Frequency and Breaks

Taking some time off, changing frequency

Summer break is upon us. I’ll be taking the next two weeks off and will be out of range. When I return, I’ll have a new posting schedule:

Sundays - Short Story a Day
I’ll post links to stories you can read at your own pace during the week, all at once, or whenever you get around to it. There will be very little commentary here. Stories will still be chosen from the Top 300 journals using the Wheel Spinner app.

Thursdays - Literary Compass
The stand out piece of the week. If there isn’t one, craft talk, updates, tips on how to improve your reading habits, or how to submit better. I’ll also answer questions from the comments or any I receive by email. If you’d like to email me questions, you can send them to: editor@fivesouth.net

The point of this Substack is to understand what journals want. The best way to do that is to READ the journals. Read the journals! Read the journals! You cannot learn this by newsletter because the information acts like me telling you food is delicious instead of you tasting it yourself. You learn by doing, getting your hands dirty, and seeing with your own eyes how these mechanisms work.

Reading: Exposure and immersion

Blog Posts: Abstraction and explanation

ChatBots: Same as reading and blog posts, but with the overwhelm of too much information you can’t use practically, it’s 40% wrong, and the hallucinations will send you on a wild goose chase.

Instead of being told “show, don’t tell” you SEE how other authors solve this problem, what methods they employ. You’ll consciously and subconsciously apply this to your own writing. You’ll also begin to see, like a magic eye picture, what journal editors actually want.

Writing is a skill. No plumber in the world learns how to plumb by being told how to plumb. They must do the work. This is the work of being a writer. Of course, this is the study portion of the job. The operations manual, if you will. The hands-on portion is writing; which you will do using the new skills you’ve learned from the reading. And these new skills aren’t always light bulbs going off. Sometimes they nestle into your brain and emerge when you need them. You almost can’t even track this knowledge. It becomes part of your collective writing knowledge banks—which is really cool.

Get it? Got it? Good.

If and when I have updates to the Top 300 lit journals list I’m working on, I’ll add short updates to the weekly post. Those updates will be behind the paywall, but all other content will remain free.

Thanks all! See you in two weeks. ⬥