Big lit mag makes big submission change

We've just heard that Glimmer Train, one of the Cadillacs of the literary magazine world, has come around to the good sense we advise to short story writers. Submit simultaneously, to several publications at once. Life is too short to wait for a reading.

Glimmer Train is changing things to read more stories, a rare and positive move in the lit journal world. The publication is already the home to thick sheaf of contests, which now have tighter deadlines to free up your stories faster. You learn much sooner if you've won, or can move on.

Details on the submission changes are at the Glimmer Train Web site. There's also a nice little interview with award winning writer Roy Parvin, talking about place. Don't forget, the Glimmer Train folks publish a couple of Guides to Writing Fiction — Building Blocks and Inspiration and Discipline.

The magazine's Fiction Open closes December 31. $20 to submit, but they do good work for writers.

Contests open up, want your words

Writer's Digest is running a short story competition with a $3,000 prize. Deadline is Dec. 3, so polish up that story and get it out, along with your $12. Twenty-five winners in all. It's interesting to note that the First Prize winner also gets a FREE "Best Seller Publishing Package" from Trafford Publishing. It's an on-demand publishing deal, good for the writer who can't invest the $3,000 for 500 copies of a book.

By short stories they do mean very short. No more than 1,500 words. If you do the math, that's probably less than 10 pages. But if you've been in one of my Writer's Workshop evening sessions, you might have a good start on a story that's the right length.

Contests like this are a good spark to get your writing out there. Even chapters of a book, if they're written a la short story, make good entries.

Glimmer Train, a top-notch Cadillac of a literary journal, runs lots of contests. The Short Story for New Writers contest wraps up on Nov. 30. It's $15 an entry, which the founders remind us help to support the journal. (Really, if you haven't seen one of these, just check out the newsstand at Borders or Barnes & Noble.) Not easy to get in, but the New Writers contests give you an edge.

Glimmer Train will take up to 64,000 characters, something Word can report, for a Short Story. I like the journal a lot; it has a wide range of stories, and few that are as experimental as the ones in Zoetrope. The journal is run by the two sisters, Linda Swanson-Davies and Susan Burmeister-Davies. They've been at it for 17 years, a long time in the lit journal world. Submissions are online-only, too, because as they say, "we had to consider the strain on our backs after lifting postal bins full of stories all those years."

Gestures, or not?

I was surprised to learn today that Evan Marshall, a former agent who is now a writing coach, advises against using a lot of gesture in scenes.

Use Body Language Sparingly

New writers sprinkle their dialogue with a lot of gestures and mannerisms. Characters smile, grin, frown, shake their heads...

Most of the time the readers don't really care, unless the gesture or mannerism is important for conveying meaning. Keep body language to a minimum in your dialogue. Many aren't necessary because the words have already delivered the message.

Marshall, whose Marshall Plan for Novel Writing has a companion workbook, says that sometimes a gesture is useful to show us a pause.

"I couldn't leave Belinda. not after all she's done for me — medical school, raising our kids." Frank looked down at his cigarette, studied it a moment, then gave Susan a frank look. "I love you more than anything in the world, but I can't marry you."

Pencils down, and keyboards rise up

It's a very strange confluence of writer's energy we see this month. In a few days at most, 12,000 of the best writers for the screen, TV and movies, are going on strike. Pencils Down is their rally cry. It's been almost 20 years since the last prolonged strike by writers. All they want is another 4 cents of residual money for every DVD sold.

They won't be working by the start of the week. If you watch TV, you will lose your shows for awhile, maybe forever if it's a long strike. The talented stuff, the shows you want to watch because HBO can be the new novel, those are going on strike.

There's a wonderful, powerful discussion of the strike on the Web site of WGA writer John August.

At the same time, thousands more writers are picking up pens and lighting up keyboards in National Novel Writing Month. Their goal is to finish writing 50,000 words of a novel by the end of November. These are fledgling writers, for the most part, or some who are polished but just stuck and want to blow out the lead from their minds' engines.

I'm not sure if NaNoWriMo ever took place alongside a Writer's Guild strike. But it's strange times indeed. And if you are writing for print, take a little refuge that your business aspirations for your work don't require a union membership. Not yet, anyway, although many of the most successful writers are members of the Authors Guild.