Cool -- I'm looking at job listings for teachers.

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Erin, insent. And hey! You left me totally hanging there at the end, you tease.

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Funny truth -- I left you hanging cause I had a booty call I had to get to! Apropo for the tale, n'est pas!

And, yo, backflung. I'll be Netted again tomorrow AM.

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My most recent project:

Call for Submissions

“The November Third Club,” [link] an online literary journal seeking to “up the ante” of literary political writing, is seeking poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction that resonates with a political message and rises above the mere rhetoric and rant. The emphasis will be on political literature, will be unabashedly left-wing in nature, and will be looking at literature written from a liberal, green, anarchist or libertarian perspective. Biases up front.

The November Third Club is edited by Victor D. Infante, fiction editor; Richard Beban & Ray McNiece, poetry editors; Carlye Archibeque, nonfiction editor and Sam Hamill, contributing editor. We are also currently seeking fiction and nonfiction editors, so if you’re interested, drop us a line at nov3rdsubmissions@yahoo.com, and put “editor query” in the subject line.

Some of the ideas we are interested in exploring from a literary perspective include reclaiming church and state, electoral fraud and reform, race and identity, censorship, individual liberty and of course, “The War on Terror,” but we’re open to new ideas, particularly innovative ones. Don’t just rehash tired old knee-jerk anti-Bush propaganda and give us your commentary on Associated Press news stories. We want something that pushes the envelope of political writing. We’re open to styles and genre, we just want the writing to be good and the message to resonate.

Politics have permeated through literature as long as people have been writing. For a rough idea of what we like and are looking for, consider the work of such writers as George Orwell, Phillip K. Dick, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Tony Hoagland, Wanda Coleman, Barbara Kingsolver, Sherman Alexie, Philip Levine, Marge Piercy, Studs Terkel, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Paine, Ralph Ellison, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Aldous Huxley, Amiri Baraka, John Steinbeck, Charles Simic and Adrienne Rich, to give a small sampling. Seriously, we’re open. But don’t just imitate these greats, give us something new and unique. The simple idea is that no amount of facts and statistics makes a political message real to most people, but stories and symbolism can.

Guidelines for submissions:

• Previously published material is fine, as long as the original publisher is acknowledged and the author retains the copyright. All copyright reverts to the author upon publication. Please acknowledge The November Third Club if material it published first is reprinted elsewhere.
• Unsolicited submissions will only be accepted via e-mail. Our e-mail address is nov3rdsubmissions@yahoo.com.
• Please note whether the submission is poetry, fiction or creative nonfiction in the subject line of the e-mail. Unmarked submissions may be deleted unread.
• Please submit no more than three to five poems, or ten pages of prose.
• Please put your name and e-mail address in the body of the e-mail. Please also include a short bio, no more than 200 words, in the body of the e-mail.
• The submissions themselves can be either in the body of the e-mail or in an attached Word file. No other formats will be considered.
• The deadline for the first quarterly issue is August 1st.
• We cannot pay anyone for their work as of this time.
• We think it should go without saying, but please, please, please proofread your work before sending it to us. Our staff is still small, and has better things to do than to fix your typos.

Thanks very much for your time and interest, and we look forward to seeing what emerges.

Sincerely,

The November Third Club

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Drabble time!

Challenge #60 (the pictures from the Look At Me website) is now closed.

Challenge #61 is two parts. Take this scenario: two people in a small space*, and write your drabble in a specific genre.

Classifying writing into a single "genre" can be a sticky thing. For one thing, no two people can ever seem to agree on a definition for "literary fiction," or if it even *is* a genre. So I'm not offering up this challenge to create quibbles or quarrels over whether or not something fits in a genre. I trust you all to write what moves you, label it however you like, and set it free. Simple as that.

Some examples of genres -- and I'm sure that (1) all of you know these already, and (2) all of you can probably list scads more genre categories that I left out -- are fantasy, historical fiction, mystery, sci-fi (does sci-fi belong in fantasy? that's an example of strict genre labelling that I'm not touching with a 10-foot fountain pen), westerns, tragedy, romance (another category that transcends "genre," as there's historical romantic fiction, and even within that category, there's Regency, Victorian, etc.), steampunk, erotica, fairy tales, hardboiled crime fiction t waves to erika , comedy, horror, and epics (though that might be hard to fit into a drabble).

Though I'd be impressed at a 100-word epic.

*Right, the asterisk -- thought I forgot, didn't you? When I say "two people in a small space," you may define "small space" however you like. When you're in a space with someone you don't want to be with (for instance), even an airplane hangar can feel too small. Just make us believe it through your writing.

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and rises above the mere rhetoric and rant.

HEY! "Mere" rant?

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• Your* rants are never mere, Allyson. They transcend form.

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hooray, erika! Rants can be art.

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That had no genre. Er, what I took away, that is.

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A good rant is totally an art form.

If I wasn't elderly and feeble, I could dig up some of my own from the glory days of my distant, dusty youth...

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