Writing Prompt: Micro Fiction Challange

This week the prompt has to do with length, more than content. The prompt is to write a story using less than 300 words. A story of this length is considered to be a work of micro fiction. These pieces are usually longer than 100 words in length but they do not have to be….

Flashlight Press: Open To Book Submissions

Flashlight Press focuses on publishing illustrated children’s books. Their books are a lot of fun to read and very well illustrated. They receive a lot of good reviews and are pretty widely available, even outside on the United States. If you are considering submitting to them and are unfamiliar with their books, look for one to…

The Opening Line: Accepting Submissions

              The Opening Line is an online literary journal that is open to publishing a wide range of work including novel excerpts, flash fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and short stories. They only publish work by authors who were previously unpublished. It is very compelling to read the issues they…

We Support Banned Books

6 or so years ago, I read Truth & Beauty by Anne Pattchet. It was one of my favorite books right away. I loaned it to my mother, who loved it. A little while later I read an article about the book by Anne Pattchet in The Atlantic. I was shocked to discover that it…

The Best One Liner Contest

Congratulations to the winners of this week’s writing contest! They are listed below. But first, a bit about our contest series. Every week we are going to have a contest on our Facebook Page. The contests will change from week to week, but the winners will always be published in the magazine. The contest winner…

Why Do You Write?

Congratulations to the winners of this week’s writing contest! They are listed below. But first, a bit about our contest series. Every week we are going to have a contest on our Facebook Page. The contests will change from week to week, but the winners will always be published in the magazine. The contest winner…

Evaluating a Publisher’s Website

Updated February 20th 2016 Submitting your work to full length publishers is a terrifying process partially because you are facing potential rejection and partially because it is not easy to know if the publisher will treat your work fairly. I have written before about how to avoid bad publishers in the article Red Flags. Sometimes…

Fireship Press: Open To Submissions

Updated April 2019: Fireship Press changed ownership and there have been some issues since the transition. You can read more here. I would not recommend them at this time. Fireship Press is a small press that focuses on publishing books with a nautical theme, historical fiction, and history books. Fireship press publishes about 15 books…

Writing Prompt: Ghost Story

I love a good ghost story, not the kind that are told around campfires where the ghost is terrorizing a family, or is passing as a young woman in a dress for a night, but the stories that play around with what a ghost is. For example, the ghosts in Harry Potter served a lot…

Quote of the Week

Bat City Review: Now Accepting Submissions

              Founded in 2004 at the University of Texas at Austin, Bat City Review is an annual print journal publishing fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and visual art. In its ten year lifetime, this entirely student-run journal has published work by many noteworthy authors whose accolades include a Poet Laureateship of…

Passages North: Now Accepting Submissions

              Passages North is a print journal, founded in 1979, produced by Northern Michigan University. They publish both veterans and newcomers, and though their aesthetic has changed over the years to accommodate new trends, they tend to prefer writing in the literary style. They publish fiction, poetry, and non-fiction…

Writing Prompt: For the Love of a Good Title

A good title can go a long way. It can intrigue the reader and it can even change one aspect of a story, so that the reader interprets it in a different way. Some of my favorite classic titles include A Widow for A Year, Love in the Time of Cholera, Pig Earth, A Wrinkle…

The 10 Best Writing Quotes

Over the last 2 years I have made over 3,000 literary quote memes, including the one featured above. This means that I have spent many hours seeking quotes out, reading them, and re-reading them. I now like to think that I can spot a fake quote a mile away, although this is not always the…

The Six Word Memoir

Congratulations to the winners of this week’s writing contest! They are listed below. But first, a bit about our contest series. Every week we are going to have a contest on our Facebook Page. The contests will change from week to week, but the winners will always be published in the magazine. The contest winner…