Weird Circular #3 December

Weird Circular #3 December

December 01, 2016

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

Welcome to the Weird Circular

Dear Fellow Writers of the Weird:

Thanks for sticking with your writing. It's been a rough month, and I know many of you weathered November while writing for NaNoWriMo, novel deadlines, and other goals. I just want to say: I see you, writers, working to make the world a place of light. We need your voice. 

And now, liftoff. 

~Holly

December Submission Calls

Eye to the Telescope, Deadline Dec. 15th: Theme: Robots. Robots and computers have served to make our lives both infinitely easier and infinitely more complex. They are created by humans, and yet they mystify us. We can’t quite decide whether we should classify robots alongside shards of amethyst silent underground, twisting vines of morning glory climbing toward the sun, mosquitoes buzzing in search of blood, or researchers interpreting their experimental data. Maybe they belong in a category of their own.     For this issue of Eye to the Telescope, it is your opportunity to tell everyone about your hopes or fears about life among machines. Let us place your poetry here, to be faithfully communicated to the world through humanity's largest electronic undertaking so far, the internet. Tell us: where are we going, where have we been?

Newfound, Deadline Dec. 21st: Theme: Other Worlds     Our spring issue will explore “other worlds.” This can mean work that represents exploration and discovery, “the alien/other” or otherness, foreign spaces and their remains, and/or activities of those living in such environments. Other Worlds can also mean states of mind or transformative conditions.

Other Upcoming Submission Windows: 

Need more submission ideas? Check the

newest markets, Duotrope's

, Literary Mama's

, or

.  But don't forget to submit!

YOU SHOULD BE WRITING

Prompt #1: This prompt is borrowed from Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft. If you're looking for a great prompt book, I highly recommend this one. Here's the exercise: Write a paragraph or page of text entirely without punctuation. No periods, commas, dashes or other interruptions. See where the unfettered text takes you. (I've found this is easier to do on the handwritten page, if that helps.) Bonus Round: Make your experiment into a poem. 

Prompt #2: Go to your bookshelf or Kindle. Find your favorite book, the one that you read over and over again. Find the most luscious, most beautiful, most difficult, most memorable passage you can in the book. Then, copy that passage by hand or by typing (by hand usually works better). Pay careful attention to voice, style, and mood. Jot down a few notes about why you love this writer. Bonus Round: Write 1-2 pages of a story/poem/whatever copying the writer's style and voice, but put a spin on it to make it yours. Change the content or the characters, or perhaps flip the genre. 

Prompt #3:

 a. Make a list of winter things: Snow, ice skating, holidays, pumpkin spice latte. b. Make a list of foods, but be as specific as possible: Raspberry Lemon Tarts, Sweetpotato Pie, Leek and Onion Soup. c. Make a list of places you've never been. d. Try to combine 1 item from each list into a story, poem, or essay. 

Bonus Round:

 e. Make a list of words you've never heard of using this

. Work 2-3 of these words into your piece. 

Editing tip of the month: Try retyping or rewriting your piece by hand. How does this make you feel about the piece? What do you notice about your style or voice? What bothers you, what do you like?

Inspiration from the Ether

☢ Weird Inspiration from the Real World A whale swims into the Hudson river  ☢

News From Your Corporeal Host

All quiet on the home front. I hope you have a safe and lovely holiday season. I have good news: 2016 is almost over, friends. I have hope that 2017 will be better. Keep making beautiful things. I want to read them. 

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