each other.

But you know what? Failure weighs way more than success. When you put things on that imaginary scale, each small failure weighs as much as a wheelbarrow full of rocks while each huge success weighs almost nothing. Success makes you lighter—it makes you able to float for a minute or even an hour—while failure drags you so low your chin scrapes the pavement.

That? Is not fair. I don’t know about you, but I can have a million successes each day (I woke up alive! I made the best cup of coffee known to mankind! I wrote a sentence I could be proud of and wouldn’t mind other people reading! I knitted a row without stabbing myself with the needle and bleeding to death!) but that one thing I screw up makes me feel like the amazing things don’t count. The scale isn’t affected by the airy happy things I place on the success side, and then it cracks in half with the weight of that awkwardly worded email I sent in which I accidentally hurt someone’s feelings.

So hey. Let’s do things differently this year.

Throw away the scale.

Let’s NOT tally up our successes and failures. Failure will win because it’s big and loud and hulk-smashy. Success (with its fairy wings and gossamer breath) will get pummeled and then go hide in the bathroom to cry.

Screw that.

If you just have to make a year-end tally, write down what you’re proud of this year. Things like:
•    At your day job, you didn’t smack a single person.
•    Your blueberry muffins disappear from the kitchen within seconds.
•    You made someone laugh until they cried.
•    Your socks matched more days than they didn’t.
•    You started that novel, and now you have more words written than you did last year.

If your fingers get itchy to list the failures, DON’T. Break the pencil and marvel at your own strength. You already spent enough time on what didn’t go well—I know you did. From enormous impossible things like not saying the right thing before a loved one died to tiny silly things like only remembering to put eyeliner on one eye: You have spent enough time hurting.

Forgive yourself like you would forgive the person you love most. Don’t spend time “learning” from it — you did that already without even having to try. Be kind to yourself. In three weeks let’s turn the calendar page without fanfare. Last January we thought we had a whole year to finally get things right, but come on. What a burden to place on a brand new year. What was really true was that we noticed where we were in time. We can do that any old day. Let’s do that today, December 10th. Or September 17th. Or February 3rd.

Every day is a good day to notice where you are, right now.

Celebrate your successes because they are daily and many and they are spectacular.

RACHAEL HERRON is the bestselling author of the novel Splinters of Light and Pack Up the Moon (both from Penguin), the five-book Cypress Hollow series, and the memoir, A Life in Stitches. She received her MFA in writing from Mills College, and when she’s not busy writing, she’s working her other full-time job as a 911 fire/medical dispatcher for a Bay Area fire department. She’s a New Zealand citizen as well as an American, and she is a proud member of the NaNoWriMo Writers Board. She can probably play along with you on the ukulele.

Sign up for Rachael Herron’s Blog, so you don’t miss a single episode in the life of author Rachael Herron.

December 10, 2015
What hurts right now? Prompt #209

You! Yes, you. What hurts right now?

Write about that.

Or write about what is hurting your fictional character.

Writing Prompt: What hurts right now?

December 9, 2015
“Challenges always present themselves . . . “

“Challenges always present themselves in any creative undertaking, but you’ll never get far if you let doubt rule you.”

Susan Bono author of What Have We Here: Essays about Keeping House and Finding Home.

December 8, 2015
Personal Essay is Memoir in Short Form

If you have written your memoir, or are in the process, and it’s not shaping into what you envisioned, you could transform it into a personal essay.

It might be easier, at some point, to concentrate on writing a personal essay, rather than a book-length manuscript.

There are many posts on The Write Spot Blog about how to write personal essays. (Please scroll down for the how-to posts).

You may be writing vignettes to satisfy your desire to write family stories. You can publish these with the help of many do-it-yourself publishing companies.

If you want your personal essays to be published for public consumption, there are many opportunities for submission: Big Brick Review, Chicken Soup for The Soul, The Christian Science Monitor, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction and so many more places. Check the back pages of Writer’s Digest magazine.

You can submit your writing to be included in anthologies. Conduct an internet search to find anthologies that are currently accepting submissions. An online search for “submit to anthologies” yielded thousands of results. You can also find anthologies that are looking for submissions in the back pages of Writer’s Digest magazine.

And of course, you can check in at The Write Spot Blog anytime to find publications that accept personal essays, just click on “Places to Submit.”

You can subscribe to The Write Spot Blog and not miss a single post. When you subscribe, posts will be delivered to your email inbox. Just fill out the information on the home page of The Write Spot Blog — Right side, scroll down.

December 7, 2015
Colorado Review

THE COLORADO REVIEW accepts short fiction, personal essay, poetry, and book reviews.

FICTION & NONFICTION
Colorado Review considers short fiction and personal essays with contemporary themes (no genre fiction or literary criticism).

POETRY
Poetry of any style is accepted. Please limit poetry submissions to no more than five poems at a time.

PRIZE FOR POETRY

NELLIGAN PRIZE

BOOK REVIEWS

If you would like to submit a book review, please send query to respective editors.

SUBMISSION DATES AND FORMAT (Scroll down)

Nonfiction manuscripts are read year-round.

Fiction & poetry manuscripts are read from August 1 to April 30.

Simultaneous submissions are accepted; writers must notify CR immediately if the work is accepted elsewhere.

CR considers only previously unpublished work.

Colorado Review purchases First North American Serial Rights; all rights revert to the author upon publication in CR. We pay $10 per page ($30 minimum) for poetry and $200 for short stories and essays. Authors also receive two copies of the issue in which they are published and a one-year subscription to CR.

Colorado Review strongly encourages writers to be familiar with their magazine before submitting.

Examples of work published in Colorado Review are posted on their website (scroll down).

December 5, 2015
Deep but not profound . . . Prompt #208

The name of the game is: Deep but not profound.

Apples but not bananas

Boots but not shoes

Carrots but not potatoes

Door but not window

Eggs but not chickens

Have you figured out the formula? Here’s a clue:

Look at the letters in the first words of each line above.

More clues:

Sleepy but not tired

Sleep but not slumber

Greet and hello and goodbye but neither here nor there.

Solution to this riddle:

The first word has double consonants or double vowels. The rest of the words don’t matter.

Two more:

Matter but not material

Correct but not right

I’m becoming addicted. . .

Hope you have fun with this little brain teaser!

What lines can you come up with?

Writing Prompt: Choose a line or a photo and write.

December 4, 2015
Rejection, Dejection, Perfection

Guest blogger Terry Elders writes about rejection, dejection, and perfection.

Luck was on my side. My first submission to an anthology, just eight years ago, got accepted by Chicken Soup for the Soul for “Celebrating Brothers and Sisters.” Since then my stories have appeared in well over a hundred books. But I estimate that I’ve averaged five rejections for every acceptance. That’s a success rate of only 20 percent. Perseverance is key.

I write for an audience. I’ve known talented writing students say that if they’re ever rejected, they become too discouraged to continue to submit. When I told this to a realtor friend, he laughed.

“That’s ridiculous. I get turned down every day. If I stopped showing houses, I’d never make a sale. You smile and move on to the next potential customer.”

I agree. I’ve adopted my late husband’s favorite motto, “Never, ever give up.”

I keep an orphanage in my stories file. Here’s where all my rejects dwell. Periodically I spot an opportunity that’s perfect for a story that’s languished in the orphanage for years. I apply a little literary rouge and send it out again.

At first I wrote stories that I thought would make people smile or nod or become inspired. As I grew older, my inner voices urged, “Go deeper.”

I started with “Dreaming as the Summers Die,” about the last time I saw my birth mom. “Not suited for our audience,” said a couple of traditional anthology publishers. When I read these messages, I could feel the distaste, the pulling back, and I envisioned how I’d spoiled some editor’s morning. Even a friend who read my story suggested I should concentrate on more cheerful topics, and that perhaps I’d better get over something that happened all those decades ago.

But I persevered and resubmitted. I wanted to see this story in print. It finally found a home in Dream of Things’ debut anthology collection, Saying Goodbye. An online magazine, The Fertile Source, also printed it, and Five Minutes More picked it up. And additionally the story appeared again in Joy, Interrupted, from Fat Daddy’s Farm. How encouraging to find that not every publisher shies away from more meditative pieces.

I continued with “A Ruffled Mind,” about what it was like to be six years old and scared witless by crossing the street or going to the playground. This story appeared in Anxiety Disorders: True Stories of Survival by Hidden Thoughts Press.

Once I began edging toward the dark side, I gained courage. Did I want anybody to know why I held on to a hopeless love for years and years? Did I want anybody to know how diminished I felt when my tiny little adoptive mom called me an elephant? What about those feelings of resentment during my late husband’s last weeks? Shouldn’t I be ashamed? Filled with guilt? Maybe not, I decided. Maybe others have shared those experiences. So I wrote those stories, too. And they were published.

“Needs” appeared in Jonna Ivin’s Loving for Crumbs, “Elephants Never Forget” in Virgie Tovar’s Seal Press publication, Hot and Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion, and “Wheels and Deals” in Hidden Thoughts Press, It’s Weighing on Your Mind.

I don’t dwell on the dark side a hundred percent of the time, though. I still write inspirational stories and submit to Chicken Soup. I’ve had 25 stories accepted by that publisher. I’ve also had eight stories cut by Chicken Soup at the final moment. That doesn’t stop me from submitting to nearly each new possible title posted on its website.

Further, since the nonfiction anthology market has diminished in recent years, I am considering fiction. I know where to start for ideas. I’m betting there are a few orphans that can be spiffed up through imagination.

Maybe with perseverance, luck will nestle up to me once again. There’s still room in my bookcase for a few more anthologies with a story carrying my byline.

TERRI ELDERS, LCSW, began writing for publication in her early teens. Her nonfiction stories have appeared in over a hundred anthologies, including multiple editions of the Chicken Soup for the Soul and Not Your Mother’s Book series. She co-edited Not Your Mother’s Book…On Travel.

After a nearly three-decade odyssey, she recently returned to her native California. She’s happy to be back near her son, old friends, and her beloved Pacific Ocean. She blogs at A Touch of Tarragon.

December 3, 2015
Tradition . . . Prompt #207

~Tradition~

Quick! What’s the first thing you think when you see the word “tradition?”

Write about that.

OR:

Write about a tradition from your childhood.

Write about a tradition you gave up.

Write about a tradition you enjoy.

Ready? Set your time and write for 15-20 minutes. Just write!

December 2, 2015