How to Find Out What Editors of Online Journals Like

I love the Million Writers Award for many reasons, but one great reason to pay attention to the nominations might not be obvious to all. Over at this page, the editors of dozens of online journals have posted links to what they believe to be the three best stories they published in 2009. You can’t buy a resource that good. Not only is it a great place to find out about online journals and see if you like what they publish, you can get a pretty good sense of what the editors are looking for and what they’re proud of.

I also find it interesting to gain insights into related magazines. Some writers have been nominated by several different editors. So, if you like the work of X writer and think yours is similar, this might give some clues as to where you should be sending your own writing.

Jason Sanford says this year there have been more nominations than ever before. My observation is that there are everything from very obscure niche publications (Stymie, a magazine that until recently was devoted entirely to literary stories about golf) to professional speculative fiction markets such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Every writer should have the page I linked above bookmarked.

Million Writers Award Winners Announced

Jason Sanford has announced the winners of the Million Writers Award:

1. First place (winner of $500): “The Fisherman’s Wife” by Jenny Williams (LitNImage)
2. Runner-up (winner of $200): “Fuckbuddy” by Roderic Crooks (Eyeshot)
3. Honorable mention (winner of $100): “No Bullets in the House” by Geronimo Madrid (Drunken Boat)

Congratulations to all!

He also kindly links here, which I appreciate. If you’re looking for my posts on the Million Writers Award finalists, here’s a list of finalists, followed by related posts:

• “The Whale Hunter” by Steinur Bell (Agni) – Stories Within Stories
• “Intertropical Convergence Zone” by Nadia Bulkin (ChiZine) – Making a New Myth
• “No Bullets in the House” by Geronimo Madrid (Drunken Boat) – Distance
• “Fuckbuddy” by Roderic Crooks (Eyeshot) – Second Person, Second Post
• “The Fisherman’s Wife” by Jenny Williams (LitNImage) – The Selkie’s Story v The Writer’s Story
• “Every Earth is Fit for Burial” by Cyn Kitchen (Menda City Review) – Fathers
• “Interview With A Moron” by Elizabeth Stuckey-French (Narrative Magazine) – Breaking Out of the Form
• “The Tale of Junko and Sayuri” by Peter S. Beagle (OSC’s Intergalactic Medicine Show) – The Pleasure of a Classic Tale
• “Grief Mongers” by Sefi Atta (Per Contra Fiction) – Excerpt to a Great Ending
• “Nine Sundays in a Row” by Kris Dikeman (Strange Horizons) – Nine Sundays, Ten Stories

If you still want more, you can check out:

And Now the Moment of Truth, Million Writers Finalists Posted, No More Teasing (which contains my nominees), Fantasy Magazine, Atomjack!, Million Writers Award Notable Stories. For a summary of last year’s results, see Congratulations to Matt Bell.

You can find even more from last year by typing “Million Writers Award” into the search box.

And Now the Moment of Truth

I’ve posted on all 10 finalists for the Million Writers Award, and now I have to decide how to cast my vote. Last year, I knew I would vote for Matt Bell’s story as soon as I read it. This year, it’s a much harder decision. From Jason Sanford’s blog, I know which stories were in the lead as of a few days ago, and it’s hard not to let that influence me.

I’m torn between Geronimo Madrid’s “No Bullets in the House,” Cyn Kitchen’s “Every Earth is Fit for Burial,” and Peter S. Beagle’s “The Tale of Junko and Sayuri.”

The strangeness of the Million Writers Award is that I actually find it pretty hard to compare the Beagle story with the other two. I struggled with this a great deal when reading through nominees. How do you compare Westerns, for example, with contemporary fiction? I decided then that the final measure, in that case, is supremely subjective. Which story will I remember longer?

I’m going with “No Bullets in the House” because it’s stuck with me for days, but it’s a tough, tough choice. I admire Jason Sanford’s taste a great deal, and of course he’s chosen a great list of finalists. May the best one win. If you haven’t voted yet, do it now. The polls close at 11:59 p.m..

Congratulations to all the finalists, and I can’t wait to see which story wins.

Nine Sundays, Ten Stories

Kris Dikeman’s “Nine Sundays in a Row,” published in Strange Horizons, and the last of the finalists for the Million Writers Award, is another fresh take on a classic theme: the crossroads. Here’s the form that this crossroads myth takes:

If you wanta learn you somethin’, go on down to a place where two roads cross. Get there Saturday ’round midnight, and wait there ’til Sunday morning—do that for nine Sundays, all in a row. The dark man, he’ll send his dog to watch on you while you wait. And on the ninth morning, the dark man will meet you. And he will learn you—anything you wanta learn. But you remember this: that dark man, he don’t work for free.

The narrator is the dark man’s dog, speaking as he watches a girl come Sunday after Sunday. At first, he doesn’t think much of her, but he’s true to the archetype of dog, and soon he is loyal to her–more loyal than she is to herself.

I think what really makes this story work is the voice, and the way the story stays absolutely rooted in its point of view. The dog’s not cutesy, and, while he does fit the traditional concept of dog, he’s not stereotypical. Dikeman uses just a touch of vernacular. This is so hard to get right, but I’d say she pulls it off. The dog’s diction comes through in a “mebbe” here and the way a contraction is used there.

The other characters all have stories of their own–the dark man, of course, and the girl, and the dog’s rival, Red Rooster. Dikeman doesn’t try to take any of that on. She just lets these other stories hover there, just visible at the edges of the dog’s perception. This is the dog’s story, the story of how it is brave, heroic, and loyal, but that story serves as a glass through which many other stories can be glimpsed. This viewpoint is what makes the crossroads story feel so fresh–that and the very specific sense of the dark man that the story creates.

Excerpt to a Great Ending

I regret that as the hours run out on the voting period for the Million Writers Award, my posts become more perfunctory. Acknowledging that, I’ll continue.

Sefi Atta’s “Grief Mongers” was published in Per Contra, and is an excerpt from a novel, Swallow. I often feel that novel excerpts don’t work well as stories–too much is left out, and it’s hard to get the feeling of a natural story arc. “Grief Mongers” is an exception. The story is tightly focused on one idea: People are in many ways more comfortable with disaster than anything else, and will in some cases even manufacture it.

The story centers around the death of a small boy named Ayo, who has apparently fallen into a septic tank and drowned. The narrator is invited to participate in the wild scene of mourning and spectatorship, but is disgusted by it:

I was tired of these people, a birth, a death, they were there, ready to bear witness. They did not know the difference. They were grief mongers. The women who held Mrs. Durojaiye, why did they have to do that, hold her down and beg her to be strong? As she stumbled around the corner, dribbling from the mouth, the one thought I had was, Let her go. What was the sense in holding her?

The story makes a sharp point, but not in a pedantic way, and the ending is satisfying. It completes the plot, reveals a new truth about the setting and the people in it, and shifts the narrator significantly from the detached position she held at the beginning of the story. I’m impressed to find such a good ending at the end of an excerpt.

Even as this is the end of this smaller story, I can see that it doesn’t tie up too much–this moment wouldn’t drag a novel to a halt. It’s interesting to me to wonder about the difference there. How can a moment feel so clearly like the end of a short work without stopping the reader in a longer work?

I know that when I’m reading a novel that’s really good, I often experience it as a series of searing scenes. Each climaxes and leaves me stunned or shocked or satisfied, but each also drags me forward through the larger narrative. Each scene must have a true ending to point home to what has happened within that flash of story, but I’d always thought this felt significantly different from the ending to a short story.

Sometime, I’d like to take a look at Swallow to see how Atta’s larger work reads.

The Pleasure of a Classic Tale

Peter S. Beagle is an author wound deep into the fabric of my childhood. I’ll never forget the revelation of The Last Unicorn. He had a story on the finalist list for the Million Writers Award last year as well. This year’s story, “The Tale of Junko and Sayuri,” published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, is a twist on the trope of the animal wife.

To speak of the story on its own for a moment, it’s structured in the classic way of the fairy tale. Junko is the classic hero–a smart, handsome man of low birth who struggles with the glass ceiling he faces because of his class. As is the classic way, a beautiful woman is the vehicle for his ascension, in this case, an animal wife.

An animal wife story, however, is never one of contentment. The archetype, I believe, gets at the way lovers are always strangers to each other on some level. No matter how well two lovers know each other, and no matter how much two strive to be one, at some point two become two again. Sleep brings dreams that can’t be shared, and there are endless mysterious thoughts and glances that can never be opened to the other. To me, the animal wife story acknowledges this by having the woman take on other shapes, becoming an entirely different, and unknown, creature.

The ordinary story is of love and loss. The man can’t leave well enough alone and tries to claim the wife beyond what is possible, and so the wife slips away. Beagle, however, tells a different story. This is the tale of misguided ambition, and his animal wife takes on the role of Lady Macbeth. She reads his secret desires for murder and becomes the force of her husband’s id.

Beagle’s story is about the dangers of being understood, the dangers of the heart’s desire. It is about how the grace of love can conceal something much darker.

I’m talking about the story and its meaning and neglecting its lovely language. The story’s language functions to set a consistent scene, and to clue the reader to the archetypes in play. It then carefully guides the reader into the new territory that Beagle is exploring. A close analysis could do more by way of showing how this is done.

I found this story incredibly satisfying. It has a plot, it has emotional depth, it takes old, venerable archetypes and reveals something new about them. The ending is perfect. It’s great to be in the hands of a master.

I thought about “The Fisherman’s Wife” as I read this (I commented on that story here). The stories are in similar territory, doing quite different things. I prefer this more classic approach. It is easier, because the story can be read either lightly or deeply. I like stories that reward both sorts of reads.

I’ve scheduled several posts on the Million Writers Award today, since this is the last chance to vote.

Breaking Out of the Form

Most of Elizabeth Stuckey-French’s “Interview with a Moron” is written in the stiff voice of a school report. The narrator refers to himself as “Interviewer” and to his institutionalized brother as “Subject.” The tension within the narrator reveals itself in flashes as he breaks his clinical tone to say the things he can’t keep to himself:

She was asked why Subject stood in the hole but said she did not know. When asked if he had dug the hole himself, she said she did not know. When asked how long he’d been doing this, her reply was the same.

Sister should know more than she claims to know.

As the story goes on, the breaks become more and more obvious, until “Interviewer” and “Subject” have a physical altercation in the hole where “Subject” likes to stand:

Subject, not seeming to appreciate or comprehend what he had just been told, asked again why Interviewer had not brought Mother and Father with him.

Interviewer inquired as to why he alone was not sufficient.

Subject said it was because Interviewer was a vile and wicked serpent.

Interviewer reminded Subject that he was the one who had just been crawling around in a filthy hole like a reptile.

Subject reached out and placed his hand on Interviewer’s shoulder, stating that even though Interviewer was a silly, stupid, stubborn man, he pitied Interviewer.

Interviewer knocked Subject’s hand away and said that the only reason he had come to see Subject was because he had been assigned by a professor to interview a moron.

Subject shoved Interviewer.

Interviewer shoved back.

The Interviewer concludes that it’s impossible to reason with a moron, at the end of the clinical report. Thankfully, this is not the end of the story.

The end of the story is written in an entirely different voice, the narrator’s natural voice, and his attitude toward his brother in these final paragraphs is much more tender. There is still the pedantic tone of the Interviewer, however, which is what ties the story’s two voices together:

But with Richard there is never an end to the matter. Against all my counsel, Richard went downtown, distracted the organ-grinder, snatched the monkey, and ran away. He brought the little monkey, whom we named Willie, back to our house in a shoebox. We attempted to hide Willie in Richard’s room, but the creature escaped and Mother caught him pulling the tail feathers out of her stuffed cockatoo. It was an extremely unpleasant day at the Lee house.

This more natural voice, though still taking a superior attitude, is able, at the story’s true end, to finally reveal “Interviewer’s” feelings about “Subject.” Though things happen in the story that might suggest an action plot–the fight–I’d say the real plot lies in the contortions it takes for Interviewer to admit that he sees his brother as a human.

The story was published in Narrative Magazine, and is one of the finalists for the Million Writers Award. Voting ends today.

Fathers

I’m really impressed with Cyn Kitchen’s “Every Earth is Fit for Burial,” another finalist for the Million Writers Award, this one published in Menda City Review. I’ve been noticing recently that I’ve tended to go on a fair bit about the things in stories that aren’t working for me, and have had less to say about what is working for me. It’s hard to know what to write about “Every Earth is Fit for Burial,” because every part of it works for me so well.

This is a story about a family, particularly focused on the father, and I like the way Kitchen weaves in details that reveal the kind of man he is (abusive) without resorting to cliche:

The main thing is he can’t run. Mama said he used to be quick and wiry when he played football in high school. These days he only runs when he absolutely has to and then it’s a clumsy skip-hop that makes me want to giggle at the wrong time – say if he’s trying to run down Mama when she’s driving off in the middle of an argument. Mama says if she could have practiced being married to him for twenty-four hours, she would have found something else to do with her life.

The narrator is the daughter, Sophia Jean, and the meandering of paragraphs like this give a clear sense of her chatty, childish voice and tendency to repeat bits of information overheard from adults, while also revealing key details about the family that Kitchen is writing about.

Most of the narrative thread follows how Sophia’s father starts going to church after having a spiritual experience in the midst of the storm, and what she and her mother hope will happen:

Daddy laid there, his hands shaking. I started to cry. Never in a million years did I think this day would come. Sure, I’d prayed for it, but I’m not sure I believed it would really happen. Right then I began to wonder about the future. About tomorrow and the day after that, but I wondered more about next month and next year. I wondered if Daddy would change into somebody like Lola Sullivan’s Daddy, who always had butterscotch candy in his pocket that he handed out with a hug to whoever wanted one – even if they stunk and nobody else wanted to be near them. Or, maybe God had a call on Daddy’s life, and we’d have to buy a touring bus because we discovered we could all sing like the Happy Goodmans, and that Daddy could preach and people would get saved, and we’d wear nice clothes, and people would tell us what a blessing we were in their lives. Away from the spotlight, with just the three of us traveling to the next city, I could imagine sitting next to Daddy with a map unfolded in my lap. He would stay off the main drag choosing two-lane country roads for our route because the scenery was more interesting. We would stop to eat at roadside diners, and he would call me his little sidekick. I was excited about whatever was going to change in Daddy and whatever was going to change in our lives. I was ready for us to be a family, and this was the perfect beginning.

Of course, the conversion doesn’t stick in the way Sophia or her mother hoped at all. Kitchen, to her credit, resist ending with some dramatic scene that proves that the father is a bastard. Instead, the final scene is lovely and subtle. Sophia’s father gives up on church, but Sophia, unlike her mother, doesn’t think this means he has given up on God. In a special treat, he takes her for a ride in his truck, and they end up visiting the cemetery where her lost leg is buried.

In a masterful touch, the scene echoes a story of town history that Kitchen introduced at the beginning. That bit of information, about a child saint with a lost arm, had seemed like a throwaway paragraph to me at first–some random bit of scene-setting. Instead, it turns out to be a clue to the true spiritual thread running through the story. The bluster and drama about church and baptism and tent revivals turns out to be a distraction from the true beating heart of divine revelation.

I love the subtlety of this story’s final lines. I love that Kitchen portrays the father as the difficult, angry man he is, and yet also perfectly conveys the love, admiration, worship, and worry that Sophia has for her Daddy.

As I’ve said before, a story that works at developing its own specificity takes me back to similar incidents in my own life, which I remember with their own specificity. In my case, the special car trip with Dad was to buy chocolate soda at some rural convenience store in the backwoods of Oahu. The trip to the cemetery was to visit the grave of his own father, not of his buried leg. But I remember the moments of solemnity that gave being alone with Dad a sense of heightened importance. These memories sit beneath my reading of the story, giving it greater depth and greater meaning for me.

There’s not much time left to choose which story to vote for–the deadline is June 17.

The Selkie’s Story v The Writer’s Story

I’ll be honest. I remember reading Jenny Williams’ “The Fisherman’s Wife,” published in LitnImage, during the nomination period for the Million Writers Award, and I didn’t like it much. It’s an unfortunate truth that more accessible stories have an advantage, even though less accessible stories sometimes give a large reward for careful scrutiny. I believe it’s important to work at reading literature, but I don’t always have the energy for it, and “The Fisherman’s Wife” needed more energy than I had at the time.

I still find this story difficult, and I’m going to lay out why. As a note, I generally only write on stories that I think are good. Even if I’m critical of them, their quality is what makes them worth dissecting. It makes no sense to kick a story when it’s down, so to speak. In this case, I’m trusting that all 10 finalists are really good stories. Explaining my difficulties with this one, though, touches on a longstanding confusion I’ve had about certain types of stories.

There are two stories in “The Fisherman’s Wife.” One is the story of the writer’s relationship with the main character:

It shouldn’t be this hard to tell a story, but the characters keep getting in the way. Stella wants to be twenty, then eighty, then twenty again, and she refuses to answer when I ask where she was born. I try to write and she slams a book over my hands.

The second is the story of a selkie married to a human man:

Because if this story was ever about anything else, it was about an old Scottish legend that goes something like this:

Selkies were mythical sea creatures in the shape of a seal. The females could shed their sealskins and come ashore as beautiful women; if you managed to successfully capture a Selkie woman’s pelt, she would stay in human form and be an obedient, if melancholy, wife.

However, if she ever found her skin, she would leave her husband and children, and return to the sea.

According to legend, she always found her skin.

Now, my first problem is that I’m more interested in the story about the selkie, and I’m disappointed when I find out that this is, perhaps, what the story used to be about. My second problem is that I have trouble accepting the writer’s story, which the story is now about, as fiction. The “I” narrator fools me. The fact that it’s about a writer fools me. Why does this matter?

If the story is nonfiction, then this is the story of how a writer gave up on the deeper story that was trying to emerge:

You see, when I started thinking about Stella, she was indeed twenty years old, a fisherman’s brand new Selkie wife. All I wanted was to understand her. I wanted to follow her through the years of her marriage, to the point that she found her skin and went back to the sea, and ask if she would know the meaning of regret. And what of the years between: did she know her fate? Did she miss the sea? Or simply yearn for something better?

The frame story, of the writer and the character, seems like a copout, an admission of failure to fulfill the promise of the paragraph I just quoted. I suppose one possibility is that the story that was actually written is better at answering these questions than a traditional story would have been. I’m skeptical of that. I have given up on stories this way before. I couldn’t cut it as a writer for the school newspaper because, the first time the administration stonewalled me on something, I gave up and wrote a humorous column about how the administration had stonewalled me. I told that story because I didn’t have the drive to tell the story I wanted to tell. The idea that the writer gave up on her deeper story to tell the story of craft disturbs me and disappoints me.

So I have to set this feeling aside to read this story. Instead of believing that the story is nonfiction, I have to believe that it’s fiction. The difference is that, if this story is fiction, the writer thought about what to write, and decided that she wanted to explore the relationship between a writer and a character. That would be the goal, then, and this story was then designed and structured to reveal that to the greatest extent possible.

It’s hard for me to maintain this faith in the story’s fiction, since the “I” voice fools me so much. If I try, then I have to believe that the author made the character a selkie for a reason. A selkie is a slippery, magical beast that’s hard to hold. It can be tamed temporarily, but it’s certain to slip away. If this character is a selkie, then all characters are selkies in some way. All of them are “obedient, if melancholy” in the grip of the writer, and all of them are waiting for the moment when they can find their skin and slip away.

In their selkie selves, they are fluid. They don’t need to be pinned down. They don’t have to make sense or be consistent. This is their preferred state. When a writer catches a selkie-character’s skin, the writer forces the selkie into domesticated existence, making demands, such as wanting to know where the character was born.

This is the final section of Williams’ story:

Tonight I will dream of being a seal—muscles solid and lean, sinewy and taut in the beats of swimming. I dart back and forth in great zigzags through the water, cutting lines across the shallow ocean floor with my shadow, clean and new and bold.

As the waves close overhead, I might take one last look at the shore, white and gleaming. But I have no need for that now, no need for air. The sand falls away beneath me and the abyss is near. With wet eyes and seamless skin, I let myself slip, slip away into that great deep blue.

The story begins now.

The “I” voice so far has been the writer, but now the writer and the character have merged.

To trace the writer’s story, then, the writer begins by capturing the selkie and wrestling with it, domesticating it. The selkie eventually gets away and steals her skin, ready to return to the unconscious from which she came. The writer has been fighting this, but finally she gives in. When she does, however, she finds that she goes with the selkie, into the greater, more fluid story that exists outside the world of human domestication. She becomes one with the character.

To return for a moment to the more traditional story wrapped inside, it’s interesting to think that the selkie’s husband might be bound to the selkie in this way. In other words, that when the selkie escapes him, she frees him somehow in addition to freeing herself.

One other puzzling piece: In the beginning, Williams tells us the following about the story to come:

It also begins in a bathroom, in a state of slow epiphany.

It also ends in a suicide.

I’m not sure what’s meant to be the suicide. Is it the writer, as she slips into the character, or vice versa? Perhaps another explanation is that the selkie-character actually can’t find her skin, and so can’t get away. After her suicide, the writer can take the skin herself, or the husband can, becoming a selkie in turn.

That’s my best effort to take the story as a story. I’ve been pushing myself lately to keep reading difficult stories and see what I can find in them, and I often feel rewarded for this. If I’m on the right track about what’s in the story, I see how it’s good, and it’s certainly well constructed. Despite the respect I have, however, I’d still prefer to read the selkie story, the one that isn’t told.

Second Person, Second Post

Roderic Crooks’ “Fuckbuddy,” a finalist for the Million Writers Award published in Eyeshot, was on my own short list when I read nominees. The basic story is of the main character’s regret at how he treated an old lover, and the combination of manipulation and tenderness that seems poised to rekindle the romance. What works for me is that it’s sincere and heartfelt without being sappy, and the characters are all fully realized.

The story’s written in second person, and I think it’s a great example of the second person confessional tone I’ve written about in the past:

It’s more of the “you” that substitutes for an “I” in certain types of conversations. It’s used for statements like: “You know how sometimes you’re just angry at people who don’t deserve it.” But what I really mean is, “Sometimes, I’m mad at you when you don’t deserve it, and I’m sorry, but too afraid to say so.” It is a “you” that signifies a frightened “I,” and so contains a plea for identification, an upfront assumption that you and I participate in exactly the same sins.

The tense in this story calls upon the reader to identify, to admit that she, too, has treated lovers that way, or has considered it, or could see herself doing the same:

When he finally worked up the nerve to ask if he was your boyfriend or not, you had already prepared a little speech. You told him you weren’t ready and that it was you, your problem, but you didn’t mean it. Really, after you tallied up his pros and cons, you just figured you could do better. It thrilled you to see the disappointment on his face, the recognition that he had been nothing but a form of entertainment, a hobby you took up and were ready to put down. You don’t even remember when he stopped coming around.

I do connect to this. The story nails the description of the sick feeling that comes weeks or months later, once it’s clear it was a mistake to spurn the lover this way. I have no trouble connecting with the second person narrator in this paragraph and many others like it. I did notice, however, that the first line throws me every time I read it:

Pretend it’s late in March, 2002. And you’re gay.

I understand that the story is about gay men, and that the tense is asking me to pretend this way. Making it explicit didn’t work for me, though. Calling me “you” slides me right into this state of pretending. This first line, on the other hand, serves to emphasize to me that it’s not 2002, and I’m not a gay man. I think this emphasizes the pitfall of the second person tense–if the reader is somehow made to feel that “you” doesn’t apply to her, there’s trouble.

I have a story, as yet unpublished, written in second person, that starts with the line:

The night you almost divorced your husband, you slipped out of bed while he slept and walked down the street to make phone calls.

Along with a rejection slip, I received a comment from an editor saying that he was a man, didn’t have a husband, and was thrown by the second person. This story, which is about an incident that makes the narrator feel ashamed, was my attempt to hit the second person confessional. Up front, however, I’ve told half the population that the story isn’t actually about “you.”

How do stories like Laura Madeline Wiseman’s “How to Measure Your Breast Size” pull it off (when she’s clearly speaking to half the population herself)? Not sure.

The first time I read “Fuckbuddy,” the story that followed the first couple of paragraphs was a pleasant surprise, and I’m glad I kept reading. I think the second person walks a very fine line, however, between inviting the reader in and alienating her.

P.S. I’m trying to get reviews posted on all the Million Writers Award finalists before voting ends, which is coming up very soon. My Thoughtcrime Experiments series, which still isn’t done, is on hold for the moment because of the deadline on the Million Writers Award. I may post a few “bonus” reviews in order to get through everything in time.