As with past AWPs, I found yesterday that I could really only digest two panels per day. I attended three, but the third panel was somewhat lost on me, unfortunately. This morning, I took in another informative session, however!

Behind the Curtain: An Insider's Look at Four Top Literary Journals

Panelists: Carolyn Kuebler, Oscar Villalon, Patrick Ryan, Julia Brown; Moderator: Matthew Landsburgh

I've been interested in the ins-and-outs of literary magazines (mostly as a writer and reader but occasionally as an editor) for a long time now, so I could not resist this panel.

Landsburgh asked each panelist to provide an overview of their journal, speak to the kinds of work they publish in print and online, speak to their process of selecting work, and also what is an easy rejection versus what catches their attention for potential publication.

Brown, a fiction editor at AGNI, based at Boston University, said that next year will be 50th anniversary of the journal. They publish 250 pages of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art twice a year, and AGNI 94 includes a Future of Translation portfolio representing 21 languages. They publish a similar variety of things on their blog but also do Q & As, more reviews, and graphic novel excerpts. They receive an astounding 21,000 submissions a year across genres, around 8,000 of which are for fiction, so are constantly reading and passing around submissions that are whittled down to 6-8 stories per issue. Brown likes to read one third of a piece; within the first few pages, she says, "you can tell if it is something you want to pass on to others or not." But also: “sometimes there’s a story like a thorn that isn’t to your taste but there’s something about it that makes you want to pass it on." Brown loves when she is being led through a story and the sentences are like bread crumbs--it feels exciting and dangerous. When there’s a honed sensibility in the language, “it’s evident from sentence one”

Villalon is the managing editor at ZZYZYVA, a San Francisco-based journal with no institutional affiliation, publishing poetry, fiction, nonfiction, interviews, and art three times per year. In addition to online classes, they do 27 events per year, which include festivals, conferences, and interviews at bookstores with contributors who have a new book, which sounds like a really nice way to build community. Villalon also noted that online publication is paid the same as print. They do not take online submissions, however, and they do not use readers— interns log submissions and do a first read mostly for their own benefit, making a maybe/maybe not pile but it’s for them to learn about common mistakes and what works well in a submission. Editors look at everything. Submissions with cliches and clunky sentences are a quick rejection. They are looking for a believable voice, conviction, something that sounds true, that it’s not a writing exercise or thought experiment but something meaningful.

Ryan, the editor in chief of One Story, also a magazine with no affiliation, said that next year is their 20th anniversary. They publish one short story per month in chapbook format have published 284 different writers so far, half of which it is their first publication. They receive 10-12,000 submissions per year, close 2 months a year to catch up. A volunteer team of 12-15 vetted, trained readers commit to reading 15 complete submissions per week and they must submit a “best” submission of the week (I love this requirement); an assistant editor reads the best ofs, then sends them to Ryan, who starts all of them and they work together to winnow down what to read next. Red flags include confusion and obscurity, a mistake made by a lot of emerging writers; no sense of urgency by page two, no sense that the story is going anywhere. But if a colleague says to read it, he reads the whole submission.

Kuebler, the editor of New England Review, which is based at Middlebury College, noted that they publish short short fiction to novellas, poetry, essays (critical, personal, lyric, travel), dramatic writing, and translations in all genres, but they do not publish reviews or art. Occasionally they do an emerging writers issue (e.g. writers who have not yet published a book). They have a podcast in which theater students at Middlebury perform published work which sounds lovely! A volunteer team of 20 readers (some recent grads, some retirees) read 10,000 submissions a year. The editors get to know the readers well before the readers can be quite brief in their comments on Submittable, where much of the conversation takes place. The editors will read the readers' comments and the submissions and then decide whether to advance story to Kuebler who “is the keeper of the big picture” in terms of what’s been published recently and what will be in future issues. She loves to get a submission where she wonders “how’s this going to work?” yet the piece feels authoritative.

The panel ended with the all-too-important urging of writers to subscribe to one or two journals. If every writer did this, it would create significant support for the literary ecosystem. So please do so if you don't! Happy subscribing, reading, and submitting!

When AWP announced their 2022 conference would be in Philadelphia, I was super excited to go and hang out with my publisher Lanternfish Press in their hometown. During the pandemic, I became a mom, and I'd thought by now perhaps there would be a vaccine for the littlest humans, but as the conference approached it became clear that there would not be one in time. I decided to attend virtually instead. (Fingers crossed for an in-person return to AWP in Seattle in 2023!)

I like to choose a theme for each AWP to narrow down the many options. One year I focused on literary agents. Another year I focused on learning more about the literary magazines I wanted to submit short stories and essays to. This year, I am putting the finishing touches on my third novel, set in the Netherlands in the late medieval/early Renaissance period and in 2016, and I am trying to make progress on my collection of lyric food essays that blend research and memoir, so I am focusing on panels on historic fiction and creative nonfiction.

What follows are some notes from the virtual panels I attended. I hope you find them helpful!

Staying in Key: Recognizing & Avoiding the False Notes of Anachronism

Panelists: Janet Benton, Donna Hemans, Keenan Norris, Jennifer Steil; Moderator: Aimee Liu

Liu invited each author to read a brief excerpt of their work and discuss the challenges they faced writing particular times and places.

Benton read from Lilli De Jong, set in a 19th century alms house in Philadelphia, near a swamp. In this scene, a pressing question for her was: what is the condition of a baby close to death? Her Quaker protagonist meant attending to language, interaction, spiritual belief, and characters' views of the choices they are making in very particular ways. In this time period, Benton noted, Quakers "were not slavish to religion" and "were willing to buck convention," something she wanted to stay cognizant of. At a reading, an octogenarian Quaker asked Benton how she managed to capture the voice of her grandmother, which sounds like quite an accomplishment!

Stiel read from Exile Music, which tells the story of Jewish refugees from Vienna in Boliva in the 1940s. She chose a passage that required a lot of research: what did La Paz look like in the 1940s? How did the refugees communicate, socialize, get help from refugee organizations? What was the effect of altitude on the body? One strategy for writing this book was to make Viennese culture as clear as possible first to demonstrate the sense of loss and disorientation upon arrival in La Paz. As someone who moves to a different country every few years, she now makes sure to take extensive notes upon arrival in each new place, to maintain that perspective.

Liu's novel Glorious Boy is also set in World War II, but on India's Andaman Islands, off the coast of Burma. Researching this novel is what gave Liu the idea for this panel. One question she had as a writer: what is it like to move through a forest that’s never been penetrated and you’re on a spy mission where you can’t leave a trace? The area was used as a penal colony by the British so there were also people from all over India, therefore making it quite a multicultural place. One strategy Liu used was to choose an American protagonist to help avoid anachronisms; she makes mistakes because she is American and then Liu as the author can make those mistakes clear to American readers.

Hemans's novel Tea by the Sea flashes forward to 2010, in Jamaica, where Plum, a young woman born in New York, is in search of the daughter that was taken away from her. As a Jamaican-born author, Hemans had to take care to consider how Plum would see Jamaica. She also needed to take care to depict the landscape of 2010 and not the one she grew up with; for example, a plant disease has ravaged many a coconut farm and there are less cane fields and orange groves than Hemans saw growing up. Hemans also talked about imbuing the landscape of Brooklyn upon Plum's return with a sense of loss.

Norris's novel The Confession of Copeland Cane is set in Oakland from 2020-2030. An important challenge was the need for "fidelity to present tense conditions while looking forward to the future.” For example, COVID emptied out San Francisco in the short term and he had to speculate how that might reverberate over the decade. A special challenge was that he began writing this novel in 2015. Liu remarked that his novel, published in 2021, was the first that showed people grappling with masks. He said, "The desperation of having to rethink my book was a great lesson in the creative risk of writing a book.”

What’s Form Got to Do with It: Finding Shape in Memoir Projects

Panelists: Tyrese Colman, Krys Malcom Belc, Marcos Gonsalez; Moderator: Sarah Fawn Montgomery

I came to this panel thinking about my essay collection but I came out of it also thinking about my one-day memoir of living with a rare chronic illness and choosing to grow my family through adoption.

Tyrese Coleman read from How to Sit, a memoir that is not 100% nonfiction: "Memories are not facts…they contain their own truth regardless of how they’re documented." She recommended David Sedaris's Barrel Fever as an example of a work that mixes fiction and nonfiction in one volume, though the genres are clearly delineated, and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street as examples of "memory writing." Her next book will mix historic fiction and memoir (exciting!) and as a memoirist who is not an academic or journalist she encourages others in the same position to provide context before feeling free to offer conclusions, e.g. don't feel obliged to be neutral in your own memoir.

Krys Malcom Belc's The Natural Mother of the Child is a memoir in essays that also includes speculative nonfiction, a genre I'd love to learn more about. As he was writing the book, he wondered: was this an essay collection that needed to be diversified or was this a memoir that needed more blending and cohesion? The book's central question: what does it mean to be a transmasculine person who has given birth? Each essay looks at this question but has its own aesthetic and level of research versus personal exploration. Belc spent a lot of time looking at pictures from childhood and legal documents, trying to understand his passage through time, and offers these materials to readers— it’s a visual book. Regarding the question of what research to include and what to exclude, he noted that editors can help point out where there is too much research--the stuff you’re nerding out on that an audience beyond you would not be so interested in.

Marcos Gonsalez wished that before he wrote Pedro’s Theory he'd asked himself “What is the narrative I want the reader to leave with? What are they moments?” The pre-writing process, he advised, should put key moments under a microscope and incorporate the perspectives of others even if it don't align with your own. He also urged the audience to consider: how can you make research reader-friendly and reader-inviting and integrate it into the fabric of the story? How do we include literary criticism or historiography, for example, while still inviting the reader in? Two inviting examples: Jenn Shapland's My Autobiography of Carson McCullers and Kate Zambreno’s Heroines. Of course you need to think about your audience when you consider this question. A final important consideration: what painful moments do you want to share with readers and what meaningful moments do you want to share on your own terms, without feeling overexposed?

Sarah Fawn Montgomery spoke to resisting the traditional narrative arc of memoirs of mental illness. She urged the audience: "don't revise your life." She said, "Flirting with the truth" helped her "stay true to madness" in her first memoir Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir. Her intended audience was her family, which did not go to the doctor, so she took medical language and research to show how doctors were overly sedating women or categorizing normal emotions as madness. Her forthcoming lyric memoir, Halfway from Home, blends Montaigneian essays with hermit crab essays and research in “the psychology of mirror and 19th century oil painting and the science of nostalgia" among other super intriguing topics!

That's all for today; hopefully I'll be back tomorrow with more tidbits. If you're attending AWP in person or virtually, what are some pieces of advice you're gleaning that you're finding helpful?

January is almost over. Is it too late for a blog post on setting intentions? I would venture not! The pandemic and being a new parent (do I still get to say "new" now that my child is one?) is a constant reminder to be gentle with myself and find the right level of ambitious that I find fulfilling without giving myself a migraine.

What soldiering through a migraine feels like?

So what are my writing and publishing goals for this year? With my second novel releasing from Lanternfish Press in late September, I have to be mindful of the marketing and publicity work just around the corner. I learned with my first novel, Daughters of the Air, that marketing and publicity can be ::e n d l e s s:: I do like it! But I also need to keep space for work-work, creative writing, and life.

I started writing my second novel two days after I began submitting my first novel—with a haiku workshop as a palate cleanser in between. I started writing my third novel, my current work-in-progress, just a year after starting my second novel. It's a long story as to why that I won't get into here, but I was heartened to learn that Jess Walter juggles multiple book projects simultaneously, and I'm sure many other writers do as well. Welp! The big hope for this year is I "finish" that third novel. (NB: Here's my silly essay "How to Finish a Finish a Novel in Only 15 Years"; I love that this essay landed in The Nervous Breakdown.)

My other writing goal is write two more essays for the collection that I began the same year as Novel #3. I'm taking an essay writing class through Atlas Obscura, where I've been having a great time teaching fairy tale writing. It'll be my first time as a student since taking a wonderful Hugo House class in 2016 with Alexander Chee on making fictional characters of historic figures, and I'm really looking forward to it. My plan is to write one piece arising from the class and one essay after finishing reading A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays, which I have ordered from one of my favorite Chicago bookstores, Exile in Bookville, which is located in one of my favorite buildings in the city.

That's it for my writing. I think those are plenty of goals for the year, given what I've got on my plate. I stopped aiming for 100 rejections per year a few years ago, though I do think it's a good goal to have if you're starting the submissions process and need to develop a callous against rejection. By my calculations, I had a 17% acceptance rate in 2021 so I do need to aim a little higher as my general goal, per advice from Creative Capital, is 10%. But I'm not going to tear my hair out over this one. As I say to my son, "Gentle! Gentle!"

My last goal is to continue to help emerging writers stretch their craft and hone their approach to getting their work out in the world. If you have short stories or a novel you're working on and if you'd like to work one-on-one with me, you can check out my coaching and consulting page at Hugo House here.

What are your goals for 2022? Any special plans for writing, reading, publishing? Or maybe you want to learn to cook something special this year? My cooking is toddler-centric now, but I've been dipping in and out of Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. I love her opinions: "Powdered rosemary must be shunned." Onward & upward & twirling, twirling, twirling!

 The Seattle Review of Books invited me to participate in their fun & breezy column, "Whatcha Reading?" I touched on dark psychological fiction, heartbreaking poetry, an essay on the cleverness of crows, and more. Something for everyone! Plus: a preview of some Women in Translation Month picks.Over on the Magic Realism blog, Zoe Brooks had this to say about Daughters of the Air: "In every way this is a mature intelligent book which may not suit all readers, but it is an example of how magic realism is so suited to ambiguity and  to difficult subjects." You can read the whole review here. Also, I wrote a very personal essay about life choices here on Healthline.Finally, this Monday at 6:30 pm at the Phinney Neighborhood Association, I will be participating in a panel discussion on the author-editor relationship at the Northwest Independent Editors' Guild. The panel will include Dave Boling, author of The Lost History of Stars and Jamie Swenson of the University of Washington marketing and communications department. Matthew Bennett of the guild will moderate. Not in town but curious about the topic? You can tune in live on YouTube.

In my last post I promised blood. Well, I'll just say I slid my boot off Friday night and it was like I was one of Cinderella's stepsisters. I'm still limping. On to day 3!What is a better breakfast than a leftover Cuban sandwich? Leftover fried oysters. Just kidding! The Cuban sandwich was much better. Day 3 was the best because Michael got a one-day pass and we got to roam the book fair together."The Worst Writing Advice I Ever Got" is an irresistible title, so of course we wrenched ourselves away from the book fair for it. Here, without narrative, a fun grab-bag of quotes:

• "Creative writing aphorisms are as useful as Dr. Phil." -Chris Abani
• "Your book won't save you. It's just something you're going to do because you're nuts." -Min Jin Lee
• "How do I handle writer's block? I don't write." -Ada Limón

I appreciated Limón's story of navigating two groups of people: those who roll their eyes at "abuelita poems" and those who say, "where's your abuelita poem?" And Melissa Stein's remark that dread may be a sign that advice you've been given may not be for you, anxiety might mean it's worth exploring the challenge, and excitement is obviously a good sign. Abani noted that "Craft advice is only important if you're asking questions. What are you trying to do?"We stuck around for a reading and conversation between Min Jin Lee and Sigrid Nunez. Nunez on writing about sex: "The vocabulary is not there. It's either coy, clinical, or filthy, none of which do justice to human sexuality." At the book signing, Lee called Michael and me adorable. So that happened.My attention span went out the door by mid-afternoon, so it was off to the hotel bar for wine and fried calamari! Naturally, someone in panda suit wandered in. Next year in Portland! Maybe Seattleites can get some party buses organized...

The Friday of AWP is always the best day. The nervous energy of Thursday has dissipated, and the inevitable Saturday flu epidemic has not yet emerged. I woke early to respond to student stories and breakfasted on a leftover Cuban sandwich, wondering if it would make me barf later. Reader, it did not! A fortifying start.Alan Sincic, the fantastic Orlando-based writer who was The Furnace's Writer-in-Residence, was on a 9 am panel on the lyric sentence. I'm a fan of Sincic's prose *and* mad presentation skills, so the early start was well worth it. The moderator, Pearl Abraham, kicked off the discussion with this advice: "If the voice doesn't work, write better sentences." Then Sincic woke up the crowd with a call-and-response activity, that gradually built up to us chanting together: "I am an individual and will not surrender my voice to the crowd." He said, "A sentence is less like the beam of a house and more like the branch of a tree," that a sentence has ghost limbs lost in the editing process. He proceeded to take apart this Mark Twain sentence, examining each word choice and its placement as a way of generating suspense and delight: "Is a tail absolutely necessary to the comfort and convenience of a dog?"Baylea Jones analyzed a sentence from Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, graphing sounds and letters, including patterns of consonant use, and internal rhymes: "Black walnut trees dropped their green-black fuzzy bulbs on Aunt Ruth's matted lawn, past where their knotty roots rose up out of the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty children suntanned dark and covered with scars." Wow! I had fun retyping that.I ducked out early to get to my book signing at the Lanternfish Press table, where I got to hang out with my editor Christine Neulieb and publisher Amanda Thomas,  and connect with new readers and old friends, including Julia Mascoli, who was in my Tin House workshop in 2013 and who is Deputy Director of Free Minds Book Club and Writing Workshop doing great work with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people in Washington, D.C. (Seattle-area folks, you can donate books to prisons and other under-served communities via Seattle7Writers Pocket Libraries program.)Later, I chilled at the Cambridge Writer's Workshop table, celebrating the release of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, which includes my "Summer-Inspired Writing Prompts." Co-editor Rita Banerjee was there with her mythic poetry collection Echo in Four Beats, as was Maya Sonenberg, whose new chapbook After the Death of Shostakovich Père is out from PANK Books.That night, the celebration continued at the Helen Gordon Davis Center for Women, a beautiful old mansion a mile away from the convention center. There were many, many readings. One was from Women in the Literary Landscape; crowds whooped in appreciation for Anne Bradstreet, Virginia Kirkus, and the biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt. (I am a rube for not remember which biographer was mentioned, so here are five of them!)  Nell Painter, author of A History of White People, read from her forthcoming memoir Old in Art School, Diana Norma Szokolayi read her poem "Sarajevo," Sonenberg read an anti-plot manifesto, and I read an excerpt from Daughters of the Air in which Pluta has committed arson in Brooklyn and found refuge in an abandoned Times Square theater. Fun! There is so much more to write...! I'll wrap things up in one more post. Sneak preview: there will be blood.

In 2014, I focused my blogging attentions to 16 posts on writing prompts for Ploughshares. Now that the series is done (though stay tuned--I have plans for them), here's a little update on what I've got on deck for 2015.

• I'm slowly submitting Novel #1 to small presses.
• I'm almost done with a third draft of Novel #2, workshopping a chapter a month with my writing group. In early December 2015, I will have a public reading thanks to a grant from 4Culture. More on this novel soon.
• I'm in the planning stages of Novel #3 (!)
• My story "Raven in a Jar" will appear in the March/April issue of CICADA; in the fall, my story "I Loved You in New York" will be released as a chapbook in Alice Blue Books' Shotgun Wedding series.
• My New Year's resolution is to get more into food writing, since food is all over my fiction. So far I've brainstormed 16 articles to pitch. I want to pitch somewhere between two articles a day and two articles a week (this will depend on some other news hanging in the balance). I can't control whether an article will be accepted, but I can certainly control how often I send out work. I believe this is called a "SMART goal". Wish me luck! Here's a helpful tumblr with examples of successful pitches.
• I'm teaching several classes at Hugo House, most immediately Intro to Fiction: Writing the Short Story and Hugo at the Henry: The Senses in Reading and Writing.

What are your plans for 2015?

My latest blog post for Ploughshares explores the sense of touch in writing, with wisdom from Aristotle, Ann Hamilton: the common S E N S E at the Henry Art Gallery, Natalie Goldberg, Diane Ackerman, and John Edgar Wideman, and with a bit of inspiration from Hieronymus Bosch. Here's how the post begins:

Touch is the sense common to all species. So wrote Aristotle in Historia Animalum and De Anima. And so is the premise for the art show Ann Hamilton: the common S E N S E, which I’ve been helping out with here in Seattle, and which explores the sense of touch and our relationship to nature, as well as our ability to be touched, emotionally and intellectually, through the private act of reading.This got me thinking about the importance of touch in writing. Like the sense of smell, touch is a tad neglected when compared to the senses we gravitate toward first: the visual and the auditory. But think about how connected you’ve felt to a text when the author captures a particular tactile sensation or visceral reaction? How do those moments create emotional and intellectual resonance?continue reading

My latest blog post for Ploughshares offers suggestions for inserting and escalating conflict in fiction, with advice from Stephanie Kallos, Janet Burroway, and Merrill Feitell. Here's how it starts:

In fiction, only trouble is interesting. For the conflict averse, instilling a story with juicy conflict may take some practice. Someone who has read many drafts of many of my short stories once dubbed me “Anca Did She Forget the Conflict Szilagyi”–a moniker that has become helpful as I work on second and third drafts of stories. As is often the case in learning something, I was aware, theoretically, that I had this problem. But how to proceed?Continue reading

In honor of Friday the 13th, I've uploaded to SoundCloud a recording of a short story of mine, "Skitter," about a man losing all of this teeth. It's the first time I've recorded myself (except for an experiment or two for teaching English as a second language), so please forgive the faint whine of a lawn mower coming from outside! I think it adds a certain je ne sais quoi. More aural fun to come![soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/52771480" iframe="true" /]

I used to strong-arm my undergraduate students into thinking more about titles - not because I'm one for strong-arming, but because sometimes titles are a last minute concern, whereas I believe they're essential to the writing process. It was important for expository writing students to focus their essays through thinking of apt titles, and it was important for fiction students to think about how a title can add sharpness and/or layers of meaning to a story. Donald Murray, a big teaching-of-writing guy, used to generate about 150 titles per piece. He allowed himself to be clumsy and awkward in order to find what was precise and just right. Whenever I told my students this, they would grip their notebooks in apprehension until I'd say, "we're not going to generate 150 titles today, but we are going to generate 20." They'd sigh with relief, then get antsy by the tenth prompt. Some were eager to share new titles at the end and others said, with arms crossed over their chests or with a twinkle in their eye, "My original title is still better." In any case, keeping a list of titles to potentially write to, even if I never write the piece, is something I enjoy doing and find quite useful. That said, lately I've been collecting imaginary titles for novels that, in all likelihood, I won't write. (I'm keeping titles of actual works-in-progress close to my chest for now.) Here are the imaginary titles:

The Sex Lives of Traffic Engineers

Young Jewish Men Arguing in Diners

The Sweat Pickle

The Fishmonger's Uncle's Tax Accountant

Hard Drinking Elsewhere

The Ghost of Obligation

The Ineffectual Perfectionist

People Alone in Cars Reading E-mail

Now you try!

Last week, I finished a fourth draft of my novel (whew!). One thing I tried to excise was filtering. I'd used "look" about 178 times in about 65k words (thanks Find All function). This was not to my loving. Verb choice aside, as John Gardner notes in The Art of Fiction and as Janet Burroway points out in Writing Fiction, filtering is an unnecessary and common mistake. Phrases like "she noticed", "she saw", "she looked at", or "she remembered" needlessly take readers one step away from the story rather than letting them inhabit the story and experience it with or through the characters. Now, the act of seeing is important in my novel, but I definitely didn't need to let filtering phrases run rampant in the manuscript. Combing through the draft, I found instances in which removing the offending filter helped me expand and deepen imagery and sensory detail. That isn't to say you can never ever use those verbs (that's silly). But you'll want to ask yourself if you really need to.p.s. Readers, out in the ether or down the street, what do you think of bolded text in blog posts? This is my second such use. Helpful?  Unnecessary?

On Saturday I took a fabulous one-day class on revision with Karin de Weille at the Richard Hugo House. I'm between the third and fourth drafts of my first novel, taking a month-long break so that I might return to the manuscript with fresh eyes. Though I sometimes get the itch to go back to the novel, I've found that if I interrupt the fallow period too soon, I start to lose steam. The time away is so key. In the meantime, perhaps the most heartening lesson I've taken from the revision class was to luxuriate and indulge in the revision process - rushing is the last thing you want to do (I guess I knew this, but it's always a helpful reminder). I've plunged myself back into the world of the short story, drafting some new ones, splicing and rejuvenating  a few I wrote last spring, and sending out a couple that seem "done". Onward!

So I'm now the editor of the guest stories portion of Rosemary Mosco's website. There's a new email address for submissions: 55gueststories at gmail dot com. I hope y'all will try writing one--55 words, no more, no less. They're oodles of fun. I put one of my own up on the site (Ro originally had it on her livejournal). Take a peek .