“Circles Have Ends” at SYW Magazine

I’ve had a bunch of stories surface in the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to keep up with them here. I have updated my writing page with all my publications, so if you’re hasty to read them all (and you’re probably not), you can charge over there and get reading, but for the blog I’ll just do my updates one by one.

This update is for my story, “Circles Have Ends”, which is a story I wrote over two years ago. It was an assignment I wrote in a class I took at Chuck Palahniuk’s writing workshop. Since then that workshop has evolved into what is now Lit Reactor, so getting this thing published was a bit of a look back at where my “career” with writing started. I’d been wanting to pursue writing since forever, but I’d never actually been legitimately serious about it until I penned “Circles Have Ends” and I started getting responses. They were good responses, and I really felt good about them, about myself.

I’ll be honest and admit that writing is a real personal, withdrawn sort of hobby. I mean, you can only really write when you’re alone, so I don’t know what’s a more lonely, self-indulging than writing (other than masturbating, I suppose). While I realize that some writers might be extroverts, I was definitely one of the introverted awkward kind of writer until I really started sharing my work outside of my friendship circle, and I mean really sharing the raw and exposed work that was in me, but that I’d never really bothered to write until I was in that class. “Circles Have Ends” was somewhat inspired by my time in high school as a pre-Taylor Swift teen with plenty of insecurities.

“Circles Have Ends” is at its heart a girl’s story. While I was never a ketamine addict, didn’t dye my hair red, and never fucked a total douchebag like the story’s main character Maddie, it was her raw and exposed nature that evolved from the stuff I experienced in high school.

That drive to be something else.

That delusion that people respect you for who you think you are.

That need to escape to a solitary place.

That’s what writing is when you first start out.

“Circles Have Ends” was the first story I started submitting to markets. I got no bites, but a few positive comments from editors who like the writing, but felt that the combination of teenage drug addiction and angst might have been too mainstream or too dark or too odd for their magazine. I thought I was a genius, but plenty of editors could have given less of a shit. I learned a lot just from submitting it, and I grew a lot as well. So I sent it over to SYW Magazine (which will soon become Revolt Daily). I’d met the editor, Laramore Black, via Lit Reactor, and I thought the story would fit with the vibe he’s got over at his magazine. Thankfully he loved it, and now my “would-be publishing deflowering” story has finally found a home.

You can read it now at SYW Magazine.

03/13/2013 | Sexy Hipster Graphics, Writing | Comments Off