Market research: BOOTH & writing prompt 17

Today's post contains a review of Booth and the weekly writing prompt.

Market research
Booth

• Online & print publication since 2009. Run by MFA fellows & students at Butler University.
• New online content posted every Friday. Print issues in winter & summer.
• Non-paying market.
• Accepts poetry (up to 5 at a time), fiction (up to 7500 words), nonfiction (up to 7500 words), comics (up to 20 pgs), lists.
• Submission period: September - March.
• Accepts simultaneous submissions. Accepts multiple submissions for poetry; everything else is one submission at at time. No wait time between rejection & submitting again. No info on whether they accept previously published work.
• Submissions accepted via electronic system (Submishmash) only. No submissions via email.
• No info given on rights requested.

I. Love. This. Journal. I first heard about Booth a year or two ago when someone (maybe on Facebook?) posted a link to Alexander Lumens's "Phys. Ed. 112 Syllabus: You and Your Apocalypse." The majority of the work they publish is right up my alley - careful language, twisted humor and a different way of looking at the world. When I read it, it feels like someone has inserted a key into a lock in my mind I didn't even know was there. And it fits just right.

What I (re)learned this week

Here are three fairly unrelated things about writing that I learned in the last week-ish.

1. You can't just go on about your busy business and expect the ideas to elbow their way past all the other junk into your brain; you have to make space for them to come. You have to invite them and wait.

Photo by Rick Campbell

Sigh. I thought I knew what I was going to blog about this week. Twice I started blog posts, got a paragraph into them, and then abandoned them. I'd start writing, and then I'd realize I didn't really know what I wanted to say. But instead of sitting with it, instead of making space to think about it, I moved onto the next thing. And I almost didn't write a blog post today because I didn't already know what I wanted to write.