This week the challenge was to write a memoir title. It was brought to our attention that the original winner’s title was not original. So we have selected a new winner and runner up. We apologize for the initial mistake and any confusion that may have caused.

Normally we host a different contest every week, however we are going to take a break from hosting the contest for the rest of November. The next contest will start on the first Saturday of December.

Winner:

Runner Up:

Editor’s Choice:

I want you to pick one of those words that belong to the second category. A word that you love but that you don’t often use. Write that word down at the top of the page. It is the title of your poem.

Then I want you to approach the word in two ways, the first is to approach it for the associations you have with the word, what you think about when you think of it. The second is to approach the word and focus on the literal meaning of the word.

You should give yourself about 10 minutes to write the prompt. It is fun and can equal some interesting results.

Melville House is a Brooklyn based publisher of literary fiction and non-fiction books. They are a respected and established independent press. They were founded in 2001 by sculptor Valerie Merians and fiction writer/journalist Dennis Johnson, in order to publish an anthology titled Poetry After 9/11.

They are currently open to unsolicited submissions of non-fiction manuscripts. Although they may at some future point be open to unsolicited fiction manuscripts, they currently are not.

They publish a wide variety of books including works by indie favorite Tao Lin, The Nobel award winners Imre Kertesz and Heinrich BollI, reprints of books by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Hardy, and a series of books called “The Last Interview” which each focus on a different author.

If you have a non-fiction manuscript or proposal, send them a query email with no attachments to their non-fiction editor. The email address is submissions [at] mhpbooks [dot] com.

The non-fiction books they tend to publish lean towards the political or current events. The following titles should give you a better idea of the range of work that they publish, Is Journalism Worth Dying For? , The People Reloaded, Havana Real, Wild Food From Land And Sea, and The Silence Delusion.

To learn more about the publisher and to get a better idea for the work that they publish, you can visit their website here.

The issue they are currently reading for is themed. They are looking for work on the topic of Nature or Nurture. They do not expand on the theme in any way, so it is open to interpretation.

They use the submission manager Submittable for all their submissions. They only do blind submissions. Which means that on the file itself you cannot include your name or any personal information.

They are looking for flash fiction submissions under 1,0000 words, short fiction under 3,0000 words, creative non-fiction under 3,000 words, and up to three poems at a time (no stated word limit). They have very specific formatting guidelines, so make sure to review them before submitting.

The Quotable tries to respond to submissions within 2-3 months.  Occasionally they are much faster than that. They accept about 1 in 30 submissions, approximately.

Unfortunately it is a little hard to get a feel for what they publish because very little is available for free online, however the PDF version of each issue is just three dollars and the print issue is six dollars.

They seem to encourage writers whose work they have published to write guest blogs on their website. Usually these blogs tend to be about writing and they are a great way to additionally promote yourself and your writing.

To learn more or to submit visit their website here:http://thequotablelit.com/

I tell you this story not just because it was something naive I thought as a teenager, but because many writers have similar goals, not in terms of specifics, but in terms of the goal not being within their control.

Even two years ago I had similarly unrealistic goals. I wanted a manuscript length book to be published by the time I was 30. Now, if I was willing to make compromises about the quality of the publisher, that might have been possible, but even then it was not a guarantee. So many manuscripts are submitted every year and editors have their own established tastes.

However during that year, when I was struggling with that unrealistic deadline, I read a book called Succeed: How We can Reach our Goals. The book is by Heidi Grant Halvorson. I found some of the writing itself a little off putting, but the research based core of the book was fascinating. Heidi Grant Halvorson focuses on concrete ways that you build willpower to focus on your goals and to avoid the kind of positive thinking that actually encourages failure.

What I realized quickly was that it was most important to set realistic goals and to focus on what I could control. It seems very common sense now, and when expressed bluntly it seems obvious, but it wasn’t for me.

However when I told people this, many interpreted this as just being about focusing on my writing, producing more, and making it as good as possible. However that is not how it is meant to be interpreted.

Instead I focused not only on writing and editing, but on submitting my work for publication, writing query letters, and writing proposals. In short I focused on making sure that my writing had a lot of opportunities to reach the right people, the people who could get my book published.

I wrote down concrete goals on a white board and monitored how close I was to reaching these goals. For example, I made a clear goal of getting my manuscript out to 6 publishers during that first year, and I did. I also made it a goal to get my poems out to at least 100 literary journals that year, which I achieved.

Now I feel a lot less stressed and more contented with my life. I know that I am putting a lot of effort into the factors I can control, and not focusing on those I cannot.

Now I might still not have a book, but I have received a complimentary personal rejection letter from one of my top choice publishers, and I am still not yet 30. I have also had quite a lot of work published in literary journals that I greatly admire.