“How To Write Stories About Writers” Submission Guidelines

Christopher Lasch, the author of “The Agony of the American Left,” and “The Culture of Narcissism” condemned modern and postmodern narrative techniques, especially metafictional approaches to literature. He wrote:

“Novelists and playwrights call attention to the artificiality of their own creations and discourage the reader from identifying with their characters. By means of irony and eclecticism, the writer withdraws from his subject but at the same time becomes so conscious of these distancing techniques that he finds it more and more difficult to write about anything except the difficulty of writing.” He went on to note that in a Narcissistic Culture “even the rich lose the sense of place and historical continuity, the subjective feeling of ‘entitlement’, which takes inherited advantages for granted. This gives way to what clinicians call ‘narcissistic entitlement’ — grandoise illusions, inner emptiness.”

At “How to Write Stories About Writers” we aim to take this moralist’s objections seriously even as we continue to employ ironic, subjective, and metafictional techniques in order to expose not only the literary devices that are employed in our own short stories but also those employed at work, in the family, in the shopping mall, in schools, and finally in society at large that reinforce our passivity and perpetuate what is ultimately a corrupt social order.

We are seeking stories about stories, literature about literature, and writers writing about writers. This is this the publication for your narcissism, this is the publication for your alienation, this is the publication for your skepticism, for your fiction that is self-reflexive, ironic, dissociative, and wild.

“How to Write Stories about Writers” is an online publication at dietsoap.org. We seek stories ranging between 500-4000 words. We pay a flat $5 honorarium.

While I’m not sure how to create a new blog on our wordpress website I’ve nonetheless decided that we will be starting a new blog/publication at Diet Soap at the end of August.   How to Write Stories About Writers will feature Stories about Writers, Stories about Writers Writing Stories about Writers, Advice from Writers on How to Write Stories About Advice From Writers, interviews with Writers Who Write about Writers, recipes, and limericks.

The first edition will feature the fiction of Electricvelocipide’s own John Klima. So look for How to Write Stories about Writers on August 31st right here at Diet Soap.org.

Our second internet edition of Diet Soap is also due to arrive that same day, so look for it also.  It will feature fine work from Ross Lockhart amongst others, and will appear in its usual webpage.

Our Sabotage issue will be coming out in, oh hell, I don’t know.  Maybe October?  It will be published like a paperback book…or at least that’s the current plan.

We are still taking submissions for the Sabotage issue, but your work will only be considered for that issue if it is actually about sabotage.

Future issues of Diet Soap will be on these themes:

• Life after Capitalism
• Claustrophobia
• Mania, Panic Attacks, and Every Day Life
• and How to find Edible Grubs

 

Ben Segal, the author of From Georges Bataille to Jesus Christ in Four Moves (which appeared in the first issue of Diet Soap) sent me a copy of his first book about a month ago, and I spent a good amount of time trying to solve it. “78 stories” is much like life in so much as the sequence and thereby the meaning of events has to be deciphered. Of course this book presents itself as a crossword puzzle and since it is in fact the story of a solver whose goal is to complete the unusually difficult puzzle of his own life and death as he fills in the spaces in a newspaper crossword this is entirely appropriate.This is the kind of book you might want to frame and hang on the wall, or alternatively fold up and stick in your back pocket to solve during your commute.Congratulations, Ben! And congratulations to No Record Press for picking out such an interesting and fun writer to showcase.

Diet Soap Issue #2 (Sex and Gender) was recently reviewed by David Hebbelthwaite at “The Fix.” He had this to say:

Diet Soap’s website—and, indeed, the magazine itself—suggest that it’s meant as a provocative publication. Well, I have to admit that I didn’t find issue #2 to be quite that; but it does have some good stories that make telling points about the subject of sex and gender. It may not be as provocative as it hopes to be, but it is thought-provoking.

O.K., fair enough. But we certainly do want to be provocative as well as thought-provoking, so keep those subversive submissions coming in! Our upcoming issues are “Sabotage” and “Slavery.” What’cha got for us? Send it to douglain@dietsoap.org, or if it’s poetry, send it to poetry@dietsoap.org

Hi everyone!

So the Diet Soap Team has been working hard to get a head start on Issue #3, which is scheduled to hit the streets in late October 2008. The theme for issue #3 is “Sabotage” and we need fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and art.

Send us stuff! We pay $5 per piece, plus a contributor copy. And for this next issue, we’re going to be moving to Lulu for our printing and doing the magazine up as a perfect bound with a full color cover! So it’s going to be gorgeous.

Send your submissions to douglain at dietsoap dot org. You can also send poetry directly to our poetry editor Camille Alexa at poetry at dietsoap dot org.

We look forward to hearing from you!

New Poetry Editor: Camille Alexa joins Diet Soap

Camille Alexa has joined Diet Soap as poetry editor and first reader.  A fine writer her work has appeared in such publications as Escape Pod, ChiZine, Space & Time Magazine, A Thousand Faces, and more. 

Her email address is poetry [at] dietsoap [dot] org.  She has requested that future submissions contain the word “submission” in the subject line, and that I falsely attribute a quote from Karl Marx to her. 

Camille says, “The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but she cannot of course create it. ” 

We’re glad to welcome Camille to Diet Soap, and look forward to how she’ll influence the future of this little journal.