The Publisher Came to Me

May 13, 2022 by Randal Eldon Greene in Books, Dialogues, Fiction and tagged acceptance letter, Corona Crew, Corona\Samizdat, publications, Rich Harsch, Slider, writing challenge | Leave a comment

Some things in life are luck and some things are perseverance and putting yourself out there. Some things are both, though not probably a 50/50 split. In fact, I don’t even like to think of the good things in life as being a ratio split between luck and effort, rather I like to believe that effort can lead you to lucky breaks that wouldn’t have otherwise been on your path had you not worked hard and been brave in the first place.

Right now I feel overwhelmed with luck. The masthead of Corona\Samizdat, Rick Harsch, reached out to me to ask if I had a book I’d like to publish with them. I told him YES and then promptly described my dialogue-only short story collection and emailed off links to some pieces from it published in zines. The thing is, I wasn’t actively even looking for a publisher. Only occasionally would I find myself working on one my dialogues, usually after I had heard about a themed anthology or magazine which one of my stories might go well with. I planned to wait until after I was finished editing my novel before working seriously on my dialogues. But then, the perfect publisher for this weird, little collection came knocking on my social media door.

How did I end up so lucky? I own . . . let me count them . . . eleven books published by this press (if I wasn’t on a book-buying ban without a gift card in hand, I’d own more). I adore Corona\Samizdat’s releases. Their covers are often enviable and trippy. They’re releasing some of the best experiments in literature bound in some of the most amazing cover art I’ve ever seen. So what in the world possessed Rick to reach out to me on the off chance I had a book just sitting around, unpublished or out of print? In short, how did I end up so lucky?

I’ve been on Instagram for over a year, but only this year have I really been figuring out how to properly use it (I don’t think I even owned a smart phone when I first signed up using a web browser; I intended to toy with advertising my Hello, Author interviews on the platform). It was on Instagram that I discovered Corona\Samizdat and began—as frugally as possible—buying their books. I followed them. They followed me back. I followed Rick. He followed me in turn. All the while, I began posting more bookish content.

It was on April 27th that I posted several photos of my office, the first one being a photo I took directly in front of the dusty TV screen I use as for my computer monitor when I’m editing. The accompanying text was this:

Me contemplating actually cleaning up the messy office which I haven’t really used for writing since December, as the Kanban board shows. Piles of paper litter the place, the desk is a wreck, and the book I’m writing increasingly wants the weight of the room lifted. It is an ideal writing space to boot.
…
We have finally found a new crew member at work, meaning that soon things should be normal. Normal for me means working only weekends and one evening a week. Normal also means I can try out a new writing routine. Since the baby was born less than 5 months ago, in December, I have been attempting to write while taking on the roll of full time dad. These past couple of weeks the baby has changed, is demanding more attention and thus more time. So I’m thinking now that I need to try writing later at night, after baby and wife are in bed. I think this may be my new way forward for writing.

It was the next day that Rick reached out to me asking if I had a book. It was pure luck . . . except for the parts that led up to the lucky break. Everything coalesced to put me on this path, from brute-force learning an app I find unintuitive and putting myself out there (shitty pictures and all) to denying myself small indulgences so I could comfortably buy a few extra books—it all led to Rick taking the time to read the words I wrote to accompany a weird selfie I snapped. It all led to my lucky break. I couldn’t have had this kind of luck without participating in the book and writing world of today’s social media. And I really couldn’t have have done it without Rick seeing my post and deciding to take a chance on me. So thank you, Rick.

I’m happy to announce that Dialogues: A Collection of Creative Conversations will be published at some unspecified time in the future by Corona\Samizdat. I’m working on edits. A couple of stories were inexplicably lost in the move from a rental to our house. I may also find that not all of the dialogues are actually salvageable in their current forms (and maybe even in their concepts). I know I’ll have at least 52 completed, but can’t say that all 52 will come from the 2018 self-imposed challenge of writing one story a week for a year using only dialogue. I feel incredibly lucky that I’ll be joining the Corona Crew—a group which includes Rick and all of the authors and illustrators he’s published through Corona\Samizdat. And hopefully the luck will keep coming as I get hard at work on this collection.

Dialogues: A Collection of Creative Conversations by Randal Eldon Greene — Dialogues by Randal Eldon Greene

NEW PUBLICATION – Bright Moon Over Lover’s Bridge

February 20, 2022 by Randal Eldon Greene in Fiction, Personal and tagged jobs, new publication, publications, Slider, writing jobs | Leave a comment

I forgot to make an individual blog post for when it came out, but my short story “Bright Moon Over Lover’s Bridge” has been published in the Anansi Archive Anthology, Vol. 1. You can currently read it online or purchase the book on Amazon.

This story was the first one I wrote after meeting my then future wife, Libby. I remember her thinking it was quite good. I also had a couple of rejection letters that praised its aesthetic, but they rejected it anyway. The one I remember clearly was a moon-themed anthology, and I think my piece turned out being very different than any of the others – more artsy and less hard genre. Like many of my favorite pieces of writing, this one took a while to find a home. And I’m happy to see it found a home both in print and online.

I’ve also been working with a friend at one of the local public libraries to create a new writing critique group. I’m really excited to not only read the work of others with a constructively critical eye (something that always invigorates me) but to also start sharing excerpts of the novel I’ve been working on for years now. I’ve been spending a lot of time editing it, really cleaning it up for my beta readers. I know I’ll have even tougher work to do with one of the later chapters that I believe will need a lot of rewriting due to a misguided attempt at a tonal shift that I don’t think paid off in the end.

I’m still working at the hotel. The company is trying to sweeten the position, but . . . well, there’s other prospects that look enticing. Though nothing can beat this job’s usual atmosphere, there comes a time when more than doubling one’s income looks like the better option. But we’ll see.

COVID poetry

June 26, 2021 by Randal Eldon Greene in Interviews, poetry and tagged COVID-19, creative writing, Elizabeth Ellen, Exit Carefully, Fast Machine, Fiction, Hello Author, interview, online publication, pandemic, poem, poetry, publications, Slider, The Junction | Leave a comment

Source: Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository

When I was young I filled notebooks full of poems. These days, I don’t write much poetry. But I wrote a poem about dating during the pandemic. This isn’t from personal experience, but observation and extrapolation helped me along.

It’s short and sweet, and I’d appreciate it if you took the time to read it: FOR WHEN NO ONE DOES SOCIAL DISTANCING ANYMORE

While I didn’t intend it, I actually published my interview with Elizabeth Ellen on the same day my poem came out.
Normally, I don’t bother making a blog post about the interviews, but since it came out on the same day, I thought I ought to explain. The Junction didn’t say exactly when my story was being posted online to read, so it was just a coincidence that the day I got my Ellen interview up was the same day my poem came out (though the poem must have come out after I got the interview up since I didn’t see anything about “For When No One Does Social Distancing Anymore” until this morning).

We talk about autobiographical fiction, cancel culture, her collection Fast Machine, and her new play Exit Carefully.

Do check out my interview and subscribe to the newsletter too! Thanks a zillion, all you bookworms.

But, yes, it can be scary – terrifying – once the time comes to let the world see your art. Even if, especially if (?) the entire time you were making it you were like, FUCK YOU (middle finger raised) to the world.
Elizabeth Ellen

New Publication in Squawk Back

March 15, 2020 by Randal Eldon Greene in creative non-fiction and tagged creative non-fiction, creative nonfiction, Essay, experimental writing, Gertrude Stein, nonfiction, prose, publications, Slider, Squawk Back, vignette, Word Portrait | Leave a comment

This one goes out to all the major Lit Nerds. It’s A Word Portrait of Gertrude Stein in the Style of Gertrude Stein’s Word Portraits, a biographical piece on that giant of Modernist Literature and woman who invented new ways to play with words. If you’re not familiar with her Word Portraits, go find some online. A word portrait is a “little prose vignette” or, as I describe it, an experimental biography.

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

My own word portrait is both homage and fanboy imitation. Of all her writing, it’s these prose vignettes I turn to again and again for their charm, wit, and ironically vague exactness. It’s my hope that my Lit Nerd homage would at least please this patron of the arts. I know that it pleased Zak Block and the others at Squawk Back. It’s a good feeling when you’ve written something that you know needs to live up to that which it’s making direct nods to and someone believes in it enough to print it when they certainly could have published anything else. So thank you Squawk Back for believing my own Word Portrait to be of literary merit, even if it’s only homage and imitation of the literary giant I’m writing about.

The whole issue is free to read online, so go check it out to discover some of the coolest writing out there on the net.

plain of swords – New Publication

March 1, 2020 by Randal Eldon Greene in Fiction and tagged fantasy, Flash Ficiton, outposts of beyond, plain of swords, publications, short story, Slider | 1 Comment

plain of swords

I’m so excited to announce that my first hard fantasy story plain of swords has been published in Outposts of Beyond. I call it my first hard fantasy because I have written some other things that are arguably fantasy-esque, such as Demon Zone, but nothing like this: We have a knight, a princess, and a dragon. But don’t expect this to be a straightforward tale either. It’s not really what you’d expect just from those details.

plain of swords is an experimental story. I try to indicate with the all lower-case title that this piece is approaching the conveyance of prose in an unusual way:

a plain of swords is made to kill. The knight surveys the glinting blades . . . crows swoop low . . . a daring game . . . “a death dance,” the locals say . . . a love affair with the polished edge and the gore of impaled pilgrims who have flung themselves from the cliffs above . . . a reenactment of Saint Leemarrow’s ancient miracle . . . only with less flying . . . yet just as much faith.

As you can see, it’s their January issue, but there was a delay at the printers, so it came out just last month (and I got my copy in the mail—check enclosed—just yesterday). This is also the last issue of Outposts of Beyond. I’m super happy to see that it’s a very reasonable price, only $9 USD. I think people spend more than that for coffee and cookies on the regular.

If sci-fi and fantasy isn’t your thing, I’ll understand you probably won’t buy it unless you’re a huge fan of mine (I see you waving your arm in the back there, Mom!). So if you’re really wanting to see the rest of the short story, you’ll have to purchase a copy of the magazine since I don’t know when I’ll have a collection coming out with plain of swords in it. Probably not anytime soon (though I certainly have been building a collection of stories which will include plain of swords).

Thanks for all the support, Bookworms. Let me know what you’ve been reading lately. If you’re a writer, me know what you’ve been working on and if you’re been writing outside your usual genres and how you experiment or keep it traditional within your own work.

Remembering to Celebrate Our Successes

December 24, 2019 by Randal Eldon Greene in Fiction and tagged alcohol, C.R.Y., Celebrate Our Success, copypasta, dark comedy, drugs, Inspiration and education for creatives, inspirational, medium, motivational, positivity, publications, short fiction, short story, Slider, transgressive fiction, zine | Leave a comment

Dear Blog Reader,

I am not going to troll you. This post is about my latest publication, Remembering to Celebrate Our Successes, which appeared in C.R.Y. yesterday. It’s an enjoyable piece if you read it blind. And I suggest you do. Below I’m going to be writing about the publication, so if you would rather not have spoilers, please click the link above and return here when you’re done.

In the past month I had around 30 people follow me on Medium. Currently, I try to check out my followers and read something of theirs if they happen to be writers. Almost every single person who followed me was a writer, generally posting their articles rather than submitting to publishers who use Medium, a company that hosts the writings of both publishers and individual bloggers. Some of the authors were quite good. About 20, however, wrote what I can only describe as motivational copypasta. Maybe it is original writing, but the vague feel-good and self-improvement articles certainly lack any original ideas or spin.

I have found that since Medium created a paywall option for articles—meaning that writers are actually paid when their work is read—that tons of articles with clickbait titles, containing little of substance, have exploded on the host’s platform. Remembering to Celebrate Our Successes is my response to this.

Derailment is the central image of this article. The piece starts out as another pro-tip for positivity, aimed at creatives and entrepreneurs. Your reading expectations are derailed when this motivational article turns into a story about the narrator’s celebration of his recently completed manuscript. Likewise the narrator’s own plans are derailed when his drug and alcohol-fueled night go awry. In fact, the image of derailment, in the form of dilapidated boxcars sitting off the train tracks, sets the final scene of this story.

By the way, this is a story. I only wrote it to make it seem, at first, like a nonfiction article. The character is not me. He only shares a vague resemblance to me, including a common nickname, just as the story only shares a vague resemblance to all the motivational copypasta inundating Medium’s feed.

Anyway, I appreciate you giving my story a read. And don’t forget to celebrate your success while knowing that perfection in your plans is unattainable, and sometimes what you want is derailed by circumstances both within and out of your control.

Also, don’t write clickbait. Write something original.

All photos from Pixabay or remixed from Pixabay unless otherwise stated.

Reflections on a decade-long journey to getting a flash fiction story published.

August 21, 2019 by Randal Eldon Greene in Dialogues and tagged Dialogues, expire, Fiction, publications, Raw Art Review, Short Stories, short story, Slider, The Titanic | Leave a comment

A revised and updated version of this post was published in The Ascent. Please read it there (especially if you are a paying member of Medium) because I get paid a little when my piece is read and clapped for. Thank you.

〈 Read Expire for free in Raw Art Review’s Spring 2019 Collection or buy a hard copy on the publisher’s website. 〉

This story took a long time to place. I don’t think it took so long because it was poorly written. In fact, I’ve had some compliments on it over the years. The editor at 34thParallel (one of the first magazines I ever submitted to) had this to say about it:

Dear R.E.
Let me say I’m impressed by your story; dialect in any form is difficult–damn difficult–for a whole lot of reasons of which I’m sure you’re aware. So I’ll repeat, I’m impressed–damn impressed (if you’ll excuse my language).

Only this April, the editor over at Barren Magazine had this to say about the two dialogue flash fiction stories I had submitted for consideration:

Thank you for sending “Expire” and “Attributes of a Girl” for our review. I really loved the experimentation but (especially “Expire“) we literally couldn’t tell what was happening. I know these responses are annoying but hope it helps a little!

Tahoma Literary Review also found the piece hard to understand. While they apparently made their way through the dialect, they ultimately decided that it didn’t work:

[I]n “Expire,” I found myself working really hard to parse the patois/dialect.

In other words, the form/gimmick outstripped the narrative.

I don’t blame any of these publications for rejecting Expire. It is a short piece and it is purposefully difficult. In fact, that’s the whole point. The form/gimmick is another layer of the theme. In fact, the way the story is presented makes the reading experience mirror the central issue of the story.

If you do figure out what is going on then you realize that the story is about how difficult it is to get a point across when trying to tell a story. The piece is constructed in a way to make it difficult to read. While the narrative revolves around a guy who doesn’t understand a specific word in a story being told about the Titanic, the form of the story itself challenges you, the reader, to understand the story on the page. Expire is printed as a block of text, using only dialogue without any dialogue tags, and one of the speakers in the story uses a black American vernacular. It’s not easy to read.

Expire is hard, and it’s meant to be hard. So I’m not surprised that I’ve received both positive feedback and criticism. Yes, I’m a little surprised it took me a whole decade with at least 33 submission attempts to get Expire published, but published it is at long last by Raw Art Review.

One of the differences with Raw Art Review is their commitment to trying to get a work. And that’s why I think they published this story where others didn’t. Bullet ten of their current submissions guidelines says this:

“Editors assume you are smarter than we are. We will strive to understand your intention ; stay open-minded and try to avoid imposing our presumptions on your work.”

Trace Sheridan, the editor with 34thParallel who was “damn impressed” with the use of dialect in the story, asked to see some more pieces alongside it. She ended up publishing the story Bad Weather instead of Expire. I don’t know exactly why she or her team didn’t publish it, although I think they would have had I had more stories like it—dialogical and dialectical—since she asked to see some more pieces while also asking, “Is this part of a larger set/collection of pieces?” And, at the time, no, it wasn’t a part of anything larger than itself.

Expire did eventually inspire me to spend a year writing dialogues. It was a good year. And I came out of that year with a good collection. Truly, I owe a whole book to Expire that I wouldn’t have otherwise written. Expire not only set the tone and implicit theme of the entire collection, but as a story that took a decade to get published, it reminds me that storytelling is a difficult art, even when you accomplish perfectly what you intended to do, like I did with Expire. It is one of my best pieces. And like many great pieces of storytelling, it says something that not everyone can hear and not everyone will like, but it says what it has to say boldly from the first word to the last little piece of punctuation.

Image source CC0 Domaine public

BIG – New Publication

July 8, 2019 by Randal Eldon Greene in Fiction and tagged COLP, Dialogues, Giants, Gypsum Sound Tales, publications, Short Stories, short story, Slider, The Wave | 1 Comment

My thirteenth dialogue to be released is BIG. Okay, it’s actually a rather short story, but it’s subject is big and is fittingly appearing in the Gypsum Sound Tales anthology COLP: Big. All the stories in this collection are themed big: Big is home to a collection of stories that feature large, enormous or gigantic characters and concepts and, in this situation, it is most definitely a case of bigger is better.

My story is called The Wave. If you’re so inclined to read some short stories about big things, you can purchase a paper copy or you’re free to grab a Kindle copy on Amazon.