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Contents October 2019
Volume 132 Number 10

FEATURES DEPARTMENTS
8 From the Front Lines
The doctor is out
Writing is not that kind
of therapy.
BY YI SHUN LAI

10 Freelance Success
Money matters
Why freelancers should
ask for more money.
Always.
BY PETE CROATTO

38 Literary Spotlight
Driftwood Press
BY MELISSA HART

40 Conference Insider
Gotham Writers
Conference
BY MELISSA HART

IN EVERY ISSUE
2 From the Editor
32
4 Take Note
42 Markets
12 How to fictionalize your 26 Pick your punk
hometown You’ve heard of cyberpunk and 47 Classified advertising
World-building is rarely simple. steampunk. But what about
Does drawing upon your child- greenpunk, oceanpunk, or myth- 48 How I Write
hood stomping grounds make it punk? Here’s the scoop on all the
any easier? different subgenres populating
BY LAUREN PUCKETT the literary punk scene today.
BY HEIDI RUBY MILLER
16 Anatomy of an
antagonist 30 Writing across margins
Can we tell the stories of margin-
How to craft the villain your
alized communities if we aren’t
hero deserves.
BY JESSICA STILLING
part of them?
BY EDEN SQUISH MACKENZIE

20 But what if ?
Pro tips for writing (and publish-
32 More eyes = more sales
Understanding and creating ads
ing) speculative fiction.
BY JACK SMITH
for your book on Amazon and
Facebook.
BY KERRIE FLANAGAN

Cover: Chones/Shutterstock (matches), Sloth Astronaut/Shutterstock (books)

writermag.com • The Writer | 1

FROM THE EDITOR
NICKI PORTER
The haunting season
I read multiple genres all year long, mixing poetry
and nonfiction with novels and short stories as I
please. The lone exception is October, when I read
one genre and one genre alone: Horror.
I want books that go bump in the night, leave
me terrified to sleep with the lights off, convince
me that someone’s lurking in the linen closet. I
want prose powerful enough to raise goosebumps
on my arm. I want stories that linger long after
I’ve closed the covers (or buried under them).
Scary movies, horror books, creepy TV shows,
I love them all. But when I confess this love to
others, I often get the same shuddering reaction:
“Oh, I can’t do stuff like that. Too scary.”
Which, of course, is a pretty understandable
response, right? Who would willingly spend their
free time knee-deep in a case of the heebie-jeebies?
So why do fans keep coming back to horror?
What makes a person want to be scared?
I think about it a lot, especially in an age where
the headlines contain enough horror to last a life-
time. What drives a person to spend their leisure
time in a fictional hellscape? Why do we seek the
dark, and what do we hope to find there?
Part of me knows it provides a temporary
escape from everyday anxiety. It’s hard to fret
over that upcoming root canal when flesh-eating
zombies are on the loose. I know it’s also a path to
explore all the larger things in life that haunt us.
(Is The Shining about ghosts, or is it about addic-
tion? The wise reader answers: Why not both?)
Still another part of me craves art that creates a
physical response in the reader. If an author can
use the English language to make me audibly
laugh, tear up, or shiver in my chair, that’s a damn
2 | The Writer • October 2019
fine piece of writing. So I want books that make
my heart race. I want language that gives me chills.
I want to feel something when I read, and horror
promises I’ll feel vividly alive from start to finish.
But I think one of my favorite things about
horror is how much earnesty exists at its core.
Fiction is a lie, plain and simple, but oh, how
much of it is spent convincing the reader that it’s
the truth. And ghosts, goblins, and ghouls are all
a much harder truth to sell than a troubled mar-
riage or murder case – and one humans don’t
have any good reason to swallow. We want to
laugh, so we flock to comedy. We need to under-
stand death and pain, so we relish tragedy. But
humans don’t have much of a good reason –
socially or biologically – to admit a work of art
makes us afraid. Showing fear implies weakness,
insecurity, a loss of control. So we cross our arms.
So we jut our jaw. And we say: You think that’s
scary? That’s not scary.
That’s stupid.
That’s why it’s easier to make a horror-comedy,
with fake-blood hijinks and campy zombies. So
we laugh at the things that should scare us. But
how brave, how confident is the author who will
stand in front of a crowd, that swarm of crossed-
arm skeptics, and say: I am going to tell you a
story that will scare the living daylights out of you.
And you’re gonna love it.
That’s the kind of confidence I want to see in
an author. That’s the kind of confidence I want to
see in fiction, period.
So come November, I’ll welcome all my cheer-
ier genres back with open arms. But for the rest
of this month, you’ll only find me in the dark.
Keep writing,
Nicki Porter
Senior Editor
@nickimporter
 This month on
Senior Editor
Nicki Porter
Accounts Receivable Associate
Wayne Tuggle
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Something wicked this way comes…
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In memory of Susan Fitzgerald, COO, 1966-2018
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writermag.com • The Writer | 3

IDEA GENERATING MACHINE
I ONCE WROTE TO LIVE.
Now I walk to write to live.
Those extra words entered my life
after my head exploded from a rup-
tured brain aneurysm. Fourteen hospi-
talizations, 10 ambulance rides, and
four brain surgeries followed.
Such an experience – compressed
into four nightmare years – forces a
complete life reboot. How does New
You practice Old Craft?
I started on the road.
Initially, that pathway involved cir-
cles – small round ones – traveled with
a walker. White knuckles clasped icy
aluminum handlebars. My legs wob-
bled and trembled as my toes and
heels, stuffed inside rubber-soled hos-
pital socks, gripped the wood floor.
4 | The Writer • October 2019
By Melanie Ormand
Behind me trailed a physical therapist,
her strong hands clutching the gait belt
that encircled my waist.
Every morning and afternoon, we
exercised like this at the rehabilitation
hospital where I relearned how to
walk, talk, eat, bathe, and dress myself.
Afterward, the therapist would guide
me back to my room, settle me into
bed, and ask, “Do you want it?” I
would nod yes, and she would snuggle
my laptop next to me in bed.
And always, I fell asleep within
minutes of trying to write. Some part
of me – buried deep within – knew
these rehab experiences held stories,
needed to come out. Capturing them
fresh was best. But my words labored,
my attention lagged, my eyes fought to
stay open. Still, my fingertips tapped.
My body’s needs demanded another
focus: more physical recovery.
I would wake up sometime later,
laptop dark and tucked against the
bed’s side rails. Good days delivered a
paragraph on a walking memory; bad
days, the revived screen revealed noth-
ing save-able.
Time can heal, and I did, too.
I worked up to a cane, then an exer-
cise bar or my husband’s arm, then,
weeks later, my own two feet. On dis-
charge from rehab, my doctor ordered
strength-building exercises. He sug-
momojung/Shutterstock
gested walking. The tracheostomy tube
in my throat, combined with Houston’s
humid summer heat, vetoed traversing
neighborhood sidewalks. My husband

drove me to the nearby mall. I could
not yet navigate steering wheels, gas
pedals, freeways, or other drivers.
The mall’s storefronts captivated
me. Its near silence on those early
mornings distracted, sending my
glance back to crammed window dis-
plays bursting with color and possibil-
ity. I wanted none of the clothes,
jewelry, or furniture. My healing brain
rebelled at the overload. My eyes
turned away, looking instead at the
worn tile floor. Is that why my writing
shut down during these walks? I find
no words written during these weeks.
Only months later – my throat now
free of tubing – did I venture outside
alone to walk. The worst summer heat
had abated. Both my strength and
weight had returned to healthier levels.
I loaded careful supplies that first
day: towel, water bottle, tissues, Chap-
Stick. But I first tucked into my waist
pack a three-inch notepad, plus a felt
pen. My cell phone offered backup. For
safety in case of another sudden medi-
cal emergency. And dictation. Who
knew what I might see that would
demand a digital story later?
As I stepped onto the sidewalk, my
body nearly collapsed in both joy and
fear. The concrete welcomed me like
an overstocked playroom lures a curi-
ous child. Even tree branches appeared
to crook their limbs in my direction,
promising freedom, relief, and discov-
ery unlike anything I’d known in previ-
ous seasons.
My confidence surged in the simple
act of walking. So did the story ideas.
Fears of stumbling on the path or,
worse, collapsing face-first onto the
sidewalk vanished. In came possibili-
ties for flash fiction, short stories,
long-form fiction, novellas, short
essays, poems. Most stunning was a
pair of high-concept novels. Walk time
morphed into a storytime flood zone.
Ideas came from every source, all
unexpected. People biking by. Birds fly-
ing above. Animals skittering nearby.
“Praise and criticism seem to me to operate exactly on the same level. If you get
a great review, it’s really thrilling for about ten minutes. If you get a bad review,
it’s really crushing for ten minutes. Either way, you go on.” —Ann Patchett
Cars and trucks racing along. Even the
sky overhead delivered narratives, cour-
tesy of clouds-as-dinosaurs, war-like
sunbeams, and stinging-bee raindrops.
As the weeks passed, the ideas
morphed, moving to feed my longtime
priority project – a stalled-by-sickness
novel. The more I walked, the more
my novel returned to life. Character
dilemmas resolved themselves as solu-
tions arose in time with my heels
pounding the sidewalk. A footfall at a
stop sign delivered a new name to
replace an old, awkward one. Scenes
moved into new settings, thanks to a
magical park encounter involving a
family resembling my protagonist’s.
This wealth – so unexpected amid
my focus on simple physical recovery –
overwhelmed every sense I possessed.
Everything around me blossomed in
those months. I saw, heard, smelled,
and even tasted and touched the life
around my walks in ways my old life
had never known.
Rainwater shimmering in a refilled
stream. Rolling tires squishing against
summertime asphalt. Blood-red roses
emanating tones of honey. Oak leaf
rubbing gritty as sandpaper against
dry fingertips.
On their own, these images and
sensations married the ideas and the
words. It became so persistent, I
named it. I had to.
Idea Generating Machine, or IGM.
The voices – yes, I hear voices but,
most often, they’re only nudges or
teases – whisper in soft detail with
who does what, where, when, why, and
how. Those questions and answers
trigger my long-ago reporter past. I
smile as ancient muscle memory awak-
ens to a new form of wordsmithing,
this time of the fiction kind. With my
history and in this new writing life, it
all equals perfect sense.
Sometimes it’s only three words of
scene text. Or a dialogue edit here for
Chapter 2, Scene 4. A new nickname to
spice up an old essay.
The softest whispers carry the big-
gest weight, like last spring’s one-word
download for a funky road trip blog.
RoadBroads. I whirled around and
asked, “where did that come from?”
Never had I thought of writing a blog,
much less while driving to a mountain
writing retreat.
Too many more pressing projects.
IGM insisted, expanding its message.
Create it before the writing retreat. Get
a logo. Images of a road, a car, a broad.
Write and post as you drive. Keep it
going after the retreat.
As the words came in, I smiled, skin
more goose-pimpled by the second.
Reaching for my cell phone, I dictated
to Siri the newest message. The most
detailed and longest IGM since I fell ill.
(And yes, I developed the blog. Some-
thing I never intended to create or
write. But still do. Weekly. IGM
reminds me.)
We’ve got a routine now, IGM and
me.
My heels start out tap-tap-tapping
on the empty sidewalk, my sneakers
pounding one step at a time. My eyes
drop down to focus on the gray squares
of concrete rising up. It’s a welcome of
sorts, as if the sidewalk awaited my
return. I hear and feel my rhythmic
pace, soles slapping to their own pri-
vate metronome. I walk where I’m led,
sometimes to pass by the nearby ele-
mentary school. On other days, I head
in the opposite direction, where fewer
bicyclists crowd the pathway.
In the sunrise walks, my eyes scan
the horizon, searching for what’s write-
able. If it’s later in the day, I scan land-
scapes such as the neighborhood park
with its turtles and alligators. But
wherever I walk, start time equals eye-
ball time. This activates my stable of
walk-to-write questions: What’s differ-
ent today? If it looks the same, how do
I view it differently? Anything I’ve
never seen? How can I use today’s walk
in a story?
When IGM nudges, I stop the
writermag.com • The Writer | 5
questions and listen. We’re all playing
Tag, and I’m It.
Sometimes my recent past roars
back, demanding attention to the aneu-
rysm story. IGM has delivered clever
phrasings for aspects of that out-of-body
experience. “Hovering high above yel-
low waving cornfields, three states north
of home” was one. Another borders on
the TMI: “Nurse Ratched flipped me
over for yet another painful insertion.”
These are tough messages to hear while
walking. Too much of this story remains
raw. It will be told, however, because this
machine won’t let me forget.
IGM visits about four times a week.
At its cue, I tap either the Siri button or
the Dragon Dictation app on my
phone and start narrating what I’ve
heard. I prefer the former because the
voice-to-text conversion works better
with my talking style. I never slow
down, instead walking and staying
focused on the sidewalk immediately
in front of me. The rhythm and pace of
my steps feed the messages in a process
I’ve yet to understand.
I also ignore the content of the
message. It’s akin to a first draft story.
Rough. Ugly. Lay it down anyway.
Capture the words. Activate secretarial
skills. No time for judgment, revisions,
or second-guessing. This is ore, not
gold bars.
After completing the dictation, I
forward the message(s) to my studio
computer. Immediately. On most
walks, one IGM incoming means more
is on the way. Some walks, I’ve sent six
Siri messages.
When I arrive home after 4 miles on
the trail, my life feels richer, more com-
plete. Physical work is done, and the
mental efforts are warmed up. I shower
and change, then walk again – this time
to my office, ready to transcribe what
awaits, my first writing work of the day.
Another writing day begins, and
I’ve yet to step into my studio.
I’ve missed some daily walks. Real
Life intrudes sometimes. I pay a price
both ways. When I miss, IGM returns
slowly. A temper tantrum? In missing
her, I return to the sidewalk faster.
Other tips: I walk alone. No ear-
buds. Ever. And no pets.
Finally – relax. Ideas come when
you’re not looking or craving them.
I craved healing and recovery, not
stories or words. Once I relaxed about
storytelling, two words left my vocabu-
lary forever: “blocked” and “stuck.”
When you walk, look, and listen,
the fountain of ideas floods.
I don’t recommend how I got here.
Four brain surgeries disrupt more
than a writing life. But my story is not
about that. It’s about this – learning
how to observe, listen, and capture
writing ideas.
Writing, like life, is how you walk it.
—Melanie Ormand crafts fiction and nonfiction in
novel, blog, and essay form from her Houston
studio. Find her at melanieormand.com and
roadbroads.com.

ASK THE WRITER

What’s the Oxford comma?

This comma goes by many names, including the serial
comma and the Harvard comma, and is an issue of quite
a bit of anxiety for some. (For the purposes of this
response, I’ll call it the serial comma.) It’s the comma
that comes before the final item in a list of three or more:
I packed a deck of cards, pretzels, and three novels.
See that comma before “and” toward the end of the
sentence? That’s the serial comma. And why so much
debate? As long as the sentence is clear, you can use it
or not use it at your discretion. As always, there are
notable exceptions. If you’re following a style guide,
look up the particulars. Chicago Manual of Style advo-
cates for its use, while AP Stylebook recommends skip-
ping it if the sentence is clear.
This issue of clarity is where things get sticky. In the
example sentence above, the sentence is clear without
the serial comma. But this next sentence changes
meaning depending upon the absence or presence of
the serial comma:
I mailed the invitations to my friends, the mail car-
rier, and the fire chief.
With the serial comma, there are more than three
invitations going out: one to each friend, the mail carrier,
and the fire chief. Without the comma, it reads like this:
I mailed the invitations to my friends, the mail car-
rier and the fire chief.
That makes just two invitations: one to the friend
who is a mail carrier and the other to the friend who is
a fire chief.
Take your stance on the serial comma and be consis-
tent with it, while at the same time keeping tabs on
clarity.
—Brandi Reissenweber teaches fiction writing and reading fiction at
Gotham Writers Workshop.

6 | The Writer • October 2019

 “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your
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writermag.com • The Writer | 7

FROM THE FRONT LINES
BY YI SHUN LAI
The doctor is out
Writing is not that kind of therapy.
E
very once in a while, I make
the colossal mistake of read-
ing my old diaries. I do it in
a circumspect manner: I
squint one eye closed, lift the lid of
whatever Banker’s Box I’ve chosen
with one index finger, turn my head so
that I get just a glimpse of the books
lined up relatively neatly in their box.
I flip through with one hand, still
holding the box lid aloft with one fin-
ger of the other hand, and choose
something with both eyes closed.
Then I let the lid float back into
place, dislodging dust so that I have to
really squinch shut both eyes.
I crack open the diary the exact same
way: one eye shut; paging through deli-
cately; holding my breath as if I’m about
to smell the stinky tofu of my memories.
8 | The Writer • October 2019
Ech, you say. Surely, she’s
exaggerating.
I’m not, I promise. It is so onerous to
look back through my diaries. I do it
when I have to remember things. You
know, recapture feelings, like how it
was the night my mom got robbed in
our driveway and no one heard her
yelling for help. Or the day I turned 40
and my well-meaning husband exe-
cuted a surprise birthday party he
didn’t invite my best friends to (they
lived too far for an invitation, he said,
displaying what I filed away as Mid-
western sensibility).
Yeah, I’ve filed those feelings far,
far away, in a dusty Banker’s Box. You
betcha.
And then there’s the goldmine of
facts: We don’t remember things as they
actually happened. Every time you
remember something, you’re just
remembering the last time you remem-
bered it, so your memory is basically
one big pile of fishing stories in which
the fish just gets bigger and bigger every
time you tell that story. Diaries can
reveal how things actually happened.
So if my diaries are such a wealthy
repository of writing prompts and
information, why the hell do I have
such a hard time looking at them?
The reason is obvious: The writing
is garbage, and I don’t just mean the
stuff from my teen years. Why, as
recently as yesterday’s entry, the writ-
Roi and Roi/Shutterstock
ing is rife with adjectives and adverbs,
it reeks of someone struggling to com-
prehend what has just happened,
someone reaching to make sense of
things with one of those grabber claws
for help. (The entry I wrote the night
my mom got robbed is full of all caps
and underlines; me swearing ven-
geance upon the guys that did it and
then ran away, literal thieves in the
night. Reading it is mortifying.)
This is why, although writing is
great therapy, the writing that exists
in your diary isn’t meant for anyone
else’s consumption but your own
weeping self.
And yet we get work in Tahoma Lit-
erary Review’s open queue that is
clearly written from the position of
someone who’s using their writing to
work their way through an event or
understand a problematic person in
their lives. Sometimes, this work can
take the form of short stories as the
writer tries to put up a wall between
the events that have affected them so
and the creative work they know can
help them and their readers to work
through the issues the event has raised.
Writer and producer Ken Pisani,
whose novel AMP’D was a finalist for
2017’s Thurber Prize for American
Humor, is one of the quickest, most
concise wits I know. If you’re writing
too close to an event that’s really
affected you, Pisani said in a class I
once took from him, you run the risk
of being maudlin.
That kind of treacly sentimentality
is enough to ruin any good that might
come out of a written piece of work.
Time and distance, it’s said over and
over again, heal all. So how can you
know when you’re too close to some-
thing? The two most telling ways I
know aren’t useful until after the fact,
but that’s OK. (If you already have
something written about your trigger-
ing event, then you have something to
start with. And it’s always easier to
work from something, even if nothing
from that first draft ever makes it into
the final draft.)
First: You’re really sensitive to feed-
back. You might feel like you’re ready to
get feedback on a piece of work, but
when you get the feedback, you’re all
jumpy and prickly. This is a surefire
indication that you can’t be objective
about what you’ve written, which means
you probably don’t have enough dis-
tance from the thing you’re writing
about. An acquaintance once asked me
to edit a piece about the very recent
death of her father. It had a lot of holes
in it, which I pointed out. She couldn’t
understand how I could tear down her
work so clinically when she was clearly
writing about something that was dear
to her.
Second: You feel icky when you’re
writing about the event, thing, or per-
son you’re trying to understand. This
is a similar feeling to when you’ve just
experienced something awful, and
you’re trying to write about it. You
relive it as you’re writing about it, so
writing about it feels like accidentally
brushing up against a skinned knee –
ouch! There. That cringe. That just-
before-barfing mouth-watering
sensation. If ever you experience that
while you’re writing something, step
away from it. You need more time
before you can try it again. When
you’ve let enough time go by that you
can poke at your skinned knee and it
has a protective scab over it, then you
can touch it.
OK. Fine. You begrudgingly agree
that you need time. But you need to,
want to write about this thing. It is
burning a hole in your creative pocket.
What do you do?
You compromise. You make some-
thing that’s just creative enough to be
proud of, but just wacky enough that
you balk at sending it in someplace for
consideration. You make something
just for you.
By “you,” of course, I mean “me.”
Here’s the party trick that never fails to
entertain my brain and keep me an
arm’s length from subjecting some
poor editor to my not-ready-for-con-
sumption work. (It also prevents me
from subjecting myself to inevitable
rejection.)
I make a game of whatever the thing
was. I look for a new way to tell my
story, something totally wacko, like an
essay comprising entirely crossword
puzzle clues, maybe. I write a list of
directions, a recipe. Perhaps the thing
loans itself well to maps. I’ll write that.
Or I’ll write it from an animal’s point
of view.
Whatever the thing ends up being,
it’s definitely not ready for publication.
First drafts never are, right? Or maybe
it’s the bones of something even better
than what I would have originally writ-
ten. Either way, it’s a whole new work,
and that has fed my creative beast, so I
have bought myself a little more time
and distance before the urge to tackle
the thing darkens my door again.
So many times, I’ve slaved away at
something, only to realize that I’m just
not ready to write about the thing. But
I think this is OK: If a thing matters so
much that you just have to write about
it, then it deserves time and room to
breathe and evolve into something that
will see an audience.
Eventually, the mortifiying writing
will become something concrete. You
will have distance enough to see it and
its impact on you with clarity and with
more experience; you will have used
your tools and skills to shape it into
something that can truly help you to
resolve your feelings about the event or
person. The work will sound signifi-
cant when read out loud; look just
right on the page.
And, I bet that your eventual work
will have the added benefit of helping
someone else to navigate their own
thing, too.
Yi Shun Lai is the fiction editor and co-owner
of Tahoma Literary Review. Read about her
writing coaching and editing services; her
novel, Not a Self-Help Book: The Misadven-
tures of Marty Wu; and her daily adventures at
thegooddirt.org.
writermag.com • The Writer | 9
 FREELANCE SUCCESS
BY PETE CROATTO
Money matters
Why freelancers should ask for more money. Always.
“
W
hen I started doing
the ‘I don’t get out of
bed for less than $4 a
word’ thing, people
started paying me $4 a word.”
This is all Taffy Brodesser-Akner,
the New York Times Magazine staff
writer and freshly minted best-selling
novelist, told Cosmopolitan’s Jen Ortiz.
In mid-June, when the comments hit
the social media terrain, it didn’t take
long for writers to bitch before realiz-
ing Brodesser-Akner is an aspirational
figure, not a nemesis.
Citing a brutal workload and pub-
licity schedule, Brodesser-Akner
declined to comment, though in an
email she attributed the flak coming
10 | The Writer • October 2019
from “just a couple of people” and
expressed no regret for what she said.
“Honesty is still good.”
A large lesson exists inside that con-
cise quote: Writers should always ask for
more money. Should our rates start at $4
a word? Heavens no. But Brodesser-
Akner first attracted attention as a first-
rate freelancer for a variety of
well-known publications, including
penning a series of memorable profiles
at GQ. She has a remarkable knack for
humanizing celebrities, people whose
business is distancing themselves from
us mortals. Read her piece on Don
Lemon, the frequently mocked CNN
personality, or new Batman Robert Pat-
tinson. She deserves to get paid well.
So do you. All you have to do is ask.
Britni de la Cretaz, a veteran free-
lance writer, asks for more money 95%
of that time. “The rate negotiation
comes when you already know the
publication wants what you have,” she
says. “So, at the point, the power is
actually in your hands.” That’s leverage.
She gets more almost every time.
Editors, de la Cretaz believes, expect
a negotiation. “They’re coming in
low,” she says, “and they almost
always have more money.” If she’s
offered $50 for a blog post, she’ll ask
Ronnie21/Shutterstock
for $75. For larger publications offer-
ing 60 cents a word, she’ll counter
with $1 a word. For 1,500-word
reported pieces, she started asking for
$650 instead of being satisfied with
$350. And she got it.
“I was surprised at how easy it was,”
says de la Cretaz, who has written for
The New York Times and The Atlantic.
When the rate didn’t budge, she nego-
tiated other perks such as travel and
transcription costs.
“I ultimately think the amount of
money that you want is whatever it is
that will make you enjoy working on
the piece,” says freelance writer Elon
Green, who has written for a number
of publications, including Columbia
Journalism Review. “That varies by
writer, and what made you happy two
years ago is not necessarily what’s
going to make you happy today. You
ask for what you need.”
What if the editor refuses to budge
on the price? It’s perfectly OK to walk
away. I’m sorry, but that price doesn’t
work for me, but maybe we can collabo-
rate in the future. Thank you for your
consideration. As de la Cretaz noted,
your pitch works. Surely another publi-
cation will provide a home for a higher
price. The benefits extend beyond dol-
lars. The higher the price, Green
believes, the more time editors will
spend making it better.
Getting more money involves
finesse. You can’t be offered $1,000
and ask for $5,000. That’s an invita-
tion for professional exile. Go slightly
above what will make the story worth-
while. Let’s return to reality: $1,000 is
too low; you want $1,500. Ask for
$1,700. You’re negotiating up; the
publication will negotiate down. This
gives you a better chance of meeting
in your middle. Based on how the edi-
tor responds, you can accept, politely
decline, or negotiate extras like tran-
scription fees.
If you’re worried about upsetting
an editor, please redirect that con-
cern. As a full-time freelance writer, I
am running a business. Gratitude
does not put butter on my bread.
Good editors understand the realities.
“I was totally sympathetic,” says for-
mer GQ executive editor, Devin Gor-
don, who felt bad if he couldn’t get a
writer more money. And de la Cretaz
doesn’t blame editors for not-great
rates but a “broken media system”
where everyone is working with
“much less cash flow.” Translation:
publications don’t have the money
they did 20 or even 10 years ago, and
it’s not as if the cost of living has pla-
teaued. The editor who stomps their
feet over a polite request for a 25-cent
IF YOU’RE WORRIED
ABOUT UPSETTING AN
EDITOR, PLEASE REDIRECT
THAT CONCERN. AS A
FULL-TIME FREELANCE
WRITER, I AM RUNNING
A BUSINESS. GRATITUDE
DOES NOT PUT BUTTER
ON MY BREAD.
a word increase is either a tyrant,
delusional, or both. Leave them
behind without regret.
A lack of aggravation is more
important because top-tier freelance
writers don’t make that much money
compared to elite professionals in
other fields, says Gordon, who edited
Brodesser-Akner at GQ. A contract
freelance writer, like Chris Heath,
writes five 8,000-word features in a
good year. That’s $160,000. Yes, it’s a
wonderful haul, but a pittance for doc-
tors, lawyers, and top executives at
banks and technology firms.
That money doesn’t factor in the
research and prep work that separates
a great writer from a good one. And
let’s not forget: that six-figure salary is
before taxes.
It’s not a great system.
“Can we just say it,” Gordon says.
“It sucks.”
Green, de la Cretaz, and Gordon,
now a full-time freelance writer, have
all written pieces where the prestige
of the publication outweighed their
fee. “There are also publications that
I’ve written for – that I would con-
tinue to write for – at discounted
rates, because writing for them gets
people to talk,” Green says. “That’s
sort of the bargain I made with
myself.” I’ve done that too. I wrote
heavily reported oral histories for the
websites at Sports Illustrated and Roll-
ing Stone. The pay stunk: I earned less
than $1,000 total – for both. But the
prestige – and attention – those clips
generated proved invaluable. It was a
great investment, more so when one
piece provided contacts and material
for my book.
Every piece a freelancer writes,
Gordon says, is a billboard ad to get
more work, but he can see a world
where the compensation is on par
with the exposure.
“It’s just crazy to me that we’re not
psyched about someone doing well,” he
says. “We need some success stories in
this business. Hopefully, with the
impact of Taffy and how good she is
and how successful she is, editors and
publishers will say, ‘I’d rather have one
Taffy and pay her $5 a word than five
people who are a quarter as good and
pay them a quarter of the money.’”
With decent-paying writing gigs at
a premium, landing one is an accom-
plishment because it requires your
heart and soul and professionalism,
that exhausting mixture of the passion-
ate and the practical. Don’t gripe about
what everyone else is making. Advo-
cate for yourself, and get paid. You
deserve it.
Veteran freelance writer Pete Croatto (Twit-
ter: @PeteCroatto) is working on his first book
for Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
writermag.com • The Writer | 11
 HOW TO
fictionalize
hometown
YOUR

WORLD-BUILDING IS RARELY SIMPLE.

DOES DRAWING UPON YOUR CHILDHOOD
STOMPING GROUNDS MAKE IT ANY EASIER?

By Lauren Puckett

12 | The Writer • October 2019

T
his is home: the scratch of dewy grass, barely
alive after the heat of summer, still sharp and
squelching from morning and evening sprinkler
sessions. Roads and hills rise and fall like unsteady
breaths. In Columbia, Missouri, a short drive from
the Missouri River, the short downtown strip of Broadway is
dissected by stoplights, which the college students love to
jaywalk after a cheap pitcher at one of several storied sports
bars. Faurot Field, the football stadium, is typically holy
ground this time of year, though lately the team’s struggled to
fill seats. There’s a steakhouse gem in a strip mall and an
indie bakery stuffed inside the arthouse cinema. This is home,
my indefinable home, one of those mid-size Midwestern
towns not always at ease with its own identity.
But wait. What if this were home: A
main street called Littleton rather than
Broadway. An indie bakery hidden not
inside a theater but, perhaps, inside a
museum. Or, consider this: Columbia
underwent a seismic controversy over
race on the University of
Missouri campus in 2015,
but what if, instead, a
debate around identity
had sparked in 2020, dur-
ing the re-election campaign
of Donald Trump?
I wouldn’t be writing about Colum-
bia, no. Not the real one, anyway. But it’d
be something like Columbia – a fiction-
alized version tweaked to fit a different
world, one tailor-made for a novel.
This is the conundrum I faced
when I started revising my first book, a
maraga/Shutterstock
draft I’m still rewriting, recreating, and
rethinking every day. I originally
started by placing my characters in San
Antonio, a city I’d visited once and
considered a perfect fit for the novel’s
mood. But as I pushed through the
first several thousand words, I saw the
cracks in what I knew. There was no
way I could build a realistic world
around a place I’d only traversed as a
one-time tourist. The resulting product
would be inauthentic or, worse, offen-
sive to true San Antonians.
I trashed the setting and uprooted
my characters to my hometown:
Columbia, Missouri. Except I was
soon presented with another problem.
The magical realism of my book, and
the nefarious secrets hidden in the set-
ting’s restaurants and small businesses,
didn’t seem accurate to my true vision
of Columbia. I didn’t want readers
thinking I looked upon my birthplace
with derision or despair. True, I have
critiques of the college town I call
home, but, in the context of the book,
they came out more scathing than
soul-searching.
Finally, it was time for Plan C: A fic-
tional setting. I’d create a college town
in Missouri, but one with details that
differed from Columbia. I’d draw from
memories and beloved childhood
landmarks to make this place authentic
to the area, but the feel of the town and
its distinguishing features would be all
their own.
As straightforward as it might seem,
fictionalizing is a messy business. You
start with something real, then infuse
it with the un-real, but leave behind
enough bits of the real to convince
readers you’re as close to real as the un-
real gets. Still with me?
The process only gets more compli-
cated when you fictionalize something
writermag.com • The Writer | 13
as raw and pure as your own home-
town. Your family and friends might
still live there. You have memories that
go bone-deep. That place is as much a
part of you as your own fingers skim-
ming the keyboard.
So why, when choosing a setting for
short stories and novels, do many
authors create a fictional version of
where they grew up? What’s the
appeal? And once you get started, how
do you do it right?
Frustrated by these questions, and
wondering what I’m (almost definitely)
doing wrong, I sought out several
authors who’ve found success fictional-
izing their birthplaces. They shared
their wisdom and advice, and we
laughed over common misconceptions
and mistakes. There’s no perfect way to
do this, and you’d be wrong if you
thought fictionalizing were easy. But
with a few smart do’s and don’ts, you’ll
feel a lot steadier as you step forward
on a similar quest.
DO:
Ask yourself why. Many writers love
seasoning their manuscripts with tastes
of home. But home means something
different to everyone, including your
characters. Before you slide a creative
spin on your hometown into your
novel, ask yourself why that’s the best
fit. Are you searching for more creative
rein or trying to avoid readers’ precon-
ceptions? Would your story make more
sense in a world most audiences can
visualize – for instance, the streets of
downtown Manhattan – or someplace
that’ll require much deeper detail? Lis-
ten to your gut as you make this choice,
and take my experience as an example:
You’re allowed to change your mind.
Soniah Kamal, author of Unmar-
riageable, a Pride and Prejudice retell-
ing set in her birth country of Pakistan,
recommends one good reason to
choose fictionalization: You don’t have
to sweat the small stuff. If you’re writ-
ing about a hometown you haven’t vis-
ited in a while, you’d hate to set the
story around a restaurant that closed
14 | The Writer • October 2019
five years ago. A fictional town gives
you the freedom to use those child-
hood influences without adhering to
every minor historical detail.
DON’T:
Assume fictionalizing is a get-out-of-
jail-free card. Sure, you get to pick
where the coffee shops and stop signs
go. But that doesn’t mean you have a
license to create entirely new rules for
where your characters live. Even in sci-
ence fiction or fantasy, there are real-
world considerations to respect.
Consider my made-up Missouri
town. If I liked, I could infest it with
unicorns. That’s the beauty of fiction.
But it’s in Missouri, so those unicorns
better be able to survive in high humid-
ity, and on a diet of soybeans and corn.
You’ll have to make similar choices
with any story based – even loosely! –
on reality. Your readers will go along
with your larger creative choices if you
can establish, first, that you know the
region you’re writing about.
DO:
Start with your most visceral memo-
ries. When Cynthia Swanson sat down
to pen her latest novel, The Glass Forest,
she envisioned a specific spot where
her town would reside. She grew up in
Peekskill, New York, and The Glass For-
est’s setting – fictional Stonekill, New
York – needed to look different but
evoke the region’s sights and sounds. To
begin, she tapped her most vivid child-
hood memories: the smell of the Hud-
son River; the sound of trains rolling
along the tracks at night; the choke of
woods that swallowed winding roads.
She knew these details were authentic
to the area, and Peekskill residents
would recognize her subtle nods. But
she left enough unsaid that she could
still develop a new town with its own
myths and legends.
When developing your landscape,
try something similar: Ask yourself
what you remember most about home.
Take a page from your kindergarten
exercises, and check off the five senses.
What did you eat most often at your
parents’ table? Did the stench wafting
from a nearby hog farm force you to
drive by with your nose plugged? What
did the trees look like in the middle of
winter? Could you hear wind whistling
through the canyons while you tried to
fall asleep?
You won’t want to use every mem-
ory, as some will only be applicable to
you and not to the region itself. But the
ones you feel are universal? Those are
your keepers.
DON’T:
Rely entirely on those memories. Swan-
son says she started the writing process
by acting on instincts and visceral
memories. She didn’t even have a
chance to go home to Peekskill for addi-
tional research until she’d already sold
her manuscript to Simon & Schuster.
But when she did go home, she knew
she had some double-checking to do.
She drove to the exact place where she
pictured Stonekill could stand, and
there, she scanned her surroundings to
ensure everything matched what she’d
put on the page.
Even in fiction, this sort of
research is essential. Swanson cross-
referenced her story with first-hand
testimony, old photos, and historical
accounts of the Peekskill area. You
might think you know the place
where you grew up, but more likely
than not, there are details you’ve for-
gotten, events you’ve overlooked, and
context that can hugely alter the inter-
pretation of your manuscript.
DO:
Choose your name wisely. In the
fraught early drafting process, it might
be tempting to slap a name on your
town and call it a night. But especially
in fiction – where names like Hogwarts
and Metropolis are immortalized – you
want something that stands out (and, if
you’re ambitious, might look good on a
sign at Universal Studios). Still, the
name must make sense to your home-
town’s region.
Take Missouri, for example. We’re
notorious name-copiers. In the Show-
Me State, there’s a Paris, a Versailles, a
California, a Carthage, a Carthage, a
Breckenridge, a Buffalo, an Albany, an
Amsterdam, and even a Beverly Hills.
So, if I were to name my book’s set-
ting something like Santorini, Mis-
souri, well…it might sound a little
ridiculous, but it wouldn’t be totally
without precedence.
Swanson made a similar choice
when she named her setting Stonekill.
“Kill” is derived from the Dutch word
for “creek” or “water channel,” and
many of the surrounding towns share
the name, including Swanson’s home-
town of Peekskill and the nearby Fish-
kill, New York. She liked the creepy
sound of Stonekill, but the name also
fit the history of the area. Thus, it was
a natural choice.
Komal also spent hours narrowing
down her city’s name in Unmarriage-
able. Although the full backstory of Dil-
ipabad, one of the book’s main settings,
didn’t survive the revision process, she
believes the research she put into the
title was meaningful regardless. She
wanted something that invoked post-
colonialism, one of the major themes of
Unmarriageable. By giving Dilipabad a
name that wasn’t British – and therefore
not stamped by British rule – she could
signal the importance of reclaimed
identity in countries such as Pakistan.
Here, as in most stories, the name is not
just a name. It’s a symbol.
DON’T:
Play with replicas. Stephen Markley,
author of last year’s Ohio, understands
better than most the temptation to
funnel personal experiences and rela-
tionships directly into your fiction. “It’s
something that sort of burns within
every creative person,” he says. “To
offer an explanation not only to read-
ers but to themselves about what they
experienced.” Ohio takes place in New
Canaan, Ohio, a town loosely based on
the cities where Markley spent his
youth. And the book’s dark subject
matter – involving the opioid epi-
demic, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,
and the Great Recession – is heavily
inspired by the death and destruction
Markley witnessed during his child-
hood in Mount Vernon, Ohio.
Still, he says he needed time to
acquire an appropriate amount of dis-
tance. He’d been trying to write a ver-
sion of Ohio ever since high school,
but he struggled not to directly, as he
puts it, “render one-to-one people you
know or situations you experienced
within the context of the novel.” Real-
ity, he explains, tends to be much
weirder than fiction. That isn’t to say
auto-fiction can’t work. But when
you’re creating a fictional place, the
parallels you draw must be carefully
chosen. You must have the distance
and maturity to know what to say
about them.
DO:
Draw a map. If you’ve got an artist’s
hand, this can be a blast. For those of
us with handwriting like 8-year-olds,
it’s a little less fun.
Either way, this is your chance to
make your world seem real. You can go
by instincts for the first 50 pages, but
once your city starts to take shape,
you’ll need to abide by its rules. You
can’t tell readers the gas station is at the
corner of Park and 7th when you told
them 30 pages ago it was on Cherry
and 9th. Even if you steal landmarks
from your hometown, you’ll need to
know where they go within the context
of a new world.
Markley started with the basic
geography of his hometown, then went
back and made a map. Komal built a
city around a bazaar, then went back
and – you guessed it – made a map.
Sooner or later, you’ll need to know
where things are.
The joy is, you get to choose what
the map looks like and how to make it.
Some authors love open-source map
generators that exist as downloadable
software online. Those more artistic
than I am might make a Narnia-
inspired watercolor. Me, I get by with a
few pencil scratches in a journal, with
the occasional use of a protractor,
ruler, and compass. Just make sure you
invest in high-quality erasers before
you get started.
DON’T:
Think your readers won’t recognize
what you’re doing – and react. Feed-
back, especially from folks still dwell-
ing in your hometown, will run the
gamut. Some readers will immediately
lay claim to the setting of your novel;
they’ll swear they know exactly where
it is you’ve broken the ground for your
book. Others might take offense to the
critiques or praises you bestow upon
the region. Inevitably, someone will
complain about what you got wrong.
Your readers will take enormous
pride in what they recognize as home.
Respect this to the best of your ability,
but prepare yourself for a difficult les-
son: You can’t make everyone happy –
even under the guise of fiction. Don’t
be afraid to tell the truth of where you
came from, even if that truth is emo-
tionally or politically fraught. Give
your setting the context it needs and
deserves, but don’t shudder away from
creative leaps because you fear reader
reactions. If the story resonates, then
you did your job.
“It’s important for writers to keep
their bravery about them and really
forge ahead on those first drafts and
really not panic at all the panic,” Mark-
ley says. Choose what is best for your
characters while honoring the reality of
the place that raised you. Once you’ve
found balance on that shaky ground
between fiction and reality, your story
will have its chance to soar.
Lauren Puckett is a magazine editor, freelance
journalist, and fiction writer born and raised in
the Midwest. Her work appears in publications
including Literary Hub, Bustle, Apartment Ther-
apy, The Rumpus and 5280 Magazine. You can
find her on Twitter @laurpuckett.
writermag.com • The Writer | 15
A
T

N
A

N
S

I
 ANATOMY
OF AN
ANTAGONIST
How to craft the villain
your hero deserves.
By Jessica Stilling

writermag.com • The Writer | 17


I don’t
want to
upset anyone,
but until the moment when Kylo Ren (spoiler
alert) does a complete character 180 in The Last
Jedi, I was pretty bored with the movie. It wasn’t
just the fact that he’d thrown Snoke, the large vil-
lain-y-type guy in the chair, into the vacuum of
space, deciding to save Rey instead of heeding the
calls of The Dark Side that perked me up; it was
the fact that finally a character had exhibited
actual change. But soon all that character devel-
opment went right out the window (or into that
same vacuum of space) and I was bored again.
Kylo Ren had been our antagonist for nearly
two full-length movies. We’d seen him struggle,
we’d seen him make other people struggle. And,
yes, he did some bad things, but it wasn’t until
that near-180 that he got interesting – only to
have him turn that 180 into a 360 and become
uninteresting again.
Characters are the backbone of any story, and
no one is more important to a story than its main
characters. Yes, the protagonist comes first, but a
well-developed antagonist can help drive a narra-
tive in many complex and compelling directions.
When crafting a story, it’s important to look at
the dimensions of the antagonist, or the “bad guy,”
just as it’s important to communicate the many
facets of your protagonist. We’ve generally started
to move away from the “mustache-twirling bad
guy” in both genre and literary fiction, characters
like the Smurfs’ Gargamel and all the Evil Queens
who want to do bad only because being bad feels
so good. Yet not every story calls for a redeemable
or redeemed antagonist. No matter which type of
antagonist you choose, it’s important to fully
understand both the character and their function
in your story so that they ultimately drive the plot
just like your protagonist.
18 | The Writer • October 2019
THE FOUR MAIN TYPES
OF ANTAGONISTS
1
THE ONE YOU LOVE TO HATE
Otherwise known as “the mustache-twirling bad
guy.” These characters just get in your hero’s way.
Your hero wants to save the world while this antagonist
wants to destroy it. Your hero wants to marry the prince,
this antagonist wants him all to herself – not because the vil-
lainess loves him, but because she wants to win, she wants
his money, she likes his powerful position, etc.
Another aspect of this type of antagonist is that they
often don’t have a good reason for getting in the protago-
nist’s way. Let’s say Protagonist and Antagonist are both up
for a job. Protagonist wants the job because they love what
they do or they need the money or they’re really good at
said job. Antagonist is usually independently wealthy, bored
with the job, and just wants to win for bragging rights. Typi-
cally, this antagonist hates the protagonist – and not always
for a good reason.
The Emperor from Star Wars is definitely a “Love to
Hate” type of antagonist. We learn from episodes one
through three that there’s more of a method to his mad-
ness, but even then, it kinda seems he just likes destroying
things for money and power. In literary fiction, there are
examples of these Love to Haters as well. Take Jason from
The Sound and the Fury. His first line to us is “Once a bitch
always a bitch,” when referring to a sympathetic character.
Then, a few scenes later, when a very young child really
wants to go to the fair but can’t afford the ticket, Jason
takes a ticket to said fair out of his wallet, watches the
child’s eyes light up, and then burns the ticket right in front
of him – and laughs.
Previous spread: Morphart Creation/Shutterstock (illustrations), Jiripravda/Shutterstock (mask)
These kinds of antagonists cause a reader to focus their
anger. They allow a reader to root harder for the protagonist
because so much is at stake. And most of what is at stake is
defeating this bully. But the problem might arise where a
reader wonders if your protagonist is really that good, or is
the alternative just so bad that they have to root for the
hero? These kinds of antagonists can help drive a plot, but
always be wary of making antagonists too bad for no reason
or they can start to look like a caricature.
2
THE SYMPATHETIC ANTAGONIST
This model has become much more popular in
recent years. Part of this might be because when
you really sit and listen to a character, when you hear their
whole story, it’s hard to hate them. Few people burn tickets to
the fair while defeated large-eyed children watch. Most char-
acters have desires just like a protagonist, and when those
desires conflict with others, or if those desires are in some
way detrimental to the person or (more often) others, an
ordinary character becomes a villain.
So what makes an antagonist sympathetic?
Backstory is one way to garner sympathy for a character,
even if they’re doing terrible things. Take Frankenstein’s
monster, for example: We all know that the monster even-
tually goes on a killing rampage to try to destroy the life of
his creator, Victor Frankenstein, but when we eventually
learn about all the pain and ridicule the monster suffers
during his short life, the reader begins to understand the
monster better.
Desperately wanting something for a good reason (or at
least a good enough reason) is another way to make an
antagonist sympathetic. Catwoman, in Tim Burton’s retell-
ing, wants to take down the mob that destroyed her. Sure,
she hurts a lot of people in her wake, but at least she has
(kind of) a good reason for what she’s doing. While a “Love
to Hater” wants the job just to win a power grab, a sympa-
thetic antagonist may want the job to prove something to
his parents, who never truly believed in him. Maybe he
doesn’t do nice things to get that job, but at least he has
more complex reasons.
Being conflicted also helps with the sympathy factor.
Let’s go back to that Kylo Ren scene with Snoke and the vac-
uum of space. He is obviously conflicted about his role in
the Dark Side. He might have acted badly, but he makes at
least some effort to change.
3
IT’S COMPLICATED
There’s a middle ground between an antagonist we
feel deep sympathy for and one we just hate. Some
antagonists are just in the way. We might decide to root
against them, but there’s nothing essentially villainous about
what they’re doing. Think of Boris in Donna Tartt’s The
Goldfinch, our protagonist Theo’s childhood friend who
(spoiler alert) gets involved in crime and steals things from
the protagonist. Still, there’s something charming about
Boris that makes you want to forgive him (even though he’s
an adult and should know better), because at the end of the
day, he does come through for Theo.
4
AN ANTAGONIST LARGER
THAN ONE PERSON
Antagonists do not have to be a single person.
They might be a group of people, like the three ultrapopular
alpha females in Mean Girls. An antagonist could be a soci-
ety or larger structure, like a company, government, or a
religion. Antagonists come in all shapes and sizes, so don’t
feel you need to stick to one lone “bad guy.”
WHAT YOUR
ANTAGONIST NEEDS
1 A good antagonist is a lot like a good protag-
onist. They need to have a compelling back-
story. Just as you build the world and the life
of your hero, the same should be done for
your antihero.
2 Antagonists should be really good at some-
thing. If they weren’t exceptional in some
way, how or why would they be able to com-
pete with your protagonist? Maybe they’re
brilliant, or they’re incredibly strong or fast
or…something. We need a reason to trust
that your antagonist is powerful enough to
go up against your protagonist at their best.
3 Flaws. Lots of flaws. Flaws are what make any
good protagonist interesting. Romeo was
impetuous, Anna Karenina was a bit vain,
Scarlett O’Hara was selfish. Your antagonist
should have imperfections as well. And
unlike a protagonist, your antagonist’s flaws
need not necessarily redeem them.
Think about creating an adversary your main
character deserves: Anyone big enough, cool
enough, smart enough, strong enough, to go toe-
to-toe with your protagonist should be a well
fleshed-out, fascinating, and, in many cases, com-
plicated character. Just as we spend time crafting
all the many facets of our hero (and other vital
characters to our story), it’s important to remem-
ber the bad guy. Make your protagonist earn your
readers’ affection and give them someone worthy
to fight. But the overarching rule of antagonists
(which is admittedly sometimes broken to great
results but should still be followed most of the
time) is to try not to let your antagonist’s story or
personality overshadow your protagonist. At the
end of the day, your complicated, flawed, complex
antagonist should help your even more compli-
cated, flawed, complex protagonist shine.
Jessica Stilling is a novelist and short story writer. Her sec-
ond novel, The Beekeeper's Daughter, was published in Sep-
tember 2019. She lives and teaches in New York City.
writermag.com • The Writer | 19
 BUT
WHAT
IF
PRO TIPS FOR WRITING
(AND PUBLISHING)
SPECULATIVE FICTION.

y Ja c k S m
B i
th
 A
ll fiction is speculative to some
extent, posing a “what-if ” question,
which serves as the premise and
drives the plot. But for fantasy author
Kij Johnson, winner of both the Hugo and Nebula
Award, the specific genre of speculative fiction
adds its own special writing challenges: “A brilliant
speculative story is harder to write than a brilliant
realistic story, because it must do all the same
things mainstream literature does – characteriza-
tion, language, theme, and all the rest – and also, it
needs to meet the requirements of the genre: accu-
rate science, plausible worldbuilding, and the
physiological triggers essential to a horror story.”
Before you set out to write any form of specula-
tive fiction – whether fantasy, sci-fi, or horror –
you must be aware of the meaning and application
of this term. What exactly is speculative fiction?
We’ve turned to several seasoned writers of
speculative fiction to answer this question plus
others: What is the difference between sci-fi and
fantasy, which are sometimes represented together
as “SF/F”? How does YA speculative fiction differ
from speculative fiction for adults? What makes
good speculative fiction as a whole?
Then we’ll focus on the industry, asking sev-
eral agents representing speculative fiction:
What makes the cut in the modern publishing
marketplace?
What is ‘speculative fiction?’
According to Lois McMaster Bujold, four-time
winner of the Hugo Award for best novel, this lit-
erary term, a few decades old now, was meant to
provide “an umbrella term to encompass both
science fiction and fantasy and reduce the time
wasted arguing over which category any given
tale fell into.”
Johnson sees it as “an umbrella term for stories
that operate outside reality in one way or another:
they cannot happen or did not happen or cannot
happen yet – at least, according to current under-
standing of the world.” It is often “consciously
extrapolative – what would happen if reality were
changed in X way? – but it doesn’t have to be.”
According to Johnson, the term has wide appli-
cation to a number of genres: “science fiction,
fantasy, supernatural horror, surrealism, irrealism, and some
experimental forms.” Daniel José Older, bestselling MG, YA,
and adult fantasy writer, adds magical realism and mythology
to this list.
For fantasy writer Janice Hardy, speculative fiction is
“about the fantastic, be it a magical world or a scientific
idea.” In either case, she adds, “it explores the ‘what if?’ and
speculates on things that aren’t real or aren’t real yet (as in
the case of science fiction).”
Linda Nagata, author of both science fiction and fantasy
and winner of the Nebula and Locus awards, also stresses
the fantastic. “If a story reaches past the mundane world to
include a fantastical element critical to the plot, then it’s
speculative fiction,” she says. Like others, she sees the term
as inclusive of several genres.
But is this term merely definitional? Bujold doesn’t think
so. She believes its genesis was a “covert attempt to rebrand
science fiction and fantasy into something more literary-
sounding.” Rebranding or not, science fiction writer Robert
Silverberg, multiple winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards,
member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame,
and named Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of
America, sees the term as quite useful, in that “it’s a some-
what more accurate label for ‘science fiction,’ which often
has very little science visible in it but which deals with ‘what
if…’ speculations.” Even so, he says, “‘science fiction’ is the
more familiar term, and I still prefer to use it.”
Science fiction versus fantasy
If you set out to write either science fiction or fantasy, you
might wonder where your story or novel project fits in
terms of these often-lumped-together genres. Is there a dis-
tinct line between sci-fi and fantasy?
Many readers might differentiate between the two with
a sentence like “science fiction deals with technology; fan-
tasy deals with the supernatural.”
But is the demarcation between these two that simple?
“There is a little bit of a gray area there,” says Older, “but
I think of science fiction as generally and mostly focused on
the technological aspect and fantasy focused on the magical
aspect.” Yet he notes that this separation is a “little too easy.”
writermag.com • The Writer | 21
 Perhaps a science fiction expert could give us a defini-
tive answer.
“One answer, per science fiction scholar James Gunn, is
that science fiction is about things that could happen or could
have happened, and that fantasy could not happen, at least in
our consensual understanding of what is possible,” Johnson
says. But this definition is somewhat problematic, she states,
since “this disregards a lot of things,” one being that “our
understanding of what is possible changes regularly.”
Silverberg puts a different spin on the relation between
these two genres. He sees science fiction as a subgenre of
fantasy: “Though much of it involves so-called ‘hard science’
speculation impinging on physics and chemistry, most of its
most common themes – time travel, for example, or faster-
than-light interstellar journeys – are in the present scheme
“A fantasy or science fiction writer
has to convince the reader that
the story she is telling is set in a
world as real as our own.”
of things scientifically unattainable and perhaps impossible,
so ultimately they must be considered to be a kind of fan-
tasy, though different in tone from the kind of fantasy that
deals in magic spells and rings of power.” His conclusion?
“In the final analysis, most science fiction relies on magic
concealed behind a screen of scientific jargon.”
Bujold is with Silverberg in not seeing sci-fi and fantasy
as two distinct genres, but she doesn’t view one as a sub-
genre of the other; instead, she sees them “as a continuum.”
“For me, a tale is on the fantasy end of the spectrum if,
within the world of the story, the supernatural is real – magic,
gods, demons, monsters, and so on,” Bujold says. “It’s on the
SF end, even if it contains contrafactual elements such as
faster-than-light travel or (a good example of a boundary
case) telepathy, if the rationale for it within the story calls on
purely material explanations.”
Nagata also endorses the continuum idea. “I see the genres
as blending into each other, a blurry spectrum without a strict
dividing line,” she says. “Some works are clearly science fic-
tion – set more or less in the world or the galaxy as we know
it, with events treated as explainable phenomena, even if we
don’t know how to explain them – while the supernatural
haunts the other end.”
Works not easily classified find themselves somewhere in
between the two ends of this spectrum, and it may not even
be up to the author to decide what to call it. Nagata says it’s
“often a marketing decision” that determines whether a work
gets categorized as science fiction or fantasy.
22 | The Writer • October 2019
Adult versus young adult
speculative fiction
Though they’re not exactly “genres,” adult specu-
lative fiction and YA speculative fiction are cer-
tainly different categories in which age and
maturity matter. But where is the line between
them? As a writer of either, how can you be sure
you’re following the various genre conventions or
reader expectations?
According to Bujold, the critical dividing line
between the two is the age of the protagonist:
“Two works otherwise nearly identical in style
and tone might, for example, be sorted into sepa-
rate markets depending on whether the focus
character was 15 or 30.”
For Adrianne Finlay, whose book Your One &
Only was named one of the best YA science fiction
novels of 2018 by Kirkus Reviews, there are two
critical dividing lines between the YA and the adult
form. Like Bujold, she rules out the writer’s han-
dling of particular fictional elements: “The tone,
content, premise, vocabulary, and character devel-
opment within young adult books varies as much
in YA as it does in adult fiction, and the category is
usually not defined by these considerations.
“What makes a book YA,” she continues, “is
partly the assumed age of the audience (around
12-18), and the age of the main character (also
around 12-18, though probably toward the older
end).” The operative word here is “partly.” The
themes taken up in the YA work constitute the
second dividing line: “Certainly there are plenty
of adult books that feature teenaged protagonists,
so what makes a book truly YA are the general
themes explored in the story.” These themes relate
to “issues surrounding the transition from child-
hood to adulthood – the formation of identity
and self-discovery, searching for one’s place in the
world, first love, first loss, and coming of age, to
name only a few.”
Older states it succinctly: “Every book is about
a crisis at the heart of the book. In YA fiction, it’s
about shedding the mythology of childhood.”
Or, as Hardy puts it: “YA is about making mis-
takes and figuring out who you are as a person,
and that’s at the core of any YA story no matter
what the genre. With speculative fiction, the
stakes are typically higher, and the price of failure
much more costly, so a large percentage of YA
speculative fiction is about ‘saving the world’ in
some way.”
From a historical perspective, says Silverberg,
there’s a notable difference between today’s YA
speculative fiction and that of 50 years ago.
 TIPS FROM Drawing on his early experience in writing the form, he

WRITERS
states, “When I was writing YA SF fifty years ago, writers
avoided dark emotional complexities, particularly of the
sexual kind. But apparently that taboo is no longer opera-
tive. And much YA SF now seems to be dystopian, whereas
writers in my era were encouraged to take an upbeat view of
the future.”

Tips from speculative fiction writers

Perhaps you’re normally a writer of realistic fiction and you’re
just now branching out, trying your hand at some form of
ADRIANNE FINLAY: JANICE HARDY:
“Speculative stories, “At the core, good speculative fiction. Or let’s say you’ve been writing speculative
at their best, offer speculative fiction is fiction for a while, but you’d like tips for improvement.
up a critique, and still a good story. According to the pros, what are some key do’s and don’ts?
ultimately a subver- The speculative For Nagata, if you want to write good speculative fiction,
sion, of our domi- aspects inspire and
nant assumptions enhance the story- “First and most important, read a lot of good speculative
and expectations telling – they’re not fiction and read widely. Be open to subgenres new to you
about the world in a replacement for it.” and read outside the field too.”
which we live.” But don’t be derivative, cautions Hardy: “It’s important to
push boundaries and create fresh worlds and ideas readers
haven’t seen dozens of times before.”
“Speculative fiction is a heavy trope genre, so it’s easy to
rely on tropes and not move beyond them when developing
a story,” she says. As examples of tropes, she includes The
Chosen One (e.g., Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Luke Sky-
LINDA NAGATA: LOIS MCMASTER walker), The Noble Savage (e.g., Avatar), and time travel.
“Good speculative BUJOLD: “Keep an eye on the story’s internal logic,” says Nagata.
fiction is not about “Finally, write your
the technology or own story. As my “Your speculative element needs to be consistent within
the magic. It’s about friend Pat Wrede the rules you set for it, and it needs to be a critical part of
how people relate to once cogently the plot.”
that speculative ele- remarked, ‘If you try Strong worldbuilding is essential, states Johnson. “A fan-
ment, how it shapes to chase the market
their lives, how it and fail, you will tasy or science fiction writer has to convince the reader that
empowers or chal- have wasted your the story she is telling is set in a world as real as our own. She
lenges their human- time utterly; if you may not know every detail of her world’s physical and human
ity, and how they are chase the market geography, its assumptions and history, or its scientific and
changed by it.” and sell, they’ll just
want more of what moral rules; but she conveys the sense that she is describing a
place that is plausible and complicated, just like our own.”
Nagata White (Nagata), Carol Collins (Bujold), Salon di Marco (Johnson)

you didn’t want to

Photos by: Jamie Orr Photography (Finlay), Karen Nickel (Hardy), Dallas

write in the first “I am especially frustrated by science fiction and (non-fab-

place.’” ulist) fantasy that isn’t rigorous,” she continues. Writers must
get the essentials of that world down in adequate detail: “A
nation (or a spaceship, or a galactic empire, or a magic sys-
tem, or 1810 London) requires resources and resource man-
agement. It exists in a world with physics, even if they’re not
KIJ JOHNSON:
“Speculative fiction ours. It is part – perhaps a small part – of a much larger sys-
has to keep all the tem.” If you’re writing realistic fiction, as she points out, you
balls in the air: plot, know “the rules” of that world, or you can research them; by
characterization, the same token, don’t slight the “realities” of the world you’re
voice, and the rest –
and it has to invent creating in your speculative fiction, she cautions.
new worlds.” But in focusing on the speculative element, don’t ignore
characterization, warns Nagata. “No matter how amazing
your fantastical element might be, your story is about the
characters. Show us who they are. Make us care about them.
It’s the human element that makes a good story, even if
you’re writing about aliens.”
writermag.com • The Writer | 23
 “What brings speculative fiction to life is the anchor it TIPS FROM
AGENTS
has to the non-speculative elements,” Older says. Ordinary
“human actions…make us believe in the reality of the work,
and then we can accept the ‘fantastical world.’”
In the same vein, Silverberg cautions against “thinly char-
acterized characters.” Other problems that need to be
addressed include “melodrama,” “implausible plot situa-
tions,” and “awkwardness of style.”
How about YA speculative fiction?
Keep your audience firmly in mind, states Finlay. “To
write YA science fiction, or any book for young adults,
LAURIE MCLEAN, JULIE GWINN,
authors should most importantly have a profound respect
Fuse Literary: The Seymour
for their audience. Young adult readers are so often thought- “Because fully Agency:
ful, intelligent, empathetic, and engaged with the world fleshed magical sys- “Fans are very edu-
around them, and as readers they’re passionate, dedicated, tems and plausible cated, so the sci-
science-based ence needs to be
and incredibly observant.” Given these traits of YA readers,
worldbuilding are plausible.”
Finlay says, “they deserve books that speak to who they are expected by readers
and what is important to them.” of speculative fiction,
What makes good YA dystopian fiction? As Finlay sees it, writers must
research these in
such works “offer us an opportunity to engage with contem-
depth before they
porary problems and concerns through the lens of fiction.” begin writing so
The question to ask yourself, she says, is how does the fic- they can deliver a
tional world you’re setting out to create relate to the real solid, believable
foundation for their CONNOR
world around you? What kinds of problems do you see in
stories. Otherwise, GOLDSMITH,
this world that you can address in your fiction? Think of it readers will feel Fuse Literary:
this way, she suggests: “Any good dystopian story opens up cheated, and “Science fiction and
an exploration of fundamental ideas in our culture and tells reviews will show- fantasy comment on
case their ire.” the world around us,
us as much about the real world as it does about the fic-
so bring your unique
tional world presented in the book.” perspective to the
In fact, according to Finlay, YA dystopian literature can table. No two peo-
serve a valuable educational function. “This exploration ple see the world in
the same way.”
offers a space for the young adult reader to begin interrogat-
ing the adult world that they are preparing to join.” Such
interrogation amounts to critical thinking, and this higher-
order thinking has implications not only for the individual
but also for society as a whole: “At their best, dystopian sto-
ries lead to reshaping and subverting our dominant assump- from the Big Five on down to small and regional
tions and expectations and offer up a pathway to a better presses are looking for it. I don’t know how long
society for young people who are still determining what that trend will last, but if you’ve got something
impact they wish to have on the world.” ready to go, start querying.” She also urges writers
of short stories and novellas to submit their work
Tips from literary agents on speculative fiction to the numerous “online zines, magazines, and
Writers can tell you what makes solid speculative fiction on a anthologies that are looking for excellent shorter
craft level. What do agents say? As you’ll note below, they’re work” in speculative fiction.
likely to stress some of the same things: strong worldbuilding, Before drafting a speculative novel, says
solid fictional craft, and freshness or originality. With the McLean, you should first do adequate research in
fierce competition you’ll face in publishing, achieving these is order to do solid worldbuilding and to develop
most likely a must if you want agent representation. strong character background. Do this, she states,
Photo by: Freddie Breeden (Gwinn)

“before you write the first sentence.” Why? “Only

Fuse Literary
The encouraging news for speculative fiction writers is that
the market for this kind of fiction is very good right now,
says Laurie McLean, partner at Fuse Literary. “Speculative
fiction is experiencing a popularity spike, so publishers
24 | The Writer • October 2019
when you know everything about your magic sys-
tem and its rules or advanced scientific habitats and
physics can you write a story that holds together.”
If you’re into YA dystopian fiction, McLean
suggests taking “something wrong with today’s
society (there’s a lot to choose from), and expand
that out to the future. It will soon become dysto-
pian, trust me.”
Originality is vitally important, says Connor
Goldsmith, also from Fuse Literary. Among other
fictional areas he represents, he seeks both sci-
ence fiction and fantasy. “In today’s market, new
speculative fiction has to stand out as fresh,” he
notes. While in query letters, writers should men-
tion a few comparable titles to note how their
book is similar to others, don’t be merely imita-
tive, says Goldsmith: “It’s not enough to say that
your book is like Harry Potter or A Song of Ice
and Fire. Those are juggernauts of the genre!”
Your novel must be distinctive: “What matters is
finding an idea that speaks to you and feels differ-
ent from what you’ve seen before.”
If you don’t have a book project ready yet,
Goldsmith recommends beginning with small
SF/F magazines. “There are so many great venues
out there, and it’s a good way to build buzz as a
new author in the space.”
Martin Literary Management
Britt Siess, of Martin Literary Management, repre-
sents science fiction, fantasy, and horror. As to the
term “speculative fiction,” she finds this term rather
“tricky.” In fact, she’s careful about using it: “If you
aren’t classifying your story as SF or fantasy, why?”
She advocates using the term only “if it really
applies.” For instance, she says, “Sometimes,
there’s crossover. A book might have SF elements,
but the questions the story is asking are more
speculative in nature. If that’s the case, note it.”
The bottom line for her: “I find, as with any
book, it helps to know what a speculative story is
trying to explore. For example, are you taking
something you see happening in today’s society
and imagining the world that that might lead to?
Then find publishers who’ve previously published
works that are getting at that same question or
have shown interest in that topic,” she says.
In terms of craft, solid worldbuilding is
extremely important to Siess, but good world-
building alone is not enough, she says. It must be
“immersive,” or integral to the whole story. For
her, good speculative fiction requires “a good bal-
ance between worldbuilding and the plot. Read-
ers should feel like they’re in an entirely new
world, but they shouldn’t be confused.”
Which books don’t make it? For Siess, it’s those
that lack clear “rules” governing the whole: “I see
a lot of speculative fiction that jumps in too fast
and leaves me wondering what the rules of this
particular world are.” As far as that goes, she says, your
reader should work a little, but not too much: “A little guess-
ing helps build anticipation, but too much means a reader
can’t connect with the story.”
One big no-no for Siess: “Avoid 10 pages of exposition!”
Instead, she says, you should “weave worldbuilding into
the narration.”
The Seymour Agency
According to Julie Gwinn of the Seymour Agency, which
represents a broad spectrum of fictional genres, if you’re
submitting science fiction, you “need to make sure there is
plausibility to the science. You can ask readers to suspend
their belief as long as it isn’t too out there, too implausible.”
If it is, she says, “you run the risk of alienating (pun
intended) your reader.”
Yet while scientific plausibility is essential to good Sci
Fi, Gwinn urges writers not to ignore the essentials of all
good fiction writing, namely “strong characters, conflict
between characters, and a resolution.” Much of the specula-
tive fiction she receives emphasizes “worldbuilding, gad-
gets, technology, weapons, or transportation” – but at the
expense of “the basic elements of novel writing, like com-
pelling dialogue and character and plot development that
move the story along.”
Once you’ve covered the genre basics, as well as the basics
of good fiction writing, you’re ready to submit, says Gwinn,
but be sure to find the right audience for your work. She offers
the following insights on marketing your finished novel:
“There is a spectrum, and readers of speculative fiction are
very educated and know if they like high fantasy, urban fan-
tasy, science fiction, shape-shifters, etc., so make sure you do
your research first, label your project correctly based on the
subgenre it fits into, and find Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram
groups to join where the discussion is about books, movies,
graphic novels, comic books, etc., within those genres.”
Do be sure to develop that strong presence on social
media, she urges: “If you connect with fans while on the
journey to publication, you’ll have a fan base ready when
your book comes out.”
Put in the work
Before you try your hand at speculative fiction, read widely
in the genres covered by this umbrella term. Read both
adult and YA speculative fiction. Do adequate research to
meet the demands of the genre you’ve chosen. When you’re
ready to submit, decide on a possible market for your work,
whether commercial or small press. But don’t submit until
you have a stellar work of speculative fiction.
Jack Smith is the author of four novels, three books of nonfiction, and
numerous reviews, articles, and interviews. His collection of articles on
fiction writing, Inventing the World, was recently published by Serving
House Books.
writermag.com • The Writer | 25
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P O NA L K SCE N
C O O ARY P U N
RE ’ S THE S L ITE R
HE AT IN G THE
PO PU L R
Y MI LLE
DI RU B
BY HEI

26 | The Writer • October 2019


all started when Greg Shaw
used the term punk in the April
1971 issue of Rolling Stone. The
movement may have been
already building, but now it
was a word, and as all writers
know, words are power.
Less than 10 years later, Bruce Bethke intro-
duced a new version of that word to the literary
scene with his 1980 short story “Cyberpunk.”
Said Bethke in the foreword to his story on the
British website infinity plus, “In calling it that, I
was actively trying to invent a new term that
grokked the juxtaposition of punk attitudes and
high technology. My reasons for doing so were
purely selfish and market-driven: I wanted to
give my story a snappy, one-word title that edi-
tors would remember.”
History of the original literary punk
Most people think of the Blade Runner movie
from 1982 as an early example of cyberpunk. In
fact, the movie and the novel it was based on, Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K.
Aleksandr Artt/Shutterstock (illustration), Gleb Guralnyk/Shutterstock (typography)
Dick, was cyberpunk before anyone knew what
cyberpunk was, including Dick himself when the
novel was first published back in 1968. Then in
1983, Bethke’s short story “Cyberpunk” was pub-
lished in Amazing Stories, but it was the editor of
another magazine, Gardner Dozois of Isaac
Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (better known
as Asimov’s), who talked about it as a cultural
term in the media. This made way for arguably
the most famous cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer
by William Gibson, in 1984.
Granted, some will note that the Japanese were
first with the Akira manga series by Katsuhiro
Otomo in 1982. (In fact, Asian culture still figures
prominently in many cyberpunk stories, especially
as the setting.) Even more critics and enthusiasts
point to influences by grand masters like Philip K.
Dick, Pat Cadigan, Michael Swanwick, John Brun-
ner, Stanislaw Lem, and Harlan Ellison.
But I’ll save those debates for a panel at the
next World Science Fiction Convention. For our
purposes here, we’re more interested in how those
’80s and early ‘90s novels by Gibson, Bruce Ster-
ling, and Nancy Kress, among others, fueled a
new obsession within science fiction readers and
then went mainstream with hacker punk book
and film protagonists who took their anti-estab-
lishment, anti-social, anti-normal-haircut atti-
tudes into the highly technologized near future.
These plots were familiar enough to be relatable
to non-SF fans but boasted an extra kick of sex,
drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.
I know it’s certainly my favorite sub-genre of
science fiction. I own copies of just about every
cyberpunk movie made, including both Blade
Runners, put Neuromancer on my “books I’ve read
twice” list (to date there are only five), fill my Ins-
tagram feed with cyberpunk artists (for examples,
check out @neuromute – Gibson fans will get that
one – @301_2015, @steveroe_, and @dennisjvi),
and I have watched Altered Carbon on Netflix no
less than 10 times.
Of course, my minor obsession is nothing
compared to the die-hards for whom this cultural
milieu is a lifestyle. They dress the dress, talk the
talk, and sing the songs. Take Janelle Monáe
(whom I listen to least once a day). She propels
cyberpunk into a parallel world, that of Afro-
punk, a 1970s movement still popular today
where Black Americans participate in a counter-
culture of creativity and artistry.
Says K. Ceres Wright, author of the cyberpunk
novel COG (Dog Star Books): “To be Black in
America IS to be marginalized, like the tradi-
tional cyberpunk antihero. The use of the suffix
in ‘Afro-punk’ merely formalizes the concept.
Afro-punk formally refers to the participation of
Black people in alternative subcultures, but I
envision an aesthetic that includes art, music,
fashion, literature, language, math, science, and
more. So I’ll co-opt the word cyblerd to describe
this vision.”
A recent star to rise among the cyberpunk
derivatives is, of course, steampunk, mainly
because it, too, involves lifestyle. And fashion.
Don’t forget about the fashion.
writermag.com • The Writer | 27
 “Yes, I write about Victorian heroines in bustles, lacy
blouses, and corsets (and wear all of them, too) – but the
punk aspect allows me to subvert tradition and give these
fictional women a voice, allowing them to act in pursuit of
their own agency and happiness.”

“What’s to stop an author from dressing her
characters in clothes that the author can then
make – and wear to conventions and book sign-
ings?” says Shelley Adina, bestselling author of
the Magnificent Devices series (Moonshell
Books, Inc.). “If the point is to draw a reader into
the world you’ve created, why not extend that
world beyond the page? But even more than that,
what I love about steampunk is the punk part of
it. Yes, I write about Victorian heroines in bustles,
lacy blouses, and corsets (and wear all of them,
too) – but the punk aspect allows me to subvert
tradition and give these fictional women a voice,
allowing them to act in pursuit of their own
agency and happiness.”
Most readers have heard of steampunk, thanks
mainly to K.W. Jeter coining the term in the April
1987 issue of Locus magazine, but cyberpunk, this
progenitor of all literary punks, has also spawned
other sub-genres from the logical and inevitable
analogpunk to up-and-coming socially-oriented
greenpunk to the bizarre (and probably doomed
to live in obscurity) cattlepunk.
How does a punk get its name?
Mostly, it has to do with the technology level. I
liked what Daniel Hope, managing editor of Fic-
tion Vortex, had to say in a 2014 article for LitRe-
actor: “…many of these subgenres are based
primarily on the technology and tropes of a past
era, but with a futuristic twist.”
When I researched “the punks” to teach my
class in Seton Hill University’s Writing Popular
Fiction MFA program, I scoured dozens of
sources to come up with this list of 10 most-
mentioned punks. There is much debate about
28 | The Writer • October 2019
the legitimacy of any particular punk sub-genre,
so some eyebrow-raising gems like sandalpunk
(punk starring Iron Age characters), gothpunk
(punk starring goths), and stitchpunk (punk
starring rag dolls) I’ve left for others to canonize.
Some are absurd, some irreverent, but doesn’t
that embody the spirit of punk?
In fact, when I considered my own space opera
series, I realized elements of these novels belong
to no less than five punks: spacepunk, cyberpunk,
biopunk, nanopunk, and…wait for it…bugpunk.
Why so many punks? Probably because it’s sim-
ply easy to put the word at the end of anything and,
voila, another new sub-sub-genre. In most cases, it
really comes down to cyberpunk and steampunk –
the sci-fi punks leaning more toward the former
and those with more fantasy elements grouping
within the latter. And, of course, there are retrofu-
tures, alternate realities, and slipstreaming between
genres to consider. All of this makes exact classifi-
cation a bit challenging, therefore it may feel more
natural to readers, critics, and authors to create a
new category for those novels. But what happens
when that classification isn’t quite exact enough?
You guessed it – we can have punks ad infinitum.
(Infinitypunk: You heard it here first!)
Just like the definition of each punk isn’t exact,
finding works that most represent a particular
punk is also at times a point of contention, even
among the authors themselves. So, to give you the
quick and quirky low-down for the punks on my
list, I went with a one-sentence explanation for
each, supposing that they were taking place
within the Potterverse.
Now…
Pick your punk.
BIOPUNK
Instead of taking Harry to Diagon
Alley, Hagrid drops him off at a black
site laboratory to have biological modi-
fications made before he attends his
first day at Hogwarts.
related to: FRANKENPUNK
example works: Change Agent by
Daniel Suarez, Ribofunk by Paul Di
Filippo, Beggars in Spain by Nancy
Kress
CYBERPUNK
Dumbledore is a crafty A.I. and Hog-
warts is in an alternate version of
downtown Tokyo covered in neon and
in perpetual night.
related to: NANOPUNK and
POST-CYBERPUNK
example works: Neuromancer by
William Gibson, Islands in the Net by
Bruce Sterling, Snow Crash by Neal
Stephenson
DIESELPUNK
Newt Scamander is still in New York
during the 1920s, but he’s a bi-plane
pilot charged with ferrying men and
beasts to the top of the Empire State
Building.
related to: DECOPUNK,
ANALOGPUNK, and TRANSITOR-
PUNK
example works: Leviathan by Scott
Westerfeld, Mortal Engines by Philip
Reeve, Amberlough by Lara Elena
Donnelly
GREENPUNK
Hogwarts is covered by a climate
dome, and the students work on build-
ing machines to scrub the atmosphere
of the extra carbon dioxide in order to
save the rest of the planet.
related to: ECOPUNK and
WEATHERPUNK
example works: The Windup Girl
by Paolo Bacigalupi, Watermind by
M.M. Buckner, Nature’s Confession by
J.L. Morin
IRONPUNK
Professor Snape fulfills a lifelong
dream of forging a giant walking
machine in his image but then all the
professors want one, and he has to
destroy his forge before the iron dop-
pelgangers overrun Hogsmeade.
related to: BRONZEPUNK and
STEELPUNK
example works: The Iron Duke by
Meljean Brook, Red Rising by Pierce
Brown, Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft
MYTHPUNK
Harry, Ron, and Hermione are elves
who try to help Cinderella escape but
end up trapped by the evil stepmother
themselves as told through a series of
lyrical lamentations.
related to: ELFPUNK, MANNER-
SPUNK, and SWORDPUNK
example works: Tithe: A Modern
Faerie Tale by Holly Black, Tooth and
Claw by Jo Walton, The Labyrinth by
Catherynne M. Valente
OCEANPUNK
Hogwarts is a deep-sea colony sur-
rounded by a bubble, and Hedwig is a
giant sea horse.
related to: SEAPUNK and
PIRATEPUNK
example works: Into the Storm:
Destroyermen Book 1 by Taylor Ander-
son, The Emperor’s Men 1: Arrival by
Dirk van den Boom, The Pirate Raiders
by C.G. Mosley
RAYPUNK
Harry and Voldemort use ray guns
instead of wands to battle but since
there are mini-fusion reactors power-
ing the weapons…one wrong blast and
the death toll is even higher for that
last book.
related to: SPACEPUNK and
ATOMPUNK
example works: Empire State by
Adam Christopher, Arabella of Mars by
David D. Levine, Into the Dark by J.A.
Sutherland
SPLATTER
PUNK
Harry and Ron don’t save Hermione in
time and witness her gory, violent
demise at the hands of the bathroom
troll.
related to: It is a punk unto itself.
example works: Cities of Night by
Philip Nutman, Splatterpunks: Extreme
Horror ed. By Paul M. Sammon, The
Scream by John Skipp and Craig Spector
STEAMPUNK
Harry rides his steam-powered vac-
uum cleaner in an alternate version of
Victorian England while wearing a top
hat and leather goggles.
related to: CLOCKPUNK, GEAR-
PUNK, and SILKPUNK
example works: The Anubis Gates
by Tim Powers, Boneshaker by Cherie
Priest, The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu
Heidi Ruby Miller teaches at Seton Hill Univer-
sity’s MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program.
She is the co-editor with Michael A. Arnzen of
the award-winning writing guide Many Genres,
One Craft and author of the Ambasadora series,
Man of War, and an upcoming novel for Edgar
Rice Burroughs, Inc. She lives in Uniontown,
Pennsylvania, with her award-winning-writer
husband, Jason Jack Miller.
I N
the fall of 2018, I partic-
ipated in a writing
workshop at a liberal
arts college where one of
my white peers wrote a
stereotypical Asian-
American protagonist
for their piece.
When critique rolled around, and a
fellow student pointed out the stereo-
types at play in the author’s work –
namely how the protagonist was
displayed as an overly docile mathema-
tician – the author was stunned.
They asked, “What? Am I not
allowed to write POC characters?”
My answer is simple:
No.
OK, maybe I exaggerated the sim-
plicity of my answer.
Anyone can write any type of mar-
ginalized characters. If your writing is
to reflect the world around you, then
you’re going to have characters who
fall into groups that you aren’t a part
of. That goes deeper than including
people of color; it includes also queer
people, trans people, disabled people,
and more. But if the first question you
have about writing marginalized char-
acters is “Am I allowed to write them?”
then you’re asking the wrong question.
A sign that you’re just not ready.
Yet.
When it comes to writing outside
the margins, questions of permission,
like the one above, often come in bad
faith. They reflect a fear of being ostra-
cized by the wider book community, of
having their career marred by bad
press, more than they do a fear of
doing wrong by the community the
writer aims to represent.
But that raises the question: What
should you be asking?
“First, you need to ask yourself if
you’re taking the space of someone
with that marginalized identity who
might want to tell a similar story. Are
you the best person to write this
story?” says SJ Sindu, the queer, gen-
derqueer author of color behind the
novel Marriage of a Thousand Lies. “A
30 | The Writer • October 2019
WRI–
lot of times, the answer is no.”
Some stories are best told by mem-
bers of the community they represent.
Take Sindu’s novel – a narrative cen-
tered around the navigation of queer-
ness as a Sri Lankan-American, the
protagonist’s brownness and queerness
threatening each other the whole way
through. That is a story that would be
ACR–
pretty hard for a straight or non-Desi
to tackle.
After all, when members of a
community look for themselves in
their media, authenticity is the
difference between positive
representation and tokenism.
Ahmad Danny Ramadan, author of
The Clothesline Swing, offers this
example. “Say you want to write about
MAR–
a gay man of color, and you’re a
straight white woman. If you wrote
that character based on your experi-
ences meeting your two best friends
who happened to be gay, you’re only
painting with wide strokes, and in a
way generalizing the gay lived experi-
ence. That, in a way, leads to stereo-
typing, and suddenly you’re writing
yet another gay fashionista with
oppressive shopping habits who
screams ‘yass queen’ whenever any-
thing tickles his fancy. To avoid that,
actively seek people from the commu-
CAN WE TELL THE
nity you want to write about (the STORIES OF MARGINALIZED
COMMUNITIES IF WE
more, the merrier), ask them mean-
ingful questions and be curious about
their lived experiences, and be per-
sonal – and accept that sometimes
AREN’T PART OF THEM?
they might not answer your questions.
Finally, pay them for their time – even
with a bag of home-baked cookies.”
In the search for authenticity, the
thing marginalized readers are pick- Ramadan says. “None of them did jus-
ing up on, Sindu and Ramadan argue, tice to the portrait of refugees, and all
is intimacy. That experience with the of them were written by people outside
life about which you’re writing. Read- of the refugee community.”
ers recognize that intimacy as authen- That doesn’t mean a cisgender
ticity, and they are looking for it. author won’t or shouldn’t write a trans-
After all, that is the heart of the gender protagonist or an abled author
#OwnVoices movement, right? The write a disabled protagonist. There are
desire for authenticity. cases in which you may find you have
“I can think of five books whose particular stances, knowledge, experi-
main characters are Syrian refugees,” ence, or ideas that you feel equipped to
–TING
–OSS
–GINS
explore and feel you can without snub-
bing more connected authors. In such
cases, there’s a follow-up question: How
do you represent the community well?
Research.
No, really. Research! Research the
community. Not like an anthropology
assignment, but if you want to accu-
rately write a community you aren’t a
part of, you have to engage with it. But
remember to engage when and how you
can as respectfully as possible.
BY
EDEN SQUISH
MACKENZIE
When Ramadan found himself
writing about lesbian Syrian women
while working on The Clothesline
Swing – which focuses on the experi-
ences of queer Syrian refugees, not
unlike himself – he sought out Syrian
lesbians in order to give the commu-
nity the authenticity it deserves.
“I’m doing my research at the
moment, through examining the cul-
ture of the local drag,” he says about a
work in progress involving Syrian drag
queens, “getting to know multiple drag
queens, participating in the drag scene
not only through my research but also
through integration into it: voting for
the drag royalty, attending drag shows,
and celebrating their ups and downs
with them, as well as advocating for
support for them.”
If you’re struggling for places to
start – unsure of how to find details
about a community, where to find
spaces that welcome you, who to
interview, etc. – Google is free! Start
an online search for events, centers, or
organizations in your area. Spend
time volunteering with LGBT youth
centers – maybe offer to do a work-
shop or two. Go out and talk to Black
people at Black events (provided you’re
welcome to the cookout, of course).
Engage meaningfully with any articles
(or videos) produced by queer or trans
or POC or disabled creators.
For interviews, social media is a
lifesaver. Tweet about your project and
that you need to interview subjects.
Writers and other creators do this
pretty often to solid results. If it doesn’t
work? Try using another social media
platform; ask people with a stronger
following to signal boost.
Recruit diverse beta readers – espe-
cially ones who share pillars of identity
with your characters. Diversify your
circle of critique partners if you have
one, and hire sensitivity readers.
Sensitivity readers are especially
important since their job is to help us
writers avoid negative biases,
insensitive language, or cultural inac-
curacies in their work. In other words,
their entire job is to make sure we
don’t screw up royally. Sindu’s advice?
Hire as many as you can manage.
If you’re stuck on where to find
them, writingdiversely.com’s directory
or quiethouseediting.com’s diversity
reading list are good places to start.
(They’re also among the first Google
results for “sensitivity reader list.”)
If all of this seems daunting to you,
good. It should be. The more con-
cerned you are about making a mis-
take, the more effort you’ll put in – and
the more likely you are to get it right in
the long run. After all, the end goal is
to avoid hurting whatever community
you’re representing and to avoid
exploiting them. The less authentic –
the less intimate – the narrative, the
more likely it manages to do both. Of
course, one size does not fit all, but
these are some solid first bases.
Respect requires tenacity and
humility. Tenacity in the drive to dive
deeper than you ever imagined you
would need to for the sake of the story
in the hopes of building that realness.
Humility – equally as important – in
being perfectly ready to accept and
acknowledge criticism as well as your
own shortcomings.
You’re going to make mistakes. It’s
inevitable when you aren’t directly
connected to your subject matter.
What is most important is that you do
everything you can to mitigate those
mistakes. And when members of the
community speak up about what you
got wrong, don’t get defensive. Don’t
hide behind the declarations of “am I
allowed” or “what do you want from
me” that so many others do. Instead,
own it.
Learn from it.
And do better moving forward.
Eden Squish Mackenzie is a queer and trans
writer of color currently studying at Ringling
College of Art and Design.
writermag.com • The Writer | 31
SALES
UNDERSTANDING AND CREATING ADS FOR
YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON AND FACEBOOK.
BY KERRIE FLANAGAN
Dmytro Balkhovitin/Shutterstock
IF
you plan to
self-publish AMAZON ADVERTISING
your book (or
you already Love it or hate it, Amazon is the largest
have), you online retailer in the world, with over
need to think about 300 million shoppers and a 2018 net
how you’re going to revenue in the U.S. of $232 billion.
get it into the hands of This makes it the place to sell and
readers. One tried-and- advertise self-published books.
true way is through Generally, people visit Amazon with
paid advertising. the intention of buying something. If
Though it can seem your self-published book (print and/or
like a huge undertaking eBook) is available through Kindle
of both time and Direct Publishing (KDP), you can pur-
money, with the right chase ads to have your book show up
guidance and informa- as a “sponsored” product in search
tion, you can create a results for related items. (If someone
successful marketing searches “Southern cookbook” and you
campaign through wrote a Texan barbecue cookbook, for
Amazon Advertising example, your book could show up in
and Facebook that the results, although it would be subtly
won’t break the bank. labeled as “sponsored.”) Each ad con-
Here’s how. tains the book cover and a few lines of
text. These ads are pay-per-click
(PPC), which means you only pay
Amazon if someone clicks on it.
Dave Chesson, founder of Publisher
Rocket and Kindlepreneur, is well-
known for his expertise regarding
Amazon Advertising. He says one of
the best things about Amazon ads is
that they help eliminate authors’ con-
cerns that “my book’s not being seen.”
“Before [Amazon] ads existed,” he
said, “you had to choose the right key-
words [for someone to find your
book]. You had to ensure you ranked
at the top. You had to do all these
efforts of grabbing somebody from
somewhere else and driving them to
your book. Ads took all that away.”
If you are willing to pay a few cents
for each click, you can get your book in
front of people who are shopping for a
book in your genre or books similar to
yours, he notes.
“Now you get this amazing oppor-
tunity to see how many people saw
your book, then how many people
clicked on your book, then how many
of those people ended up buying it,”
says Chesson.
How it works
First, decide on a daily budget ($5-$10
is plenty) and then decide on the bid
you want to set for each click (Chesson
suggests around .25 cents).
Next, write a sentence or two about
your book. Now it’s time to think up
your keywords: You can enter up to
1,000 individual keywords or keyword
phrases that are somehow related to
your book. For instance, you could list
other authors/titles in your genre,
words related to the topics, themes,
writermag.com • The Writer | 33

settings, and related hobbies, or a list
of movies similar to your book. (For a
romance novel starring a Tuscan res-
taurant owner and her old flame, you
might list romance, lost love, second
chance romance, childhood sweet-
heart, books about Italian food, novels
set in Italy, Under the Tuscan Sun,
romance books about Italy…).
Remember, when people shop on
Amazon, they use the Amazon search
bar just like they use Google. They
type in words they believe will help
them find what they are looking for.
This works to your advantage when
trying to find keywords related to your
books because you can do the same
thing: In the search bar, test different
words by slowly typing and seeing
what auto-populates in the search box.
If you start with Italy, suggested words
people have already searched with this
topic appear automatically. Type
romance after Italy and different words
show up. If you add books, even more
targeted words appear. You can now
create a spreadsheet with all of the key-
words you’ve found and copy them
into the Keywords box.
Chesson believes authors benefit in
two important ways. First, unlike other
platforms, Amazon lets you get your
book in front of shoppers who are ready
to buy. “An example of this is on Face-
book when you have an ad,” he says.
“You have to convince someone who is
looking at the latest memes or outrage
on Game of Thrones or cat videos to
stop doing that, come over to Amazon,
decide to buy right now, and then buy.”
Secondly, he says you can now see
where the problem is with elements of
your book. “If you have 100,000 people
34 | The Writer • October 2019
see your book and nobody clicks on it,
that tells you that your book cover is
not enticing. That includes your title,
subtitle, book cover, and maybe a bit of
the blurb you put in for your ad.”
If you have people click on your
book, but they don’t buy it, that tells
you your book description may need
some work. “I’ve seen directly where
just changing the book description
increased the conversion rate by 2.5
times,” Chesson says.
Keywords
Chesson states one of the main mis-
takes authors make is coming up with
only a handful of keywords related to
their book and setting a high cost per
click (paying $1.50 per click when you
only earn a $2 royalty on each sale, for
example). Instead, he says authors
need to find as many keywords as pos-
sible that are in some way close to their
book. Remember, you only pay if peo-
ple click on the ad, and people will
only do that if the book cover, title, and
blurb draw their attention.
Don’t be afraid to enter too many
keywords. Chesson suggests, “Put
them out there. See what is working
and then experiment. It’s a process. It’s
not selecting a few keywords, throwing
them up there, and hope they work. It’s
figuring out what is working now. Why
is it working? Why is Amazon showing
[my book] for that? Why is it making
sales? And then build campaigns cen-
tered around that.”
He says Amazon ads are not a “set
it and forget it” system. You can’t cre-
ate an ad and then just sit back and
reap the benefits. It takes effort to find
what works.
TOOLS FOR FINDING
KEYWORDS
Dave Chesson created a pro-
gram, Publisher Rocket, where
writers can type in one word or
phrase, and the software will
search Amazon for all related
words, authors, and titles, which
you can export to a spreadsheet,
then cut and paste all the words
into the Keyword box. There is a
$97 fee for the program, but it’s
certainly a time-saver.
Though less directly targeted
for authors, free resources
abound to help users find rele-
vant keywords, including:
• Keywordtool.io
• Wordstream’s Free Keyword
Tool (wordstream.com/
keywords)
• Ubersuggest (neilpatel.com/
ubersuggest)
STEPS TO CREATE
AMAZON ADS:
1. Go to advertising.amazon.com.
2. Sign in or create an account.
3. Select “I have a KDP account.”
4. Find the three dots with
options on the right. Select
“Promote and Advertise.”
5. Select “Run an Ad Campaign.”
6. Select “Sponsored Product.”
7. Fill in all the boxes with your
information. The “i” in the cir-
cle provides information about
what to put in each box. In the
Targeting section, choose
“Manual Targeting” so you
can add your own keywords.
In the Keywords box, select
“Enter Keywords.”
8. Launch the campaign.
 EFFECTIVE ADS
ARE A BLEND OF
ART&
ANALYTICS.
In January, Amazon updated its
dashboard, giving users more data and
information to better understand how
their ads perform. It shows statistics
about the number of impressions (how
many times your book is shown on the
page of a search result), how many
clicks from shoppers, how much you
spent on clicks, and the number of sales.
This allows you to check daily to see
what works, make adjustments on what
isn’t, and fine tune your ads to make
them as effective as possible. Keep in
mind, Amazon isn’t always the best at
reporting sales right away, so don’t jump
in too quickly to stop an ad campaign.
Another data point is the ACOS
(Advertising Cost of Sale), which is
the percent of attributed sales spent on
advertising within 14 days of clicks on
your ads. According to Chesson, a
70% ACOS is breaking even between
what you spent per click and the sales
you are making. Anything below this
percentage is great, but an effective ad
will also have a much farther reach,
increasing natural sales (anything not
related to the ad) of your book because
it will get more attention from Ama-
zon and move your book up in the
rankings. This is important to under-
stand if you find your book hovering
around this 70%, because if sales are
steady or you see an increase in sales,
your ad is working.
When done right, Amazon ads are
an essential piece of any marketing
plan or a successful book launch, but
they can also breathe life into the sales
of an older book. Remember, Amazon
doesn’t care if the book is a few years
old. If it detects a sales increase, it will
show your book to more potential buy-
ers, which means more sales.
FACEBOOK ADVERTISING
Facebook has over 2 billion users
worldwide, making it a great platform
to reach potential readers. But think
about the reasons people are on social
media: Unlike Amazon, where users
are usually there with the purpose of
buying items, Facebook is a place
where people go to connect.
Independent author Adam Croft
has sold over 1.5 million thriller and
crime fiction books to date. He’s also
the author of The Indie Author Mind-
set. When Croft began his indie career,
he says, he approached ads with a “this
is my book, I think it’s great, why don’t
you buy it” mindset. He admits he
wasn’t thinking about the psychology
behind the various platforms and why
people were there.
Croft feels that effective ads are a
blend of art and analytics. When he
made that shift in how he thought
about advertising, he got better results.
With the release of his 2015 book, Her
Last Tomorrow, he approached his ads
under a new mindset. He produced ads
that said, “could you murder your wife
to save your daughter?” along with an
eye-catching image. The suggestive
tagline resonated with Facebook users
and received a lot of attention, causing
Croft’s book to move up in the sales
rankings, eventually making it a
bestseller.
Amy Alcorn, owner and directing
manager of Aspen Grove Marketing,
works with clients to help them effec-
tively use Facebook and other social
media platforms to grow their business
or, in the case of authors, sell more
writermag.com • The Writer | 35
books. Creating effective ads is one
important piece of a successful mar-
keting plan.
Alcorn says every successful ad
campaign targets the correct audience,
then includes effective imagery and
messaging. Which, when you think
about it, is not that different from writ-
ing a book where you have a certain
reader or genre in mind, and you craft
your words to form the plot and visu-
als to fit that audience.
Audience
There are billions of people on Face-
book. Not every user is going to be
interested in your book. You need to
think about your target reader. “You
don’t need to target everybody; you
need to target the right people,”
Alcorn says.
If you wrote a young adult fantasy
novel, your audience might be male
and female readers between the ages of
16 and 25. But that’s not enough. Go
even deeper: What movies do these
readers enjoy? Where do they shop?
What are their hobbies? What music
do they listen to? Think about all these
things because knowing your reader
goes beyond just age and gender. Your
target audience could be readers
between 16 and 25 who enjoy attend-
ing comic conventions, watching
superhero movies, and playing Dun-
geons & Dragons. That’s very different
from a reader in this age group who
enjoys rock climbing, outdoor sports,
watching action thrillers, and back-
country camping. Members of the
same age group can have very different
interests – interests that can all be
directly targeted with Facebook ads.
36 | The Writer • October 2019
Alcorn says the biggest mistake peo-
ple make is not putting enough time
into understanding their audience.
“You need to spend the time to create
the foundation with the audience. Build
that ad appropriately,” she advises.
Imagery
Images can be powerful. They evoke
emotions, convey a tone or mood, and
pull us in. The tendency for many
authors is to rely on their book cover as
the only image in their ads. But since
people are on Facebook to be social,
you should think more broadly about
the images you use in a post or ad.
Are there scenes from your book
that can be represented with an
image? Are there concepts, themes,
recurring jokes, locations, or other
elements that can be shown with an
image? For example, having warm,
inviting images of Italian food and
classic images of the Tuscan country-
side immediately give your target
reader an idea of what your Italian
romance is about.
Having a person in the photo can be
enticing, too, because humans are
drawn to and connect better with peo-
ple rather than objects, especially on a
social site like Facebook. Alcorn sug-
gests thinking about the emotions in
the image and your target audience.
How will they react when they see it?
“Having an image that really tells
the story and captures people is huge,”
she says. (To create eye-catching imag-
ery, Canva is an easy-to-use program
that has both a free and paid version. It
allows you to easily layer photos and
text to create the mood and feel you
want for your ad.)
Once you decide on your image,
you then create your messaging for
the ad. Think again about your objec-
tive. Are you trying to get people to
buy the book, sign up for your news-
letter, comment on a post, etc.? What-
ever your goal, make sure your text
conveys a message to drive your
desired results.
How it works
Facebook ads will only work on a busi-
ness page, not on your personal page.
If you don’t have an author page, set
one up first. To begin, you need to log
in to your Facebook author page. Click
the small triangle to the very right of
the menu bar, which shows more
menu choices. Choose “manage ads.”
Create an ad account and then
start your ad campaigns. Facebook’s
Ads Manager will walk you through
the various steps of the process. It
starts by asking about your objective.
Do you want to reach more people,
generate leads to build your newslet-
ter, increase engagement or traffic to
your website? There are many differ-
ent choices to consider, and it explains
each one.
Next, create the audience. As men-
tioned earlier, you don’t want to target
everyone. Think about your target
reader. On Facebook, you can break
down your audience by location, age,
and gender in addition to interests,
occupation, or behavior. In the
Detailed Targeting box that says,
“Include people who match at least one
of the following,” the goal is to narrow
your audience. As you type specific
words in the box (Italy, Tuscany, reader,
women’s fiction…), it auto-populates
 RESOURCES
Amazon Advertising:
advertising.amazon.com
Adam Croft Indie Author
Mindset Mini Course:
indieauthormindset.com
Adam Croft, author:
adamcroft.net
Aspen Grove Marketing:
aspengrovemarketing.com
Publisher Rocket:
publisherrocket.com
Free Amazon AMS Advertising
Course for Authors:
kindlepreneur.com/
ams-book-advertising-course
Kindlepreneur:
kindlepreneur.com
Canva:
canva.com
Mark Dawson’s The Self
Publishing Formula:
selfpublishingformula.com
Creative Penn Podcast:
thecreativepenn.com/podcasts
different choices, and you pick the ones
that work best for your purposes.
If you wrote an outdoorsy guide-
book for women in the West, start
broad, say, with women who live in
Colorado and Wyoming. Then click
“Narrow Audience” and refine that
down even more. The next Detailed
Targeting box could be women in
these areas who like hiking, camping,
rafting, fishing, and backpacking.
Keep narrowing it down until you feel
you have a solid target. As you add
more words, Facebook will show you
the audience size and potential reach
and engagement.
The next important component is
the budget. One big difference between
Facebook and Amazon Ads is with
PPC ads on Amazon, you can set a
small daily budget of $5 or $10, but it
spends your entire budget. With Face-
book, the amount you put in for your
budget is always used. You don’t have
to put in a large amount for it to be
effective, but understand it absolutely
will be spent.
The final steps include deciding
which page you want the ad to come
from (if you have more than one Face-
book business page, that is) and
uploading the image or video.
One interesting feature with Face-
book is the Split Test, which is found at
the beginning of setup, right after the
objective. With this option, you can
create two or more versions of an ad
shown to a similar audience, and you
can see which one performs better.
Note the things that do work and the
things that don’t, and you will get bet-
ter each time. “It’s a process of natural
selection,” says Croft. “Clone the
winner, and change another small
thing.” It could be the headline or the
text, but try another variation until you
end up with an ad that does well.
As with Amazon, you should take
the time to look at the Facebook Ad
analytics and insights to see what
works and what doesn’t. “So many
people won’t take that last step,” says
Alcorn. “They just put money out
there and say, ‘I think it worked,’ when
it didn’t.” The insights appear as soon
as the ad goes live, and you can see
from day to day, and even hour to
hour, how the ad is performing (num-
ber of people reached, number of
clicks, demographics of people who
clicked, amount spent…). If it isn’t
doing well, you can shut it off.
“Start with five, 10 dollars, and scale
up if it works,” Croft says. “If it doesn’t
work, tweak it, change it, spend
another five or 10 dollars, and see if
that works. It would be daft spending
much more than that without testing
and playing around with it.”
For self-published authors, market-
ing can be a challenge, but using ads
can help get books in front of readers
effectively and efficiently if you take
the time to understand your audience
and how to best reach them.
Kerrie Flanagan is a freelance writer from Col-
orado who moonlights in the world of romance
with a co-author under the pen name C.K. Wiles
(ckwiles.com) as well as the fantasy realm under
the pen name C.G. Harris (cgharris.net). She is a
writing consultant, speaker, and author of eight
additional books under her label, Hot Chocolate
Press, along with penning Guide to Magazine
Article Writing, and she is the creator of Maga-
zine Writing Blueprint. KerrieFlanagan.com
writermag.com • The Writer | 37
LITERARY SPOTLIGHT
BY MELISSA HART
Driftwood Press
This 6-year-old journal seeks lyrical writing with a fine attention to detail.
J
ames McNulty, co-founder of the
literary organization Driftwood
Press, recalls with admiration a
contributing writer named Shane
Page who separates his paragraphs
with multiple spaces when he’s revis-
ing so that he can study each clearly
on its own.
“There’s so much attention paid to
each sentence and paragraph, and that
gets to me emotionally...seeing really
gorgeous writing,” McNulty explains.
Editors at Driftwood Press, a print
and online publication now in its sixth
year, look for beautifully crafted stories
and poems. All topics and genres are
welcome as long as the writing indi-
cates time spent pondering each sen-
tence and its effects on a reader.
McNulty urges potential contribu-
tors to look at their prose as if evaluat-
ing a poem. “In poetry, you think
about where lines break, where stanzas
break,” he explains. “A lot of writers
don’t think about language and craft.
They need to look closely at sentence
and paragraph structures and how
these contribute to executing the nar-
rative, to tone and pacing.”
Tone, editorial content
While poetry editors at Driftwood
Press consider lyrical poems, they
prefer narrative pieces like Julia
Levine’s “Ordinary Psalm with Assas-
sination and Slaughter” (Issue 6.1),
which begins:
“In that basement, before the
RCA console, she stood the
hissing iron on the board’s end,
away from my father’s white col-
lar, and wept . . .”
38 | The Writer • October 2019
Fiction editors lean toward literary
writing, with ideas presented in a com-
plex and nuanced way. “If a piece is
more content-driven, putting all its
attention into plot and none into craft,
then that’s not something we’re inter-
ested in seeing,” McNulty says.
He admires Nicole Zdeb’s “Honey-
comb Beach” (Issue 7.1), a short story
about the sexual awakening of two
young women on the beach. “One likes
the other, who picks up a dead turtle
and starts scraping it out,” he says. “It’s
grotesque and bizarre, and it brings out
these complex, compelling feelings
about loving someone while being
made uncomfortable by them. It’s a
beautiful story, told in just three pages.”
Contributors
McNulty points to Susan Jardaneh’s
“The One You Love” (Issue 6.2) as the
type of fiction he likes to publish. “It’s
about a daughter dealing with her
mother’s illness, and the interesting
structural premise is that the story is
INSIDE LITERARY MAGAZINES
told in reverse,” he explains. “This enliv-
ens the reading, as we get to see how the
mother’s illness first started presenting
itself toward the end of the story. It
plays with our conception of traditional
plot momentum; the structuring breaks
all our expectations of how a story
should evolve.” He also appreciates Joe
Totton’s “The Starling Killers” (Issue
6.2), about a father and son embroiled
in a difficult relationship and hunting
starlings in the wheat fields. “The son is
being forced to kill all of these starlings,
and he doesn’t want to,” McNulty
explains. “There’s this really gorgeous
imagery of the birds coating the trees,
then later of them raining down from
the sky. Both pull you into the story.”
He notes that the content of the two
stories couldn’t be more different – a
father and son hunting starlings, and a
daughter going through her mother’s
cancer experience. “But all of our sto-
ries have a similarity in that the writers
pay particular attention to each sen-
tence, to the crafting of really gorgeous
language,” he says.
Issue 6.1 includes a story titled “Ter-
minal Velocity,” by Claire Agnes, whose
work impressed editors so much that
they invited her to work as a guest edi-
tor on Issue 6.2 and then hired her on
permanently. The story begins:
“Our last dinner as a family had
been at Pizza Peddler. It was our
Saturday night, post-Commu-
nion tradition. My mother liked
the grilled chicken salad and my
dad liked the cowboy burger
and Billy King. I liked Billy King
too. He always made Hershey’s
kisses appear underneath our
 salt shaker and never laughed
when I asked for a green balloon
sword instead of a pink rose.”
“The story’s got this really emo-
tional kick to it,” McNulty explains.
“It’s about a daughter losing her father,
who abandons her and her mother,
and it also appeals to me on a craft
level. It’s brilliantly intimate without
ever being sentimental.
Advice for potential contributors
Driftwood Press editors accept pieces
for publication with the understanding
that the contributor must be willing to
revise and perfect the work. “When we
critique pieces, our goal is to explain
what craft mistakes a writer is making,
but not to overstep by telling the writ-
ers exactly how to fix them,” McNulty
“We are actively searching
for artists who care about
doing it right, or better.”
ONLINE AND PRINT.
Genres: Fiction, poetry, graphic narra-
tive, interviews, and hybrid forms.
Reading Period: Year-round.
Length: Three poems up to 60 lines
each; fiction to 4,000 words.
Submission format: Online submission
manager, via website.
Payment: Varies; see website for
details.
Contact: Editors James McNulty & Jer-
rod Schwarz, editor@driftwoodpress.net,
driftwoodpress.net.
explains. “Whenever we edit a piece, I
make it clear that nothing is a demand.
Everything is a conversation and a col-
laboration, l all to make the piece as
good as it can possibly be.”
Potential contributors can find sam-
ple issues of Driftwood Press online for
free and order print copies as well, in
order to familiarize themselves with
the content and aesthetic of the maga-
zine. The website includes information
on upcoming contests and about
online seminars taught by editors with
the goal of teaching the craft of beauti-
ful writing.
Contributing editor Melissa Hart is the
author of Better with Books: 500 Diverse Books
to Ignite Empathy and Encourage Self-Accep-
tance in Tweens and Teens (Sasquatch, 2019).
Twitter/Instagram: @WildMelissaHart

Florida’s Premier
LOW-RESIDENCY MFA
Fiction | Nonfiction | Poetry

Past and Present Guest Writers and Editors Include:

Richard Bausch, Michael Connelly, Lydia Davis, Arthur Flowers, Nick Flynn, Roxane Gay,
Hal Hartley, Terrance Hayes, Amy Hill Hearth, Eli Horowitz, Denis Johnson, Miranda July,
Ben Lerner, Jamaal May, Susan Minot, Rick Moody, Francine Prose, George Saunders,
Heather Sellers, Patricia Smith, Deborah Treisman, Colson Whitehead, Lidia Yuknavitch

Teaching Faculty Include:

Jessica Anthony, Sandra Beasley, John Capouya, Brock Clarke, Erica Dawson (director),
Mikhail Iossel, Stefan Kiesbye, Kevin Moffett, Donald Morrill,
Jason Ockert, Alan Michael Parker, Jeff Parker, Corinna Vallianatos

Learn more at www.ut.edu/mfacw

or by calling (813) 258-7409.

writermag.com • The Writer | 39

CONFERENCE INSIDER
BY MELISSA HART
Gotham Writers Conference
Spend two days talking craft and networking with agents at this NYC conference
hosted by one of the country’s most well-known writing centers.
F
or 26 years, Gotham Writers
Workshop has empowered
students in person and online
with creative writing classes
and public lectures. In October 2019, it’s
launching a writers’ conference held at
the Ace Hotel in mid-town Manhattan.
Director of Conferences and Con-
tests Josh Sippie has attended numer-
ous writers’ conferences. He longed to
break away from the traditional model
in which writers meet literary agents to
pitch a project in a 10-minute forced
conversation – a model he says many
agents would like to eliminate as well.
Instead, Gotham welcomes anyone
to attend the first day of the confer-
ence, which will be filled with
40 | The Writer • October 2019
presentations about authors’ journeys
from rejection to publication. The sec- CONFERENCE:
ond day will be devoted to agent Gotham Writers Conference
roundtable presentations and discus- DATES:
sions by invitation only, based on an October 25-26, 2019
application and writing sample. COST:
“This fits with the Gotham philoso- $245-$595
phy,” Sippie explains. “We don’t want to LOCATION:
take your money if you’re not ready for New York City
something. We want to see your query CONTACT:
and pages first, to make sure you under- Conference Director Josh Sippie,
stand what you have. We don’t want to contact@gothamwriters.com,
waste your time or the agents’ time.” writingclasses.com/
writers-conference/index
IM_photo/Shutterstock
What you’ll learn
The first day of the conference begins
with a panel of authors talking about book, moderated by novelist and edi-
how they’ve written and published a tor Joe Okonkwo. Memoirist and fic-
tion writer Kim Liao, whose essay
“Why You Should Aim for 100 Rejec-
tions a Year” went viral among writers
on LitHub (6/28/16), will talk about
the importance of rejection as an inevi-
table precursor to success, while
author Weike Wang will talk about
how she wrote and sold her award-
winning debut novel, Chemistry.
Writers attending the first day of
Gotham Writers Conference will learn
how agents select their clients in an
afternoon session titled “The Agent’s
View: What We Talk about When We
Talk about You.” The day concludes
with a happy hour and “The Agent
Game Show,” during which agent Jeff
Kleinman will ask a panel of three
agents fun and light-hearted questions,
such as “What’s the strangest thing
you’ve ever seen in a query letter?”
“He then lets all three agents answer,
and he chooses the best answer,” Sippie
explains. “The winner gets a goofy prize
for each question they get right. Then at
the end, he anoints an overall winner,
which I am just giddy to see.”
Writers applying for the second day
of the writing conference must submit
a query letter and the first 10 pages of a
manuscript before Sept. 24, or until
seats are filled. Two agents representing
each genre – nonfiction, mainstream
literary, genre fiction, and middle
grade/young adult – sit at a round table
with up to nine participants.
“Each writer talks about their query
and first pages, and then the agent
gives feedback,” Sippie explains.
“They’re there to teach, to share their
wisdom with prospective writers.”
Featured presenters
The agents at Gotham Writers Confer-
ence look for serious writers, people
who are ready to have an agent tomor-
row. The nonfiction table includes Jeff
Kleinman from Folio Literary Manage-
ment and J.L. Stermer of New Leaf Lit-
erary & Media. Suzie Townsend of
New Leaf heads the roundtable
devoted to middle-grade and young
adult literature, along with Jim McCar-
thy of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret.
As of press time, two tables are
GET
devoted to mainstream/literary fiction,
with insights from agents Kerry
SOCIAL
D’Agostino of Curtis Brown, Jenny Follow us on
Bent of The Bent Agency, Noah Ballard Facebook
of Curtis Brown, and Mitchell Waters
of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents.
and Twitter
Kurestin Armada of P.S. Literary and
Alec Shane of Writers House head the
genre fiction table. “We asked for two
agents per table so they could bounce
ideas off each other,” Sippie explains. @thewritermagazine
“They’re always interacting on social
media; they already know each other, so
that’s going to make for a good time.”
Advice for first-time attendees
While Sippie would love for people to @thewritermag
attend and pitch a manuscript and sign
with an agent, he asks writers to attend
the conference without that expecta-
tion but with a mind open to absorb-
ing information about both their
preferred genre and the business of
publishing. “We want to give people a
learning experience and a community
feeling rather than just this hope that
they’ll attend this conference, and their
life will change,” he explains.
During round-table discussions,
participants will be able to take notes
on what agents have to say about query
letters and sample pages from writers
working in the same genre. Sippie
urges attendees to have fun with the
agents and treat interactions with them
like a regular conversation. “They’re
people, too. We’re all supporting each
other,” he says. “At the conference,
we’re hoping to inspire a genuine con-
nection between writers and agents
that will last for years.”
Creative Writing
Contributing editor Melissa Hart is the
author of Better with Books: 500 Diverse Books
Classes in NYC
to Ignite Empathy and Encourage Self-Accep- & Online
tance in Tweens and Teens (Sasquatch, 2019.
GOTHAMWRITERS. COM
Twitter/Instagram @WildMelissaHart.
writermag.com • The Writer | 41
MARKETS
COMPILED BY TONI FITZGERALD
Niche mags
Many writers think only of the big-name magazines as outlets to pub-
lish work. But smaller magazines that specialize in a niche market are
often looking for solid writers to contribute to each issue.
The magazines in this section are a small sampling of what the industry
has to offer. Find more market listings at writermag.com.
Information in this section is provided to
The Writer by the individual markets and
events; for more information, contact
those entities directly.
ANIMALS/PETS
ANIMAL WELLNESS Natural pet magazine
aimed at helping pet owners make wise health-
care choices for animal companions. Accepting
articles of 500-1,500 words. Particularly interested
in submissions for Animal Passages, Warm &
Fuzzy, and Tail End columns. Submit via email.
Contact: Animal Wellness, 160 Charlotte St.,
Suite 202, Peterborough, ON, Canada K9J 2T8.
866-764-1212 . ann@redstonemediagroup.com
animalwellnessmagazine.com
THE BARK Publication for dog lovers covering
canine nutrition, culture, obedience, and gear.
Accepts unsolicited submissions and previously
published material. Accepts short pieces (fewer
than 600 words) on general tips, how-to, and
other topics, as well as some fiction, personal
essays, and poetry. Contact: Claudia Kawczynska,
editor, The Bark, 2810 Eighth St., Berkeley, CA
94710. submissions@thebark.com
thebark.com
BIRDWATCHING Bimonthly magazine for fans
of wild birds and birdwatching. Topics include
untold stories about birds and bird behavior; first-
person accounts; birds in the news; birding
hotspots; tips for attracting, feeding, and identify-
ing birds; photo essays; first-person narratives
about finding rare birds; history of ornithology and
birdwatching. Send queries by email or regular
mail. Contact: Editorial Dept., BirdWatching Mag-
azine, 25 Braintree Hill Office Park, Suite 404,
42 | The Writer • October 2019
Braintree, MA 02184. mail@birdwatchingdaily.com
birdwatchingdaily.com
THE HORSE Monthly magazine about equine
health care, focusing on educational topics and
news for professional horse owners. No unsolic-
ited material accepted. Submit resume and writing
samples before sending a manuscript. Contact:
Stephanie Church, editor-in-chief, P.O. Box
919003, Lexington, KY 40591.
schurch@thehorse.com
thehorse.com
CURRENT EVENTS/POLITICS
THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
International online and weekly magazine cover-
ing a wide range of issues and events. Features
articles on domestic and foreign affairs, econom-
ics, education, environment, law, media, politics,
lifestyle trends, women’s rights, family issues,
community, personal finance, careers, education,
books, art, travel, cultural commentary, occa-
sional poetry, and more. Seeks news for print,
email, and online editions. See website for guide-
lines. Contact: The Christian Science Monitor,
210 Massachusetts Ave., Boston, MA 02115. 617-
450-2300. See website for editor email addresses.
csmonitor.com
HARPER’S MAGAZINE Oldest general-inter-
est monthly in America features articles on poli-
tics, environment, society, and culture. Also
interested in fiction. Written queries required for
nonfiction articles. Will accept unsolicited fiction
manuscripts. Submit by regular mail only.
Monthly. Contact: Harper’s Magazine, 666 Broad-
way, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10012. 212-420-
5720. harpers.org
MOTHER JONES Independent journalism
publication focusing on national topics including
social and political issues, environmental issues,
corporate wrongdoing, human rights, and politi-
cal influence. Accepts queries by email or regular
mail. Contact: Mother Jones, P.O. Box 584, San
Francisco, CA 94104. 415-321-1700. See website
for editor email addresses. motherjones.com
THE NATION Publishes articles and comments
on politics and culture from a liberal perspective.
National affairs of interest include civil liberties,
civil rights, labor, economics, environmental,
political, and feminist issues. International affairs
topics include political, economic, and social
developments. Submit query via form on website.
Accepts some poetry; see separate poetry guide-
lines. Weekly. Contact: The Nation, 520 Eighth
Ave., New York, NY 10018. Email from website.
thenation.com
REASON “Free Minds and Free Markets.” Pub-
lishes articles on politics, economics, culture, and
science from a broad-minded libertarian perspec-
tive. Email and regular mail queries only; include
published clips. No manuscripts. Monthly. Con-
tact: Brian Doherty, Reason, 5737 Mesmer Ave.,
Los Angeles, CA 90230. 310-391-2245.
bdoherty@reason.com reason.com
WASHINGTON MONTHLY Publishes topical,
informative articles about politics, government,
culture, and the media in the U.S. Seeks features,
short news items, humorous sidebars, and book
reviews for political and cultural titles. Submit
queries by email or regular mail. Bimonthly. Con-
tact: Washington Monthly, 1200 18th St. NW, Ste.
330, Washington, D.C. 20036. 202-955-9010.
washingtonmonthly.com
YES! Magazine focuses on building a more sus-
tainable, compassionate world. Each issue has a
theme but also covers topics such as health, climate
change, globalization, labor, social, and racial jus-
tice. Submit queries and proposals with published
clips or a writing sample. Prefers electronic queries.
Contact: YES! Magazine, 284 Madrona Way NE,
Suite 116, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110.
submissions@yesmagazine.org yesmagazine.org
FAMILY
ADOPTIVE FAMILIES A digital resource for
families before, during, and after adoption featur-
ing topics such as preparing for adoption, health
issues, school and education, birth families, talking
about adoption, parenting tips, and guidelines.
Several departments also accept freelance work.
Submit queries by email (preferred) or regular
mail. Quarterly. Contact: Submissions, Adoptive
Families, 108 West 39th St., Suite 805, New York,
NY 10018. submissions@adoptivefamilies.com
adoptivefamilies.com
ATLANTA PARENT A resource for parents
with children up to age 18 in the Atlanta area.
Covers topics such as child care, education, family
activities, and health. Send submissions by email
as a Word attachment (preferred) or postal mail.
Monthly. Contact: Atlanta Parent Magazine, Attn:
Editor, 2346 Perimeter Park Dr., Atlanta, GA
30341. 770-454-7599. editor@atlantaparent.com
atlantaparent.com
CHESAPEAKE FAMILY LIFE Free parenting
publication serving portions of Queen Anne’s
County in Maryland. Especially interested in local
travel stories. Submit queries by email. Monthly.
Contact: Chesapeake Family, 121 Cathedral St.,
Third Floor, Annapolis, MD 21401. 410-263-
1641. editor@chesapeakefamily.com
chesapeakefamily.com
CHICAGO PARENT Publishes essays and fea-
tures about child care, education, and balancing
work and family for parents in the Chicago metro
area. Interested in local writers. Submit queries by
email only. Monthly. Contact: Chicago Parent.
Editor: Tamara L. O’Shaughnessy.
tamara@chicagoparent.com chicagoparent.com
THE GREEN PARENT A “green lifestyle” and
natural parenting magazine from the UK. Topics
include pregnancy and conscious birth, breastfeed-
ing, family life, alternative education, natural health
and beauty, food and drink, eco-friendly house and
garden, green travel, and ethical fashion. Submit
manuscript by email only. Bimonthly. Contact:
The Green Parent, Farthings, The Quadrangle, East
Hoathly, BN8 6QP. features@thegreenparent.co.uk
thegreenparent.co.uk
PITTSBURGH PARENT Features information
for parents in the Pittsburgh metro area about
parenting, family events, and resources for fami-
lies. Send queries and submissions by email only.
Contact: Honey Hill Publishing, Inc., Pittsburgh
Parent Magazine, 1126 Pittsburgh Rd. (RT 8), P.O.
Box 674, Valencia, PA 16059. 724-898-1898.
editor@pittsburghparent.com pittsburghparent.com
PREGNANCY & NEWBORN Targets parents
who are pregnant or who have children under the
age of 1. Topics include prenatal health, prenatal
nutrition, emotional wellbeing, labor and delivery,
infant care, and parenting. Prefers queries by
email; include clips of previously published arti-
cles. Contact: Pregnancy & Newborn.
editor@pnmag.com pnmag.com
RAISING ARIZONA KIDS Publishes articles
for parents raising children in Arizona. Works
with Arizona-based writers only. Topics must
have a local angle. Submit queries and submis-
sions by regular mail or email. Contact: Raising
Arizona Kids, 5229 N. Seventh Ave., Suite 102,
Phoenix, AZ 85013. 480-991-5437.
editorial@RAKmagazine.com
raisingarizonakids.com
WESTERN NEW YORK FAMILY MAGA-
ZINE Features articles for parents in Western New
York. Offers information on area resources and
family activities for the Buffalo metro area. See
website for issue themes. Submit articles by email
only. Monthly. Contact: Western New York Family
Magazine, 3147 Delaware Ave., Suite B, Buffalo,
NY 14217. 716-836-3486. Michele Miller, editor
and publisher. michele@wnyfamilymagazine.com
wnyfamilymagazine.com
WORKING MOTHER Features articles for work-
ing women about balancing their professional,
family, and personal lives. Submit queries by email
with links or clips of previously published work, if
possible. Monthly. Contact: Working Mother Mag-
azine, 2 Park Ave., 9th floor, New York, NY 10016.
See website for specific contacts for editorial con-
tent. 212-779-5000. workingmother.com
FOOD AND DRINK
EATINGWELL Features articles and columns
about cooking and nutrition science, including
the origins of foods and social issues related to
food. Prefers email queries. Bimonthly. Recom-
mends starting with front-of-book queries. Con-
tact: EatingWell Media Group, 120 Graham Way,
Suite 100, Shelburne, VT 05482. 802-985-4500.
Check website for specific editors’ email
addresses. eatingwell.com
EDIBLE GREEN MOUNTAINS Publishes arti-
cles and recipes of interest to communities in Ver-
mont. Submit queries for features and
departments by email. Quarterly. Contact: Edible
Green Mountains. P.O. Box 2607, Manchester
Center, VT 05255. 802-768-8356.
info@ediblegreenmountains.com
ediblegreenmountains.com
EDIBLE SEATTLE Publishes a wide variety of
articles and recipes of interest to the Seattle and
Washington state community. Submit queries for
features and departments by email. Bimonthly.
Contact: Edible Seattle. Editor and Publisher Alex
Corcoran. mahill23@gmail.com edibleseattle.com
EDIBLE SOUTH SHORE & SOUTH COAST
Publishes articles and recipes about food, beer,
and wine in the communities of the South Shore
and South Coast areas of Massachusetts. Submit
queries for features and departments by email.
Quarterly. Contact: Edible South Shore, 15 Ever-
green St., Kingston, MA 02364. 781-582-1726.
laurie@ediblesouthshore.com ediblesouthshore.com
GASTRONOMICA Features articles from any
field pertaining to the history, production, uses, and
depictions of food. Accepts research articles, prose,
poetry, original artwork, photographs, and car-
toons. Also publishes book reviews. Contact: Gas-
tronomica. gastrome@ucsc.edu gastronomica.org
GLUTEN-FREE LIVING Dedicated to providing
useful and up-to-date information for those who
follow a gluten-free diet. Topics include gluten-
free regulations and news, travel, recipes, living
well, and savings. Contact: Editorial Dept., Glu-
ten-Free Living magazine, 25 Braintree Hill Office
Park, Suite 404, Braintree, MA 02184.
lgoerner@madavor.com glutenfreeliving.com
VEGNEWS Magazine for vegans. Interested in
food features, restaurant reviews, interviews, busi-
ness profiles, features, plus queries for the regular
departments. Prefers queries with clips by email.
Contact: VegNews, 817 South Los Angeles St.,
Suite #2B, Los Angeles, CA 90014.
editorial@vegnews.com vegnews.com
writermag.com • The Writer | 43
MARKETS
WINE ENTHUSIAST MAGAZINE Features
articles about wine, travel, and fine food in print
and online. Also interested in items for the front-
of-book and back-of-book sections. Submit pro-
posals by email or regular mail. Monthly.
Contact: Wine Enthusiast Magazine, 200 Summit
Lake Dr., Valhalla, NY 10595. See website for spe-
cific editor emails. winemag.com
HEALTH/FITNESS/SPORTS
AMERICAN ANGLER Publication devoted
exclusively to fly-fishing, with an emphasis on
cold water fly-fishing for trout, steelhead, and
salmon. Seeks articles about techniques, finding
fishing spots, information about different types of
fish, and casting. Author must be prepared to pro-
vide photos to accompany how-to articles. Email
queries preferred. Bimonthly. Contact: Benjamin
Romans, Editor, American Angler, 643 Broad St.,
Augusta, GA 30901. greg.thomas@morris.com
americanangler.com
BACKPACKER Primarily for wilderness hikers
in North America. Seeks articles about destina-
tions, gear, personalities, and techniques. Occa-
sionally publishes articles about kayaking/
canoeing, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing and
other human-powered travel modes. Departments
also open to freelancers. Email queries only. 9x/
year. Contact: Backpacker. Check website for edi-
tor email addresses. backpacker.com
BLACK BELT Features articles related to martial
arts: technical and strategic skills, training meth-
ods and fitness, and historical and philosophical
topics. Pays more for articles with photos. Submit
query letters by email or regular mail. Contact:
Black Belt Magazine. Email via website.
blackbeltmag.com
CANOE & KAYAK MAGAZINE Publishes arti-
cles and features on canoeing, kayaking, and raft-
ing adventures, destinations, boat and equipment
reviews, techniques, and how-tos. Accepts articles
from authors experienced in paddle sports. Sub-
mit query by email via website. 5x/year. Contact:
Canoe & Kayak. Check website for specific edi-
tors’ email addresses. canoekayak.com
EXPLORE For Canada’s active outdoor enthusi-
asts. Covers adventure travel, hiking, mountain
biking, climbing, paddling, and winter sports.
44 | The Writer • October 2019
Send queries and submissions by email (pre-
ferred) or regular mail. 4x/year. Contact: Explore,
PO Box 57096 East Hastings, Vancouver, BC,
Canada, V5K 5G6. explore@explore-mag.com
explore-mag.com
OUTSIDE For people with active lifestyles. Cov-
ers outdoor events, regions, sports and adventure
travel, personal experiences, the environment,
and outdoor equipment. Submit queries only and
relevant clips. Monthly. Contact: Editorial
Department, Outside magazine, 400 Market St.,
Santa Fe, NM 87501. outsideonline.com
PREVENTION Monthly healthy living magazine
covering health news and research from experts,
food and nutrition, beauty, fitness, self-help, and
relationships. Contact: Prevention, 300 W 57th
St, New York, NY 10019. editor@prevention.com
prevention.com
YOGA JOURNAL Magazine on the practice and
philosophy of yoga. Accepting articles for depart-
ments on the yoga lifestyle and nutrition/cooking.
Submit query by email. Contact: Yoga Journal.
yogajournal.com
HOME AND GARDEN
THE AMERICAN GARDENER Official publi-
cation of the American Horticultural Society.
Offers feature-length articles, including in-depth
profiles of plant groups, descriptions of innovative
landscape design projects, gardener and garden
profiles, historical developments in American gar-
dening, and descriptions of important plant
breeding and research programs tailored to a lay
audience. Bimonthly. Submit proposals by email
or regular mail. Contact: The American Gar-
dener, American Horticultural Society, 7931 E.
Boulevard Dr., Alexandria, VA 22308.
editor@ahsgardening.org
ahsgardening.org
CANADIAN HOUSE & HOME Offers an
inside look at home decor in Canada, including
information on the latest furniture, fabrics, and
accessories. Also includes tips from renovation
experts and tricks for organizing and entertaining
with style. Submit queries with clips by email.
Contact: Canadian House & Home, 445 King St.
West, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 1K4.
letters@hhmedia.com houseandhome.com
VERANDA Features articles on the decorative
arts, books, collectibles, luxury goods, interiors,
gardens, table settings, floral arrangements,
unusual travel destinations, and furnishings. Sub-
mit by regular mail only. Contact: Veranda, 2901
2nd Ave. South, Suite 270, Birmingham, AL
35233. veranda.com
PERFORMING ARTS
AMERICAN THEATRE Covers trends and
events in all types of theater, as well as economic
and legislative developments affecting the arts,
with a particular focus on professional, nonprofit
theater. Mail or email query. Contact: Rob Wein-
ert-Kendt, editor-in-chief, American Theatre, 520
8th Ave., Fl. 24, New York, NY 10018. 212-609-
5900. at@tcg.org tcg.org
DRAMATICS Monthly magazine for high school
theater students and teachers with practical arti-
cles about acting, directing, design, production,
and career-oriented profiles of working theater
professionals. Also publishes one-act and full-
length plays. Plays should be performable in high
schools. Contact: Dramatics Magazine.
publications@schooltheatre.org
schooltheatre.org/resources/dramatics
EMMY Bimonthly industry magazine for TV
professionals and enthusiasts. Official publication
of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. No
highly technical articles or academic/fan-maga-
zine type articles. Best section for newcomers is
“Labors of Love,” the 500-word, front-of-book
profiles of TV people. Contact: Editor, Emmy,
5220 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, CA
91601. emmys.com/emmymag
OPERA NEWS Publishes articles of interest for
the opera professional and the opera buff. No fic-
tion or personal remembrances. Submit query or
manuscript and published writing samples via
email. Contact: Kitty March, Opera News, 70 Lin-
coln Center Plaza, Fl. 6, New York, NY 10023.
info@operanews.com operanews.com
TEACHING THEATRE JOURNAL Quarterly
journal for professional theater educators.
Includes articles on acting, directing, playwriting,
technical theater, profiles of outstanding educa-
tional theater programs, curriculum design,
assessment, teaching methodology, and reports
on current trends or issues in the field. Contact:
Teaching Theatre. publications@schooltheatre.org
schooltheatre.org/publications/teachingtheatre
REGIONAL/CITY
ADIRONDACK LIFE Publishes articles about
history, culture, recreation, wildlife, and personal-
ities in the Adirondack Park region of New York.
Submit queries by email (preferred) or postal mail
with clips of previously published work. Contact:
Annie Stoltie, Editor, Adirondack Life, P.O. Box
410, Jay, NY 12941. astoltie@adirondacklife.com
adirondacklifemag.com
ATLANTA Publishes articles about life and style,
food and dining, arts and entertainment, and gen-
eral-interest stories about Atlanta and the sur-
rounding area. Monthly. Contact: Atlanta
Magazine, 260 Peachtree St., Suite 300, Atlanta,
GA 30303. 404-527-5500. See website for editors’
email addresses. atlantamagazine.com
BALTIMORE Covers the Baltimore metro area
with articles about local people, events, trends,
and ideas. Prefers email queries, but will accept
queries by postal mail. Monthly. Contact: Balti-
more magazine. 1000 Lancaster St., Suite 400, Bal-
timore, MD 21202. 443-873-3900. See website for
editorial email addresses. baltimoremagazine.net
CHICAGO Publishes articles about living in Chi-
cago, including dining, entertainment, shopping,
fashion, news and politics, home, and garden.
Email queries to appropriate editors as listed on
the website. Monthly. Contact: Chicago Maga-
zine, 160 N. Stetson Ave., 4th Floor, Chicago, IL
60601. 312-222-8999. See website for editorial
email addresses. chicagomag.com
THE IOWAN Covers current issues, history, cul-
ture, people, places, and events of Iowa. Submit
queries by email. Bimonthly. Contact: The Iowan,
903 North Second St., Ames, IA 50010. 515-232-
6710 . editor@iowan.com iowan.com
KANSAS! Magazine devoted to promoting tour-
ism in Kansas. Especially interested in travel arti-
cles. Submit queries by postal mail or email.
Quarterly. Contact: Editor, KANSAS! Magazine,
1020 S. Kansas Ave., Suite 200, Topeka, KS 66612.
785-296-2009. ksmagazine@sunflowerpub.com
travelks.com/ks-mag
LAKE SUPERIOR MAGAZINE Focuses on
Lake Superior region (U.S. and Canada) history,
current events, lifestyles, environment, and tour-
ism. Submit manuscript by postal mail or email.
Bimonthly. Contact: Lake Superior Port Cities
Inc., Publishers, 310 E. Superior St. #125, Duluth,
MN 55802. edit@lakesuperior.com
lakesuperior.com
LONG ISLAND WOMAN For women ages 35
and older in the Long Island, New York, region.
Publishes personality profiles and articles on a
wide variety of topics, including lifestyles and
family, health, beauty, fashion, food, and travel.
Submit queries and articles by email only.
Monthly. Contact: Long Island Woman, P.O. Box
176, Malverne, NY 11565. 516-505-0555.
editor@liwomanonline.com
liwomanonline.com
MIDWEST LIVING Publishes travel, food, gar-
den, and home-decorating articles relating to the
Midwest states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illi-
nois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri,
North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kan-
sas. Submit clips and query by postal mail.
Bimonthly. Contact: Query Editor, Midwest Liv-
ing, 1716 Locust St., Des Moines, IA 50309.
midwestliving@meredith.com
midwestliving.com
NEW JERSEY MONTHLY Publication cover-
ing trends, people, and news in New Jersey,
including local personalities, current issues, poli-
tics, business, health care, history and attractions,
shopping, recreation, nightlife, local sports/ath-
letes, home, and garden. Submit queries by email.
Monthly. Contact: New Jersey Monthly, 55 Park
Place, P.O. Box 920, Morristown, NJ 07963. 973-
539-8230. See website for editorial email
addresses. njmonthly.com
NEW YORK MAGAZINE Covers New York
City news, culture, entertainment, lifestyle, fash-
ion, and personalities. Weekly. Contact: Editorial
Submissions, New York Media, 75 Varick St., New
York, NY 10013.
editorialsubmissions@nymag.com nymag.com
NEWPORT LIFE MAGAZINE A lifestyle maga-
zine about the people, places, and attractions of
Newport County in Rhode Island. Submit queries
by postal mail. Bimonthly. Contact: Newport Life
Magazine, 272 Valley Road, Middletown, RI
02842. 401-849-3300. Fred Albert, Editor,
falbert@newportri.com
newportlifemagazine.com
NORTH DAKOTA HORIZONS Publishes arti-
cles showcasing North Dakota people, places, and
events. Be prepared to submit photos or illustra-
tions with article, if possible. Quarterly. Contact:
Editor, North Dakota Horizons, P.O. Box 1091,
Bismarck, ND 58502. 866-462-0744. Email via
website. ndhorizons.com
OHIO MAGAZINE Publishes stories about all
aspects of Ohio, including its culture and heritage,
people, and travel spots. Submit queries by email
or postal mail. Monthly. Contact: Jim Vickers,
Editor, Ohio Magazine, 1422 Euclid Ave., Suite
730, Cleveland, OH 44115.
jvickers@ohiomagazine.com
ohiomagazine.com
OKLAHOMA TODAY Explores the people,
places, culture, and events of Oklahoma. Prefers
submission of queries or manuscripts by email.
Bimonthly. Contact: Karlie Ybarra, managing
editor, PO Box 1468, Oklahoma City, OK 73101-
1468. 405-522-9501.
Karlie.Ybarra@TravelOK.com
oklahomatoday.com
OREGON COAST Covers communities, busi-
nesses, events, people, activities, and the natural
wonders that make up the Oregon coast. Query
by email or postal mail. Bimonthly. Contact: Ore-
gon Coast magazine. oregoncoastmagazine.com
OUR STATE: DOWN HOME IN NORTH
CAROLINA Publishes articles that focus on
North Carolina history, personalities, travel, arts
and crafts, nature, adventure, culture, and nostal-
gia. Monthly. Contact: Editor, Our State Maga-
zine, P.O. Box 4552, Greensboro, NC 27404.
editorial@ourstate.com ourstate.com
PORTLAND MONTHLY Celebrates the Port-
land, Maine, region with features on personalities,
arts, getaways, architecture, cuisine, and light-
hearted glimpses of Yankee contradictions. Also
publishes fiction. Submit queries to editor by
online submission manager. 10x/year. Charges
writermag.com • The Writer | 45
MARKETS
$25 reading fee. Contact: Portland Magazine, 165
State St., Portland, ME 04101. 207-775-0101.
staff@portlandmonthly.com
portlandmonthly.com
SEATTLE Devoted to local issues, lifestyle,
home, travel, and entertainment articles about the
greater Seattle area. Submit queries and clips by
email as noted on the website. Monthly. Contact:
Seattle Magazine, Tiger Oak Media, Inc., 1417 4th
Ave., Suite 600, Seattle WA 98101. 206-284-1750.
Check website for editor email addresses.
seattlemag.com
TETON FAMILY Published for families in the
Jackson, Wyoming, or Teton Valley areas. Seeks
stories that promote a sustainable and healthy life-
style. Welcomes local writers. Submit query and a
writing sample by email. Contact: Teton Family
Magazine. christina@tetonfamilymagazine.com
tetonfamilymagazine.com
TORONTO LIFE Features articles about the local
urban scene in Toronto. Submit unpublished arti-
cles and queries by email or regular mail.
Monthly. Contact: Toronto Life, Editorial Depart-
ment, 111 Queen St. E., Suite 320, Toronto, Ont.
M5C 1S2. submissions@torontolife.com
torontolife.com
VANCOUVER MAGAZINE City magazine
with a focus on urban life (sports, civics, social
affairs, business, politics, media, restaurants, fash-
ion, shopping, and nightlife). Submit queries or
manuscript. 10x/year. Contact: Vancouver Maga-
zine, 230, 4321 Still Creek Dr., Burnaby, B.C. V5C
6S7. 604-299-7311. mail@vanmag.com
vanmag.com
YANKEE MAGAZINE Regional magazine for
the six New England states. Publishes home,
travel, food, and nonfiction editorial articles.
Include writing samples with submissions. Con-
tact: Joe Bills, Yankee Magazine, P.O. Box 520,
Dublin, NH 03444. editors@yankeepub.com
yankeemagazine.com
TRAVEL
AFAR Travel magazine covering culture, crafts,
and foods of interesting places around the world.
Queries must be pitched specifically to one of the
existing sections. Contact: Afar Magazine, 130
46 | The Writer • October 2019
Battery St., 6th Floor, San Francisco, California
94111. pitches@afar.com afar.com
BRITISH COLUMBIA MAGAZINE Publishes
articles about the people, heritage, history, travel
destinations, parks, wilderness, and ecology of
British Columbia. Email queries preferred. Quar-
terly. Contact: Dale Miller, Editor, British Colum-
bia Magazine, 802-1166 Alberni St., Vancouver,
BC V6E 3Z3. 604-428-0259. editor@bcmag.ca
bcmag.ca
THE EXPEDITIONER Online travel magazine
accepting unsolicited first-person travel stories
1,200 words and up. Contact: Expeditioner. Matt
Stabile, matt@theexpeditioner.com
theexpeditioner.com
PASSPORT MAGAZINE Travel magazine for
gay and lesbian readers featuring articles about
travel opportunities, gay-friendly destinations,
and events around the world. Submit queries by
postal mail. Contact: Passport Magazine. Email
from website. passportmagazine.com
TRAILER LIFE Targeted to RV travelers, includ-
ing folding trailers, fifth-wheel and travel trailers,
motorhomes, camping vans, and truck campers.
Publishes articles about interesting destinations,
RV-lifestyle personalities, on-the-road hobbies,
new products, campgrounds, and maintenance.
Submit queries by postal mail. Contact: Trailer
Life, Managing Editor, 2750 Park View Ct., Suite
240, Oxnard, California 93036.
info@trailerlife.com trailerlife.com
TRANSITIONS ABROAD Articles with practi-
cal travel information for webzine about cultural
travel, the working traveler, living abroad, and
student travel/work/volunteering/study. Check
website for list of possible article topics. Requests
at least two photos with the submission. Submit
manuscript by email. 6x/year. Contact: Transi-
tions Abroad.
webeditorial@transitionsabroad.com
transitionsabroad.com
TRAVEL + LEISURE Monthly magazine for
sophisticated, active travelers planning both plea-
sure and business trips. Stories should provide
service information, including when to go, how to
get there, where to stay, where to eat, and what to
see and do. Query letters by email preferred. Con-
tact: Travel + Leisure magazine, 225 Liberty St.,
New York, NY 10281.
submissions@travelandleisure.com
travelandleisure.com
WANDERLUST British travel magazine seeks
articles about travel around the world, including
destination features, unusual travel adventures,
special-interest features, and travel advice. Submit
queries by email. Contact: Wanderlust, Capital
House, 25 Chapel St., London, NW1 5DH.
submissions@wanderlust.co.uk wanderlust.co.uk
WEDDING
BRIDE & GROOM Wedding publication for
New England. Publishes articles on any and all
topics relating to wedding planning and trends.
Also accepts honeymoon articles. Contact: Bride
& Groom Magazine, Attn: Managing Editor, 176
Worcester-Providence Turnpike, Suite 101A, Sut-
ton, MA 01590. 508-770-0092.
info@originalweddingexpo.com
originalweddingexpo.com
SEATTLE BRIDE Open to queries from local
freelancers for articles about weddings and brides
in the Seattle area. Submit by email with pub-
lished writing samples. Contact: Seattle Bride,
Tiger Oak Media, Inc., 1417 Fourth Ave., Ste. 600,
Seattle, WA 98101. Meg Bartley, editor.
bartley@tigeroak.com seattlebridemag.com
WISCONSIN BRIDE Bridal magazine for
engaged couples in Wisconsin. Looking for local
freelancers to cover stories on weddings and
brides in the area. Contact: Wisconsin Bride,
Tiger Oak Media, Inc., One Tiger Oak Plaza, 900
S. Third St., Minneapolis, MN 55415. Sarah Bau-
mann Rogers, editor. sarah.rogers@tigeroak.com
wibride.com
WRITING/PUBLISHING
QUILL & QUIRE Publication for the Canadian
book-publishing industry. Offers news and arti-
cles about the writing and publishing industry in
Canada. Also publishes author profiles and
reviews of Canadian books. Submit queries by
email. 10x/year. Contact: Quill & Quire, 111
Queen St. E., Suite 320, Toronto, ON, M5C 1S2.
416-364-3333. Sue Carter, editor.
scarter@quillandquire.com quillandquire.com
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HOW I WRITE
BY ALLISON FUTTERMAN
Shaun David Hutchinson
N
ovelist Shaun David
Hutchinson’s compelling
(and award-winning) YA
novels combine specula-
tive elements with LGBT characters
and themes. Now he tackles nonfic-
tion for the first time with his mem-
oir, Brave Face. He recounts his
tumultuous life during his teenage
years as he struggled to understand
his sexuality, his depression, and the
suicide attempt
that led to a
search for self-
acceptance.
Hopeful and cou-
rageous, Brave
Face is every bit
as poignant and
gripping as
Hutchinson’s fic-
tion. Next up is his first non-specula-
tive novel, The State of Us. The story
of two opposing presidential candi-
dates’ sons who fall in love will be out
next year.
Writing memoir vs. fiction
Usually, I’m a “write by the seat of your
pants” kind of person when it comes to
fiction. I have a vague idea and a char-
acter voice, and then I’ll jump in and
explore. With memoir, I already knew
what happened. I had to create an out-
line of events and decide how I wanted
to tell my story. Having an outline and
supporting materials, such as journals
and emails, is not something I nor-
mally have [with fiction]. I experi-
mented with time jumps or linear
order and picking events that best told
the story. It was a challenge trying to
find the honesty that’s necessary when
telling a story in the first person. In
fiction, I need to find the core honesty
48 | The Writer • October 2019
In fiction, I need to
find the core honesty
of the character,
but this time the
character was me.
of the character, but this time the char-
acter was me.
Honesty on the page
I’m a private person by nature. With
the memoir, when I sat down with my
editor to work on it, I realized it was all
or nothing. I was either going to let
people into that part of my life during
that time, or not. I wasn’t a particularly
wonderful teenager. I had my faults,
and I thought it was important to show
those faults – and to show that the way
I saw the world wasn’t necessarily the
way the world actually was. But it was
the way I interpreted things. It was the
truth to me in that moment.
Crafting YA/teenage dialogue
It boils down to honesty. I try to stay
away from slang because that immedi-
ately dates things. There’s a thing I see
a lot in beginning writers when work-
ing on dialogue. They try to transcribe
exactly how people talk, but dialogue is
looking for the soul of the conversa-
tion. It’s about making every word
count. I think teens are far more open
when they speak than people think
they are. I don’t dumb them down.
Starting point
Generally, I just start writing and find-
ing the character’s voice and let them
tell the story. Sometimes I’m dead in
the water, and sometimes there are
false starts. I have ADHD, and if I
know too much about the story, I get
bored. Part of the fun is figuring out
what’s going to happen. It typically
takes me three to six weeks to write a
first draft, and it’s usually terrible. I’m a
fan of throw it away and start over. I’ll
outline a draft I’ve rewritten and make
changes I need to, and then rewrite it.
Some are easier than others.
Writing for an audience
I’m only writing for two people – the
high school version of me and my best
friend, Rachel. She’s the first person
who reads my work. When you start
thinking about “who is my audience”
and “how to broaden my appeal,” then
you’re writing for committee. And that
doesn’t work out well for me.
Chris Piedra
Allison Futterman is a freelance writer based
in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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 YOU CAN’T FIND THIS IN PRINT.
EXCERPT From Brave Face by Shaun David Hutchinson.
The following excerpt from my memoir
Brave Face begins with a vocabulary
lesson. Specifically, the vocabulary of
hate. It wasn’t gay people I hated, how-
ever, it was myself. While I find the use
of that particular F-word offensive, I
used it in this selection to help readers
understand how gay people were com-
monly viewed when I was a teen, how I
viewed them, and how, therefore, I
viewed myself.
VOCABULARY LESSON, PART 1
Eighth Grade, 1991 to 1992
I KNEW WHAT IT MEANT TO BE
A FAGGOT, BUT NOT WHAT IT
meant to be gay.
I was thirteen, in eighth grade at St.
Mark’s Catholic School. Thankfully,
this wasn’t a building filled with nuns
who beat our knuckles with rulers.
Our science teacher and vice principal
was a woman with short hair who’d
served in the military, rode a Harley
to school, and taught us about both
puberty and evolution. We attended
daily religion class, which is where I
did my homework for my other
classes, and had mass once or twice a
month, but I didn’t mind.
Despite not being Catholic, I liked
St. Mark’s. It was nothing like my pre-
vious school, where I’d been fre-
quently sent to the administrator’s
office for counseling with the vice
principal,who would beat my ass with
a sandal and then pray for my eternal
soul, which she made sure I knew she
believed was hell bound. I hated that
school so much that I faked fevers by
going to the bathroom and running
hot water against my forehead. I also
scraped a pencil eraser across the
crook of my arm until it bled and fre-
quently jumped from the top of a
metal geodesic dome on the play-
ground in an attempt to break my
ankle. My only friend was a boy who
once ate a spider during a firedrill.
My experience at St. Mark’s was
different. I learned how to cultivate
friendships, how to fit in without
being miserable, how to make people
laugh. And I learned some new
vocabulary words. In the mornings
before school, I sat in front of the
library, which was situated at the far
end of a parking lot between the main
school building and the church.
Younger kids chased one another
around or threw footballs, but I was
an eighth-grader and too cool for that.
 EXCERPT CONT. Brave Face
Instead, I killed time reading. After
falling in love with Robin McKinley’s
The Blue Sword, I searched out and
devoured as many fantasy novels as I
could get my little hands on. My appe-
tite was insatiable. And when I
couldn’t find books I hadn’t read, I
reread old ones.
One morning near the beginning
of the school year, I was lounging on
the steps, my back to a column, read-
ing The Eye of the World by Robert Jor-
dan. I didn’t hear Kurt approach,
didn’t know he was there until his
shadow fell across me, and I didn’t
think anything of it until he slapped
the book out of my hand so hard the
cover tore off.
“Faggot.” He stood over me with
his hands on his hips, staring down.
I’d never been bothered while read-
ing before. In fact, I was known for
sneaking books behind my textbooks
when I was bored. I wasn’t popular,
but I wasn’t unpopular, either, and I
certainly wasn’t a faggot.
Albert was a faggot. Albert was a
tall, thin boy with delicate features
and long eyelashes whose hair was
always perfect and whose uniform
was always impeccably neat. Albert
was best friends with girls and hung
out with them instead of with us.
Tito was a faggot.Tito was my
mother’s hairdresser, and she
sometimes took me to him to get my
haircut too. He was a flamboyant
Mexican man who fluttered around
his shop, spoke with a lisp, and car-
ried his hands with a characteristic
limp wrist.
Hollywood was a faggot. Hollywood
was a character in the 1987 movie
Mannequin, which tells the story of an
uninspired young man on the verge of
losing his job designing window dis-
plays for department stores, and the
mannequin who comes to life and does
the work for him. She saves his job,
they fall in love, barf, the end. Holly-
wood is a fellow window dresser who
is played for laughs by Meshach Taylor.
From his campy demeanor and dra-
matic gasps to his flamboyant collec-
tion of glam sunglasses, he’s nothing
but a joke. Hollywood has no back-
story, no life, and serves no purpose in
the movie other than to be laughed at
and to help the hero get the girl. Holly-
wood was every gay stereotype rolled
up into one poorly written character.
Hollywood was a faggot, Tito was a
faggot, Albert was a faggot, and “fag-
got” was the worst insult to fling at an
eighth-grade boy.
“Fuck you,” I said. Slowly, I rose to
my feet. Kurt was bigger than me, but
I was taller. All I wanted to do was
pick up my book and go back to read-
ing about a world of magic, where a
person’s deeds defined them, but I
couldn’t let Kurt’s challenge pass.
There was no one else from our class
around, but that didn’tmatter.
“Faggot,” Kurt said again, and then
he walked away.
I retrieved my book, and the cover,
which I later decided not to tapeback
on. It was the cover, I believed, that
had set Kurt off, and I made the deci-
sion to stop reading where anyone
might see me so that no one else
thought I was a fag. I also decided
Kurt had to learn a lesson. So I casu-
ally whispered to the right people that
I’d seen Kurt being friendly with
Albert. I never called Kurt a fag, but
soon other kids did. Soon Kurt was
the butt of jokes. Soon boys he’d been
friends with conspired to throw him
in the Dumpster at the edge of the PE
field. And Kurt never called me a fag-
got again.
No one did.
I knew nothing of sexuality, noth-
ing of sex except that it sounded kind
of gross. I knew nothing of love.Noth-
ing of being gay. To me, being gay and
being a faggot were the same. They
were the worst thing a person could
be. They were what I never wanted to
become, and I’d do anything to ensure
I never did.
Reprinted courtesy of Simon & Schuster Children’s
Publishing.