I have a short fiction piece in the latest issue of Wigleaf.
Wigleaf is one of the top journals of super-short fiction (fiction of the very sort that Guernica, by the way, does not usually run). I love Wigleaf—the stuff in there is consistently good.
And I was very well edited, too. They made the story better than it had been.
I love this comment “strober” wrote on the Delta piece I did for the The Atlantic’s website:
great feature here – only way to do business is to mix in a bit of pleasure. Thank you for the tips!
That’s exactly it, strober–while you might have meant something else in your comment, I still think it’s important to give the potential customer something interesting.
Maybe then, the message will get through. And by the way, that’s the trend, the cheap tricks aren’t working anymore. But I wrote about that before here and here.
This issue of Guernica fiction has an excerpt from the novel, The Convent, to be published later this month by W.W. Norton & Co.
The story of a nun who adopts a baby, it’s intense and gripping. . .
Dog lovers may find the story upsetting. I sure did.
In a posting for PaidContent, Ben Elowitz writes that SEO is dead–killed by by “SMO,” or Social Media Optimization. He says readers are now going to content sites, not because of a search, but because of a link provided by a friend on Facebook. He then rhapsodizes how this could lead to a time when good content is what people are after–not keywords and the like.
Over the past five years, Web publishing has been so heavily dominated by search engine optimization (SEO) that, to many publishing executives, the right keywords have become far more important than their sites’ actual content or audience. But this movement toward SEO has been dangerous, as it’s moved publishers’ eye off their most important job of creating great content, and onto the false goals of keywords, hacks, paid links, and technical engineering that their audience doesn’t know or care about.
I hope he’s right, but it’s best to remember that there’s that thing Lewis Mumford called the Myth of the Machine: we always think the latest invention will lead to our finally becoming less vulgar (when TV was invented, we thought it meant we’d all watch cultural programs–HA HA HA).
The death of SEO could also mean (given that Elowitz’s conjectures on where traffic will be coming from is correct) that we’ll be living in a hall of mirrors: only our friends will give us news. Personally, I get my news through Google Reader, a different kettle of fish in many ways (although Reader has a social aspect). I’m not sure where that lies on the matrix. And, while Facebook is what everyone talks about, Twitter is better on click-throughs.
The death of SEO has been predicted before. The last one I recall said Google Instant has killed SEO. Maybe SEO will die like that final scene in the 70s movie, Murder on the Orient Express: everyone is killing it, because it deserves to die.
Where
The Gallery Bar, 120 Orchard St, New York, NY
When
Tuesday, November 2, 7–9 p.m.
E.C. Osondu
I picked his story, “Waiting” out of the slush pile. It went on to win the 2009 Caine Prize, Africa’s leading literary prize. (It beat out the Paris Review for the award.) The Chair of Judges, New Statesman Chief Sub-Editor Nana Yaa Mensah called it “a tour de force, powerfully written with not an ounce of fat on it—and deeply moving.”
You’re invited. It’s Free.
Jonathan Franzen and Mary Gaitskill on Osondu
“E.C. Osondu is a man with a clear head and a great ear, writing from crucial places.”—Jonathan Franzen, author of Freedom and The Corrections.
“With observant wonder and subtle humor, [Osondu] portrays…our unique capacity for hope and hopelessness rolled together.” —Mary Gaitskill, author of Bad Behavior and Veronica
My PR Quote on the party
“Guernica is proud to have been a vital part of E.C. Osondu’s career—after all, that’s why our editors work on the magazine. We want to showcase the unexpected, whether its fiction, poetry, or hard-hitting nonfiction. But also, we love to host a variety of cultural events, from Pen World Voices to our get-together salons. This book party for E.C. promises to be one of our best.”
As I’d noted earlier, I’ll be writing an occasional blog for The Atlantic on business trends.
The link is here and it’ll be updated on Tuesdays and Fridays.
As noted earlier, I wrote a piece for The Atlantic, using Google Maps.
It was a highly complex project and difficult to execute–I wrote pithy listings for some 125 spots all over the world. I also provided the client with Google map locations and art work (I volunteered for that, a bit to my shame).
It damned near killed me (there were many, many sleepless nights while I worked on this project), but the results look great. And it’s a popular feature, too!
You can find my Google Maps feature on The Atlantic Website.
Using data from the most popular newspapers out there, a group called Perfect Market is saying that while stupid articles about trash personalities such as Lindsay Lohan generate traffic, they don’t bring in the money for the websites involved. Perhaps while this is a fantasy for the newspapers publishing the piece (I read about it in The New York Times), I still believe it.
After all, when I read that crap, I parachute in, and then feel filthy for it. I bail as quickly as possible and rarely forward it.
Literary magazine of the moment, Electric Literature, writes about Guernica‘s 6th anniversary party.
It says someone stole the cheese. I know what happened: the intern stole (and then also drank) a lot of wine. She then passed the cheese around at the after party bar. It’s all a part of her payment plan–King Missile said it best as few years ago:
It starts next week. I’ve done it before. This time, I’ll be blogging on the latest innovations in the business world–info for those in the C-suite. I’m going to be including the latest in the tech world, social media, and plain old nose-to-grindstone stuff.
