Steel Toe Review, the online literary magazine that I edit, is publishing a print anthology featuring the best pieces from our first year online. The anthology will be available in mid-February.
Earlier this week, we launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for this venture, and we are already almost half way to our goal. Please visit our Kickstarter page and pledge a donation. The sooner we reach the goal, the sooner we can complete production.
You’re going to hear a lot from me about Steel Toe Review over the next couple of months.
On Monday, we’ll be launching a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for our first year anthology. More on that in a couple of days.
Also on Monday, we’ll start posting issue #10.
And finally, I’m trying out a mailing list service for STR subscribers. Up until now, I’ve just been managing the list manually, which is a huge pain. If you aren’t already on the list, sign up.
Exciting times.
The headlines foretell it. The end is nigh.
It’s probably too late for Christmas, but there’s still time before the end of the world to get your Totes Pocalypse Endtimez Survival Products from Tritone Media, which include:
My short story, “The Jigsaw Puzzle” is featured in the latest issue of the refereed e-journal the Criterion.
Thanks so much to Melissa Studdard for suggesting I submit it there. The title of the story reflects one aspect of the plot but also the process of writing it. I had written several sections of this piece separately as scattered random notes and story ideas. I suppose this process is not unusual for writers, and I’ve certainly used it to some extent often. But in this case, that was all I had, and I was surprised at how smoothly it all came together.
Hope you enjoy it.
The direct link to my story is http://www.the-criterion.com/V2/n3/David.pdf.
For October’s issue of Steel Toe Review, we haven’t gone out of our way to be Halloween-scary, though things sometimes just turn out that way.
In New York hordes of protesters continue to occupy Wall Street, and my own mind, recently re-immersed in Academia, is occupied with a search for some overarching narrative I can apply to everything that’s floating around in the zeitgeist. From here in Birmingham it feels like maybe something important is happening but we aren’t quite sure what it is yet, if we’re for it, against it, or indifferent to it. Though there is apparently a local group supporting the occupy movement, I still personally feel mostly disconnected from what’s happening. It’s easy to write it off as a group of people making the statement, “We are making a statement.”
I know there’s real substance to the feeling of oppression feeding the political movement, and at the same time, I suspect there are members of the movement that aren’t as oppressed as maybe they’d like to think they are. The feeling of disconnectedness that informs this dissonance is why I started Steel Toe Review in the first place. Birmingham is extremely disconnected from the literary and artistic community at large, and I hoped to enact some change there. The literary and the political are often intertwined, though (ideally) that connection is seldom overt. The piles of academic reading related to my graduate studies remind me that power structures are inherent in every aspect of life, and that the actions of everyday life, including reading and writing literature, are no less than tactics for navigating our way through the power structures that, by their nature, prevent us from ever being truly free.
Is that scary enough for you?
-M. David Hornbuckle, editor
While I’m on a rant about technology, let’s talk about that weird ass email all the Netflix subscribers got this morning from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.
For those of you just joining in, I’ll catch you up. Two months ago, Neflix announced a new pricing structure. Previously, DVD subscribers could essentially stream videos from Netflix for free. There was no additional charge for that, and there was also no way for someone to subscribe for streaming only if they don’t want to order DVDs. Now you can get:
Let’s forget for a second about the substance of the email. He’s trying to justify recent business decisions to his loyal customer base. There’s nothing wrong with that. The tone of the email is just weird and creepy. He starts out by apologizing for not being “more communicative” about why they were making these changes. The “apology” just comes across as smarmy. It’s kind of like a dude who beats up his girlfriend and then says he’s sorry he didn’t properly explain why she deserved to be beaten up.
And then he tacks on the NEW information that the new price structure is just the beginning. He’s actually planning to split DVDs and streaming into two different businesses, accessed on two different websites, and it’s kind of like that apologizing dude who just beat you up is now telling you that in the future, your beatings will be a little more severe because the less severe beatings of the past just aren’t satisfying his bloodlust enough.
Okay, now let’s talk about the content.
It makes some sense to divide the DVD-by-mail and streaming video services into two separate charges. They will certainly be able to make more money that way. For people that only use one of those services, it probably does make sense to make them available separately. They could have done that with a smaller increase in the “package” price and a reasonable option for subscribing to either one or the other.
I don’t think they needed to raise the prices as much as they did. That was just hubris and greed. Nobody else does what they do, so essentially, they can charge as much as they want.
But I’m really more disappointed in this new part.
First, I really LIKE the fact that I can currently look up a movie on Netflix, and if I want to, I can stream it right then and there on my laptop, or I can add it to my DVD queue. I DON’T like the fact that if I want to watch something now, I have to go to a different website and subscribe to a different service to do that.
Secondly, I think it’s weird that the DVD service, which is what Netflix did originally and became famous for, is the part being split off into another company instead of the other way around.
And thirdly, Qwickster is just a stupid name for any business, regardless of what they do.
Facebook upgraded the behavior of their Friend Lists feature earlier this week. You might remember me wishing they’d do exactly that several weeks ago. The feature now works a lot more like the Circles feature in Google Plus. At least to an extent.
In their typically misguided fashion, Facebook thinks it knows how to organize your friends better than you do. Thus, there are several auto-created friend lists based on where you say you live, work, or go to school, as well as who you are related to. And it “helpfully” creates empty lists for “Close Friends” and “Aquaintances.” All these auto-created lists have special behaviors that are annoying and stupid. You can manage who is in these lists, but you can’t delete them.
But if you hide all that crap and create your own custom lists, they are extremely useful for sharing content with certain groups of friends while not sharing it with others.
Of course, friend lists have been in Facebook for years; they just made them easier to access and easier to use. Aside from the enhanced visibility, the really important change to me is a transition from negative exclusivity to positive exclusivity. Before, you could go in your security settings and say “share this with everybody except x (or x friend list)”. Now you choose who to share with instead of who not to share with, and it’s all much easier to do. This was one of the big advantages that Google Plus had over Facebook, and I think Facebook users will find this a lot more appealing, one more reason to spend their social networking time there instead of on G+.
I was in Manhattan that day. I saw much of it first-hand, in real time, not on television. It was horrible. There are things I saw that still haunt me, that I still don’t want to talk about.
Perhaps that’s why I find all the public hoo-ha about the tenth anniversary of it to be disturbing.
A lot of people died tragically that day. A lot of people, including myself, were scarred by what they saw. It is appropriate for those directly affected by the tragedy to recognize this day in some private and personal way. That is what I will do. It makes sense for the government to heighten security. For the rest of America, it’s my opinion that they should not worry about it so much.
That day changed the way a lot of people thought and felt about a lot of things. Much of what changed was wrong. Much of it validated what the terrorists wanted in the first place, which was to make us all terrified.
I’ll tell you what I felt on that day and have felt ever since. It was horrible. It was tragic. It was disgusting. It was depressing. It was angering. But I would be damned if I was going to be terrified.
Reposted from Steel Toe Review.
I recently updated STR’s profile on the Poets and Writers website. In the “Tips from the Editor” section I wrote, “We don’t want traditional Southern lit. We want literary and experimental work that touches on themes of interest to Southerners. Interpret that however you like, but don’t assume this limits you to talking about trailers, hunting/fishing, fried food, and race relations. In fact, avoid talking about those things unless you have something really original to say about them.”
It seemed necessary to clarify this. We get a lot of submissions from people who think they are sending us something “Southern” because their story takes place in a trailer park. This is bothersome for somewhat obvious reasons. Conversely, there are many writers from the South who go well out of their way to remove any trace of Southern identity from their work. This often results in generic writing with flat characters and no sense of “place.”
This latter issue is particularly problematic for young Southern writers who equate “being Southern” with a distant past for which they have no affection. It’s not surprising that writers who happen to be born in a certain geographic area would resist being associated with racism, extreme religiosity, and cultural backwardness. And in fact, many younger writers have little experience of that past. The youth of today are increasingly “citizens of the world,” a world where the internet and suburban sprawl have a tendency to equalize experience no matter where you happen to grow up.
Of course, I don’t want to be associated with those terrible things either. In fact, I would very much like to show the world a South that has made strides in moving past these embarrassments, even if it has not erased them completely. But that is just part of my own personal and political agenda, not necessarily the agenda of Steel Toe Review.
Here at STR, Southern identity is only one of our pet interests. We have published and will continue to publish all sorts of things by all sorts of people.
One of our short stories for this month is by and about an Indian-American woman who lives in San Diego—a far cry, some would say, from the interests of most Southerners. However, we might point out that in this story, there is a strong sense of character and a strong sense of place, two qualities associated with traditional Southern writing. Moreover, the character and the place are somewhat at odds with one another in that story. There is an inherent struggle of identity between the place she is from and the place where she is.
Sound familiar?
Reposted from Steel Toe Review
Welcome back. We hope you had as fun and productive a summer as we did.
Over the summer we did some tweaking of our look and our process. We are now using submishmash for our submissions, which will help keep us better organized and hopefully improve response time. We think our visual redesign is sleeker and more professional looking.
Throughout August, we will be gradually posting the material we’ve selected for this issue, starting with the winner of our first ever fiction contest. We would like to congratulate George Sawaya for winning what turned out to be a very difficult challenge because, stupidly, we picked a theme that, in retrospect, was overly narrow.
However, we got some very interesting entries, and Sawaya’s “Mind the Gap” was the clear winner. We are also going to be posting honorable mention stories from Sean Hogan and Lucinda Dupree.
We have lots of other great fiction and poetry this month as well. Keep coming back to see what’s new.
-M. David Hornbuckle
