#literary editors

[m-c-easton]

Submission Spotlight: Blackbird

A lot of literary journals have closed until fall. This gives us months to dust off old stories and see if we can whisk them up into something tasty. When that happens, the online journal Blackbird is a great place to send stuff. #writing #publishing

Okay, so the bad news is that a lot of literary magazines have closed their doors until fall. The good news? You’ve got a few months to pull up that piece you’d given up on, dust it off, and see what you can make of it. If it fluffs up into something pretty tasty, Blackbird might be the literary magazine for you. Since 2001 (or 2002—different places on their website name different founding…

[mrghostrat]

Instead of editor, literary agent might be better for Aziraphale! He would basically represent Crowley and be in charge of him like you want and could edit his stuff more closely in the developmental stage. If you want editor it might be even better to have Crowley be a self published author and he hires Aziraphale out of his own pocket. Also I love this whole idea so much!!!!

THAT IS INDEED THE WORD IVE BEEN LOOKING FOR THGFGThhph

my god it’s been a while since i researched agents but i should not have forgotten that so easily lmao thank you

[clonerightsagenda]

Still stewing over how Riza watched Ed and Al swap sacrifices and probably learned some alchemy basics from her dad (and seems to have aptitude, given she's the one non-Xingese, non-chimera character to sense the homunculi), is willing to mutilate herself, and got pulled out of training to fight because she was just that good of a shot, so in the end she should've gone hey colonel I'm trading my dominant eye for one of yours. This works out for me too since I have to stay in the military for our Big Plan and would rather not be their star sniper anymore. Don't be dramatic about it.

Roy would not like that but what is he going to do, lie in his hospital bed and bitch about it? Ed couldn't refuse Al's sacrifice either. Second instance of someone forcing human transmutation on him but this time it's for his own good. Codependent bestie friendship bracelets partial blindness representing how uncomfortably far the other person will go even when you don't want them to. The Truth doesn't think they're quite grasping the lesson it wants them to learn but eh. Close enough. Leave the Ishvalans out of it.

[deadpanwalking]

In your opinion is there still space for new authors (that don’t write YA) in the publishing industry?

I'm guessing you mean the traditional publishing industry. I’d be a hypocrite if I told you to burn down the Big Five publishing houses that take up space in your head, but you gotta understand that in addition to the shit that’s always been wrong, there’s a now a huge labor issue on account of the buyouts and layoffs last year, not to mention that the recent layoffs in the journalism industry = less book coverage = less publicity = fewer sales = more layoffs of editorial staff.  The chances of you getting a fair shake with that crowd any time soon are not great. Mind you, this is provided you’ve already locked down a literary agent who either likes your shit or thinks it will sell (birth of first child<the purple 😎 on QueryTracker when you get Offered Representation).  In any case, if you’re pitching literary fiction, get acquainted with reputable small presses, micro-presses, and indie publishers—some take unsolicited manuscripts if you aren't repped.

[wayward-sherlock]

officially published 🥳

[rustbeltjessie]

[Santa Muerte, I ask you to remember]

Santa Muerte, I ask you to remember the wreckage of the streets. How did I escape it? How did I escape being swept from the gutters, one more marigold, one more skull crushed to confetti, one more guttering candle amongst the rest? All we had was those four rooms, up a flight

of stairs I stumbled on. Too steep, and so often too high to climb. These rooms, when I write myself back to them, refract the light. The way the blue, green, brown glass of emptied bottles of gin, whiskey, wine caught—then shattered—the late afternoon sun in that apartment, every apartment. The way

a crystal hung from a chandelier would, in a once-grand hotel turned flophouse. Dust-coated rainbows breaking across the flaking paint. The light of these remembered rooms, though, is more like the reverse—a chandelier in what was once a flophouse, now remade into a grand hotel. Nostalgia is gentrification.

I inhabit these memories and change them, the same way we changed the landscape of the neighborhoods we lived in. Without meaning to. Just by being there. Now I remember those rooms, those streets, and the people who inhabited them as exquisite, dazzling. Harder to recall the dirt, the lack

of money, the mattress on the floor stained purple with wine and vomit, the candles guttering ’til dawn, ’til wax covered the floor boards. Those rooms were squalid, and I wrecked myself in the pursuit of beauty. Before that, I lived in a different house, wretched in its own way. Crowded as it was with cats and stray

kids, sad queers and young junkies with their black-hole stares. I slept on a mattress there, alone in the hot, stuffy back room; I’d wake early and stare out into the small concrete yard, the black walnut tree dropping green fruit, staining everything brown. The pigeons with their oil-slick heads and beady black eyes; the shimmering

iridescence of the flies, those seraphs of death. When my partner in crime woke, we’d walk to the bodega for 32 oz. cups of cola, which we’d then dump half of. The rest, refilled with cheap Canadian whisky, so caustic and rotgut it stripped the wax coating from the paper. The stove in that house had a gas leak.

Even through the miasma of wax and syrupy whisky I could smell it; the sharp, eggy rot, but no one else seemed to notice, or they were too high, too low to care. It was the next place which was haunted. No gas leak there—our gas shut off a few months after we’d moved in and I too broke

and careless to get it turned back on—but those four rooms were crowded with the dead, restlessly clattering through the kitchen, perching on the edges of our mattress-beds, whispering their forlorn secrets. In those rooms, it was always the Day of the Dead. In spring, when the callery pear bloomed, their scent of tainted semen heavy on the air. In summer,

when the black walnuts cracked open on the streets, leaking, brown and green, their boozy-bitter juglone. And yes, in autumn, when the cold and haunted rooms smelled of dust, votive-wax, and the clingy, vegetal scent of just-carved pumpkins—and when all the neighborhood bakeries were making pan de muerto, the air above the autumn streets was heavy

with sugar, yeast, and orange zest. We were haunted, not only by the restless dead. Haunted by poverty, addiction, our own recklessness. The twisted shapes our longing for beauty hammered us into. We’re all doomed. My partner, my crime, scrawled that on a piece of paper which she hung, facing street-ward, in her bedroom window. And the landlord, who said she agreed,

kept trying to evict us. And the men who sang drunkenly below our window scrawled graffiti on the bricks above the alley. Gringos out. I did not blame them. I was an interloper, my ghost-white self settling there after running from—what was I running from?—the other streets, other rooms which had already finished with me. I was trespassing. Still, I learned to pray in their languages. Lit

novena candles, asked for benedictions from Santa María, Madre de Dios, and you, Gloria sea la Santa Muerte, la bendita muerte. My altar laden with ofrendas—cempazúchitl, cakes and sweetbreads, coffee and whiskey, the favorite food and drinks of our restless dead. We drank. A shot left on the altar, for the ghosts, a shot for us. Another. Offerings for them, for us

because we were dead now, or so the suburban boys said. We drank, whiskey in our coffee, beer from the bodega, spiced rum or gin the northwoods boys brought us as offerings. We drank because we woke twisted, shaking, still running from nine-day benders, we drank. To beauty, to death. How did I escape? Santa Muerte, I left those streets, those rooms, half a life ago. Tonight

they return, slow then sudden; sneak up like the creeper weed the ambulance driver gave us, nothing and nothing then I’m too high to move. I watch them flicker and refract, these shades of the past, these scenes altered by the trespass of memory. The altar of memory. And then the ghosts arrive. They fall

like the robes of a skeletal saint, like confetti from a Day of the Dead parade float; float like squid, like semen, like flower petals. Black walnut, callery pear; they smell of spice, tobacco, a gas leak, the early dark. They descend as flies, pigeons; come on as scrawls of graffiti, as thunder snow, the blued flash of light, the roar, then white. White. They fall and fall and cover it all, the squalid rooms, the wreckage of the streets, my whole wasted life, until everything

is just layers and layers of ghosts.

—Jessie Lynn McMains, from Paterson Literary Review #52 (2024)

[divinesymmetry]

still thinking about my dead poets society moment the other day. my friends and I in a dimly lit pub with our ex writing tutor who left our school due to being treated like shit. he's giving each and every one of us personal words of affirmation. this is what creative writing courses are all about.

[grants-blue-eyed-stare]

[m-c-easton]

Submission Spotlight: Guernica

If you're looking for a lit mag to place short fiction with a slant towards originality (or even weirdness) and a lot of interiority, may I suggest Guernica? They're open now, and there's no fee. Competition is a tough, so send your best! #publishing

As of May 2023, Guernica is currently open for no-fee submissions here (follow their link to create a free Submittable account). Founded in 2004, Guernica publishes poetry, essays, fiction, criticism, and journalism online. Unlike most magazines, it pays contributors rather than staff; in fact, its staff are entirely volunteers. Rather than a university affiliation, the magazine is partnered with…

[gigantomachylesbian]

men love to act like they're god's gift to prose fiction, like their workshop advice is the sole thing needed to Fix Your Story, and then not even be good writers.

[lesbianaglaya]

revoking people’s right to talk about the tolstoy marriage until they write and turn in to me a ten page essay on complex relationships

[britneyshakespeare]

Actually I must resign to the fact that The Country Wife (1675) by William Wycherley is unfortunately hilarious

[yn-has-insomnia]

so help me god I will write something this month and post it

[lovethatlaiduslow]

I literally did this to this myself but 18 credit hrs + two jobs + undergrad research assistant is actually going to kill me this semester

[bastard-of-a-bog-being]

Those funny bursts of inspiration and motivation that are just like “yes! It’s brilliant! The solution was there all along! JUST WRITE! If I sit down and Just Write and finish my stories I can send them to agents and try and get them published!

And then I look at my laptop like “now what the fuck are words and how do I use them”

[sproutbell]

i finally deleted the twitter app from my phone. i'm going to use insta/tumblr/pinterest probably exclusively from now on. the only thing is i don't get to see as much good art :/ i am still in the process of mourning the loss of all of the connections i made on twt with other artists. bluesky has SOME of the same folks, but it's just not the same. i had probably like 400 professional cartoonist/illustrator mutuals and they're all just gone now aside from a handful, lol!! not to mention all of the twitter events for people in publishing. what a fucking loss.