Spindle

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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When it comes to Spindle, I often refer to “we” but the reality is that it’s 99.5% me; I’m a control freak and have no shame admitting it.

Of course, that has a rather extreme down side to it, too.

I have a couple of poetry editors who are more like consultants whom I run poems that I’m on the fence about for a second opinion, but I read every single submission first — poetry, fiction, non-fiction, photography — and reply to every one of them myself. For a while, I was offering critical feedback on the majority of the rejections, but as anyone who has ever been an editor before, that’s a recipe for disaster on so many levels.

[Side note: Badly rhymed poems centered on the page make my eyes bleed and baby Jeebus cry. DO NOT submit such poems.  To me, or to anyone!]

Plus, I’m Spindle‘s sole webmonkey, posting all of the content and optimizing the Joomla platform, the latter of which often takes up more time than it should because I love the technical side as much as the creative side.

I sent out an email yesterday to everyone who’d submitted something last year and hadn’t received a response yet — or in some cases, who’d received acceptances but their work was never posted — explaining that we’d been on “unofficial hiatus since last Spring when I changed jobs and things only got crazier and further delayed when I bought a house, moved to New Jersey, and changed jobs again; plus the election, the crashing economy, blah blah blah. I’m not offering excuses, just context, to explain why you haven’t heard back from me yet.”

I knew I was way behind, but I was stunned to realize some of these submissions went back as far as February 2008! Ridiculous, and quite frankly, a little bit embarassing, regardless of the legitimate circumstances.

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