Showing posts with label short fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label short fiction. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 20, 2017
Life is Now
I am thrilled to announce the publication of "Life is Now" at Literary Orphans.
I wrote this story from a prompt at Nancy Zafris' amazing short fiction class at the 2016 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. I am thrilled to have been selected as the Peter Taylor Fellow for Nancy's short fiction class in 2018. I can't say enough positives about this workshop. I've had the privilege to attend the last three years - first in Nancy's novel workshop, then Nancy's fiction workshop, and again last summer in Lee K. Abbott's short fiction class. My writing has leveled-up every time I've attended. It is worth every dime for sure.
In 2016, this story won 2nd place at a local writing contest that paid really well and also received Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train's March/April 2017 Very Short Fiction contest. I'm happy to finally have it available for people to read.
I don't think I mentioned it here, but I am so excited to have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Streetlight Magazine for Invisible Girls. It sort of feels like being nominated for a Grammy. Usually these things make me feel excited for an hour, then I get back to work, but this nomination feels better than that and the high has lasted for weeks. Same with being selected to be Nancy's fellow.
Now, back to work....
Tonja
Monday, November 6, 2017
New Web Site and Publication
I don't remember if I posted here, but I have a new website. I used to be a software developer and probably can do better than this if I had some extra minutes to devote to it, but I did a simple Wix site for now.
TonjaMatneyReynolds.com
My last post got corrupted with huge blocks of white space between each paragraph. Not sure how that happened, but I deleted it.
I was notified today that one of my short stories, "Life is Now," was accepted for publication by Literary Orphans. I am so happy. This story won 2nd place at a local contest that paid big money and received an Honorable Mention by Glimmer Train in one of their very short fiction contests. I was starting to feel like my style of quirky, humorous writing was not going to survive the current political climate.
I am literally out of stories to submit. I have committed to finishing my novel by the end of the calendar year, so I don't have time to work on short fiction until I finish drafting the next 23,000 words. It's just me and the dog today, and she is being very chill. Definitely a good day to write.
First, I need to research iodine.
Tonja
Friday, August 11, 2017
Strategy for Publishing Short Fiction
I didn't write much short fiction before I attended the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop last summer (which I cannot recommend enough). I took Nancy Zafris' short fiction class after attending her novel workshop the previous summer. She said the short fiction class would help me with line-level things that would be beneficial to my novel-writing. She was right (she always is).
For the first assignment that was given before the workshop, she asked us to write a 300-word story based on a picture of a gel character smashed onto the sidewalk. It was the kid of gel creature that my kids get at fairs or from tickets at Dave and Busters. They end up on my ceiling, and the red ones leave a stain behind - my dining room table was forever marked with a red starfish.
My response to Nancy's request for us to write a 300-word story was that this isn't a thing. That is the length of a cover letter. It is three paragraphs. Stories cannot be 300 words long. I was proven wrong.
That week, I learned how to write tiny stories and how to be incredibly concise in service to a limited word count.
The week-long workshop was generative - we were given a new prompt every day and struggled to write a new story every afternoon (until 1:00 a.m. for me most nights).
In the end, I completed two stories that I loved and had a few that were kind of so-so that I have since abandoned. I left Kenyon sorely wishing I could completely rewrite my one story that had already been accepted for publication, "Hostess of the Dead," which is forever in print as is in Best of Ohio Short Stories: Volume II.
As soon as I got home, I used one of the more complicated prompts to write a story for a local contest. I won some (relatively) good money for it and later received Honorable Mention when I entered that same story in Glimmer Train's March/April 2017 Very Short Fiction contest.
I wrote another story this April that was recently published at Four Ties Lit Review. It's 1200 words, which has become the sweet spot for me with short fiction. You can read it here if you like:
"Creamed Corn and Ninja Stars" at Four Ties Lit Review
What I lacked last summer when the conference was over (and quickly figured out) was a strategy to get the stories published. That's where Nancy and Geeta Kothari helped. They said to put myself on a submission schedule. I should submit two times a week (and it's okay if it is the same story that I submit in the same week). I believe they said to avoid contests, but I think I've heard that from professors also.
If you submit twice a week for a year, you will have submitted about 100 times. Chances are, the stories will be published. This has been true for me and others from that workshop that followed the same strategy. The lovely part is that I have had four stories published in a year and now completely accept the idea that rejection is part of the job. (I honestly did not submit 100 - I got to about 50 including academic papers - and withdrew many of the submissions after the stories were accepted.)
The bottom line is that if we aren't writing, we have nothing to submit. If we aren't submitting, we aren't doing our jobs.
Do you have any tips for finding journals to submit to for short fiction (many journals seem to be closed in the summer) or strategies for publishing short fiction?
Tonja
For the first assignment that was given before the workshop, she asked us to write a 300-word story based on a picture of a gel character smashed onto the sidewalk. It was the kid of gel creature that my kids get at fairs or from tickets at Dave and Busters. They end up on my ceiling, and the red ones leave a stain behind - my dining room table was forever marked with a red starfish.
My response to Nancy's request for us to write a 300-word story was that this isn't a thing. That is the length of a cover letter. It is three paragraphs. Stories cannot be 300 words long. I was proven wrong.
That week, I learned how to write tiny stories and how to be incredibly concise in service to a limited word count.
The week-long workshop was generative - we were given a new prompt every day and struggled to write a new story every afternoon (until 1:00 a.m. for me most nights).
In the end, I completed two stories that I loved and had a few that were kind of so-so that I have since abandoned. I left Kenyon sorely wishing I could completely rewrite my one story that had already been accepted for publication, "Hostess of the Dead," which is forever in print as is in Best of Ohio Short Stories: Volume II.
As soon as I got home, I used one of the more complicated prompts to write a story for a local contest. I won some (relatively) good money for it and later received Honorable Mention when I entered that same story in Glimmer Train's March/April 2017 Very Short Fiction contest.
I wrote another story this April that was recently published at Four Ties Lit Review. It's 1200 words, which has become the sweet spot for me with short fiction. You can read it here if you like:
"Creamed Corn and Ninja Stars" at Four Ties Lit Review
What I lacked last summer when the conference was over (and quickly figured out) was a strategy to get the stories published. That's where Nancy and Geeta Kothari helped. They said to put myself on a submission schedule. I should submit two times a week (and it's okay if it is the same story that I submit in the same week). I believe they said to avoid contests, but I think I've heard that from professors also.
If you submit twice a week for a year, you will have submitted about 100 times. Chances are, the stories will be published. This has been true for me and others from that workshop that followed the same strategy. The lovely part is that I have had four stories published in a year and now completely accept the idea that rejection is part of the job. (I honestly did not submit 100 - I got to about 50 including academic papers - and withdrew many of the submissions after the stories were accepted.)
The bottom line is that if we aren't writing, we have nothing to submit. If we aren't submitting, we aren't doing our jobs.
Do you have any tips for finding journals to submit to for short fiction (many journals seem to be closed in the summer) or strategies for publishing short fiction?
Tonja
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
Short Story Challenge
Just for fun and to keep my mind engaged in non-political complexity, I am going to play around with short story structure and finish two half-written stories that follow particular structures borrowed from short stories I love. One story follows the format in one of Nancy Zafris' stories in The Home Jar: Stories, "If A Then B Then C." The other uses a "you" point-of-view, which I've never done before - this is borrowed from Karin Lin-Greenberg's "Designated Driver" in Faulty Predictions.
| Faulty Predictions |
Both of these collections are really great. I found Faulty Predictions to be a lesson in point of view.
The Home Jar demonstrated for me how to not overexplain and the importance of leaving some details open to the reader's imagination. The ending of "The Home Jar" will stick with me forever - read it, and you'll know what I mean.
| The Home Jar |
Am going to try to finish the drafts of both stories today (the novel will wait another day) and submit one of them to the Kenyon Review Fiction Contest (the deadline is next week). Anyone with me? The word count limit is 1200.
The prize for this very competitive competition is a scholarship to attend the 2017 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, which is an amazing workshop that I was lucky enough to attend last year. The fiction workshop is generative. You come in with your body and a laptop (or pen and paper if that's how you roll) and are given thoughtful instruction and prompts before noon. After noon, you write a new story, often an impossibly tiny new story. The next day, you share it with the class and get it critiqued. By the end of the week, you are changed. I walked out of there as if I was wearing different glasses when doing line-level revisions to my novel. It's expensive, but do it anyway.
Thursday, January 5, 2017
Rejection is Part of the Job
I read somewhere that writers (presumably of short fiction) should strive for 100 rejections a year.
This sounds harsh and counter-intuitive, but not submitting because of the inevitable rejection is like a software developer never going live because they fear someone will find a bug in the code (and they will) or because potential users won't love it. Developers write it anyway. They go live. They know more people will reject the program than embrace it. This is life.
I'm going for 100 in 2017. One down, 99 to go.
(I will post a link to the article when I find it.)
Tonja
This sounds harsh and counter-intuitive, but not submitting because of the inevitable rejection is like a software developer never going live because they fear someone will find a bug in the code (and they will) or because potential users won't love it. Developers write it anyway. They go live. They know more people will reject the program than embrace it. This is life.
I'm going for 100 in 2017. One down, 99 to go.
(I will post a link to the article when I find it.)
Tonja
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