Treehouse

compiled by Rachel Bondurant

A few days ago, I was telling a friend of mine what a hard time I have selecting literary magazines to submit work to, because I never know to what genre my fiction pieces belong. I found my answer in Edan Lepucki’s essay for The Millions suggesting literary fiction as its own “straightforward genre like romance or science fiction” and listing a few key characteristics by which to identify it. Limited to literary fiction, I still get close to 300 results on Duotrope, but hey, at least it’s a start.

Amber Sparks writes for HTMLGiant about what not to do when putting together a short story collection. Lessons include not treating your collection like a mix tape and not misspelling words on the first page (or anywhere else). We ought to be grateful for this opportunity to learn from someone else’s mistakes. (By the way, she has a collection from Curbside Splendor called May We Shed These Human Bodies so there is a light at the end of the tunnel.)

More Halloween stuff from Neil Gaiman. Download a free scary short story written and read by Neil from Audible.com and they’ll give money to charity. Win-win, right? Not enough incentive? If they get 100,000 downloads by Halloween, Neil will post a photo of himself reading one of his books in the bath, an idea inspired by someone somewhere deciding to read a Gaiman book in the bath and then take an artsy photo of it. This is the Internet.

Also, here: Halloween ideas from GalleyCat. Y’all, be safe out there.