Stumbling through the remainder of Sunday night; here are the results.
Submissions today.
Fusion Fragment, The Georgia Review, The Adroit Journal, and Epiphany were sent The First Day of Feeling Free.
Haven Spec Magazine - “The Psychotic Ape”
The Four Way Books, Driftwood Press "Plain Tales From The Flatlands”
Books, stories, and the like
Come Morning (The Dilettante) I found to be an enticing piece of flash fiction.
Speeding through the streets until your soles burned, you tightened a grip on the suitcase clattering behind you with your whole life on its rollers. One wheel hadn’t been quite right since knocking against a curb several blocks back, and your heart lurched at each ill-timed pop and scrape. It would make sense to turn back now. The place you left barely qualified as a shoe closet, but it had someone to share the bed with each night, to need and be needed by, to plead and prove yourself to—which was almost like love.
Hemingway’s lost generation turns 100 (Engelsberg ideas) takes on my second least favorite Hemingway novel (To Have and To Have Not gets that prize). I have been uncomfortable with The Sun Also Rises since I was an idiot Freshman at Ball State University. No doubt it has power but its characters are such a bunch of creeps.
For a new reader picking up Sun now, it is hard to comprehend how groundbreaking it was in 1926. By now we are used to Hemingway’s prose; his style has been imitated, copied and parodied for a century. His books have become a prop for the tortured, monosyllabic male in mainstream culture (even Jess Mariano in Gilmore Girls is depicted as a fan) – but when it was released, it was radical.
The sentences are stripped almost bare. Short, factual sentences. Dialogue that sounds like a pared-down screenplay: people talking as people actually do, most of the meaning left unsaid, very little spoon-fed to the reader (except, memorably, a slightly condescending explanation of what the drink Pernod is). There are transcripts of drunken conversations with next to no explanation or ornamentation added, and bald descriptions of places that still manage to make them unfold, powerfully, before your eyes, whether it be the central square of Pamplona, a bus climbing the mountains of the Basque Country, or a train rammed with pilgrims who have taken over the lunch car. No superfluous adjectives clutter the images, and they resonate more strongly as a result. The novel was an instant hit.
Sun was never without controversy. It ruined several lives, or at least reputations. Hemingway gave his friends flimsy pseudonyms that echoed the syllables and rhythms of their real names and did little to conceal their identities. Lady Brett Ashley – the novel’s anti-heroine – was based on Lady Duff Twysden, a twice-married English socialite with whom Hemingway was infatuated. Brett’s lover, Mike Campbell, was Duff’s real-life lover, Pat Guthrie. The Jewish American novelist Robert Cohn was based on the Jewish American novelist Harold Loeb, who really had run off to the coast with Duff for an intense but short-lived tryst. The writer Don Stewart, who served partly as inspiration for the character Bill Gorton, said the novel was pure journalism.
The portraits were not flattering. Hemingway depicted his friends warts and all, then added a few fictional warts for good measure. Some of the most damaging incidents – Cohn cracking under pressure and punching Jake, or Brett seducing a teenage bullfighter – were inventions. But crowded in alongside so much that was factually true, the distinction was easy to miss. To add insult to injury, the novel that parodied his writer friends outsold anything they produced themselves. It must have rankled all the more when Hemingway took the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
The Guardian view on Caryl Churchill’s Triumph: a play for today (The Guardian) is here because I read a pair of Churchill's plays in prison and thought he was more than worthwhile keeping an eye on for all that I had never heard of her. She is English, so is my ignorance an American thing?
The Guardian’s Michael Billington called Churchill “theatre’s great disruptor”. With Triumph she is disrupting the conventions of theatregoing itself: a play isn’t always something to be enjoyed between an early supper, interval drinks and the last train home. She has turned the attention economy on its head. Like a Covid-era emergency press conference, Triumph interrupts its audience’s day to make them listen. It jolts us out of our complacency.
October '26 Statistics for the Submission Pit
“Family Lore,” by Téa Obreht (The New Yorker) is probably behind a paywall, so I quoted the paragraph below to give a taste of Obreht's style. The story involves a husband trying to do the right thing, a dog, a possible rabid bat, and a new-born baby. It is a comedy-horror of brilliance. Obreht does not publish like Joyce Carol Oates, but is always worth reading when she does.
When the dog was finally in his arms, his whole body pulsing with the force of his heartbeats, the husband sank his face into the dog’s musty neck and let himself be still. There was so much to lose, and so many different ways to lose it.
The New Yorker: Fiction - Podcast - Apple Podcasts
Science fiction writer John Scalzi discusses his novel 'Monsters of Ohio'
Paris Review: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Art of Fiction No. 196
Writing articles
Grammar Rules: Ending a Sentence with a Preposition (Writing Forward) starts with my own opinion and ends with something we all ought to keep in mind.
A longstanding grammar myth says we’re not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition. For years, this myth has persisted, tying writers up in knots and making their heads spin around sentences that simply must end with a preposition.
For example: Which store are you going to?
Folks who were taught (and are now attached to the idea) that one should never end a sentence with a preposition will argue that the proper way to write the sentence is as follows: To which store are you going?
But nobody talks that way.
***
The issue with ending a sentence with a preposition is more a matter of style or rhetoric than grammar. If you want proof, check out this list of references on ending a sentence with a preposition.
So go forth and end sentences with prepositions, but only when it makes sense to do so. Write your sentences to be clear and concise, and you’ll be fine. Keep writing!
I have both doubts and a curiosity about Hemingway Editor. It uses AI, so a mark against it there. I am already finding enough errors with grammar and spell checkers that do not tout their AI roots. OTOH, it might be interesting to see if it produces anything different.
But more importantly, what if one's style is more Faulkner or Jose Saramago than Hemingway?
Writing a Novel in Short Stories by Luis Vocem is here out of my vanity. “Plain Tales from the Flatlands” came from a collection of short stories that interested no one individually or as a collection. They were interrelated but did not run along a plot. I sliced and diced the stories so that they were more connected, to even have a ghost of a plot, and came up with a novella. This short essay let me know I was not completely mad. Perhaps it will do the same for you.
The one thing a short story must do is stand on its own, period. Whether it is the plot of a larger story in something else you’re working on, or minor events around a character, it has to complete its own dramatic arc.
The cycle of creation, editing, rejection, and publishing can take anywhere from two weeks to a year or more. You can be working on one, two, or even half a dozen stories at a time. At some point, you know whether the story needs a major revision or to be put out to pasture. What is most important, however, is not really the story, but YOUR learning process – taking chances, developing your own voice. Fail, learn, learn, learn, revise, revise, revise, improve, improve, improve. There’s so much you can learn. In the short story, it all happens quickly – a luxury you do not have in the novel.
This approach may appear to be more difficult than writing a chapter, but it’s not. Instead, it gives you clarity about the material: Does it have a dramatic arc? What is the realization? Does it stand on its own? What better way to test if the material is good than sending it out and see if literary magazines want to publish it?
For me, the novel-in-short-stories was not a conscious decision. It evolved. One story got published. I could not get one of the characters out of my mind. Then another story related to that character flooded my consciousness. Wrote it. Sent it out, got published. On to the next.
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