Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

Spindle Magazine: A New York State of Mind

Things were looking dicey for April — I’m still almost a week behind on NaPoWriMo, not to mention the craziness of the real world — but I managed to post some new content before the calendar turned, with great poetry from Erica Miriam Fabri and micro-fiction from James Bezerra and Dominic Preziosi.

Check them out at: http://spindlezine.com

Also, be sure to poke through the archives and revisit some great features like “Love, New York Style” and an interview with WORDS IN YOUR FACE author, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz.

OTHER UPDATES:

You do know Spindle has a spanking new Facebook Page now, right?

Next month, I’m hoping to get our columnists back up and running again, as well as to start catching up on the growing backlog of 2009 submissions. (I’m finally completely caught up on everything Spindle-related from 2008, except for the columns.) I’m also going to have a great special feature that came out of the Acentos Writers Workshop I facilitated this past Sunday.
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Just in time for our impromptu open mic/party tonight — Spindle gets a little bit LOUDER — I’ve posted another round of great content up on Spindle for your reading pleasure!

* New poetry by Celeste Doaks, Don Pomerantz and Jacob Rakovan

* New short fiction by Diane Simmons and David Winter

With this latest update, I’ve now published over 100 poems, stories, articles and photos by 62 different contributors!

Stop by and check out the latest contributions, and poke around and catch up on any you might have missed. I’ll be reading a couple of my favorites at the show on Monday night — requests? — and we’ll have a few surprise guests performing their own work live, too.

Thanks for reading, and as importantly, for sharing with your friends!

BTW, if you haven’t become of “fan” of Spindle’s new Facebook page yet, stop by and check it out.  It’s newly interactive and will be the first place to see some of the new SpindleTV content that we’ll be producing very soon.

Spindle Magazine: A New York State of Mind

I had a productive day off from the 9-to-5 yesterday, and in between DVDs of Diners, Drive-ins and Dives and Throwdown with Bobby Flay (along with a shark jumping new episode of iCarly), I posted another round of great content to the site yesterday, including poetry and fiction by Aaron Bair, Lawrence Clayton, Jessica Colley, Jane Flett and Joanna Hoffman.

I don’t like to play favorites because everything I publish over there is a favorite by definition, but in light of how difficult good micro-fiction is, I’m particularly excited about Clayton’s El Rey del Taco. In fact, I’ve got a couple more really good fiction pieces waiting in the wings as the quality of submissions improved greatly in the second half of last year.

Click on over and check out the new (and old) content at spindlezine.com.

While you’re there, register for a free account so you can mark your favorites and/or leave comments. And be sure to share your favorites with your friends on Facebook, StumbleUpon, Twitter, etc. (hint, hint!)

Also, if you’re on Facebook, check out our new page and become a fan.

Thanks for reading!

Spindle Magazine: A New York State of Mind

The most basic advice usually given to writers looking to submit their work to magazines or literary journals is to know the market, aka read the guidelines and pick up a few issues before wasting your time and the editors’ by sending something that’s totally inappropriate for a publication.

With the increasing popularity of online-only publications, it might be time to suggest another piece of not-so-basic advice, and that’s the importance of knowing your MEDIUM.

There’s a number of differences between writing for print and writing for the web, no matter the format or genre, because the former is much more contextual than the latter.

In a print magazine, each page is designed, and the articles on them are laid out, with an intent to establish a steady flow from page to page, to carry the reader from cover to cover so they don’t miss anything, including the ads. An issue may have a specific theme, or have a number of different departments, each with their own themes, that can act as a subtle prop for the articles, stories or poems to lean on. While an online publication can mimic many of the page design elements of print, an article, poem or story has to be able to completely stand on its own, as it may be accessed in any number of ways that have nothing to do with the context of the site that published it. (aka Google, StumbleUpon, Twitter, etc.)

Online, a title is arguably even more important than usual, but especially for Spindle.

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