Discussion → roundup / checkin in
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time for a roundup ~ what squares your world these days? how's your sky - and how are your words?
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here in germany, it's one long cold snowy winter. but the cold seems to work inspiring. i finally completed my first short story collection, "in transit" (http://www.blueprintreview.de/bpr_transit.htm).
now i work on some new poems, maybe they turn into a chapbook, will see. from style they are fragmented poems, like the valentine poem "lent".
and i pieced the next call for submissions for blueprintreview together, and especially look for international submissions, theme is "micro cosmos" - here the call: http://www.blueprintreview.de/submissions.htm
viele grüße! (greetings!)
dorothee
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Good you nudged me Dorothee. Long cold snowy one in Amsterdam too, but getting slowly warmer and wetter.
News here... Children's film treatment I was working on was rejected by Dutch Film Fund for further development funding. I feel sad and poor. Not all bad though... Short story to be published by Cinnamon Press this summer and a new piece of micro fiction coming soon with good old Linnet's Wings.
Working on another film project, couple of short stories and lots of flash/micro stuff. Can't decide whether to send my novel to more agents. Trying to consolidate plans to move to Berlin in the summer, but waiting to hear if our daughter has a place in the bilingual school we'd oh so like her to attend.
Life involves far too much waiting at the moment. But there are words every day even if the sky refuses to turn blue.
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A dull, gloomy, snowless winter here on the west coast of Canada. Today the sun is teasing us into thinking spring has come. Ha! Been through this before, sun. I remain skeptical :)
Slogging on with my reviewing and my stack of short stories.The light at the end of this tunnel is the Taos Writers Conference in July. Looking forward to that very much!
Best wishes, Dorothee and Kate on your projects!
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The Southern California sun is playing hard-to-get behind some grey clouds right now. I'm shivering in 63 degrees. Somehow, I don't think that any of you are going to feel sorry for me!
An editor from a Christian (!) division of a major publisher wrote to me to say she thought my memoir "compelling, interesting, gritty, real" but that I need to work on the transitions. The reader has to "work too hard." I wanted my story to be a series of flash-cards, but obviously that's too uncomfortable for the average reader. What do you do? Adapt to survive, I'm thinking. I'm still shaking my head over the fact that a Christian publisher is even engaging in conversation with an author who writes about prostitutes giving blow-jobs to their johns. I guess sex sells - even in the Christian market!!!
Otherwise, the best thing in my life continues to be my son who's scared witless that I won't be able to continue to send him to the French American school as our funds dwindle to nil. I need a job badly. Any ideas anyone?
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Great to hear from everyone. Lou - good luck on your job search - have you considered freelance editing (ala Guru.com)?
The Oregon sky is beautiful today - So much sun it's blinding us Portlanders...it reminds me of the Colorado sky I left behind to live in this great city.
I have a story up for another week at matchbook: http://www.matchbooklitmag.com
Also - Luna Park Review is still accepting submissions for our series on Race, Class, Gender, Sexuality: http://www.lunaparkreview.com
Cheers to all!
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Hi Dorothee and group,
Dorothee I cannot keep up with you. (!) Congrats on your book and the twenty million things you're doing at the moment. Seriously, do you sleep? How do you do it?
Weather-wise, last night was another windy one in my (missing one wall, basically) apartment, and it's been raining like all get out here (in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico) - which is not typical for this time of year. Sunny, lovely day today though!
Viele Grusse auch! (Und gute Nacht - bei mir.)
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Sky's gray, which is unusual for Denver.
My words are lining up, begging to be written (a poem for Lolita, a novel about money, endless miscellaneous inspirations).
Other people's words are lining up waiting to be read. Especially in my Glass Woman Prize, http://www.sigriddaughter.com/GlassWomanPrize.htm, with a deadline of March 21, 2010 looming. So far I have about 300 entries, I usually end up with around 400 or 500. It's a prize just for women's prose (fiction or non-fiction) with a cash prize for the 3 top stories and non-obligatory publication for the next 10, bringing it up to a total of 13 stories that get recognized. The prize is in its 7th cycle. If you are a woman reading this, consider submitting. There's no entry fee. If you're a man reading this, spread the word to women writers.
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Bombay's still in the grip of winter - which by the way translates to a temperature of about 28 degrees Celsius at night. In a month, we will be sweating like there's no tomorrow.
Also, after a year of somewhat consistent writing, something's gonna get published soon (next week?) - so that's something to look forward to.
Otherwise, words and stories come and go.
Ajay
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great to hear from you all, and thanks for your wishes.
Kate, sorry to hear about the rejection. i have heard this from others, too. seems cultural funding are cut down all around. so good that we all at least have the internet, where projects can be realized without having to go into huge expenses.
Beate + Marcelle: so interesting, the glass woman price, and the lunapark race/class/gender call. this makes me think, it would be a good time to put together a plug with some of the recent calls i came across.
here, the sun lurked for breakfast, and now moved back into clouds.
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Thank you Beate for the notice for the Glass Woman Prize - I will definitely spread the word :)
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i now pieced a list with calls for submissions together, 6 calls altogether, with a focus on race / gender / majority / minority, here the link:
http://just1m.blogspot.com/2010/02/calls-for-submissions-international.html
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germans don't sleep, didn't you know? we're still keeping busy making up for twelve years of fascism and for driving all talent from our land in that time. i hear that, some time in 2023, we're allowed to finally rest.
i've kept busy myself building an evil snow man with my daughter - http://twitpic.com/14kcdu - ms flawnt smashed her toe (not so bad apparently - artists don't need toes to do their work), i'm working away on 3 pieces accepted by Mad Hatter's Review, on 3 more pieces 2 B submitted for BluePrintReview's next issue, on a wedding story for Metazen's to be wed editor frank hinton, on another piece for Metazen's e-book, and i'm trying to get my novel no. 1 to draft no.2. also waiting for pieces to appear in LitSnack and divinedirtquarterly. for some reason, i am excited to have submitted my first story to the new yorker - looking forward to their rejection letter with glee!
i do this besides my other two jobs.
the other day i met an old friend who works in the czech movie industry. she's bilingual and she cannot understand why i would write in english. seeing what i write did not convince her either. oh well.
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Hello everybody, from a windy and horribly dusty Nicosia (Cyprus, Europe)
Well, what a hectic few weeks! Had a couple of acceptances, a few "maybe"s, and a couple of "no"s.
but the Really Big News is...
... a chapbook of my "fairy-tale" related short stories is going to be published by Folded Word in 2011!
I'm really excited. Big thanks to Jessi Graustein for encouraging me from the word "go".
Dorothee, congrats again on your book ( which hasn't arrived yet) and I will be submitting to the blueprintreview soon.
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this is such a string of good luck news. i forgot i also have stuff coming out at foundling review and wrong tree review. so i suppose what i will do is shut up shop for the rest of the year and go walking in the woods.
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Nora, that is so great! congratulations. i have a chapbook from Folded Word here (Mel Bosworth's "Razzed"), and it's beautiful all around, handmade.
Finn, best of luck for your New Yorker submission! and maybe this might be interesting for you - heard it in a discussion thread, seems even though they have a "submit" option, you need an agent to get into there. being published there has partly turned into a literary promo thing. (the discussion thread here: http://motherjones.com/media/2010/01/death-of-literary-fiction-magazines-journals, it's somewhere in the comments)
but one of the contributors of blueprintreview once had mailed a travelogue to the New York Times slush pile, and they picked the text up, and it got printed in the travel section, so there always is hope.
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Hello all,
It's snowing here in Southern Ontario—again—and likely to keep up all night.
I've been away from my fiction life for a few weeks, stuck in Proposal Land, but I've been trying to keep up with everyone through messages. You guys have been doing some great work, and I hope to be back at it in a couple of weeks. I've been missing FN and the cool people I've met here. :)
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Hello from the now wet and a little less cold (formerly cold and snowy) Netherlands,
It seems most all of you have been writing more than I have. I have been busy taking care of my boys during the day and working data entry in the evenings (every now and then I remember that I have my own company...). Meanwhile, a poetry anthology I edited (in Dutch) came out so I was busy promoting that (I think we actually already sold 7 copies or so... :-[) and, in the wake of that, trying to sell my first poetry collection (also in Dutch) to a publisher (we don't really have literary agents here). And there actually is some progress in this area.
Poetry to be reviewed is ominously piling up on my desk. Editors are getting impatient but my wife finally has a few days off from her 70-hour-a-week job so I'm procrastinating until tomorrow.
Two days ago, someone actually commented on my story 'The Saved Man', finally convincing me that it is not total and utter crap and encouraging me to start my second story in English.
The Dutch government miraculously survived the results of the Iraq inquiry but, a week later, had to resign because they couldn't agree on the prolongation of the Afghanistan mission.
And I hate it when the Olympics are so many time zones away. All the cool stuff happens in the middle of the night...
Cheers,
PJ
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good to have you here, P. jonas - it's through you that i even hear about the olympics...what a shame! and when writers talk about their publications you know they have NOT written enough - they've gone dry and possibly dusty - at least that goes for me. i do need that walk in the woods.
new yorker: nah, they're gonna love me - i sent them a list of my sins since fifth grade, handwritten on parchment, and i signed with "woody allen". that should do it.
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:-) My walk in the woods has been going on for 5 years now and it's called 'raising children'. Coolest thing to be doing really, but it doesn't leave much time for writing fiction.
I'm far from dry, though. Lots of story ideas. Just no time to develop them.Is publishing in the New Yorker a guarantee for a long and happy literary career?
And Finnegan, if you're not watching ski cross and/or snowboard cross, you are missing out.
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Group Description
Second Tongue is the group for the bi- and multilingual fictionaut.
It doesn't matter to us whether your first language is French, Chinese, Greek, Swahili, Italian, Urdu, or any other of the world's groovy languages:
Make this your home, share your English writing and discuss with us what it means, for you, not to write in your mother tongue.
We also welcome native English speakers, who live and write abroad or who write in another language than English.
Share the pain - and the gain!
Dorothee, Finnegan and Nora
This is a public group.
Anyone can see it and join.