Akopos

With classwork and the enervating results of the mid-term elections, posts here will be sparse for the next few weeks. One bright spot in these otherwise gray November days is the release of Scrivener 2.0, a writing tool I use and heartily recommend to anyone needing a flexible, powerful writing environment. Made by a writer in the UK, Scrivener is the definition of quality indie software. For Mac, Windows Beta.

Scrivener is a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on helping you get to the end of that awkward first draft.

* Online lit mags are publishing some of the most intriguing writing available today. Every Monday, I post a pointer to a site that offers fiction and/or poetry either as free content or as samples from subscriber issues. Today’s pointer is to a selection of nano-fiction sites.

Following up an earlier post, below are some lit sites which publish ultra-short fiction.

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Nanoism

Nanoism (edited by Ben White) is an online publication for twitter-fiction: stories of up to 140 characters. Shorter then traditional flash fiction, it’s both a challenge to write and quick as a blink to read. Call it nanofiction, microfiction, twiction, twisters, or tweetfic—it doesn’t matter: It’s the perfect art form for the bleeding edge of the internet revolution.

We’re not just catering to the 21st-century attention span, we’re publishing flexible fiction: stories that you can read on your computer or cellphone, stories that fit in the cracks of your day.

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escarp

escarp is a text-message-based review of super-brief literature. We publish original, user-submitted poems and stories (fiction and non-).

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One Forty Fiction

The name “one forty fiction” refers to the 140-character limit imposed on users by the online service Twitter. It is the 21st century haiku.

This site is dedicated to fiction. Not poetry, but fiction. Stories told with beginnings, middles, and ends, and characters who want things.

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trapeze magazine

The main purpose of trapeze magazine is to provide a stable and strange twitter lit venue. Twitter lit makes you think; our magazine will give you tiny worlds you can escape to, from alien planets to zombie plagued concrete jungles.  We feature anything of the surreal and bizarre, horrific and steampunk. If you are looking for a diversion, we have one. We are not a main stream literary market and we never want to be.

trapeze magazine publishes one twitter story/poem every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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7 X 20

Seven by Twenty is an online magazine using Twitter as its publishing platform, for readers at home and on mobile devices. Submissions are open. Follow us on Twitter.

What We Want
Literary and speculative work. We like haiku and we don’t get enough American sentences, cinquains, hay(na)ku, senryu or prose poems. We also don’t get enough fiction.

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Cuento Magazine

Cuento Magazine is a twitter-based magazine, featuring micro fiction. We also present short-form poetry and six word stories. We like fiction where characters peek out and more story is possible. Our poetry fetish rests on a solid image. Use verbs/details that surprise, shock, amuse, anger, and confound.

Happy Halloween!

via Chicago Tribune:

Small horror presses fill niche gaps left by big publishers

As book publishers struggle to succeed in this economy, horror writers have to find alternatives to large publishing houses that, according to some authors, are accepting less material from niche genres. These writers are turning to small presses, where they might not receive a large advance but will get hands-on help from editors.

Richard Chizmar, founder and publisher of Cemetery Dance Publications, a small press in Maryland that is trying to fill the horror void left by the large publishers, said that despite tough economic times, Cemetery Dance still has a dedicated readership.

“No major New York publisher has a line dedicated to horror, so those writers are going to niche publishers,” Chizmar said. “I don’t think it is a reach to say that as the New York publishing scene tightens its belts, we continue to have a bigger audience, because horror readers have to come somewhere.”

I’ve been writing nano-fiction (aka Twitter fiction) for a few weeks now, using it as a warm up exercise. What’s great about it, and why it’s an exercise I’ve stuck with, is the concision it forces upon you– a hard limit of 140 character (not words, characters– including spaces and punctuation), definitely helps to concentrate the mind. The other excellent thing about writing nano-fiction is the ease of sending it out to the various Twitter magazines. Knowing other people are going to read your work makes the exercise more consequential and less like typing on a treadmill. Responses are usually quick and a few even pay professional rates, which translates into about $1.50 per piece– not Stephen King $$$-levels but better than a hole in the head.

The notion of “hint fiction” is especially appealing. Too much of the stuff on Twitter and online lit zines uses the joke format, i.e. setup–>punchline. Sometimes this format works but usually it just comes across as silly. The better pieces tend to encapsulate a single moment that hints at larger ideas/situations/metaphors. What is left unsaid, the negative space of micro-fiction, is where the form really shines.

via The New Yorker:

What Can You Do in Twenty-Five Words?
Posted by Ian Crouch

A good opportunity to hear a writer read their work. Audio at link.

via The Ploughshares Blog:

Yiyun Li Reads “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl”

Yiyun Li, a contributor to the Winter 2004-05 issue and a 2010 recipient of the MacArthur “Genius Grant,” recently took some time to read the title story from her new collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, for The Writers’ Block at KQED.

The story “chronicles what happens when a professor introduces her middle-aged son to her favorite student.”

As a kid, the only book I reread as much as Stephen King’s The Stand was the grand-daddy of the zombie apocalypse genre, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. My favorite horror movie is still Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. I was passing around The Zombie Survival Guide to friends and family in 2003, did the same with Day by Day Armageddon in 2004. I’ve bought and enjoyed both “literary horror” zombie novels The Passage and The Reapers Are the Angels.

In short, I love zombies.

But when the Washington Post– that bastion of bastardization, that mendacious mediocrity– starts getting in on the act, you just know the zombie genre is well and truly fucked.

via The Washington Post:

5 Books on Zombies

For horror fans who can’t bear to watch as defanged vampires and cuddly werewolves make goo-goo eyes over some girl with shiny hair, there’s still one monster who resists taming: You will never catch a zombie mooning pretentiously over his true love. Nor are the reanimated likely to be cast in a love triangle with a werewolf with overdeveloped abs. (There’s the drooling, and the shambling, and the whole eating intestines thing.) And these undead don’t — praise George Romero — sparkle. No less an authority than Stephen King has proclaimed that in a quest for world domination between zombies and vampires, zombies win. And this Halloween, there are enough new zombie books to fill a morgue, with the horde invading everywhere from Tokyo and Sweden to Lake Wobegon. (You might not be able to romanticize a zombie, but you sure can parody it.)

My attempt at 2008’s NaNoWriMo was a miserable failure. Two years later, I think I’m going to try it again and, hopefully, fail better. And no matter what I produce, I’m going to slap these stickers on my manuscript.

via LA Times:

NaNoWriMo is coming!

Exactly one week from today, more than 175,000 intrepid writers will plunge into the month-long scramble to compose a complete novel, known as NaNoWriMo.

The goal: a completed novel of at least 50,000 words before midnight November 30.

To reach that word count, a writer must produce an average of 1,667 words each day of the month — including Thanksgiving. And the day after.

The sacrificies: clean laundry, decaf, sleep, swept floors and all the other domestic and social responsibilities that writers and aspiring writers set aside in order to reach the finish line.

Good article in the NYT about e-publishing and Electric Literature‘s new book-to-app service. Electric Literature is, in my opinion, the best literary magazine being published electronically. If anyone can make a go of this model, it’s going to be them.

via The New York Times:

Blurring the Line Between Apps and Books
By NOAM COHEN

Readers of an app version of Stephen Elliott’s memoir can comment and see his responses.

Rather than exploit the multimedia potential of an app book, Mr. Elliott said he wanted to include tools that cater to a special group: Stephen Elliott readers.

“As an author, I want you to have the best experience,” he said. “People want to talk about the books they are reading with other people. Why, with everything we know, wouldn’t you include a chat room with your e-book?”

Once readers buy the app, he says, they are beginning a relationship with him and other readers; they can leave comments and read responses and updates from the author. They may even be told down the line that he has a new book for sale and then be able to buy it through the app.

* Online lit mags are publishing some of the most intriguing writing available today. Every Monday, I post a pointer to a site that offers fiction and/or poetry either as free content or as samples from subscriber issues. Today’s pointer is to Drunken Boat, An Online Journal of Art and Literature.

Drunken Boat has been publishing online since 2000. A full archive of past issues is on site.

Fiction excerpt:

Care and Feeding
Karin Gottshall

Margaret gave birth to the octopus in a wading pool in her own apartment. The midwife, who thought she’d seen everything and nearly had, took it in stride. It had been an easy birth. The creature had come out head first, a boneless mass that they at first mistook for an intact caul. No umbilical cord to cut. No blood, no squalling. He was the size of a loosely closed fist, or the bloom of a peony. He rested at the bottom of the pool, one flexible arm looping softly around Margaret’s left ankle like a long pearl necklace, and looked up at the two women through trusting, amber eyes. Next thing they knew he was climbing out of the pool, reaching for the midwife’s medical bag.

“Oh no you don’t,” she said, gently prying his sucker discs from the leather handle.

via LA Times:

HTML Giant launches a Literary Magazine Club

HTML Giant is a literary website that has become an exciting place for aspiring writers with an edge to convene, conspire and commisserate. Today it announced the launch of its own kind of online book club.

Like most book clubs, the Literary Magazine Club asks its members to read and discuss a single work together. As the name says, however, instead of reading a book, the club will be reading a literary magazine. The first will be an issue of New York Tyrant.