Category Archives: Useful Links

Useful Link: I Should Be Writing

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So, things got suddenly quiet around here in the last week or so because I found myself surprised by a sudden onslaught of work and work related stress. It was a generally bad week for productivity on almost all writing related endeavors, but I’ll talk more about lessons learned from the experience in a post coming tomorrow or the next day to reflect on a month of having a blog about becoming a writer.

Today’s real purpose is a new addition to the useful links. Frankly, I feel a little weird writing a post about today’s link because I’m sure that most anyone coming by my little blog has probably been long aware of “I Should Be Writing” the blog and podcast of writer, editor and podcaster Mur Lafferty (twitter: @mightymur) for wanna-be writers.

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Useful Link: Slushpile Avalanche

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Looking for tips on writing? Looking for tips on writing short (and flash) fiction? Looking for tips on getting your fiction published? Today’s useful link has all of that.

A very recent discovery for me, I’ve been very impressed by what I’ve found at Slushpile Avalanche so far. Now before I go any further I should mention that Slushpile Avalanche appears to be a dead or nearly-dead blog. According to Google Reader the last post was from January of this year and there was only one post in all of 2011. It’s also not a very big site; the site’s front page blog archive lists 37 posts in 2010. So, there are only 39 posts all told in the blog and not all of them may contain writing and publishing advice.

HOWEVER, with all those caveats out of the way I can say that what I’ve read over there so far has been very interesting.

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Some Inspiration

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So I did a crazy thing a day or so ago. I took this story I’d been working on and actually submitted it to a magazine for consideration. To tie in with this rash act I’ve added a new bit to the sidebar where I’m going to keep track of how many short stories I’ve sent out to publishers, how many times my submissions have been rejected and how many times they’ve been accepted. At the time of this post the count is a very tiny 1-0-0.

I have to tell you that if you’re a writer who has never tried to get any short fiction published you should really work something up that you think is of a quality worthy of submission and try it out. Pushing the send button on my submission was like suddenly being hit by a few shots of tequila. I was quite giddy and the adrenaline started pumping. Like any good adrenaline high this was a whole lot of excitement and fear all mixed up together. Now I sit and wait for the yea or nay. Luckily I don’t have to wait long because the magazine I submitted to seems to get through their submissions very quickly.

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