I have a new (actually old) story up in the very new site thickjam (specializing in the shorts that are “substantial, sticky and hard to rub off”). It’s called Turkey on Wheat. Yes, it’s a play on Bukowski’s Ham on Rye. I like a good Jewish rye, but I don’t eat ham.
Last month Michael Rudin (author of nano #147) published his piece “From Hemingway to Twitterature: The Short and Shorter of It” in the Journal of Electronic Publishing. It’s a thoughtful academic look at the different ways we’re writing (short and cheap) in the digital age that also includes a couple selections from the Nanoism archives and a quote from yours truly.
Second, the 7×20 twitter anthology 140 And Counting is now currently available (also featuring yours truly) for the Amazon Kindle.
And I never thought I would say this, but Nanoism’s first wholly independent native-language international chapter is open! In Swedish! Check out Nanoismer, and click over here for a little bit of background.
Finally, Nanoism’s 2011 contest is now open until the end of New Year’s day 2012. For those of you keeping track at home, the format is similar to last year with both free entries, raffle prizes, and more chances to win if you donate to charity.
Necessary Fiction has a neat premise for their rotating monthly Writer-in-Residence series. For January, it’s been “First Footing,” where each story begins with the last sentence of another story by another author. For example, Marcelle Heath (who incidentally wrote several of my favorite pieces in Nanoism) used nano #249 by Martha Williams as the basis for her story “Nothing Good Can Come of This.”
My own contribution is another piece arising from my continuing preoccupation with short fiction based on Craigslist postings: “+1 for a circle of friends?“
As time marches on, the number of Twitter-based books continues to increase. There’s the crowd-sourced book of clever tweets in Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less; there are the celebrity cash-in’s, like Dennis Leary’s new twitter-feed on paper, Suck On This Year: LYFAO @ 140 Characters or Less; not to mention the countless (and useless) books about Twitter itself (social media, networking, style guides, how to make “friends”, etc etc etc). There is no irony when using paper to talk about the internet in the publishing industry.
However—
There is only one carefully curated Twitter-based creative writing anthology. And that book is On a Narrow Windowsill (Kindle version), out in the time for the holiday season from Folded Word. From that link, preview it on Google Books, read the press release, and see my name several times. That’s because this book contains stories from 43 writers including myself, Mel Bosworth, Ethel Rohan, and xTx, (+39). AND it’s on SALE.
First, Zine-Scene (a blog, lit-mag, lit-mag highlighter, etc) features a profile of Nanoism and interview with me. The overview is here, with links to both. Good times were had by all.
Second, you may remember my very short story “When We Are Old” from its publication in Dogzplot. You then might remember it as a audio piece when Mel Bowsworth read it outloud at Mel Bosworth Reads Things. Now, it’s also a song:
“When We Are Old” is track 4 out of 7 on First Snow, a free, folksy Lo-Fi album by Archbishop, which you can grab right here for nothing (because it’s free).
With November comes the release of your #1 bestselling anthology on Amazon: Norton’s Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer, edited by Robert Swartwood. It contains a blurb from Jodi Picoult and stories from me (“Before Perseus”), Joyce Carol Oates, and James Frey (among many others), so go read it. Everyone else obviously is!
No, but really. This is a fun book. It’s a great concept (nanofiction with punchlines!), and there’s plenty of variety littered throughout to guarantee some will resonate with every reader.
I’m super pleased to say that my story “Cryo” is Folded Word’s third issue of Heron, a minimag that you can read, listen to, download, or print out and fold your own.
What an honor! Go read it!
I have a new piece of Craigslist Fiction up today at Staccato Fiction. It’s nice and short and you can read it here.
You could, with a few bucks to spare, also buy the first issue of Thirty First Bird Review and read my story “The Presentation of the Virgin.”
1. David Backer (from FictionDaily) and I have a new fiction collaboration. It’s called whtsgngon.
It’s very short fiction based on/reflecting current news stories, and words throughout link to interesting resources and articles from around the web. It’s a quick read, but the links also provide a chance for some interesting directed reading.
2. Roxane Gay is the first writer in residence over at Necessary Fiction, and she’s just reprinted my story “The Woman on the Sidewalk,” which was originally published in SUB-LIT, which has since died. Now it’s online again forever! Go read it! There is also a bonus post that tells you how this story came about and provides an awesome musical accompaniment! After, read this story by Paula Bomer! Then read this story by Roxane Gay!
3. My story “The Unicorn” appears in Ink Monkey 3. It’s a print magazine that you can buy here. It is not about actual unicorns. Perhaps that is a failure on my part.
During the month of April, I used Nanoism to run a little experiment in subsidized charity, the 2010 Nanofiction Contest (For Haiti). Perhaps “subsidized” isn’t quite correct—as not all donors received compensation—but I think it sounds better than raffle-backed charity or contest charity. Oh, how about incentivized. Yes, perfect.
Either way, writing contests, as a money-making scheme, are as common as companies that only care about profit and hurting the environment. I’m kidding; contests help fund some really great publications. But a quick look at the number of new “genres” Narrative Magazine has “invented” (iStory, iPoem, Six Word Story) to pull in the dough is enough to make me ill. Actually, so is the name iStory. Clearly one of their interns graduated from the “cheap plastic crap from 2004” school of advertising. Incidentally, the term iStory was actually created in 2004 during the first iCan’tThinkofaBetterNameforThis product wave, so someone should have Googled it and read the Wikipedia article. Ahem.
Anyway, how is an honest writer to know what contests to enter? More importantly, why bother paying for them in the first place? The odds of winning might be better than the lotto, but unless you’re getting a subscription or something good out of the deal automatically, it’s still a terrible financial decision for most writers, and probably a dubious one for many publications as well. But for the purpose of raising money for an excellent charity…well you get a platform, and then you leverage it.
So, instead of taking contest fees to raise money for Nanoism itself (which I fully believe wouldn’t have even covered the cost of the prize money), the money went straight to a great organization. As a function of this set-up, people also made a tax-deductible donations by entering. So the money is not simply flushed down the drain, so to speak.
And, as an added lure, donating entrants also received “raffle” tickets which gave them a chance to randomly win prizes from the independent publishing community. I went around soliciting publications I like and/or respect, and to their collective credit, most provided materials for the giveaway. People are good people.
Interestingly, the number of non-donating entries was lower than I would have expected based on our previous contests and Nanoism’s growth over the past year. My explanation is two-fold: 1) A lingering sense of guilt about not-donating that caused some people to feel uncomfortable entering. 2) The decreased odds of winning with only 1 story entry (versus the 6, 11 or more that some writers submitted). I thought that might happen, but I was surprised nonetheless.
The end result is that a lot of writers were excited to enter the contest, felt strongly about the cause (which is good), and felt inspired by it. Because in the end, they weren’t really entering a contest. I gave them an excuse to support Partners in Health, and so they did. We raised $650, which is 6.5x what my wife and I would have given if we’d just sent the prize money directly to PIH, and over 30 people are getting literature in their mailboxes as we speak. A small experimental success.