Jessica Hatch

[jessicahatch]

I've got work in Issue 20!

It’s been a mad, mad end to summer, so I’m late sharing this news. However, having a piece that uses N*zi vampires as an allegory for the disgusting lengths we’ll go to for career success IN A LIT MAG NAMED AFTER ONE OF MY LITERARY ANCESTOERS is worth celebrating at any time. 

To read “Toscanini in the Plague Year,” scroll down to the last piece in this issue or do a CTRL + F search for “Jessica Hatch.” 🖤

[jessicahatch]

Film Studios Left Hollywood in the 1950s and Changed the Business Forever

After World War II, movie studios like MGM and Paramount found themselves at a crossroads as they adapted to changes brought on by both the war and the advancement of filmmaking technology.

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The Princess Bride + Letterboxd Reviews

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Facts.

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If Not for Me Then Do it for the World

Grief Triptych with Squeaky Hinges | Jessica Hatch

“Grief over a mentor, not a friend, is parasocial at best. It feels performative, untrue, like a mockingbird making its home in a blackbird’s nest. When there was the opportunity for friendship after all, it feels worse.”

When our writing mentor, instructor, and in some cases friend Giancarlo DiTrapano died suddenly this spring, my fellow MTVM alumni Cory Bennet and Mila Jaroniec asked Giacomo at Neutral Spaces if we could publish an issue in his memory. I’m honored to have the piece linked here published beside such lovely remembrances.

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October 23: ‘I am gone though I am here’ said dear Lady Disdain

I was so miserable

my depression bare.

Then I’d found Shakespeare;

a small thing,

but it was something.

found poem with text from Harris, Charlaine. Shakespeare’s Champion. pg. 168

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Hnnnnnnng. 🖤

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Is there any better feeling than rereading something you wrote weeks or months ago and not recalling that you wrote it? 

Almost like the Muse herself picked up your pen and said, “I’ll take care of this.”

[jessicahatch]

8 Strategies to Try If a Short Piece Isn’t “Landing.”

(For all my fellow authors, based on notes I took from this fantastic piece by Lincoln Michel for LitHub.)

Try the Robert McKee way: Create a short outline of plot beats to make sure the story “works.”

Try applying a “form engine” to the piece (e.g., Carmen Maria Machado’s “Especially Heinous”).

Linguistics engine: Take repetition or contrast; take syllable sounds or sentence rhythms; a pair of concepts (up/down; light/dark); or associated words to drive the piece. (A prose villanelle?)

Write a first sentence/hook. Circle 2-3 keywords. Write 10-20 words you associate with them and add them to the piece.

In revision, look for scenes or sections that are not “receiving power from the story’s engines.” Cut or fix. 

Is the inciting incident clear? 

Could I be using dialogue to greater effect?

Cut too much description for description’s sake; suggest back story, but don’t elaborate. When in doubt, leave it (a word, sentence, etc.) out.

[jessicahatch]

Should I be on social media at all, as a writer?

I’ve been thinking a lot about social media and being a writer lately. I understand the correlation between the two. Social media equals built-in platform: grow yours, and you’ll be able to say you have a verified account or 10,000 followers in your query letter, or whatever metric seems to suggest you’ll sell a lot of books. 

At the same time, social media seems to also equal a lot of distraction and a lot of snark. At least for me. I’ll hype myself up to go on Twitter, to interact with other writers and the publishing industry gatekeepers who keep accounts there. It’ll work for a while, but soon I’ll find myself demoralized by a subtweet that seems to condemn if not me, then my brand of optimism or my brand of being a little too quirky to be mainstream or, or, or... 

And the worst, in my opinion, is when these subtweets come from agents or editors themselves. It makes me feel like I’m the nerdy theater kid all over again, and the cool kids just laughed in my face when I asked if I could put my cafeteria tray down at their table. 

With that in mind, I’ve been thinking actively about how social media is a boon and how it is an energy drain at one and the same time. I don’t think even the most well-meaning advice (e.g., Cal Newport’s admonishment in Deep Work [HBG, 2016] that we shouldn’t be on social media at all) is one-size-fits-all. While I find Twitter exhausting, someone else might thrill from it. Vice versa for me getting a rush from Instagram.

I think moving forward I’m going to be on:

- Instagram for my editing business

- This Tumblr to journal (to myself mainly! I don’t expect anyone else to follow this rambling nonsense) about my writing life

- Facebook because, call me old-fashioned or lame or a Millennial, but I like keeping in touch with far-away friends.

I had been using Twitter to post about my writing life, etc., but nope. Tumblr’s more fun. It makes more sense to me. 

So I suppose the answer to my question is: c’est depend. And c’est depend on what you get out of it in exchange for what you put in.

[jessicahatch]

Weekly Pitching Stats

Novel: Out with 2 agents. On querying hiatus for some needed revision.

Short Story: Out with 3 journals, 1 contest. 1 rejection this week. Overhauled it, so that I hope its future submissions get more love.

NYC Midnight Short Story: Waiting to hear back.

[jessicahatch]

On the Many Different Engines That Power a Short Story

The hard thing about writing—or one of the hard things in the endless series of hard things about writing—is that there’s no one way to do it. Instead, there are infinite paths in the dark woods of…

My writing has been feeling a little stale and getting its fair share of rejections lately. 

This article has me jazzed to try some different “engines” on for size.

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‘Natural’ healing is metaphysically incoherent but valuable – Alan Jay Levinovitz | Aeon Essays

‘Natural’ remedies are metaphysically inconsistent and unscientific. Yet they offer something that modern medicine cannot

Oh, look. A way for me to differentiate my witch novel from all the ones that take naturopathy at face value.

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Dead Poets Society (1989) dir. Peter Weir

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#NeverNotReblogDeadPoetsSociety

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I’ve been thinking a lot about operant conditioning lately...

...and it seems clear to me that the #writinglife, past a certain point, plays completely into B.F. Skinner-style psychology. 

Recall that Skinner is the dudebro who conditioned mice to press a button and get a food pellet. One day he didn’t have enough food pellets for his mice, so he randomized the button to sometimes produce a pellet, sometimes not. As you may guess, given the way casinos succeed and the way we can never get off our phones, thanks to the randomized reward patterns both provide, the mice continued to press the button for a lot longer when the reward was randomized than they did when it was given every time. 

And yes, writing should be an intrinsic passion first and foremost. I don’t know anyone who shells out for conferences, workshops, editorial work, etc., who doesn’t absolutely love writing. Otherwise, why would you? But the ups and downs of putting yourself out there as a writer, the operant conditioning of being a writer, has to count for something.

Case in point: Yesterday morning I was reflecting on how I’m not getting any younger but that if I hold the line, hopefully some agent will eventually want to represent me. That afternoon a [dream] agent asked for my full manuscript. This doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but the sliver of hope it gave me--the randomized food pellet--is enough for me to go on for a while.

tl;dr I guess we’re all really mice in a maze sometimes, huh?

[jessicahatch]

Heathens respond to "Q-Shaman" and Norse Imagery in Capitol Riot | News, Paganism, Politics, U.S.

Witchcraft & Pagan News - One of the figures in the forefront of the extremist riot at the U.S. Capitol yesterday wore Heathen symbols tattooed on his chest. Heathen groups have spoken out against this appropriation of their symbols by the far right. | News, Paganism, Politics, U.S.

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Yule Ritual Invocation

May this invocation I wrote bring both solemnity and light to your Yuletide celebrations. Please reblog to share with others you may know!

If you’d like access to the 12-day candle magick ritual I created to accompany this, please subscribe to my brand-spankin’ new TinyLetter: https://tinyletter.com/Strix8. The ritual will be going out via email on Friday.

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How captive peoples enriched the cultures of their captors – Catherine M Cameron | Aeon Essays

Even when enslaved or despised, captives brought novel ideas and technologies to the societies of their captors