Live, Submit, Publish, Live More

Rejection hurts. If it doesn’t hurt for you, you’re not only a writer unicorn, but a unicorn horned with melted coins from ancient Rome. Almost all of us, faced with rejection, react on a spectrum somewhere between spooning pints of ice cream over the sink to howling on a deserted beach to deciding you should just learn to do something practical, like cut hair.

We’re talking literary journals today, so let’s get perspective. Common acceptance rates for literary journals—of which I’ve edited three—tend to hover between one and three percent. That means it takes 97 rejections just to be normal. That much rejection likely won’t happen to you. Keep in mind, though, that with this level of sifting, most rejections have nothing to do with you but with that journal’s needs, backlog, and other inscrutables. One year my journal published back-to-back stories about animals. When we realized that, we promised ourselves no animals for two years. Your dog poem may be wonderful, but we can’t accept it.

What you need isn’t one finished piece and one or two submission ideas. You need a submission plan. That means at least five or six finished pieces, more if you have them, and an equal number of venues to send them to. More is better here too. It’s rare these days for journals not to accept multiple submissions, so get the numbers on your side. You will drastically increase your odds, and any one rejection won’t kill your soul. The ice cream can go back into the freezer.

An effective submission plan uses targeting--finding the right venues for you. The fact is that you want to be published and somebody out there wants to publish you. But you have to find each other. This can take time, but time that can be seriously reduced.

One of the smartest means to success is always, always, looking at calls for submission. These are public announcements by publishers and editors that they are looking for a particular kind of work, on specific topics or in specific forms.

Some of the best sources for calls are Poets & Writers online Classifieds, New Pages, and Entropy.

A quick look at Poets & Writers’ call page finds calls for literary works on subjects as diverse as hindsight;  21st century cities and their transformations; and the changing nature of today’s environment. You can see that these are very specific. Checking regularly, finding the right fit, gives you a big advantage. Note the genre they’re looking for. Give yourself time once a week to look at calls for submissions. It will take you maybe half an hour.

A related practice is to define to yourself carefully what your work is doing, both in content and style. Many journals are specialized. For instance, Alimentum focuses on food “as a muse.” Slag Glass City focuses on urban environments. These are very different journals, that may or may not fit your approach. Finding journals with a specific focus is something Mr. Google will be happy to do for you.

Finally, my blog is called “Live, Write, Publish, Live More” because publishing should always be bracketed within your life, whatever your life may look like. Remember: you are taking that brave step of doing the writing. For every writer out there, there are a hundred people regretting that they never pursued this dream.

Use my contact form to send me questions, successes, or horror stories. They’re all part of the landscape.

Literary Awards: How to, Where to, When to

 How do people get literary awards? There are a lot of award myths: the awarders find you; to nominate a book you just send it in; you can’t nominate yourself; your press will know what awards you’re eligible for and go ahead and nominate you. I created this list for myself and thought I’d share it. Note it obviously isn’t every award that’s out there. If you know of any I’ve missed, drop me a line.

 Most awards have a formal submission process and those are the only books judges consider. They also mostly have entry fees. And some surprisingly let you nominate yourself (I know authors who nominate themselves each year so they can say they are a “Pulitzer-nominated” author. I do not judge). Some awards consider self-published books; some do not. Many presses who do not nominate don’t because editors are too busy to track awards or fees are too steep.

 The time to talk awards with a press that takes your book is on acceptance or during production. This is also true if you choose self-directed publishing. Editors might want you to track deadlines for them and issue reminders. If funds are an issue you might want to look into ways you can sponsor those fees. I’ve found small grants to cover these in the past.

 Lambda Literary Awards (Lammys): These awards recognize the best writing in the areas of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer lives. There are many categories, including fiction, memoir, poetry, science fiction, and more. Self-published books are considered. Ebook-only books are not. See website for deadlines and details:

 National Book Award: This and the Pulitzer are the most well-known awards here. Categories are fiction, poetry, nonfiction, translated literature and young people’s literature. The award opens March 17 and closes May 20 (so SOON!). The fee is $135 and presses must nominate. Their self-published book rules are a bit complex. Check the site.

National Book Critics Circle Award: There are six categories, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, criticism, autobiography, and biography. Each category has a committee that judges that genre. Committee members can nominate books, but books sent in by the press will also be considered. It’s free except for multiple copies of the book. The press needs to do a free registration.

 PEN America is an awards and advocacy organization that sponsors many awards in all genres and many different areas. They give out awards for literary translation, science writing, books of individual essays, debut short story, and too many other categories to list. These awards come with much prestige and cash prizes ranging from $1,000 to $75,000. Books must be submitted by publishers. There is a fee, but most fees will be waived if the press’s annual budget is less than $2,000, 000, a point you might want to let your press know.

 Most PEN awards open June 15 annually but check the site. No self-published authors. An important thing to note is that you can submit the same book in more than one category—that debut novel might also fit socially engaged fiction, for example. Research on fit for your book should come from you.  The best way to learn which PEN awards might be right for you is to go to their website.

Pulitzer Prize: The Pulitzer is awarded in many categories, including a large number in journalism. If you’re reading this, you probably fit into one of their categories. Anyone can nominate a book and it can be self-published. You must be a U.S. citizen and the book must have been published and available for purchase in the award year. The fee is $75. Last year’s deadline was June 19.

Writing the Tough Stuff--Why and How

I’m on something of a class-visiting and other-writer-group visiting spree these days and here are the two questions I get asked most: first, how do I write about that? You know, that that. The thing that feels scary, shameful, embarrassing, terrifying to imagine out there in the world. And question two: My story involves other people who behaved badly—maybe very badly-- but who are still in my life. And who will not applaud having this badness revealed in a public space. How do you write that?

I get the questions, I realize, because I am a high-disclosure writer, which sounds better than saying I’m quite the blabbermouth, as we’d put it in my NJ. If we imagine a spectrum that has the wonderful but personally buttoned-up Annie Dillard on one end, I’d be pretty far in the other direction. I write not only about family stuff but about being bipolar, drug-dependent, a psychiatric survivor, and a person who experiences psychosis. A high school dropout. The book I have coming out next month (February) covers among other things sexual predation in a psychiatric hospital and shock treatment in my mid-teens.

The book—The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here—brings in consciousness studies and science, particularly physics. There’s a lot of interviews with scientists and discussion of some of the more fascinating work being done out there: can we say anything is objectively real? Does time exist? Does consciousness exist in the mind only or is it a larger force? I wrap the story of my own mind, what it does and what has been done to it, in these larger questions.

But does that make what I do better somehow? No. It’s just how my mind works. Stripped bare to themselves, these stories need to be told. As do yours. As an editor, I am hungry for those real stories, stories of witness.

In response to these questions I get I’ll give a few bullet-y thoughts, and then I’ll come back not just to the why, but the how.

·       We have all as a nation been asked to survive a lot these past four years. Writing is survivorship. Maybe, yes, you are chronicling a suffering. But on the page, you stand free enough to tell the story.

·       I used to imagine that when I wrote about psychosis, drugs, dropping out of high school, I put on the page a stick figure who was just that thing. In my head the stick figure had a little sign: Psychosis Girl. I thought that labeled and compressed self was all readers would see, but that is not the case. You are a living, breathing, complicated multidimensional human on the page. Take that in. In giving that scary thing you are only showing us one piece of your completeness.

·       Flippantly I might say that if people don’t want readers to know they behaved badly they shouldn’t have behaved badly. I can’t say my experiences with this disclosure issue were easy. People were pissed. They didn’t want to talk to me for a while. But they got over it and if I had it to do over again, I’d be more honest, not less.

The final thought I share when I talk to these writers is that there are drafting questions and there are publishing questions. Drafting questions are, how can I make this the best work it can be? How can I reach down into that muck, if muck there is, and be staggeringly honest and see how that creates a story, whether fiction or nonfiction or poetry--that muck operates in all genres. And how it illuminates some piece of the world only I can illuminate.

So you draft like hell, and you draft fearlessly as hell, and you go back to it, and you make it as perfect and real and human as you can. And only then do you put your feet up and consider those publishing questions: not so much are those other people out there ready but am I ready. Are there ways I would feel comfortable moving forward, if I’m not all damn-the-torpedoes? Would pseudonyms help? Am I ready for this to appear in this kind of journal but not that one? And proceed accordingly, with good people in your life to support you and give you courage. Even if that good supportive and courageous person is you.