Moving Day!

Hi,

For those of you who have been gracious enough to subscribe or to read, this blog has undergone a big overhaul. Please come visit at the new site: www.writer-friendly.com.

Thanks!

Sally

Tin House's Winter Fiction Issue is out!

Tin House's winter fiction issue is out. Oh right, I just said that. Well, bear with me. I like this press. I like their attitude. I like their content. The issues aren't cheap but they're jam packed with interesting stuff.

I'm planning to subscribe this year. I don't know if it's the right thing to do, but I try to subscribe to at least one literary journal a year and I change from year to year. I suppose it would be good to subscribe to one and stick with it for decades. I've subscribed to Zoetrope: All Story, ZYZZYVA, The Santa Monica Review, The Sun and Weber: Contemporary West in the past few years.

This year it's Tin House's turn.

Why? Partly because they published a really great collection of food writing called Food & Booze a couple of years ago that was so good that it led me to a lot of other pleasurable books on food. And because they also publish other anthologies, fiction and non-fiction.

Seriously, check out their catalog. There's some really great stuff there. I love the creative selection of titles for their writer's bundle of books at a bargain called The Tin House Writer's Series.

If you go, check out their submissions page. You know you want to.

Help me. I want to work for these people!

Bad Sex in Fiction Award Winner Named

From the still viable Los Angeles Times:

Jonathan Little "Wins" Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

December 1, 2009

London - Jonathan Littell won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, the United Kingdom's "most dreaded literary prize," for his depiction of the sadomasochistic encounters between twin siblings in "The Kindly Ones."

The judges cited Littell for one incestuous scene that unfolds on the bed of a guillotine and another that invokes the myth of Cyclops, "whose single eye never blinks." These marred what the judges called an impressive work.

"It is in part a work of genius," the judges said in an e-mailed statement Monday about the World War II novel, which won the Prix Goncourt, France's top book prize, in 2006.



Previously won by Tom Wolfe, Sebastian Faulks and Norman Mailer, the Bad Sex in Fiction contest seeks to dishonor the author of the year's "most embarrassing passages of sexual description in a literary novel."

London's monthly Literary Review inaugurated the prize in 1993 "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it."

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

Writer Friendly is Getting Friendlier

It's been quiet around here lately. Sorry about that.

It's because a lot is going on behind the scenes right now. There's a lot of shuffling and hammering going on underneath the skin of Writer Friendly.

I'm going to relaunch the blog in January 2010.

There will be more resources and better yet, there will be guest bloggers. Just when the winter is starting to get you down, friends of Writer Friendly will tell you what they think about a wide variety of writing related topics.

Whoo hoo, right!?

See you soon. In the meantime, here's a nice picture of the beach at Ventura, CA to inspire you.

Write well, little pigeons!

Indiana Review Call for Submissions - Theme : Blue

Call for Submissions: Blue

Indiana Review is looking for art, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for a special feature on Blue in our Summer 2010 issue.

What do we mean by blue? We mean the color, the mood, the music. We’re looking for work that honors, laments, declares war on, reinterprets, reinvents, and redefines “blue.” Our door is wide open and the possibilities are endless. We’re thinking the color blue; the blues; narrators named Blue; Holden Caulfield; Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue;” William Gass’s “On Being Blue;” a melancholy mode; blue ghazals; blue sonnets; blue sestinas; blue short shorts; blue memoirs; blue suede shoes; the blue lagoon; Paula Abdul leaving American Idol; Ellen judging American Idol; tragedy; blue roses; familiar blue tropes (see clouds, sky, moon, dolphins) turned on their ears. As always, we want work that is well crafted and original. Don’t go for the obvious—surprise us! We won’t know it until you send it. Deadline: December 1st. Online submissions only. Regular submissions still open.

Read Me A Story! - Toni Morrison Reads from A Mercy

[click on the image to go to the NPR download page]

What could be better than a free download of Toni Morrison reading from her new novel? (Well, okay, if I could send you a latte to sip while you listen, that'd be nice, wouldn't it?)

Raving Dove Seeks Submissions - Reopens November 5, 2008

Raving Dove, a very interesting online publication that has used one of my photographs, has broadened its scope with a new Mission Statement.

Check out full submission guidelines at Raving Dove.


Submissions—
Reopens November 5, 2008
Guidelines have been updated

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Content

Raving Dove's mission is to share thought-provoking poetry, prose, and art that champions human rights and social justice—and opposes physical and psychological violence in all its forms, including war, discrimination against sexual orientation, and every shade of bigotry. Please submit work that coincides with one of these themes. We publish material about the ramifications of violence, along with messages about kindness and hope as it pertains to one of our themes.