Writing Prompt: Dark Alley

It is a familiar scene. If you close your eyes and you can picture it. A pretty woman walks into a dark alley. She is in a big city. Their is steam rising from the sewer. It goes without saying that it is dark and the alley is dirty. This scene has been shot a…

Crack The Spine: Open to Submissions

Crack The Spine is an online and print journal. They publish four print issues a year and 52 electronic issues. They seek to publish  strange literary works in a number of different forms, including flash fiction, micro-fiction, poetry, short stories, personal essays, and book reviews. Crack The Spine has an easy to navigate website that…

Top 3 Reasons Why Fiction Manuscripts Get Rejected

My number is 28, what’s yours?  You know, the number of times a Literary Agent or Publishing House sent you the “Thank you, but no” letter. As writers we research the best possible way to write a query letter; how to manipulate our 350 page manuscript into a one page synopsis. We review all possible…

Halfway Down The Stairs: Open To Submissions

Halfway Down the Stairs is an established electronic journal that has been around for some time and seems to have established a regular readership. They publish poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, as well as book reviews.  New issues are published quarterly (March, June, September, and December), and each issue has a theme. They primarily publish mainstream  literary…

Quote Of The Week

Shock Totem: Open To Submissions

Shock Totem is a literary journal that publishes horror and dark fantasy short stories as well as non-fiction about real horrors, such as addiction. They are also open to poetry, as long as it is dark, on a more limited basis. They are primarily a bi-annual print journal, but they do publish some writing electronically…

Bare Fiction: Now Accepting Submissions

Bare Fiction Magazine is a print and digital edition literary magazine based in the United Kingdom, which launched in December 2013. They publish poetry, fiction, and plays, as well as literary reviews and interviews with writers. Though young, Bare Fiction has a clear goal: to challenge readers with mind-bending new writing. They aim to publish…

Announcing The Winners of The Best First Line Writing Contest

Congratulations to the winner’s of this weeks writing contest! They are listed below. But first, a bit about our new 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…

Writing Prompt: Amnesia

Amnesia has been a great literary prop for centuries. One of the greatest action characters of our time had amnesia: Jason Bourne. But he is not the only one. In See Jane Run by Joy Fielding the main character has amnesia. The same is true of Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson. However…

How To Promote Your Poetry Without Paying A Penny

Updated January 19th 2017 Many writers ask me this question all the time: “How do you promote your poetry without paying anyone?” There is more then one answer to this question, but it mostly comes back to hard work. In my experience, outside of paying to enter contests, it is very easy to promote one’s…

Atticus Books: Accepting Manuscript Submissions

Last Updated May 2017 – They recently changed owenership and they may or may not reopen to book submissions at some point, but they are for the foreseeable future, closed. Atticus Books is a small publisher based out of New Jersey. Atticus Books was interested in publishing unusual literary fiction. They publish books that are…

Announcing the Winners of the Six Word Memoir Writing Contest

Congratulations to the winner’s of this weeks writing contest! They are listed below. But first, a bit about our new 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…

Quote of the Week

Writing Prompt: Gender Swap

Are you working on a novel? Or do you have a favorite character from a novel by another writer? This is an exercise that requires an established character, one that you know really well, although it does not need to be one you created. Pick a character and then write down his or her name…

The Active Writer

Phillip Roth has often said that he walks a mile for every page he writes. He also writes those pages standing up. Hemingway was also known for standing while he wrote, and many modern writers from John Green to Susan Orleans have been known to use a treadmill desk. The famous Japanese Novelist Haruki Murkami…