Tag Archives: micro fiction

CHEAP POP Wants Your Micros!

23 Jan

It’s Market Monday! Grab your quirky, amped, oddball micros. You know, the ones that *POP*.

screen-shot-2017-01-23-at-6-31-01-pmI 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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Micro & Flash Fiction Contests

12 Dec
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Making it to the final round often results in publication.

I go on and off contests. Sometimes I get upset about the fees and stop submitting to them for a while, but I always come back. The primary appeal is the guarantee that the submission will be read and fairly considered in a blind judging process within a reasonable, specified timeframe.

Ordinary submissions to literary magazines and presses, despite the best efforts and highest ethical standards of Those In Charge, may never get more than a glance at the first paragraph, if your submission is not passed along by an agent or you haven’t somehow caught the attention of the reader—say by publishing something widely read and admired, or sharing an appetizer with the right person a week ago last Saturday. You can’t even blame the readers for dismissing your work without due consideration, because everyone in literary publishing, including the volunteers, are over-assigned and under-rewarded. But it’s frustrating to be the writer on the other end.

As for timing, my first literary magazine acceptance took eight months. I’ve received rejections well after a year from submission date, including from magazines that don’t allow simultaneous submission. And these timeframes are not at all unusual. With a contest, you know when the decision will come, and it’s typically within a quarter of submission.

Favorites Diamonds

All your cut diamonds need a home!

And I’m happy to know that my contest fee will fund the usual cash reward that goes to the winner, who likely earns next to nothing from her writing.

I’ve had good luck with contests—I’ve published six stories by entering them—and I want to pass along that good luck. So I’m sharing the fruits of my own search for worthwhile contests where you can submit your micro and flash fiction, knowing at least one person will give it a careful read. My modest list is here. There are plenty more to try, if you’re especially eager, but this will get you started. If you have enough publishable micros and flashes to put together a fiction chapbook, you’ll find a list of chapbook contests here.

What are you waiting for? Go!

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