Freelance scribbler exploring worlds real and imagined
V. Castro 186 pages Creature Publishing (2022)
Read this if you like: Feminist horror, optimistic post-apocalypses, Aztec mythology and culture
tl;dr summary: Collection of short stories featuring powerful women fucking shit up in various ways and places.
I'm naturally inclined toward homebody-ness as it is, and this time of year that impulse gets extra hard to fight. Why go out in that cold, rainy, grayness when I could stay in the warm place with the cats? I was thinking about this in the context of Thanksgiving, that my plan was to stay home instead of making the drive to spend the day with my family, and how the definition of home has changed for me over the years. Back in college, “home for the holidays” meant returning to the point of origin. By this point, where I think of as home isn’t where I came from, but where I’ve built my own life.
Home has that same kind of loaded and complex history for characters, too. It lives a double life as both an abstract concept and a tangible location, and that gives it a lot of flexibility and power. So, to get a sense for that, here are five prompts that play with home in various ways.
Punctuation might not be the most interesting part of writing, but it's more important than I think many writers really acknowledge. It's what molds words into coherent thoughts, bringing structure that guides readers to the correct meaning. At the same time, it helps to shape the rhythm and pacing so readers to hear it in the right voice and cadence.
I've been doing a lot of proofreading and line editing work recently, which means that I've been thinking a lot about punctuation. Creative writing is trickier to proofread than articles or web copy because not everything is a hard-and-fast rule. There are some absolutes, sure, but other conventions are a matter of taste and style, which means a pass for correctness is more about consistency within the manuscript than it is following every line of a grammar guide to the letter. That said, something I've come to realize over my years of reading other people's fiction as an editor: punctuation usage is one of the clearest signs of a writer's maturity in their craft. Professional writers understand which rules are flexible, along with how, when, and why to bend them, and are intentional with every piece of punctuation they place in their prose.
I was looking through some of my older posts recently and realized there were a few submission lists that could probably use a refresh. Sure enough, when I looked through them I found some markets that have closed, and realized they were missing a few that I’ve discovered since writing them. So if there’s anyone out there with work looking for a home, here are some potentially useful lists:
…all three now up-to-date and accurate, at least for the next little while. I also figured, since I’m in researching markets mode, I’d round up a few others that folks can send their work to no matter when they stumble across this post. Here are some literary journals not featured on any of those lists above that generally stay open for submissions year-round and have been around for at least 10 years (which means the odds are good they’re not going anywhere anytime soon).
Catherine Gammon Braddock Avenue Books (2013) 296 pages
Read this if you like: voice-driven fiction, Carmen Maria Machado, Virginia Woolf
Tl;dr summary: A woman dies under mysterious circumstances in a New York apartment building—and then shit gets weird.
See the book on Braddock Avenue Books
This past weekend was the last multi-day conference on my agenda for 2025, the Lit Youngstown Fall Literary Festival. It was my first time attending this conference, as well as my first visit to Youngstown, and I was thoroughly impressed and delighted by both the event and the city. Similar to other events that I went to this year like the In Your Write Mind Conference, it featured a huge variety of panels that covered topics ranging from craft advice to marketing strategies for authors to how to get published. I presented a panel on tips for submitters, which is a topic I'm always happy to geek out about. What was extra cool was that I got to share the panel space with the team from Chestnut Review, another publication that I very much enjoy and respect, and it was very cool to hear how they approach the editorial process.
While I spent much of my conference time in the book fair representing Scribble House and After Happy Hour (and having some excellent conversations with the folks walking through, including a chance to geek out about Appalachian folklore and the ruins around Mérida), I was able to sneak away to hear a few other folks talk. My brain is mostly focused on the book publicity and marketing process at the moment, so that's what I focused on. I figured I'd pass along some of the things I learned in case it's also helpful insight for other folks out there!
Creative nonfiction is a relatively young genre. People have been writing true stories in a fun way for a while, as noted in an article on Creative Nonfiction that traces the genre's origins through Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and the New Journalism movement, all the way back to classical writers like Herodotus and Plutarch. But as far as the genre as it's understood and defined today, that really started in 1969, when editor Norman Podhoretz was said to have coined the term. That's not very long in literary movement terms, so it's understandable that a lot of people still seem to be a bit fuzzy on exactly what creative nonfiction is.
Partly this is because there are several types of writing included under the broader umbrella of creative nonfiction—and, making things more complicated, not everybody agrees exactly which should belong to the club. Most definitions exclude criticism and scholarly writings but there are gray areas when these are paired with a narrative, and there's an even blurrier line separating creative nonfiction from journalism.
Steven Sherrill 254 pages John F. Blair Publisher (2000)
Read this if you like: Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Haruki Murakami, Greek mythology
tl;dr summary: The Minotaur (yes, that Minotaur) works as a line cook and lives in a trailer in the American South.
I completely understand why writers might find the process of submitting overwhelming. It's not a lack of resources. I'd say it's the opposite problem. There are so many newsletters and online listings for finding publishers that it can be hard to even figure out where to start.
Currently, I’d say there’s three clear top publisher databases: Duotrope, Submission Grinder, and Chill Subs. All three have built-in submission trackers, which means they provide user-reported stats along with info on submission guidelines and other relevant details. I've used all of these sites at various points but I wouldn't say that any one of them is perfect, or even the definitive best option for every writer. Here are my thoughts on the pros and cons of each site and which situations, genres, or types of writers it's the best for.
My copywriting clients have split into two pretty defined camps when it comes to their stance on AI. Most of them explicitly do not want AI involved at any stage in the process (this is the largest group in part because this is the kind of stuff I prefer to write, so these are the clients I purposefully seek out). There are a few that take the opposite approach, though—where I'm either hired to edit AI-generated text and make it sound “human” or I'm given a topic and/or prompt and asked to create copy and refine it to make it publication-ready.
Because of this, I get a lot of first-hand experience with AI writing. I also regularly use AI checkers, and have found that they vary dramatically in the accuracy of their results. I would say that a well-honed human reader is going to be better at spotting AI text, because it definitely has a distinctive tone unless it's prompted very well. I've also noticed some specific phrasings, punctuation, and sentence structures that often come up in AI-generated content. All that said, the difficulty that AI checkers often have separating human from AI text is a sign of how tricky it can be to identify exactly what gives writing that AI vibe.