Writing: Substack, Literary Magazines, and Related Matters

I subscribe to a few Substacks. However, I do not think I will shift this blog over there, but I have been trying to convince KH that his desire to be a publisher may be served by opening a site on Substack. I am thinking of a magazine featuring writers (including me, I hope)

Substack Writers at Work with Sarah Fay (Substack) is a writer and a Substack that I will be keeping an eye on, with the hope I can convince KH of going into publishing.

Lincoln Michel is on Substack and has published The Writer as Chimera (and Where Substack Fits In), and goes into depth on what can be, and might be done, with the platform with common sense.

I obviously think Substack is an interesting platform, and one growing in importance to the literary conversation and book sales. I’m here, after all. Still, I’m skeptical it will radically change traditional publishing. Some interesting novels will be serialized here and the popular ones will get physical book releases. I expect a lot of nonfiction Substack-to-book deals. But novel serialization is older than Dickens, and before the Substack-to-book deal there was the Tumblr-to-book deal and podcast-to-book deal and blog-to-book deal and so on.

Sabyasachi Ro's Unusual Writing Formats: When Your Story Demands Footnotes, Letters, or a Series of Haikus

Ultimately, unconventional formats are all about trust—earning it and keeping it. You’re asking readers to follow you into the wilderness, so give them a reason to keep walking. Whether it’s humor, mystery, or just the promise of a story they’ve never seen before, make sure your weirdness has purpose.

 The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey review – beyond the bounds of fiction (The Guardian) investigates a different form:

From her debut, Nobody Is Ever Missing, to 2023’s Biography of X, Catherine Lacey’s work has tested the forms and fabric of the novel with brilliant unease. In The Möbius Book, her experiment crosses the blurred border of fiction into something else. Life writing, autofiction, memoir? Whatever you call it, The Möbius Book is deeply serious and engrossingly playful, and it lavishly rewards serious, playful attention.

A Möbius strip is a length of any material joined into a loop with a half twist. It’s an uncanny shape, common and obvious, easily created and yet awkward to describe geometrically. For literary purposes, a Möbius is interesting because there’s intricate structure and constraint but no ending. It goes around again, mirrored with a twist. Lacey’s book takes this literally, the text printed from both ends, with memoir and fiction joined in the middle. Twin stories experiment with plotlessness and irresolution, while remaining aware of the way fiction attaches itself to linear plot and reverts to romance and quest. Characters find and lose love, find and lose meaning. 

It is unclear that the experiment succeeds, that it passes Ro's criteria of purpose.

The two modes of the book, which I hesitate to call fiction and memoir because neither is wholly committed to realism or reality, undermine each other, with images and anecdotes reappearing in transmuted form. The shadow of the angry, manipulative ex-partner falls across both, challenging the narrator’s memories and intentions although, reassuringly, never inviting the reader’s distrust. Edie’s recounting of a transformative encounter with a dying, talking dog which speaks of the meaning of suffering (is “dog” a Möbius rendition of “God”?) is reprised when the narrator attends to a man lying on the street. In the first-person section, the narrator sees Matisse’s painting The Red Studio in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, “the red I imagine on the floor of an otherwise white room”, reflecting the blood pooling under a neighbour’s door that Edie and Marie in the novel section decide is probably “paint or something”. As the narrator comments: “Reality at large has never been my subject, but interiority always has been.”

***

The question is not rhetorical. There’s a deep ambivalence in this book about needing literary and philosophical “help to get around”, about whether we’re allowed to want or need art, which is related to the narrator’s lack of appetite and consequent emaciation. “I was afraid of the line between basic needs and cravings, between living and lust.” The fear of slipping from necessity into pleasure shapes the distrust of fiction. What if storytelling is for fun? What if we don’t really need it? What if only what’s necessary is true, or only truth is necessary? 

It is not a form that I would think of offhand, just as I rarely think of a Möbius strip. Yet, circularity with a defect makes sense; it has me pairing it with Nietzsche's eternal recurrence.(6/8) 

Issue 5.11 of Cutleaf is live! June's The Sun is out! The Cincinnati Review's June newsletter. Issue 22.1 is out! UNLIKELY STORIES SIX is now live at https://www.unlikelystories.org 

Orca closes down:

Our Final Issues Are Released

We may be closing our doors but we are very proud to release our final two issues. Issue 19 is our annual speculative edition, and issue 20 is the final literary edition. Both have some of the best work we’ve published.

The staff at Orca believes that great literature should be as freely available as possible. So these last two issues, along with all our other published issues, are now available for free in PDF format. Just visit https://orcalit.com/all-issues/ and you will be able to download any of our issues just by clicking on the cover image. If you’d like a printed version, unfortunately we still have to charge for that. You can find Issue 19 here, and Issue 20 here. You can find the print version of any of our past issues by going to this page and scrolling down.

 And Heavy Metal returns. I doubt I can afford to subscribe, and the review leaves thinking I prefer the memories of my teenage and early twenty-something years:

Let the Tropes Go - a guest Post by Jodene Weber from Inside an Editor's Brain.

My debut novel The Bald-Faced Deception depicts a suspenseful mystery, centered around two women afraid to trust, each for entirely different reasons. Both are crime victims, and one is grappling with alopecia due to toxin exposure. Their journeys of self-actualization are the subplot to a suspenseful caper, but just like Nancy Drew, they don’t fit the mold of traditional tropes. When I set out to write this novel, I put a ton of FBI experience into building these flawed characters, and I flexed. I told multiple FBI stories without an FBI agent, and I didn’t follow any antiquated or imaginary “writer’s rules” about what constituted the proper formula for a crime novel. There’s no reason a suspense novel can’t address why women don’t always trust other women, or why victims are suspicious of the very law enforcement officers who say they want to help them. If there’s one lesson I learned from reading Nancy Drew, it’s that some of the best stories and life experiences are obtained when you let the tropes go.

Pay no attention to the title, this is a video about Robert Burns and also Ulster Scots poet:

Here, I have caught up with my email newsletters on writing, and a pair of YouTube videos relating to writers.

sch 6/7

I read an essay by Edmund White, but mostly he passed me by; having died, The Guardian published Where to start with: Edmund White. Recalling his essay, I thought him interesting and would read more of the same.

I managed to read one Muriel Spark novel while in prison, and having learned something of her biography, she intrigues me. Today, The Guardian published Electric Spark by Frances Wilson review – the mercurial Muriel Spark.

sch 6/8