book: Writing Realistic Dialogue and Flash Fiction, by Harvey Stanbrough

While working on the great American novel, I have been reading many how-to books on writing fiction, but none helped me with the heart of the story - realistic dialogue. Until, that is, I came upon Mr. Stanbrough's primer at a writer's conference. I laughed. I cried. Then my writing transformed with this simple realization: you can lose your reader in narration (horrors), but even weak dialogue will invite her deeper into the story line, becoming an eavesdropper intent on turning the page to find out what tidbit will said next. (Whew, saved!) With dry wit and a gentle but insistent manner, the author takes you by the hand through such topics as 'Conveying Emotion,' 'Influencing the Mood of the Reader,' 'Writing Naked,'(Yeah, now that's a topic!) 'The subtleties of Implication,' 'Mechanics of Punctuation,' 'Action Verbs and Mental Movies'. . . and the list goes on. And the cool thing is, he makes sure you get it! This primer is filled with examples and exercises that WILL improve your dialogue writing skills. Weak dialogue? Not anymore. Using these techniques, I just had my first article published in a national publication. Buy it! It'll be the best 12 bucks you spend on your craft.

story: Reinventing Julia

Reinventing Julia (Novel Excerpt)
By Jennifer Prado - JenniferPrado@yahoo.com

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The week after my birthday, as I parted my hair in front of the bathroom mirror I found a rebellious strand of white hair that stuck straight up. It didn’t have the courtesy to come in as gray first; it went straight to white! I was also still thinking about Danilo’s baby dream. Overnight, I was desperate to be young and reckless before motherhood and middle age descended upon me.
I was also motivated by the most dangerous of fuels: revenge. Danilo was away for the next week at a film festival in Amsterdam. The night he left, I had read his E-mail. I know that’s pathetic, but so is wallowing in suspicion and I already knew his password. He had exchanged a series of messages with a Dutch woman, who sounded overly enthusiastic about his participation in the scheduled events.

"I hope we have time to disappear." That had been Danilo’s last answer to her, and I was floored by jealousy. He’s cheating on me again! But this time, instead of crying, I became determined not to stay home alone. I had five nights to go out and look for as much trouble as I could find.

There is a simple rule to going out alone. If a Girl is on her own, every guy thinks that she wants it. This time I didn’t know what I wanted. It was like I was conducting what finance people call a mark-to-market. I intended to go out on the town with my coolest clothes, my biggest attitude, and my sassiest ass to see how my goods measured up to what was available on the scene. My reasoning: I was now twenty-six and before I knew it I would be thirty. I was running out of time. My youth was escaping me and I was working too hard. That was as complex, as I could manage.

Monday Night:
I would need a different look. I opened a drawer in my dresser and put on a pair of iridescent swimming goggles. I opened my closet and pulled out a big, beige coat with yak fur, and stood in front of the mirror and pulled my hair into a spout with an elastic band.

In the lobby of our building, our doorman looked at me oddly. He didn’t recognize me. I left our building, waved, and stopped a taxi.

The taxi driver rolled down the window. “No dogs, Lady.”

“What?”

He drove away.

I chased after him, pounded on the window, and he stopped. “What are you talking about?”

“No pets,” he said through the window.

“What pet? This is my coat!”

“Sorry, Lady,” he said, when I was in the car. “Where are we going?”

“Brooklyn.”

The driver sulked. He had to take me anywhere I wanted in the five boroughs, but at this time of night he would be too afraid to pick up a passenger on his return trip. So he started on the mumble-and-grumble routine.

“Don’t be like that,” I said. “I’ll pay both ways.”

He perked up. “You want music?”

“Play it,” I shouted. He threw on Miles Davis, Some Kind of Blue. Night drivers had class! I pushed up my goggles so he could see my eyes. “I thought you were calling me a dog when you stopped,” I said.

He laughed.

“Yip.Yip.Yip,” I barked as we drove off.

When we got to the warehouse in deep Brooklyn, the taxi driver lost his nerve.

“This is where you’re getting out?” There were two tall guys at the door dressed head-to-toe in baggie sportswear. The designer had outdoorsy campers in mind, but the inner city had inhaled this look for its own use. The taxi driver drove onto the sidewalk to get me as close to the door as possible.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “They know me.”

Ralphael was working the door and he opened the taxi for me.

“Where you been, girl?” I shrugged.

“Got busy doing things. How’s your music going?”

“It’s going,” he said. “You alone?”

I nodded. Ralphael had given me his demo CD during another party I had gone to with Danilo. The plastic cover had his name scrawled across it in pretty script. His mom had decided to spell it that way. It was a combination of Ralph meets Raphael. I listened to his CD at home. Ralphael’s singing voice sounded really smooth. He was one more guy with natural talent, trying to get noticed.

Within a half an hour of my arrival, I realized that I drank more vodka at the bar than I could handle and stumbled towards the dance floor to try to burn it off. I took the keep-moving to keep-from-falling-down approach. I danced by myself and with people I didn’t know. When I accidentally stumbled into someone, they lightly pushed me away. The way I looked didn’t draw any stares. We were all bizarre. But they watched me when I danced. That’s when I expressed everything I couldn’t say. Somehow, I managed to climb onto the box above the speakers and danced until my clothes were drenched in sweat. This was a place I could go to reinvent myself. When they threw the spotlight on me, I felt like a superstar.

I was so drunk when I arrived home that I ricocheted back and forth in our doorway when I first stepped over the threshold.

“I smell like cigarettes and I’m doused in enough alcohol to spontaneously combust." I dove onto our bed and passed out. Alone.
= = = = =

Bio: Jennifer Prado has a degree in Fiction Writing from the University of Wisconsin- Madison and her short fiction has appeared in numerous on-line magazines. For further information on "Reinventing Julia" and her Young Adult novel "Latina in Wonderland" please go to http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/members/JenniferPrado/.

Johnny America

Johnny America is a small journal of fiction, humor, and other miscellany. It’s also a web site, updated frequently and with much affection. Johnny America #3 (Halloween, 2005) sports thread binding and glow-in-the-dark covers, and is available now from our online shop.

Their submissions page is worth a read:

Submissions will be skimmed by a junior volunteer of questionable competence who sneaks web access while at his day job. If he likes a submission he will forward it to our lazy and capricious editors, who depending on their sobriety might or might not take notice. Our junior volunteer’s attention span is limited and his taste unrefined, so here are a few ideas that will likely propel a submission past him: reviews of bars (he likes to drink), stories with explosions, obtuse film reviews that he’ll misidentify as Clever, stories featuring Lucy Liu or any other Asian sexpot handwashing clothes or preparing dinner, non-fiction accounts of supernatural creatures (including unicorns). Mind that brevity is rewarded by our volunteer screener, and poetry by persons other than Stephanie Wakefield and Keith Kennedy is consistently rejected. We do not know why.

Flash Memoirs

The Flash Memoirs Writing Workshop is for flash fiction-length creative nonfiction (stories 1,000 words or less). Participation is required (no lurking or browsing). Members must use real names and must be at least 18 years old. The workshop will include submitting, critiquing, sharing of markets, and writing-related discussion.

Fast Fiction: Creating Fiction in Five Minutes, by Roberta Allen

Gather your writing utensils, set the timer to five minutes, and write a short short story. Do not think. Do not judge. Just write. You'll be amazed with what you come up with. The rest, says Roberta Allen, is merely a matter of rewriting and refining. There's something very appealing about the short short form (defined by critic Irving Howe as 'a moment rendered in its wink of immediacy' and limited here to 1,000 words). As in poetry, every word and punctuation mark counts. Your characters' histories have to be delivered, if at all, with just a sliver of language. The form is elegant in the way a mathematical proof can be elegant--beautiful and economical--and the examples Allen uses, from the works of Anton Chekhov, Carolyn Forch�, Mark Strand, and others, are sublime. (The examples from her students are less compelling, and one does tire of trying to keep her many students straight.)

The center section of the book comprises a nice selection of exercises to get you started. One involves writing stories from photographs; another has you choose one item from a list (such as 'a broken promise,' 'something that was stolen,' 'a party,' 'something that hasn't happened yet,' 'a child,' and 'a secret') and write a story about it.

The third part of the book, in which Allen makes an argument for using her method to write a novel in five-minute bites, is shakier. Writing longer fiction generally requires some kind of flow that this method doesn't allow for. Using this method for that purpose would require that a lot of energy to be spent creating connective tissue. Even still, the five-minute method would be useful for tapping the unconscious, working through problem spots, and getting going in the morning. After all, doesn't that page look much more inviting once it has some words on it?

Flash Fiction: Very Short Stories, by James Thomas,Denise Thomas,Tom Hazuka

These stories are among the best I have ever read. Each is short, but full of excellent writing.

Fandango Virtual Fiction Contest - 2005

Fandango Virtual is pleased to host its third annual fiction contest. This year we are opening the contest to the combined readership of Fandango Virtual's two quarterly publications, Gator Springs Gazette and Bonfire. We are accepting short stories of 1000 to 5000 words, but we won't quibble about a few words more or less. Works must be previously unpublished in any print or online venue and may be in any genre as long as they have a literary quality. Copyright to the work must be held by the contest entrant. No sim-subs allowed. Entries will be accepted from now until midnight (GMT) on 30 November 2005 and the winners will be announced on New Year's day 2006. Winning entries will be published in the May-June-July edition of Gator Springs Gazette in 2006. Authors of other entries which meet Fandango's acceptance standards may be invited to publish in future issues of the Gazette or Bonfire.

The reading fee of $10 . . . entitles the entrant to submit one story.

Sudden Fiction - American Short-Short Stories, by Robert Shapard, James Thomas

Description from Publishers Weekly:

The short fiction (each piece is one to five pages long) in this collection represents the richness and variety of American writers. A few are no longer contemporary (Hemingway, Malamud, Cheever), many are well established (Paley, Oates, Updike, Donald Barthelme, Ray Bradbury, Peter Taylor, Raymond Carver) and many are newer presences on the fiction scene. With a tiny 'frontisstory' by Robert Coover, a lighthearted introduction by Shapard and afterwords about the short-short-story form by 40 outstanding American writers, the definition of what lies between as 'sudden fiction' is well attended to. The 70 pieces themselveshighly compressed, often tantalizingdisplay a multiplicity of modes and derive from a variety of traditions. The collection presents a group of writers whose miniature stories do, indeed, as the editors suggest, 'confer form on small corners of chaos.'

Margin: Exploring Modern Magical Realism - Deep South magic for hurricane relief -- guidelines

They accept fiction and poetry:

WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?
Contributions to Southern Revival must capture, in some way, the magical essence of the Deep South. While our usual focus is magical realism, the editor has expanded the possibilities this time to include all imaginative literary forms. We are interested in diverse voices and ideas. Forms: free verse, flash fiction (<1000 words), creative nonfiction (<1000 words), digital artwork and prose poetics. Possible subjects: faith healing, voodoo, haints, curses, miracles, legends, fish stories, vampires, devils, preachers, black cats, owls, thunder and lightning, snake oil salesmen, black magic, mardi gras, witchcraft, planting by the moon, superstitions, ghost armies, sleepwalking, and all things haunted. From these submissions, we will select the best work to fill 24 pages.