The endings and the beginnings

Not that long ago I encountered a magazine -or perhaps it was a contest – which asked entrants to make sure they’d put a “30” at the end of their story, so their readers could be sure where the story ended. I was delighted that this journalistic tradition continues, and was very happy to comply.

Once upon a time I contemplated journalism as a path for me, but I was quickly dissuaded because a) it would require talking to people, which I don’t particularly like to do and b) it was understood twenty years ago to be a dying profession with low wages.

So now I write fiction, because that pays a lot better and has a much brighter future.

Oh dear, oh dear, I didn’t mean for my sarcasm hat to come out today.

Today is nearly my birthday (I refuse to spend it online) and I very soon I will no longer be 30 anything. Unless I pull a Jack Benny.

I have come to the end of a couple of endeavours recently – first of all, I completed writing a poem for every day of my 39th year, and have started well on the process of editing the results. You, dear blog readers, will be inflicted with several more poems as a result.

Secondly, I bid farewell to the team at Orca, the literary magazine for which I have been reading for well over a year.

I enjoyed working with everyone there a lot, and if you’re looking for a chance to volunteer and learn about the behind the scenes of a literary magazine, I encourage you to get in touch with them. Also, if you’re looking for a place to send your literary and/or speculative-literary story, poem, or creative non-fiction, why not give them a chance at it !?

I learned a number of things while with Orca – one of the most important things, really, is that it was confirmed for me –

The editors and readers of magazines are really happy to find a good story in their queue – or list – of story submission. These people are story and language people, and they genuinely enjoy discovering writers and works.

They do not go to work every morning with the idea of crushing writer’s dreams – they are looking to find the best they can, and they don’t care where it comes from. It might come from you. They hope it comes from you. It makes their day when they come across something they can recommend to the rest of the staff, even if they might spend some time complaining to themselves about how many uninteresting stories they had to read first.

If you want some more practical advice from my time as a slushpile reader – make sure your story starts within the first couple of pages, on the first page if possible. Slushpile readers are like everybody else these days – with so many options, who has time for boring? Your slow reveal might be amazing – but if no one actually gets to the part where the stakes are declared, your story is going to have a hard time finding a home. So set a trap for the slushpile reader, give them a voice or a situation that intrigues – right away.

Work on your last paragraph and line until it squeaks. While I was reading for Orca, there were several conversations over good stories with endings we did not like – for the love of god, do not, in your last line, attempt to explain everything, because you’re worried the reader won’t “get” it. The reader does not need to be hit over the head.

Consider the possibility that deleting your last line (or paragraph) might actually make your story stronger.

Know that even if your story didn’t get accepted, there might well of been one or two readers on a staff who really quite liked it – it just didn’t fit with everything else going on at the magazine, and competition really can be quite intense.

If a magazine tells you they want to see something else from you, believe them.

What are my plans for the autumn, you might wonder?

I am working on my own cookbook project, hoping to have my first draft completed soon, and I am also very happy to repeat the rumour which says Jenny Hammerton’s upcoming Cooking the Detectives now has a complete first draft. (She was kind enough to ask me to contribute some classic radio detective geekery.)

I have a handful of recipes I need to test yet.

Within the next week or two, I will be doing a trial run for an evening write-along online with my regional and local groups of writers – if everything goes well, I hope to host two hours or so of writing sprints once a week, probably through Skype, late September through mid-December. While I’ll be starting with local/regional people I already have contact with, if you’re interested in participating, let me know! The idea is that we’ll have a bit of accountability and a “date” to write, get some encouragement from each other, and we’ll work on our own things by ourselves but also “together” – rather like what happens at London Writer’s Salon’s Hours, only at a different time and for longer.

And as always, I have several half-completed short stories to tend to.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end of this rather lengthy post!

What have you been working on lately? What are you looking forward to as August turns into September?