Flutterings

Paying market - NonBinary Review - due by 1 November:

https://nonbinaryreview.submittable.com/submit/54457

Prose, poetry, visual art...

(h/t @chidorme on Twitter, who was retweeting @celestechan2020)

Highlights of week so far: lunch with xochiquetzl; drinks and dinner with Mike and Mary; notes from assorted friends; the latest episodes in geri_chan's Unmasked

Downsides: much swearing at Microsoft; current project kicking my butt enough that I've had to punt tennis, correspondence, and getting together with other friends. Also feeling worried-helpless about some of those friends.

Signal boost: Blizzard's Global Writing Contest: "The company is accepting 2,500 to 7,500-word pieces of fiction set in the Diablo, StarCraft or WarCraft universes until August 23, 2010."

Recent publications (all very short):

"Hazy on the Details," a PicFic

"By the waters..." at microcosms

"A Study in Setting" (text and audio) at qarrtsiluni

"free from school..." at tinywords

The Penny Experiment is seeking artists. The gist: create a postcard-sized piece of art featuring a penny and a number assigned to you by the project organizer. Donate it to the project, which will in turn sell it and donate 100% of the proceeds to a food bank.

[The guy organizing the project is also the dude who blogs about Hello Kitty Hell, which I happened to look at tonight in the course of rooting around for information on Herman Van Rompuy, who is the new president of the European Union -- and has a blog at which he posts haiku as well as quotes from Rilke and other poets. There are translations of six of the haiku on Adriaan Jan's Twitter (dated November 20).

...The connection between Hello Kitty and haiku, you ask? You actually have to ask?

...Oh, and courtesy of some bored (or catwaxing) Dutch creatives, there's already a Haiku Herman hack. Lordie.]

From the August 2007 of O: The Oprah Magazine, page 156:

...In countless conversations I have had, someone has said something and I have had several responses at once, sometimes responses that were nonverbal, coming to me in confused masses of feeling, images, and half-formed thoughts that I could not refine into words until, say, sometime the next day. Anything I did say would feel partial to me and often sounded just plain dumb.

Writing is in some way being able to sit down the next day and go through everything you wanted to say, finding the right words, giving shape to the images, and linking them to feelings and thoughts. ... It's being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapated to its new environment. It is a deeply satisfying feeling.

- Mary Gaitskill

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Several other folks have linked to the call for the Tears of the Phoenix anthology already, but I thought I ought to highlight a few things here (mainly to nudge certain members of the friendslist who've been making noises about producing original work):

The anthology is seeking original poems, drabbles, flashfic, short stories, and art.

The prompts can be combined, and they do not have to be executed in full.

Also, those of you who dig iambic pentameter might should consider entering the Science Fiction Poetry Association sonnet contest.

(I'm not affiliated with either group. I am noodling around some things I'm hoping to finish in time to submit to 'em.)