Weird Circular #49 August

The August Weird Circular

August 04, 2021

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

Welcome to the Weird Circular

Dear Weirdos,

I have a lot of thoughts today so bear with me ;) As we face down a surge in Covid here in Houston, I've been thinking about my creative practice and what fulfills me. Y'all know I have my fingers in a lot of pies. And damn, I love me some writing pie. Especially the strawberry-rhubarb-poetry variety. But this means I often feel stretched thin. 

My freelance editing work has really taken off this summer. I've managed to have one paying client per week for the last few months. That's huge. I have also been busy promoting my new book,

now available for pre-order at CLASH Books. I'm sure you've heard it elsewhere, but promoting a book in a pandemic is pretty soul-sucking. 

I'm making some renovations over at my website. One thing I'm thinking about is having a (private!) landing page for people who want to find all my resources in one place, from workshops to articles to videos and maybe even a forum. I write something like 5+ articles a month on writing over at Medium. I run workshops, I'm involved in my writing community, and I still have to find time to submit my work. I love all these things. The reality is, sometimes you have to pare down to what you love the most. I've gotten to the point in my writing career where I'm thinking about my brand and what I want it to be. So you may see some changes coming, hopefully, ones that you like. 

For now, I'd love to hear from YOU. This newsletter has been my most successful project as far as getting in touch with folks goes. So what would you like to see come from it? What are you craving from your writing that isn't being fulfilled? How can I help you break free? Hit that "reply" button and let me know. 

Your corporeal host,

Holly 

Submission Calls

Upcoming Submission Windows:

August

  • Ecotone, deadline 8/20-8/25: Theme: BIPOC Writers, no fee. Prose (up to 10k words), Poetry (3-5 poems). Pay not listed. 

  • Apparition Literary Mag, deadline 8/15-8/31: Theme: Wonder. Short fiction (under 1k words). Pays $.03/word. 

  • The Museum of Americana, deadline 8/31: Theme: My Americana. Prioritizing writers of color. No payment. 

September

  • The Fiddlehead, deadline 9/1: Theme: BIPOC living in Canada. Fiction (up to 6k words), Poetry (up to 6 poems), CNF (up to 6k words). Pays 60 CAD per page.

  • Indianapolis Review, deadline 9/1: Theme: Humor. Poetry (up to 5 poems). No payment.  

  • Uncanny Magazine, deadline 9/1: Open to short stories (up to 6k words). Pays $.10/word.

  • Eye to the Telescope, deadline 9/15: Theme: The Sea. Edited by Akua Lezli Hope. Specpo (up to 3 poems). Pays $.03/word. 

  • Chicken Soup for the Soul, deadlines vary, multiple themes in September: Creative nonfiction (1200 words or less). Pays $200. 

  • Black Coffee Vinyl, deadline 9/30: Theme: The City. Nonfiction and Fiction (up to 2k words), Poetry (up to 3 poems).

  • Hecate, deadline 9/30: Poetry (up to 3 poems), Prose & CNF (up to 1,500 words). No payment. 

Need more submission ideas? Check the

newest markets, Duotrope's

,

, SFPA's

, or Literary Mama's

.

Pre-order my book of bones!

A haunting ossuary of tiny poems covering a wide range of topics such as love, romance, relationships, queer sexuality, religion, death, demons, ghosts, bones, gender, and darkness.

The Smallest of Bones

guides those on an intimate journey of body acceptance, with sparse words dedicated to peeling back skin and diving bone-deep into the self. Raw, honest, and powerful, this collection is an offering to those struggling to find power in the darkness.

YOU SHOULD BE WRITING

Exercise: This is an exercise from my revisioning poetry class. Take a poem you've written and find a way to read it with new eyes. The goal here is to imagine how the poem might read to someone else. You might put yourself in the shoes of an editor finding your poem in the slush pile or of a reader picking up a book on the shelf and finding your poem on the first page. There are a few techniques you might try to achieve this distance:  Read your poem out loud and record yourself. Listen back to the recording. How does the poem sound? What places did you trip over while reading? Use a voice-reader app like Voice Dream or another text-to-speech program. This is useful because the "robotic" voices often don't sound human, so they don't mimic human speech patterns and you may hear the poem differently.  Ask a friend or family member to read the poem to you.  Re-type the poem out or rewrite it by hand. Allow yourself to revise as you go.  "Doodle" your poem into images. What comes to mind? Henry David Thoreau said, "the art of life, of a poet's life, is not having anything to do." Give yourself an hour in the morning to do nothing but sit and think. Go for a walk with a notebook, sit and look out your window, experience the life around you. Don't do the dishes or get on Twitter. Just do nothing. If nothing comes to you, the worst you've done is spent an hour with your thoughts. 

Bonus Round:

 Extra points if the poem no longer resembles the original in any shape or form. 

Exercise: Write a piece that personifies death. 

Bonus Round:

 What is death's favorite food?

Exercise:

 Here's a meditational writing exercise. Put your headphones on and turn on some writing music, preferably ambient music (there's a link to one below in the writing music of the month.) Write for five minutes. Don't worry about what you're writing or why. Don't worry about genre or word choice. Just write. 

Bonus Round

: Look at what you've written and think about how it felt to write. Did you feel angry, frustrated, sad, free? Why? Spend some time journaling about why you love writing. Is it the fun of being published, or the act of being creative that fuels you? How can you love your writing and let yourself write more freely?

Editing tip of the month: I have an article up about how to self-edit like a professional editor. It talks about the three types of editing I do on manuscripts and how you can use that in your own work. Here's a free friend link. 

Inspiration from the Ether

News From Your Corporeal Host

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