Weird Circular #17 February

The February Weird Circular

This month's Weird Circular is live with submission ideas, prompts, and more!

Welcome to the Weird Circular

"...I think hard times are

coming,

when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live

now,

and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. " --Ursula K. Le Guin

Dear Fellow Writers of the Weird:

As I'm sure you know, we lost a great this week. The passing of Ursula K. Le Guin has been on my mind, not only because the internet has responded with so many fantastic tributes, but because of my own current writing struggles. 

Le Guin was committed to art which did not bow to consumerism, to art that was truly life-changing, to pushing forward for our art form and never backing down. I only re-discovered her work recently but I already feel sad that I won't ever get a chance to meet her.

I believe that as long as you are writing towards freedom, hope, envisioning a better future, questioning the darkest timeline we seem to have gotten ourselves into, those good things will win out. And that's only possible when we work together--when we support our friends and the work we love, when we are willing to be critical of that which needs changing, when we ask the hard questions and aren't afraid to create work that isn't meant to fill some quota.

What about you? What standards do you need to break out of? How can your work change the world?

- Holly 

Submission Calls

Theme: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. SFF. Open to writers who identify as disabled. Fiction 750-6k words. Poetry. Nonfiction 1k-2.5k. 

Other Upcoming Submission Windows: 

Need more submission ideas? Check the

newest markets,

, Duotrope's

,

, or Literary Mama's

.

YOU SHOULD BE WRITING

Prompt #1: Think back to a conversation you've had recently that impacted you. Think about the exact words used, the intonation, the setting. Write down as much as you can remember about that conversation. Go back and add dialogue tags. Imagine this conversation in a fictional scene. What are the characters doing while they talk? 

Bonus Round: Make a story or poem out of the conversation. Look back at the character's actions during their dialogue. Try to give them something strange and unusual to do while they talk. 

Prompt #2: Go to one of your favorite works of fiction and find a piece of writing that describes scenery. Write that paragraph down by hand or retype it. Pay attention to word choice and how that impacts the larger story. Then, take some of your favorite words or emotions that you think the passage is conveying and use those to start an entirely new piece. (This works well for poetry too.) 

Example from Shirley Jackson's

The Haunting of Hill House: 

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

Bonus Round: Go back to that original passage and rewrite it entirely in opposites. If you were rewriting the above passage for example, you'd want to make the tone lighter, the house less creepy, as an example. Now see where your opposite practice takes you.

Prompt #3: Write about a tiny detail. It could be an object, like a button or a watch. It might be an emotion and how that emotion is expressed in someone's body language. It could be a piece of the landscape. Write a paragraph of luscious description of that tiny thing. Give it backstory, emotion, feeling, smell, touch, and other sensory details. 

Bonus Round: Write a story or poem in which the tiny detail you wrote about above goes missing. How do you get it back?

Editing tip of the month: Writers are always being told to cut, cut, cut. For once, I'm going to let you do the opposite. Take a piece that needs revision and set it side by side with your notebook or open Word Doc. Start rewriting the story, then close/move the other version where you can't see it. Keep writing. Let yourself write until you run out of words. Sometimes writing new words is just as powerful as revising the old. I find that when I do this, I often come back to key phrases or events in a story. Those are the ones I know need to stay in the final version.

Inspiration from the Ether

➳ Craft Article of the Month: Ursula K. Le Guin accepts NBA Book Award in 2014. ➳

☢ Weird Inspiration from the Real World: The Future of Zero-Gravity Living Is Here ☢

News From Your Corporeal Host

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