Or…”Don’t Shoot Yourself in the Foot Before You’ve Even Gotten Started” So I have a small confession to make: we here at FFO have a Wall of Shame. Yep. Sure do. And on it are the cover letters (names redacted… we’re not *that* heartless) that make us weep, pull our hair out, or basically snort […]
Nancy DiMauro, FFO staff, blogger, and writer, breaks down the infamous Hollywood Formula: Flash Fiction style. I have a confession to make. I’m not a natural short story writer. I have to fight to keep myself from haring off after one plot thread or another. Writing short fiction is hard. So, I look for anything […]
So your beautiful little story has survived slush! Hurray, right? You’ve officially passed a major milestone. The vast majority of submissions never make it any further than the slush round, and here your story is, scooped out and passed along to the second round we call the Winnowing Boards. Now, only a couple dozen stories […]
Today’s list is compiled by Nancy DiMauro, Flash Fiction Online staffer and slush reader extraordinaire. In an average month, my FFO team will have about 80 stories to review. Only stories with two votes for publication are guaranteed to move into the next round. A story can still be sent on if someone likes it […]
So now that you’ve submitted your story, what happens next? Other than shaking in your sneakers at the idea of fearsome fanged slush readers ripping it apart even as you read this. Your manuscript has been whisked away into our submissions software and is headed toward potential storydom. ….I have an odd compulsion to sing […]
Today’s confessions come from the slush pile wisdom of Nancy DiMauro, FFO staffer and slush queen. If you write, and submit those stories, you dread the slush pile. It’s an inevitable part of the process. The way you get out of the slush and into print is to impress someone like me. Someone who has volunteered […]
So you want to be a writer. That’s fantastic. I love writers. Writers are some of my favorite people. They’re brilliant and quirky and often tend to daydream (which is why they tend to thrive in their own internal worlds). You have the passion. You even have a manuscript you know will revolutionize the world. […]
I’ve been reading a lot of slush this past month. Mountains of it, really. So much slush that I have imprints of the little yes/no/maybe buttons burned indelibly into the inside of my eyelids so I can see them staring back at me even in my sleep. That’s a whole lot of slush. But the […]
To paraphrase an IO9 commentor, the dual Nebula/Hugo choice for Frederik Pohl’s SF novel, Gateway, was simply dreadful…in the sense of instilling deep dread in the reader, as any horror writer would wish to do. Pohl won three Hugos, in successive years. That says it all, doesn’t it? Oh, and another Hugo and three Nebulas, […]
Venerable poet William Blake, author of sometimes mysterious and sometimes brilliantly simple works, was a self-publishing super hero who might serve as an inspiration to would-be self-publishers. He’s perhaps best known for his illuminated “Songs of Innocence” (example plate below) and “Songs of Experience.” He had a soup-to-nuts approach to publishing, illustrated by the unpoetic […]