Daily Shorty

It’s Market Monday, my reminder to spark your ambition. And mine.

If you’ve got all the confidence and energy you need, and you just want an introduction to a new market for your very short fiction, skip to the Market Monday details below. If you’re in the thick of the winter doldrums, if like me you’re so sick at the state of our country you’re finding it hard to show up to the writing (and submitting) desk, if you’re doubting yourself and your work for any reason… read on.

2017 is going to be a year of self-talk, that’s becoming very clear. And that’s what a blog is for, first and foremost, whatever we bloggers like to think: I’m helming this Daily Shorty ship, and these posts are my captain’s log.

Today the captain is heartsick. Just as I was on December 5, when I talked about election dejection, then four weeks later, when I had to remind myself why I write, and then four weeks after that, when I used the words “election dejection” again. The captain’s heart veered from its pattern today because it has been only three weeks since the last time it cracked. This, the captain hopes, is a fluke.

In four weeks, in three weeks, every day, whatever. The solution is work and connection. For writers, work and connection amount to the same thing—writing. But on the other end of the connection is a reader. And no one can read your work if it’s not published.

So you must write. And you must publish. Both of which require ambition. And it’s tough to nurse ambition when you’re heartsick. Today I need a little help. So to follow through on this Market Monday blog post, I ignite my ambition by turning to my mother:

Over and over, as a girl-then-teen-then-very young adult, far too many times to guess at a count, over and over like the caption to the picture of my face, like a motto taped to the fridge, like theme music for the sitcom starring the nice-enough-but-comically-bumbling me, my mother said, “Ambition is unattractive in a woman.”

Oh, you were expecting encouragement? She’s not that kind of mom. But you’re in luck, because I am that kind of blogger, and I hereby offer this toast, which I have silently made to myself for many years now, every time I need to light a fire under my own ass: Here’s to being ugly.

Here’s to wanting to be seen and heard. Here’s to wanting your words to live in the world, your stories to linger in the mind of someone you will never meet. Here’s to answering the call, to donning your superhero costume, to screwing up your who-cares-if-it’s-pretty face and howling at the moon (at 10:00 in the morning, if that’s when you find time to work, the moon is out there like always, I promise). Here’s to doing your job.
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Spotlighting River Styx’s Microfiction Contest

I could have picked a better season to talk about River Styx’s microfiction contest, given its December 31 deadline, but I vowed to highlight on Market Mondays my preferred magazines who have published my own micros and flashes before moving on to my hopefuls. I’ve got a flash coming out in March, but until then, River Styx is the last journal that fits the bill. Well, you can’t say you don’t have time to prepare a submission.

Do I like what River Styx publishes?  Yes, and what’s more, I think most would agree, given the wide range of voices RS publishes, something I’ve found rare in my review of litmags. RS is living on a new site and they haven’t yet populated all their archives pages, but I quickly found some live links to shorties I love, including Allison Alsup’s “Pioneers,” Ethel Rohan’s “That Mama,” and Amina Gautier’s “Minnow.” All stories about material I would never address and in a voice I would never come close to adopting, yet I was published here, too. I really appreciate that kind of diversity.

Aesthetics? Again, River Styx is unusual in that they produce lovely print journals but also maintain a very polished and substantial online presence.

Do they nominate authors for awards? Yep. All the usual ones accounted for on their About page.

Guidelines? As I’ve noted already, there’s no particular aesthetic the magazine appears to be aiming for. Instead it’s apparently all comers welcome, and your modest entry fee (only $10 if you don’t want a subscription) gets you three bites at the apple. They limit their contest entries to 500 words.

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The personal is the universal, we writers like to say. It reminds us why our stories matter. If my protagonist finds solace by the end of the story I give her, a reader, somewhere, may find that same solace. Or inspiration or justified anger or cathartic bleakness—whatever was my goal, my ambition, for the story. The personal is the universal, so I keep a captain’s log in the hope I tell you something about your writing life, or—talk about ambition, wish of wishes—I give you a small tool to help you on your path.

Today I am heartsick. But just that little bit more ambitious from having written this post. I hope it’s catching.
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Tags: "Minnow", "Pioneers", "That Mama", Allison Alsup, Amina Gautier, Ethel Rohan