Opium Magazine has started a group on Fictionaut and I like asking Todd questions so I thought I would bother him via Google chat. I also like seeing him person because he is very good-looking and always wears a suit, and has a girlfriend who is not me. Taken, ladies, he is taken.

href="http://blog.fictionaut.com/">[read more]

Recently:
   Fictionaut Five: Jim Ruland
   Luna Digest, 1/12
   Fictionaut Faves, 1/11

“In advertising, we have a name for writers who get stuck: unemployed. I have a pretty workmanlike view of the creative process. You take what you’ve got, even if isn’t the “big idea” you’re searching for, and develop it and until your crappy little ideas turn into somewhat better ideas, and so on. Eventually you get there, but it’s all about putting in the work.” [read more]

Recently:
   Luna Digest, 1/12
   Fictionaut Faves, 1/11
   Checking in with First Lines We Love
   Line Breaks: “Shopgirls” by Frederick Barthelme

This week, Luna Park will be posting a day-by-day reading of McSweeney’s recent newspaper-styled issue 33, The San Francisco Panorama. [read more]

Recently:
   Fictionaut Faves, 1/11
   Checking in with First Lines We Love
   Line Breaks: “Shopgirls” by Frederick Barthelme
   Fictionaut Five: Mike Young

On Derek Osborne‘s “Neon Fire”
by Susan Tepper
What captivated me immediately about this little gem of a story is the straightforward way that Osborne presented the characters, place, details and plot. Yet “Neon Fire” is by no means simplistic. It’s a deeply layered, textured story of two people trying to be in love. [read more]

Recently:
   Checking in with First Lines We Love
   Line Breaks: “Shopgirls” by Frederick Barthelme
   Fictionaut Five: Mike Young
   Luna Digest, 1/5

Nicole Elizabeth: Hello Gary. I was thinking we’d do a craft talk specifically on first

lines. One of the groups you are Admin of at Fictionaut is the “First Lines We Love”

outfit. It seems to be a great forum for writers to get together on the web and discuss other works they’ve loved, been inspired by, and want to share. How

did the idea for the first line group come about? [read more]

Recently:
   Line Breaks: “Shopgirls” by Frederick

Barthelme
   Fictionaut Five: Mike Young
   Luna Digest, 1/5
   Fictionaut Faves, 1/4

Like most stories, “Shopgirls,” first published in Esquire in 1982, is less “about” something than it “is” something–a pinball journey with an amusingly repressed but intensely sexual pre-stalker stalker and a few young women who are all too aware of their intoxicating power. [read more]

Recently:
   Fictionaut Five: Mike Young
   Luna Digest, 1/5
   Fictionaut Faves, 1/4
   Checking in with Underwater New York

What makes you want to read a story and how soon does a good story capture you?

Every good sentence in a story buys you about three or four sentences of reading from me. If you follow the math, we’re talking exponential: one sentence buys four, next sentence buys the four after that, and whoa.[read more]

Recently:
   Luna Digest, 1/5
   Fictionaut Faves, 1/4
   Checking in with Underwater New York

Luna Park contributing writer Nick Ripatrazone has written a great essay on the use of literary magazines in the classroom.

It would be a short-sighted injustice to avoid the good work accumulating in these “little magazines” and instead pining for and discussing in classrooms the latest novel release. [read more]

Recently:
   Fictionaut Faves, 1/4
   Checking in with Underwater New York
   Fictionaut Five: Curtis Smith

To kick off the New Year, Fictionaut begins a new series, Fictionaut Faves, where Fictionaut members discuss one story they have faved. We thought it would be great way to revisit some wonderful writing that has appeared in the community by offering personal and critical analysis by other writers. Some of the stories may be familiar, others new discoveries, but all share the admiration of their peers. Enjoy!

“I couldn’t stop thinking about how fun it would be to imagine stories behind things like a Formica Dinette standing upright at the bottom of the East River around 16th St, and the grand piano dredged from the harbor, and the dead giraffe found by the Army Corps of Engineers, and the fleet of Good Humor ice cream trucks that comprise an artificial reef off Rockaway Beach.” [read more]