It’s Market Monday! Grab your quirky, amped, oddball micros. You know, the ones that *POP*.
I discovered CHEAP POP, home of the offbeat micro, when reading the excellent anthology The Best Small Fictions 2015. More on this little treasure and her 2016 sister in an upcoming post. For now I’ll thank the editors for bringing this terrific magazine to my attention just when I happened to be looking sideways at a handful of micro drafts I’d yanked from my Daily Shorty year. I liked them—I liked them a lot—but who would want them?
Do I like what CHEAP POP publishes? I read Leesa Cross-Smith’s “All That Smoke Howling Blue” in the anthology and thought, hmm. Is that story… finished? I read it again. Stopped to savor strange word-pairings that shot tension or was it joy? into the piece, thought hard about the sentence, “My name, a begging blue prayer,” so sad… or was it so eager? It’s a strange, jumpy or settled? little story, a slice-of-life piece if the lamplight’s flickering and the TV screen keeps going to static and you’re not sure if maybe you keep hearing that same ringing note, low, in your left ear, are you getting tinnitus or is that a memory??
After reading Cross-Smith’s piece, and then this one and this one and this one, I thought CHEAP POP might just appreciate my quirks, so I asked and they answered by publishing my micro “Just Asking,” originally drafted on April 26 during my Daily Shorty year. Many thanks to the editors.
They will like your quirks, too.
Does CHEAP POP nominate its authors for awards? Here’s their awards page.
Aesthetics? CHEAP POP does a great job of showing off an awful lot of pieces. If they didn’t have such a clean and balanced approach to page design, the collection of links would look too jumbled.
Do the guidelines speak to me? As someone committed to the craft of very short fiction, I love their devotion to micros—they take pieces 500 words or less, full stop. They couldn’t be more clear about how to put your submission together, which I very much appreciate. And this speaks to me for sure: “We don’t differentiate between Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and Prose Poetry, nor do we have restrictions on genre—if it pops, it pops! What we want to see is good writing, your best writing, and that’s it.” Yes!
If you publish at CHEAP POP, please let me know so I can congratulate you! If CP doesn’t speak to you, just move on to the next. There are so many magazines worthy of your best work, I’m sure I’ll spotlight one you like soon enough. Good luck!
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Daily Shorty 
Thank you! You’ve sparked my interest in writing a short piece here and there as I work through a memoir. I appreciate the time you spend putting the information together for us.
Oh, that’s great! I’ve only written a few cnf shorties myself and I’m getting interested in trying more, maybe also for a memoir I’ve been thinking about. Here’s to the power of short!
“Just Asking” is fantastic! I especially love the lines, “That’s what you get for asking. Well, no. That’s what you get for living with somebody you have to ask.”
Cheap Pop has such a nice clean layout. Thank you for pointing me to all these wonderful micros tonight! I feel inspired to edit some of my short pieces. I love Market Mondays!
Oh, thank you! Yeah, I love how their design so nicely highlights the micros. They publish so much, the work could easily get jumbled and lost in busyness with a less thoughtful presentation. Definitely polish those shorties and get them out! How about challenging yourself to send out just one cherished micro or flash by the end of February?
Yes, I love that idea. Challenge accepted! Thank you for all the encouragement and great info, Claire!
Yay, good luck! You’re welcome and right back atcha, your response to these posts gives me more energy to stick with my plan for the site. Onward!