Things are coming together for my novella FES IS A MIRROR to come your way soon! Check out our first blurb from novelist Robert Jones, Jr. He thinks you will dig this!

Did you know that if you buy my book on Amazon, Jeff Bezos makes 5 times as much as I do on each copy sold? Sharing some behind-the-scenes book math on why buying directly from presses is best for EVERYONE (except Bezos) in my newsletter today! aubreyhirsch.substack.com/p/book-math

This is wonderful 🌕

EMERGENCY COMMISSIONS! Round 2. I got urgent medical bills cause my physical health has been declining. I’m a disabled, black artist and feel like I don’t have to explain how hard that’s been over the last years. Please share and consider buying. Thank you everyone and sorry. 🥲💖 #commissions #art

I did an interview about keeping notebooks / diaries / journals in @kellymcmasters.bsky.social newsletter. Thanks again, Kelly, for allowing a member of the journaling tribe to share. kellymcmasters.substack.com/p/show-me-yo...

The kids are ok.

Delighted to have a story "The Hunt" in the latest issue of African American Review. Thank you to editors Aileen M. Keenan and Nathan L. Grant. @hopkinspress.bsky.social @projectmuse.bsky.social "The families of the old men would gather at Front Camp to see whether their people would be let go."

An invaluable guide to applying for writing residencies from Prince Shakur. Also, if you are member of the global majority, please consider applying for the Baldwin for the Arts fellowship. open.substack.com/pub/princesh...

Please, please, please, I need your help! (it's for next year's rankings...) Does anyone have a copy of Best New Poets 2016, 2019, 2022, 2023 and/or 2024? If not, could you please retweet? Thank you so much! 🙏

"Through the peep hole I saw a harried-looking white woman. Though she appeared younger than me, her hair was brittle and frizzed and her cheek bones stuck out painfully. She was curled over a package buried against her chest. It was wrapped in a blanket and had the form of a human."

Here goes nothing. CLUB CONTANGO is eligible for the Hugo awards (novel) if you're so inclined. 🎲🔥 Single mum on a corporate-owned space station has three jobs and zero fucks left to give until murder, and union scabbing, breathe too close for comfort.

…your art comes out of your life, and you have to keep living until you have enough to write about. Read, read, read. Art begets art. Jane Kenyon

Love what Joyce Carol Oates had to say about the forms a short story can take. She basically said there are no rules except one: it can't be boring.

Finally cracked the code on a short story paragraph that I've sweating over for a while. Gonna celebrate with some ice cream.

I’ve been hit with the gun that lays you off so… hello, I’m Aysha, I write for games. Experience with both indie and AAA, along with IP writing and worldbuilding. I’ve lead teams and i’m great in a room. Hit me up

Ever feel like you'd kill a mf for harming a fictional character? Listening to Joni Mitchell's "Cherokee Louise" had that effect on me. But then maybe she wasn't a fictional character? Mitchell seems to have often written about real people. So much the worse if she was real.

There are, seriously, a thousand more worthwhile things you could give your money to, but if you want to close out 2024 with a subscription to keep my little Degenerate Art newsletter resurrecting the past, spitting fire, and bossing everyone around in the coming year, it would delight me.

This Li article resonates with me about a story of mine making the rounds now. "The journey of one particular story ... especially frustrated me: for two years, it traveled around in the mail and gathered some of the kindest rejection letters I have ever received." apublicspace.org/news/detail/...

Just learned that astronaut means "star sailor" from the Greek and it started out as a science fiction term from the 1800s.

Weird when folks says an artist is overrated. Why not just say you don't like them very much? Overrated implies that there is some objective standard that they do not meet. That does not exist. Folks snipe so steady. They snub so snide. So ripe and ready to diminish or deride, as Joni reminds us.

“A single black tea with tapioca pearls from Boba Guys contains more BPA than a person can safely consume in a year” and other brands are no safer. This report is going to rock Bay Area teen culture sfstandard.com/2024/12/28/b...

They struck in Paris too!

Heya my commissions are open! Only form of income rn. Sharing helps a ton

What if a million men marched on DC on behalf of women’s reproductive freedom/bodily autonomy and/or human rights/protection for immigrants. I know lots of men are working for justice, as individuals. But what if a million men marched on behalf of the rights of non men. Wouldn’t that be something?

There are 2 million people in Gaza, they have access to the internet, very very few ways to earn money and there is a famine. They don’t want to ask for help like this- many of them refrained from doing so for months and months. But they are desperate and that’s why they are here.

So is the state of Virginia mourning no longer being considered a southern state the was Pluto mourns no longer being a planet?

Love these tips and trends from the editors of the Cincinnati Review www.cincinnatireview.com/submission-t...

If you're in the DC area, fellow-author Sedigitus Swift will be at Georgetown's Just Paper & Tea on Sunday with his quirky medieval fantasy series. #BookSky #authors #reading

As long as I am living in language, as I like to put it, I count it as writing. This is why reading, for example, is so important—is maybe the most important part of writing. If I'm reading, I'm also at some level taking in language's capacities... —Carl Phillips, from "Silence"

Writing tip: Write a book you can sell to publishers for a lot of money. You can then use the money to buy the things you want.

A rap battle is two men writing poems about each other

After nearly nine years at Esquire, I’ve been laid off from my role as Books and Fiction Editor. I’m looking for a new full-time role where I can use my storytelling skills, in the book world or beyond it. If you know of anything, I’m at [email protected]. (🧵1/10)

Damn and now Drake is going to have to pay a 25 percent tariff on that beef?

My fantasy adventure based on African gods published this year. Can #Blacksky help my book reach underserved, underrepresented boys and girls who deserve to see themselves in epic adventures? linktr.ee/ashleythorpe 🎅🏿

Ploughshares Journal is looking for a new Editor-in-chief emerson.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Emerso...

Dreamt about matchmaking two of my friends earlier this week. I realized yesterday that it was a metaphorical dream. I was telling myself something about a story I'm working on which was: What you have to do now is bring together these two ideas and let them live together in the story.

We can build the #literaryfiction community beyond the starter packs. Here’s how: First, hit the like button, reply with #literaryfiction, and most importantly, hit the REPOST button. Then, follow each other back. The easiest way to do so is to follow everyone who reposts. Here’s how:

I was today years old when I learned that Bluesky's CEO Jay Graber's first name "Lantian" means "blue sky" in Mandarin. Unrelated, "Stanley" means "handsome, suave dude" in old English so there's that ...

DC followers! Come out Wed. eve Nov. 20. Join me and Georgetown’s Nadia E. Brown (⁦‪@BrownPhDGirl‬⁩) as we talk Black women’s politics: Past, Present, Future. At the new JHU Bloomberg Center (555 Penn) Humanities on the Hill. krieger.jhu.edu/humanities-i...

Hey, yall! I have a literary magazine that's available for purchase! You can also donate if you wanna support but don't wanna buy a copy: suspendedmagazine.org

"On the Nature of Good and Evil" out now in Harvard Review 62: "A man rises up a saint in the morning and lays down a sinner. Or the other way around: he lays down like an angel and something takes a hold of him and - BAM! - up jumps the devil come morning." secure.touchnet.net/C20832_ustor...

Remembering the great Cuttyhunk Island Writers Residency from last fall. #AddtoBlacksky

Bluesky, Today is my 2nd day on here as an escapee from The Bad Place. I am BEGGING y’all to repost this I have $80,000 in scholarship money to give away to women and girls NATIONWIDE. I worked so hard to raise this money. Applications open THIS week. I’m scared the mass migration will impact this

For the writers in Northern Cali. Forn. I.A. creativewriting.stanford.edu/stegner-fell...