Autumn Again
By: Stevie Adler
Tags: Reading, Pentina, Centina, Blog, Writing

Photo by Valiphotos from Pexels

BLOG

Autumn Again

Blog: September 2020: Fall/Autumn Again

Here in the UK we went from sleeping with no covers at night to shivering and thinking about turning the heat on in just one day! How can that be? I’m freezing! Tomorrow I will be putting a T-shirt on under my rugby shirt. I’m sure it won’t be long before I step inside another layer, in the form of a pullover (sweater in US). Perhaps I need to be more active? Or at least move more?

Competitions

Another Furious Fiction writing contest is on the way this weekend, and the Weird Christmas Flash Fiction Contest is still taking entries.

Medium

There have been a few writers leaving Medium because of the Terms and Conditions. SubStack seems to be a favoured place. I’m still evaluating (here) and Dascha Paylor has a newsletter at Fiction in 50. Good luck to all those that jumped ship.

New Publication

As one or two publications stand still or disappear from Medium other new ones rise up to fill the gaps. From 1st September The Friday Fix will not be taking any new stories, though the publication will continue to be available. Justin Deming is still around running weekly prompts over on Twitter at fix_friday.

There is a also a new publication Centina Pentina that publish 50-word and 100-word stories only. Let us wish the editors J.A. Taylor and Bill Adler every success. Read all about why they chose the name Centina and Pentina and look in on one of their weekly prompts.

Reading

I finished reading all the short stories in Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King. Some of the stories at the start of the anthology fair sparkled and were a joy to read, but some latter ones were not as good.

If they had been read as stand-alone stories they, probably, would have been perfectly adequate but because they followed some exceptional writing they felt flat.

I also finished another Chronicles of Narnia book, which was alright.

My local public library opened up again mid-August (finally) so I managed to get a couple of REALLY BIG books (both over 500 pages) so lots of reading in store. If you have a free public library near you can I urge you to use it more because if you don’t use it you will lose it permanently for future generations.

Writing

In August, I wrote only one new story but managed to edit, and improve, three or four 100-word stories. I’m going to have to call 100-word stories Centina and 50-word stories Pentina from now on. MUCH better than drib/drab (dribble/drabble) don’t you think?

Submitting

I’ve managed nine submissions this month, which is a bit of a record for me. Three rejections so far. I keep having to remind myself that the average for short story acceptance is 6%! One story WAS accepted and is due to appear mid-September, so a bit of good news.

But then “impostor syndrome” kicks in and you start to look for reasons why some of the five outstanding submissions are taking so long and you wonder if you input your email address correctly…and so it goes on, hopeful but unbelieving.

It’s still my plan to try to get published in journals and then reprint to Medium.

Pentina & Centina

You can’t have missed my criticism for tags dribble and drabble for 50-word and 100-word stories respectively. For short I’m going to refer to this old pair as drib/drab. Much better names are Pentina & Centina! I’ve re-tagged all my 50-word and 100-word stories on Medium already.

From now on I will be tracking numbers of stories tagged with Centina(4) and Pentina(14) in my listicle: Tags for the Fiction Writer. If you have any 50-word or 100-word stories please consider changing to use a new tag so they are accepted more quickly. Stop using those horrible drib/drab tags.

Mary Shelly and Letters

Mary Shelly was born on 30th August 1797 — It was all over Twitter a couple of days ago, see #MaryShelly. She is, of course, famous for writing Frankenstein and I read all about how it came about. A holiday full of rainy days and bored holidaymakers that challenged each other to make up and tell the scariest story. Read about the holiday here.

This got me thinking, not about challenging other writers but, that we only know a lot about this holiday because they were all great letter writers. It’s possible to read the story behind the story in the letter writing of the day.

This then got me thinking “Do I know any famous writers that will write to me some of their thought process possibly direct from the muse herself” (Is it wrong to assume all muses are female?) This isn’t altogether altruistic, perhaps I can hang onto their shirt-tails?

So, I don’t know any famous writers well enough, but I do know three or four writers that I feel are on the threshold . . . time to polish my letter writing skills . . .

Well that’s all for this month, stay safe