Chicken Soup for The Soul: Best Mom Ever!

Is your mother the best mom ever? How about your stepmother, grandmother, or mother-in-law? How about the wonderful woman who is raising your children? Share your stories about the amazing, loving, miraculous, intuitive, and just plain fabulous moms in your life. Here is your chance to let all the moms know they are appreciated, loved and respected, and that you can’t imagine anyone better.

We’re looking for stories about moms of all ages, from young mothers to great-grandmothers, and everything in between. Let your mom or grandmother or stepmother or the mother of your children know that her hard work has been recognized and that without her, the kids wouldn’t be where they are today.

We are looking for those stories of special moments, the laughter, tears, support and the encouragement.

Here are some suggested topics but we know you can think of many more:

• Stories that will make us laugh out loud
• Stories about mother’s intuition
• Stories about passing on wisdom, tradition, family legacies
• Stories about mothers as the best teachers
• Stories about moms as role models
• Stories about quirky, wacky, unusual moms
• Stories about the wisdom of moms
• Stories that will inspire us to reach out to our moms and thank them
• Stories about daughters becoming their moms
• Stories about moms helping us fulfill our dreams
• Stories about grandmothers, stepmothers, mothers-in-law
• Stories from husbands and partners about the amazing woman who is helping raise their children

If you submitted a story or poem for a past Mom’s book and we did not use your story or poem, please feel free to submit it to us again. If we already published your story or poem we will not publish it again.

The deadline date for story and poem submissions is September 30, 2016.

To learn more or to submit visit their website here.

SONGS FOR A PASSBOOK TORCH: A NELSON MANDELA POETRY ANTHOLOGY

We are looking for poetry and short essays that:
(1) honor Nelson Mandela’s freedom fighting legacy (first and foremost);
(2) offer tribute to Winnie Mandela for her related activism, and all appropriate others active in the anti-apartheid struggle;
(3) shine light on the past and present fight for racial justice in SA (particularly in the context of police brutality);
(4) shine light on the profound similarities between police brutality in SA under the height of Apartheid, and current race-based police brutality in America.
Songs for a Passbook Torch, edited by award-winning poets, Truth Thomas and Melanie Henderson, is scheduled for publication when all the type is right. Payment will be in the form of one contributor’s copy.
Send your work as a SINGLE attachment (.doc; .docx; .rtf; PDF). Submit up to five previously unpublished poems and essays (honoring a 3,000 word limit) to:
SongsforapassbooktorchATgmailDOTcom
SONGSFORAPASSBOOKTORCH@…
Please direct questions to
editorATcherrycastlepublishingDOTcom
editor@…
THE SUBMISSION PERIOD FOR THIS ANTHOLOGY IS CURRENTLY OPEN-ENDED. Decisions for inclusion in the anthology will be made on a rolling basis.
Cherry Castle Publishing
www.cherrycastlepublishing.com
where words grow mighty trees

Heart of Steel – LGBTQIA

HEART OF STEEL — LGBTQIA — Knights are a well-established presence in the fiction landscape, from historical fiction to fantasy to romance. Be they chivalrous or ruthless, high or low born, noble warriors or dishonored soldiers, tales of knights are endlessly appealing—for their loyalty, their love, and all that they will do to serve and protect those to whom they are sworn.

Less Than Three Press invites you to submit stories about knights and all they are willing to do and endure for the sake of those they love and protect.

The deadline is September 30th, 2016. To learn more, read their submission guidelines.

Lakewater Press is a newer eBook and print on demand (POD) publisher. They were founded in early 2015. They publish a wide variety of fiction. They appear to be open to all genres of fiction including young adult, new adult (18-30), and romance.

It is important to keep in mind that at this point they have only published 4 books, although they have a number planned for release later this year.

They have a small easy to navigate website. I personally do not like their covers. Most of them seem to be illustrated by the same person.

Lakewater Press has a small editorial team, whose previous experience is mostly from the writing side of the table. One of their editors appears to also be published by the press. The rest do not seem to be.

In the about us section of the website they break down which editors are open to submissions and which ones are not. They also go into editor’s personal preferences, which can be very helpful.

Put your name and which editor you believe to be the best fit in your subject line. Submit a cover letter and the first chapter in the body of an email to contact@lakewaterpress.com.

Read their full submission guidelines here.

“You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. It’s hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written, but I know it’s true. If I had a nickel for every person who ever told me he/she wanted to become a writer but “didn’t have time to read,” I could buy myself a pretty good steak dinner. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.

-Stephen King, On Writing

When I was a child I read one book every day. And by a book, I mean a one hundred to two hundred page novel. Usually it was part of a series. Often it was nothing that would ever win awards. I read a lot of Nancy Drew, of The Boxcar Children, or Enid Blyton. I just needed to read.

Out of that love of reading, eventually a love of writing developed. But it took a long time. I started reading a book a day in second grade. I started writing seriously at 14, 7 years later.

As a professor of creative writing I meet people regularly who want to be writers.  They tell me that they don’t read because it will negatively impact their own personal style of writing. They say they can only be original if they are not influenced by other people’s writing.

A friend of mine who has been a professor of creative writing for over twenty years recently told me that in the last five years this view has become even more popular and commonplace. When students tell her this she then asks who is going to read their book then? Who is going to buy it? This often results in the student looking down and mumbling the word readers at the floor, as if readers are something that should be completely separate from writers.

The main issue with claiming that you are not going read because your personal writing style might become tainted or overly influenced by reading others writing styles is the fact that even if you never read another book, or form, or even an email for the rest of your life you would still be influenced by other people’s writing.

When you watch a TV show it is written by someone. When you listen to a song it is written by someone. When you see a movie, it is written by someone. So these written things are already influencing you. There is no way to avoid being influenced by others.

The creative writing professor that I mentioned earlier brings this up as a primary issue now in her classes. Half of the work people turned in one semester were rip offs or odes to Game of Thrones. Not the book series, A Song of Fire and Ice, but the television show on HBO. These students had never read the book. They were not fantasy genre readers. They just liked the show and wanted to write more like it, completely unaware of most of the writers that had gone before them. She was not impressed by the quality of the work. There was very little description. The action was confusing.

No matter what one does, one is going to be influenced by outside sources. But the quality of ones writing will be much better if they are influenced by the same medium that they are producing.

Besides, it really is impossible to avoid reading. If someone is only reading error riddled emails, and casually written Facebook posts, and Buzzfeed articles, but not actually reading well edited novels and thoroughly researched non-fiction books, their writing will not be influenced for the better.

The more you reads books the more you can understand the elements that go into them, and the better your craft can become.

To be a good writer I believe that one has to read a lot of books. Fifty a year would be a good place to start, but twenty five would work. I also think that the kind of books one reads should vary. Even though I primarily write fiction, I read a lot of non-fiction and have learned a lot from books like Gang Leader for a Day, or The Power of Habit.

I have read entire books that I did not like, that have still helped me improve as a writer. For example the book Life After Life by Kate Atkinson is not my favorite novel, far from it. But the way she described domestic violence in just one sentence has deeply effected the way I write about trauma of any kind.

Would anyone compare my style to Atkinson’s? No, of course not. But I needed to read her to develop my writer’s toolbox. Just like I needed to read Stephen King’s On Writing to know what a writer’s toolbox was, in the first place.