A guest post by Kristyn M. Levis
I have never met my publishers. I have been signed with them for three years now and we have never been in the same room together. As I am based in Sydney, Australia, it is virtually impossible for me to pop into their office in Manila, Philippines, for a meeting. Strangely enough, the arrangement still works thanks to the power of technology. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start from the beginning. View Post
A guest post by Vera Tobin, Case Western Reserve University
Recently I did something that many people would consider unthinkable, or at least perverse. Before going to see “Avengers: Infinity War,” I deliberately read a review that revealed all of the major plot points, from start to finish.
Don’t worry; I’m not going to share any of those spoilers here. Though I do think the aversion to spoilers – what The New York Times’ A.O. Scott recently lamented as “a phobic, hypersensitive taboo against public discussion of anything that happens onscreen” – is a bit overblown. View Post
A guest post by H. C. Gildfind
Like most writers, I loved reading as a kid, and writing evolved from this as the prime means through which I understood and engaged with the world.
I pursued writing throughout secondary and tertiary education. These places gave me structure, peers, encouragement, feedback and – eventually – an income. Most importantly, these places taught me that writing is, first and last, very hard but very gratifying work.
A guest post by Ashley Moore
A round of fiction submissions really is a beautiful beast: dense, overwhelming, intoxicating, and at its very best, delightful. At SAND journal, Fiction Editor Florian Duijsens and I make our way through at least 600 unsolicited stories each submissions period and are only able to publish around 8–12 of those. That means passionate pleas for our favorites and tough decisions once we’ve narrowed our selection down. But how does a writer get their work into the final rounds of editing? And how can a piece stand out among hundreds – or even thousands – of other stories?
French writer and Oulipo member Georges Perec once wrote a novel, A void, without using the letter ‘e’.
Photo: Wikipedia
A guest post by Claire Fuller
There’s an exercise I sometimes get members of book groups to do: I ask each of them to draw a picture of the cabin from my first novel, Our Endless Numbered Days (2015). The building is carefully described in the book: one door, single storey, two windows, a stove with a chimney that pokes out through the shingled roof. But each drawing is different. Some have porches, others have back doors and many windows; sometimes even an upstairs. Each reader brings her own imagination, history and knowledge to the cabin she draws, just as each reader brings a different version of the novel to life as she reads it.
