I don’t read all that many literary journals. I know this is kind of a bad thing, and I know too that part of it is that I just haven’t found "the one" that will really get me back into them. At lunch the other day, my friend Drew said he was reading Diagram pretty regularly and I do like that one, so I was picking through that some last week also, but still: for whatever reason — maybe it’s the short story thing, maybe it’s the ephemerality of it all, maybe I’m just an incorrigibly bad literary citizen — I don’t read them that often. And mostly I don’t mind this. And mostly I’ve unsubscribed to most of the newsletters, too. But this morning I got one from Split Lip and apparently they have a Bluesky account and so I fell down the rabbit hole, for next week is AWP.
AWP is the conference for the "Association of Writers and Writing Programs." It makes more sense to go to if you’re affiliated with a university (I am not), or a lit mag or org (I am not), or a publisher (I am, but the wrong kind of publisher). But it’s in Kansas City, where my parents and grandparents live, I’ve got a novel to shop around, and I do enjoy this kind of thing, so I’m going, if only to get a fresh list of small publishers and see my parents (and, of course, spend far too much money at the book fair). I suppose find "comp titles," also, but that’s sort of a separate discussion.
The point is that I was reading the "AWP" search results on this newish social media site and remembered that a certain class of folks prepare for AWP. These are largely people with books to sell (I have a book to sell, but I mean people with published books to sell), readings to announce (I probably could have found a reading to do, but why not go to the readings instead and enjoy myself?), etc., etc. I think once upon a time (the last AWP I attended, the zombified San Antonio AWP in early March 2020) I did prepare, but this year I am not prepared, and am not sure how to feel about it. I mean I feel fine. But part of me thinks I should be more prepared. But —
I’ve been thinking a little about "literary platforms" because, as mentioned, I may (or may not) have a manuscript to try and publish and a lot of the advice about querying is geared towards other genres (nonfiction, SF, genres-of-fiction-that-have-a-chance-of-making-money) that I don’t work in (instead my pitch goes along the lines of, "Hi! Do you want to publish a book that’s like half a play manuscript but really is a frame narrative and kind of a multi-"story reality" piece about returning to your hometown and having feelings about it?" and yes, I know it needs a lot of work, this pitch). There is almost no world in which I will actually need a "platform" to get through some agenting process (for: is this kind of work even agent-able? It may also still be just shit, you know?). But. I have been thinking about this blog and this guy I went to high school with named Steve who used to read it and how, back in the day, you’d get updates on Google Reader via RSS, but how nobody really uses RSS anymore (a shame), and how maybe, then, I should send a "newsletter" once a month with posts or something.
And the idea would be that I’d write the backend for this newspaper, too, because I want to learn new backend development things (I mean, really: this would mostly just be a scrape-and-send script that runs on a cron job, although I suppose the sign-up/unsubscribe functionality would be a Flask or Django app or something). I mean, I could just use an existing platform, but what fun would that be?
Anyway, I think I’m going to try it sooner or later (later, probably, since I’ve got this novel to sell and a different little probably-redundant app to finish writing), but since I don’t really like posting on social media (I miss Twitter and keep forgetting I have a Bluesky account half the time), and I do like writing these little blog posts, well, maybe this is the thing.
Something to do next time I get bored, anyway. Not that I really have much time to be bored these days, seems like. In any case —