lisa rabey writes stuff issue #6 Lolly, Lolly, get your adverbs here

submission update

I’m up to 29 submissions, 11 rejections, 2 acceptances, and 1 withdrawal from those 29.

As I write this, I received a rejection with feedback for the piece, “here we are.” The magazine liked it but there were a few issues that took me out of the running. I forgot I paid for a critique when I submitted it, and I found the critique helpful. The piece is 2500 words, and I don’t think I can afford to pay for an editor to look at it so it’ll need to be self-edited. This seems antithetical to interviewing editors a few weeks back but I’m looking at shorter pieces (under 1000 words) for the editing. (I’ve also been slammed with a $600 tax bill from the state due to incorrect reporting for tax year 2018. I forgot about the bill until Sunday night and the time to protest is now long gone; there is that.)

I’m kind of unsure where to go from here if I’m honest. Do I continue to write new stuff and farm out the short stuff for editing while shoving the needs to be edited longer pieces in the folder of the same name or do I edit those longer works? I’d like to do both, but this is something I cannot afford, time and money wise, right now.

what I’m working on now

I’ve worked on one book (titled Don’t Watch Hallmark Movies) this week; tweaked a few poems and wrote down a lot of sentences and paragraphs that may mean something but I’m not sure yet.

A few issues back of a most unreliable narrator newsletter, I talk about a song from the ‘90s that has been haunting me. (More details about the band, song, and video in the link.)

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I’ve been jotting down and mixing the phrases from the song to spark some ideas. I have one piece entitled, “she found it impossible; she washed her hands of all of this” which I titled first before whipping out nearly 1,000 words using that title as the jump off piece.

The prose echoes stream of consciousness ala Joyce or Woolf. I’ve written stream of consciousness work before. I quit enjoy it. When I was unmedicated (I’m bipolar), most of my work was stream of consciousness.

Writing this way is why it’s difficult for me to write a traditional story which is why I’m taking all the classes I can afford to learn how to do it.

chap books and ‘zines

I reached out to one of my editors to look at a chap book I published seven years ago on Amazon. The chap book, The Lisa Chronicles: Vol 1 1998, is that year’s diary entries I published online. It was self-edited. I got this idea in 2017 to publish each year as a chap book of sorts (and now realizing that would be 25 volumes ell oh ell geeze). Don’t know if I will end up doing that probably not. Might do random years when drama was at its highest. We’ll see.

The editor spot read the chap book and thinks it’s a good idea to do the editing and republishing. She’s suggesting I go through a small publishing house over putting it back on Amazon (it’s now unpublished so I won’t link to it). I cannot tell you how this makes me nervous. I’m thinking of sending, via a different issue of this newsletter, what the intro says so I can get your opinion.

Expect that later in the week.

get your adverbs here

Each edit that comes through, regardless of piece, I’m taking seriously and applying to other writing. One thing that wasn’t mentioned, but I caught myself, is my heavy use of adverbs. It started with Word caught them when I did a spell check. As I removed them, my piece, to me, reads stronger. Other words I’m working on eradicating is the random use of “that” and “literally.” I’d like to also eradicate “so,” another adverb, but that word is proving difficult to trample down. I’m working on it.

books I read

Over at a most unreliable narrator, I’m in the habit or listing the books I’m reading now. There is quite a lot (around a dozen or so) but people do click on the links (it takes them to GoodReads for the book).

Rather than duplicate the list over here (some of you are on both lists), I’m thinking of writing quick reviews (100 words or less) of writing tech books or books that I found helpful regardless of genre. If they helped me, maybe they can help someone else.

mailing lists

Signing up for mailing lists is going down a rabbit hole if you’re on Substack. One mailing list suggests three others, you sign up for one which then suggests three others and on and on it goes. (I also subscribe to mailing lists from lit mags to get a feel for their work as those lists are a bit different.)

I’m super interested in writing lists to get a feel for the competition as it were. 99% of them are about the craft, books to read, mags and sites open calls, and jobs. This list is none of those things but I hope you enjoy it just the same.

Publications

chap book: commercial breaks

Snippets

In my last a most unreliable narrator newsletter, I wrote a blurb about how much I hate authors from Brooklyn. Why? Because it seems every published author is from Brooklyn. It’s some kind of contagion that spreads like wildfire. For one I want to see someone say they were educated at a community college in Iowa.

I’m so irrationally pissed about people from Brooklyn I wrote a poem about it. Here is a snippet.

i wonder if other people

like me

feel we’ll ever be good enough

to create art

to make a change in the world

to be someone

to have meaning

in our lives

to be human

because our zip code

is not 11203

lisa x