I’m honored to announce that my micro memoir “Music Box” was selected as an Editor’s Pick for Five Minute Lit’s first Micromemoir Marathon.
The contest ran for twenty-six days in May, inviting writers to submit to one or more of twenty-six prompts, crafting pieces of exactly one hundred words. The prompt “Music Box” made a perfect title for my piece, so I kept it.
You can read “Music Box” here, and the announcement with all of the winners’ bios here.
As always, thank you for reading.
Image by rony michaud from Pixabay
For the last year and a half I’ve been so focused on novels—planning them, writing them, editing them, pitching them— that I’ve neglected my short stories and essays. I realized recently that it’s been nearly a year since I’ve had anything published, largely because I stopped trying. Not wanting to break a nine-year streak of seeing my stories online, I temporarily set aside the novel manuscripts in favor of going on submission with the shorter stuff.
In the process I discovered some great new magazines. One in particular, Reservoir Road Literary Review, seemed like it might be a good fit for my work. They were looking for stories “full of grit and discomfort that shed sympathetic light on the questionable, the unfavorable.” I had a story like that—a flash creative nonfiction piece called “Transient” that I penned way back in 2017. It’s about how we remember those whose choices in critical moments can alter forever the course of our lives. I polished up the essay, hit submit, and crossed my fingers.
Within weeks I received a warm acceptance email that did wonders for my confidence (something easy to lose when you’ve spent over a year searching for a literary agent). There’s nothing like the feeling of your story finding a home. I missed that feeling.
Image from Flickr by Jorge Jaramillo
It’s the last day of February in what was just a brand-new year—how did that happen? The past several weeks have been incredibly busy at the nursing facility where I work as we’re implementing an electronic health and medical records system. But I’ve managed to squeeze in plenty of writing, including a few blog posts that you’ll never read because I simply ran out of time to post them and now they’re outdated!
Anyway, I’m happy to say I have a new CP (critique partner), and we’ve been exchanging chapters for a few months. She’s made it all the way through my middle grade WIP and offered tons of great feedback, which I’ve been working through intensely. When you’re knee-deep in edits on a project, you often end up hating that project, and that pretty much sums up my feelings at this point. But with my CP’s encouragement and reassurance, I also feel like it’s close to being a good book and stands a chance. No matter what happens, I’m proud of writing it.
One of my goals for 2017 was to keep better track of my writing and submissions. I was genuinely shocked at how little I wrote toward new fiction last year, and how little I submitted. It’s very easy to deceive yourself about how much you’re writing when you’re constantly thinking about writing and surrounded by writers talking about writing. Now that I have a system in place, I can see the actual numbers. So far this year I’ve sent out 14 submissions, received 4 rejections and, most importantly, 1 acceptance! That piece, about siblings outgrowing each other, was published mid-month in a wonderful parenting magazine called Motherwell: You can read it here.
I’m no longer counting the hours and words I put into edits (that was last year’s mistake); in addition to those efforts it’s important to me to draft new material. Much of January was spent working on a new creative nonfiction piece called “Transient,” which was excruciating to write. It’s about something that happened in my childhood that’s memorable, not because it left a scar, but because it didn’t. While considering whether to commit this memory to paper, I did some research into those involved, and discovered something that both devastated me and inspired me to tell the story. The essay’s out on submission now, and I hope to share it with you someday soon.
Finally, I was recently invited by Superstition Review to create a podcast for their Authors Talk series, discussing the inspiration and creative process behind my short story “The Woman in Room 248.” I am so excited for this because it’s something I’ve never done before, and I have a few ideas for how to make it interesting/fun. My podcast is slated for March 28, so stay tuned!
Elizabeth Maria Naranjo is the author of The Fourth Wall and The House on Linden Way. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction have been published in Brevity Magazine, Superstition Review, Fractured Lit, Hunger Mountain, Hospital Drive, The Portland Review, Reservoir Road, Literary Mama, and several other places.
Elizabeth’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best American Essay, and Best of the Net. She lives in Tempe, Arizona, with her husband and two children.
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