Writing

My own Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction, and occasional commentary on all of the above.

A guillotine, a Sister of Battle, and a scrapbook picture from the 2001 National Poetry Slam.

Submissions: Know Your Market… and Medium

Spindle Magazine: A New York State of Mind
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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A guillotine, a Sister of Battle, and a scrapbook picture from the 2001 National Poetry Slam.

Free Chapbook: Crazy White Devil

Download a free copy of Crazy White DevilIt’s been years since I created a chapbook.

Six, to be exact.

I released Selected Squares of Concrete — a de facto “best of” poetry collection of new, revised, never-before-released and old favorites — back in March of 2003, smack in the middle of the razor-thin slice of time between my return to the NYC poetry scene after living down in Virginia for a year, and my walking away from it again about three months later, more or less permanently.

I’ve wanted to create a new chapbook for a little while now, just for myself, to collect in one place the handful of newer poems I’d written over the past few years, for those random times I end up at a poetry reading and want to get on the mic. Like last night, for example, when I decided to check out my local poetry reading and had to dig through a pile of random poems, several of which were 2-3 edits old, to find something I liked.

It was interesting reading in a totally unfamiliar setting with only one other person I knew in the small audience, and there were a couple of poets there I would have liked to have had something to give, partly to promote Spindle, but also to establish myself in the scene since I’m a terrible self-promoter.

That’s when the idea hit me; an experiment in social networking: offer a free chapbook and see how big my platform, and what my social “reach” is!

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A guillotine, a Sister of Battle, and a scrapbook picture from the 2001 National Poetry Slam.

Random Reviews: Inkheart, Wanted, Chalk

We’ve been having a lot of Blockbuster nights since we bought the house last summer, while managing to catch whatever kid-friendly movies worth seeing in theaters whenever possible, and I’ve been reviewing a lot of them on Flixster but wanted to round up the most recent batch and post them here, including expanded commentary on a few.

Inkheart: Saw it tonight and loved it! A great cast highlighted by Paul Bettany and Helen Mirren, who lift Brendan Fraser beyond his typically solid leading-man performance, and Andy Serkis as a great villain; plus, an intriguing story combine for what is effectively an entertaining love letter to the power of the written word, writers, and imagination itself. It’s a little dark for some kiddies — India said afterwards that she thought it was rated R! — but I enjoyed it so much that I went and bought the book right afterwards and started reading it in the store.

Side note: This was the first movie I’ve seen Mirren in since those pictures last summer of her in a bikini and it was a little distracting for the first couple of minutes. Zoinks!

Black Snake Moan: Surprisingly poignant and touching; great performances from Samuel L. Jackson and Christina Ricci enable Craig Brewer to fulfill the potential of his risky idea — the DVD extras are must-see — and Justin Timberlake does a solid job of not embarassing himself. The music, too, is amazing and I want the soundtrack which includes Jackson doing “Stack-o-lee”, one of the many songs that inspired the best graphic novel of 2006, Stagger Lee.

Wanted: Imagine, if you can, a mash-up of The Matrix and Fight Club, written by a roomful of monkeys with iPods and directed by the least talented monkey in the room, and you’ll get close to the total wackness that is Wanted. James McAvoy’s character and acting were lame imitations of Ed Norton in Fight Club, and the handful of kewl action moments were overshadowed by the sheer lameness of the script and, pardon the pun, threadbare plot. The comic book it was based on was similarly hacktastic, so it’s no surprise, but I expected a little better from Easy Reader. Morgan Freeman: You’re on notice!

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A guillotine, a Sister of Battle, and a scrapbook picture from the 2001 National Poetry Slam.

Outrage, Humor, Context

Burn, baby, burn
Burn, baby, burn

David Brothers was one of the smartest comics bloggers on the scene a few years back when I was at my peak of following the industry, and he’s remained one of the few whom I still follow despite my current pull list being a shadow of its former self.

[Side note: Have to get to Midtown soon before they cancel my bare-minimum pull list again. Particularly looking forward to Joshua Dysart’s Unknown Soldier.]

He has a great post up at his site, 4thLetter, called SuperHHero KKKomics 200Hate: A Year In Review, an exponentially more substantiative response to the knee-jerk (but cleverly illustrated) 2008: The Year of Misogyny, that starts as a typical rant about the poor treatment of blacks in comics, but quickly becomes something much, much better.

Some of my favorite highlights of 200Hate include:

Barack Obama– leader of Dark Reign, gullible enough to trust Norman Osborn
Crispus Allen– killed his own son, has to have some old white lady re-ignite his faith in God after he tries to kill his best friend for being a lesbian, probably Pro Prop 8, forced to wear goatee as racial identifier, likely never-nude
Falcon– lost his best friend, hasn’t appeared in Captain America lately, was set on fire once
Manhattan Guardian– tossed aside the second a WHITE Guardian shows up
Martian Manhunter– murdered with a spear (martians count as black, see also Lil Wayne “We are not the same, I am a martian”)
Spawn– blows own head off in own comic, promoting the suicide of strong and proud black men
Spawn (Michael Jai White)– Killed by the Joker in The Dark Knight, movie goes on to make a billion dollars
Storm– taken from high profile X-Men appearances to be a supporting character in some lower-selling book, forced into arranged marriage, needs Emma Frost (who once enslaved her) to call her names just so she can feel like she belongs somewhere
Tyler Perry– still not invited to write a Black Panther story where T’Challa remembers how his big grandma was the one that scared him into following the path of the warrior, leaving untold the story of Bg’mama, the true power of wakanda

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A guillotine, a Sister of Battle, and a scrapbook picture from the 2001 National Poetry Slam.

Why Your Book Will Never Be in Borders

The odds are pretty slim, and not just because they’re on the verge of going out of business:

“I market books for a living, so I can tell you an unpleasant truth: the order for any book, from any account, starts at zero,” [Andrew Wheeler, a marketing manager at Wiley] warns. “The publisher’s sales rep walks in the door with tipsheets and covers, past sales figures and promotional plans, to convince that bookseller’s buyer to buy that book… Sometimes, that buyer is not convinced, and the order stays at zero.”

(h/t GalleyCat)

The distribution system in publishing is arguably broken, partly a result of the industry’s major players’ short-term thinking, and partly because the overwhelming number of books being published these days is more than the system can support.

(Writer’s Digest publishes an aptly titled book: Some Writers Deserve to Starve! Think about it.)

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Continue ReadingWhy Your Book Will Never Be in Borders
A guillotine, a Sister of Battle, and a scrapbook picture from the 2001 National Poetry Slam.

Thrillerfest 2008

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez and Kathleen AntrimThrillerfest kicked off yesterday at the Grand Hyatt Hotel here in New York and I had the pleasure of attending the full day — I’ll be back tonight and most of Saturday — meeting some great people, picking up some interesting books, and taking in some insightful information on the publishing game from the perspective of successful authors in the thriller genre. Prior to attending, I considered myself a fan of thrillers but quickly realized the genre I tend to enjoy most is classified more as mystery than thriller — marketing semantics that, according to several authors, means more money for the thriller genre — the difference being the former’s focus on figuring out what happened while the latter emphasizes something that’s going to happen and the clock is ticking.

Lawrence Block’s Scudder series, my hands-down genre favorite, definitely falls under crime mystery, while Charlie Huston’s Thompson and Greg Rucka’s Kodiak series are thrillers, though neither author is in attendance at the show nor represented in the Barnes & Noble bookstore on-site, presumably because neither is a member of the sponsoring organization, International Thriller Writers. Inspired by the energy of the conference, I picked up four novels by authors I’ve never read before, including Kathleen Antrim (pictured, right), Steve Berry, Andrew Gross and David Liss, all but the latter I saw or met yesterday. I’ve started reading Antrim’s Capital Offense, which she describes as “What if the First Lady was plotting to kill the President?” and so far, it’s a brisk read that hits all the right notes expected from the genre.

The first session of the day, Learn How to Pitch Your Book (conducted by Antrim & Bob Mayer), was particularly fascinating for its breakdown of the process of developing a 25-word summary of your book that serves not just as your pitch to agents and editors — the only two influential people who will have actually read your entire book before it hits the bookshelves — but when done well, will represent it all the way through the sales process, internally and externally.

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A guillotine, a Sister of Battle, and a scrapbook picture from the 2001 National Poetry Slam.

March Madness

No, it’s not the basketball tournament…it’s the one-week-late March edition of your favorite NYC-centric literary journal, Spindle Magazine!

Log on now for new poetry by Roger Bonair-Agard, Gerard Sarnat, Jeanann Verlee and Beverly Wilkinson; short fiction by Tim Clancy; and creative non-fiction by Anne Germanacos.

Plus, keep an eye out next week for our featured columns: Coffee & Brooklyn, Myers Music Machine and On the 1.

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