The Right Mix

NOVELIST MELISSA SCHOLES YOUNG ON THE ART OF GETTING PUBLISHED

By Amy Freeman

Melissa Scholes Young is the author of the novels The Hive and Flood, and editor of Grace in Darkness and Furious Gravity, two anthologies of new writing by women writers. She is a contributing editor at Fiction Writers Review, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Ploughshares, Ms., Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of the Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Foundation Residency Fellowship and the Center for Mark Twain Studies’ Quarry Farm Fellowship. Born and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, she is an associate professor in Literature at American University.

Melissa, who has published with presses both large and small, sat down with TWC to talk publishing.

AF: First, let’s meet the Fehler fam! Can you tell us a little about The Hive?

MSY: The Hive is a novel of sisters, secrets, and survival. It’s a Midwestern family saga. The Fehlers run a fourth-generation pest control business in rural Missouri and when the patriarch suddenly dies, the surprising details of succession in his will are revealed. He’s left the company to a distant cousin, assuming the women of the family aren’t capable. The matriarch of the Fehlers is a doomsday prepper, but she wants to trade responsibility for romance. Facing an economic recession and new civil war amidst the backdrop of growing Midwestern fear and resentment, the Fehler sisters unite in their struggle to save the family foundation they’ve built. There’s bees and bed bugs too.

For those unfamiliar with the publishing industry, can you give us a quick overview of the types of companies out there?

In traditional publishing, meaning a publisher buys your work and sells it for you, there are five big houses: Penguin, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster. You need a literary agent to pitch your work to those ranks. They have hundreds of imprints. They represent about 80% of the market. Then there is a huge list of independent publishers and small presses. Graywolf, Algonquin, Catapult, Europa, Melville House, and Turner, just to name a few. University presses fall in the small category but are well-respected. There’s no one way to publish a book in the industry and the odds are very much against writers. But still, here we are and it’s mostly grand.

I’ve had a wide range of experiences, and to be honest, I’ve been honored and pleased with the results. I published a chapbook, Scrap Metal Baby, last year with independent micro press Summer Camp Publishing. My first novel, Flood, came out from Hachette, one of the big five publishers. My second novel, The Hive, is being published by Turner Publishing, a large independent, with a new imprint, Keylight Books, that features books to film. The Hive comes out this summer. The film rights were immediately optioned to Sony, and the audio rights were sold to Dreamscape. I edited Furious Gravity and Grace in Darkness and published them through a partnership between American University and Politics & Prose Bookstore. I prefer to mix my work among big, medium, and small and lean toward editorial teams super enthusiastic about my books.

When deciding where to shop a manuscript, what factors do you consider?

I pay attention to who is publishing authors I admire and books I’m reading. My literary agent and I talk about the industry. It’s a business decision about art. Writers have to be able to pivot. The industry changes daily, it seems, especially during a pandemic. Writers have to be flexible. Mostly, writers have to keep writing. It gives you something useful to do during the waiting. And there is so much waiting.

You’re not only a writer, but you’re an editor, and teach writing. How do your many hats affect your process, once a publisher says “yes”?

The many hats help me understand the publishing process. There is less mystery and that is a relief. As editor of the Grace & Gravity series, my entire job is to champion women writers. When a publisher says “yes” to my own work, I remind myself to do that for me too. I’m much better at celebrating and cheering other writers, but I’m learning to be a better advocate for myself. I also have to get my ‘ask’ hat on because when you have a book coming out, you have to ask for a lot. Most people say yes. Some can’t. The generosity of writers is astounding.

Can you share any insider tips on getting published?

Decide what publishing success looks like to you before you query. Maybe you want to print twenty copies of your memoir and share them with family. That’s success. Maybe you’re thrilled with a hundred-print run from a prestigious academic press. That’s success. Maybe you want to write an amazing book and keep it in your nightstand. That’s success, too.

What writing [or publishing] advice would you give Younger Melissa?

I’d tell Missy (oops) that not knowing about the industry will serve her well. A younger Melissa knocked on a lot of doors that she probably shouldn’t have, but some of them opened. Why not her? Why not you? Rejection just means you’re in the game. It’s not personal. Women writers, in particular, need to dust themselves off and get back up to bat. Research shows that women writers are less willing to submit again to a journal or publisher that has rejected them. We have to change this strategy to win the game.

The Hive (Turner Publishing) launches on June 8, 2021.

In September of 2019, authors SHANON LEE and JODI SAVAGE paired up to encourage each other through the process of writing their first book proposals. By the following year, Lee was represented by Agnes Carlowicz of the Carol Mann Agency and Savage signed with Mariah Stovall at Howland Literary. In this conversation, they reflect on their writing journey and unconventional path to landing a literary agent.

Shanon Lee: When did you know you were a writer? I knew when I was a young child. I have always written poetry and songs. I remember going up to my parents and they were like “You didn’t write that, where did you get that from?!”

Jodi Savage: I was in Mrs. Steinburg’s 6th grade class and she told us to write a poem. My first poem was called “Confidence.” From that moment on, I was like “I am a writer. I want to be a poet, like Phillis Wheatley, and the editor in chief of Essence magazine one day!”

SL: I remember being obsessed with the library. I loved walking the aisles and looking at all the books. I was the kid that read the dictionary for fun. I always had a love for words and the English language. I either wanted to be a writer, or an attorney.

JS: It is funny you would say that. In 7th grade, I selfpublished a book of poetry. That was my first book, my collection of poems. Then, I wrote short stories and wrote for the school newspaper in high school. I wanted to be a writer, but thought I should do something more professional and responsible—like become an attorney.

SL: I did some of the same things. I wrote for my high school newspaper, etc. Both my parents pushed education, but my dad was a creative. My mom was never here for living an artist’s life.

JS: How did you decide to be a full-time writer as a career? Because that is a brave choice. Black folks feel like we need to pick a career that allows us to give back to our community and make a difference, and you are able to do both while writing about social justice.

SL: I went through various careers. I joined the military at age 19. I worked in insurance and human resources for a while. One of my earliest stories was about substance misuse, and it was syndicated in HuffPost. I was studying clinical mental health counseling in grad school, and I was able to see how my writing resonated with others.

JS: You end up having more of an impact than you thought you would. My first published essay was about my experience caring for my grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s disease, and our interaction with the police. That story resonated with so many people, whether they were caregivers, living with mental illness, or had a similar interaction with the police.

SL: How did you determine which of the topics you write about should be developed into a book?

JS: I look at topics I am obsessed with and stories I keep returning to and determine a common thread. I return to Alzheimer’s and grief, but I look at grief from so many different perspectives: community, individual, and political. I keep returning to grief as a topic that is most important to me. You do not see a lot of conversation around grief in the Black community and how Black women process grief throughout our lives.

SL: What was your biggest misconception about writing a book proposal and querying?

JS: I thought you needed to take a year or more to work on your book proposal and query hundreds of agents before you reached even one that would be interested in asking for sample pages. [laughs] I also thought I needed to hire a coach to demystify the process. I felt whatever it took—I needed to do a lot more work to get to that point until I got you as a friend and was encouraged to start the process.

SL: I definitely thought it was supposed to be a lengthier process, and that it was very complicated. No disrespect to anyone that is more methodical, but the conversation around attempting a book proposal is intimidating. I considered working with a coach, but the process seemed so straightforward I decided it was not a good fit for me.

JS: We drag out the timeline by focusing on the minutia. We obsess over details that do not matter, like what order our chapters should be in, how long our chapter summary should be—ultimately your agent will change the order and you will have to edit it before it goes out on submission anyway. A lot of it is self-doubt.

SL: It is definitely imposter syndrome. However, I see the value of coaching if you need an accountability partner. Just completing a consultation made my goals more tangible. What I knew would work better for me was pairing up with someone in the same step of the process—that’s why I posted on Facebook.

JS: That was the best idea ever. When you said we were going to get our proposals done in a month, I said ‘but don’t we need like three months?’ But, it was such a good process for us! Every week, we had an assignment—whether it was working on the overview, the marketing section, or the chapter summaries. Had we not partnered on this, I would definitely still be working on my book proposal.

SL: It would still be on my to-do list! I knew I needed a nudge and I was willing to put myself out there and see what would happen. But when you responded, not only did I not know you well—I didn’t like what I knew of you. [laughs]

JS: I know, we had to make up first. I had to be like “Look girl, I know we have history…” [laughs]

SL: I considered being petty, but ultimately—it was about the work. I had to consider, “Is this someone as serious about meeting her goals as I am?” You have to be in the headspace to write a book proposal. As writers we are always dealing with imposter syndrome. There will always be a more accomplished writer—whether they write better or have more access to opportunities. The bar is high. We are not going to be Toni Morrison or Alice Walker.

JS: Exactly, we can only be the best Jodi Savage or best Shanon Lee we can be.

SL: We were able to help each other. We set goals and we were not chasing perfection. The feedback I got from you was invaluable, it was practical and it gave me the perspective of a first-time reader. What was the process like for you?

JS: It is important to find your tribe, or create your own tribe if you have to. You need a community, and we tapped into that and got it done. We traded feedback on everything from possible comp titles to anything in the proposal that was unclear as a reader.

SL: Writing a book proposal reinforced my feelings that I had a book that should be on the shelves. I was not consistently seeing the level of discourse around the topic of misogynoir in pop culture that I wanted to read. Criticism is still male-dominated, but Black women are fully capable of thought leadership, leading critical conversations, and writing books.

JS: I became even clearer about my vision when I started writing my book proposal. I thought I was writing a book about one thing, but when I looked atmy chapter summaries—I realized it was a book about something else. Actually sitting down to write a book proposal and figure out what is going to go in each chapter and figure out how you want to structure it is totally different. It helped me clarify my vision, because there was refining that needed to happen in my head about what book I actually wanted to write.

SL: Did you walk away understanding your book has a place in the market?

JS: I did. I got to that place through all of the steps we took.

SL: I knew we just needed a draft and it didn’t need to be perfect. If I didn’t have a draft completed when I was referred to my agent, that would’ve been a lot of pressure. How did you eventually connect with your agent?

JS: I saw her tweet. She announced her first agent deal and I followed her on Twitter. A few weeks later, she tweeted she was open to queries. I sent her my query letter and she responded about a week later. She requested my book proposal and I told her I would submit it in a week. Because we had done all that work, I was able to just polish it and get it to her.

SL: I did the same thing. I took a week to submit my book proposal, not knowing if taking additional time would look bad. But, a one-week turnaround was realistic for me. What advice would you give to writers on the fence about starting their book proposal?

JS: Get your feet wet by writing about your subject. It will give you an idea of whether you are passionate enough to write a book about it.

SL: What was the last piece of bad advice you received before landing an agent?

JS: I spoke to an agent at a conference about my book idea. They told me if I was serious about writing I should take this super-expensive writing workshop I could not afford. It gave me an idea of how narrowly people define “real writers” and made me wonder why she didn’t view me as one.

SL:

I remember when you mentioned that experience. To be clear, we entered this process with a body of work behind us—we are not newbies.

JS: Right! I was at the conference to speak on a panel. You have to surround yourself with a community of people that remind you of your talent. You taught me to brag on myself and how I needed to highlight all of my accomplishments. Throw it all into your query letter because you need to impress agents.

SL: I remember meeting with an acquisitions editor that works for a Big 5 publisher. I was told I needed to grow my social media following in order to have any chance at landing an agent. My articles have always done well, and I am active on social media, but hyperfocusing on building followers seemed like a losing battle. For me, it has always been more about the work—the writing itself—not the image of being a writer. This is a lifelong journey for me. Realizing you have the rest of your life alleviates some pressure.

JS: We have to stop thinking we are not ready—we are. The fact that we got the agents we did is also due to that. It is important to know who you are as a writer. There are people out there who will see the value of your writing and your stories. ◊

THE STORY OF A DEBUT NOVEL

By

Priyanka Champaneri

After graduating from college in 2005, I worked an office job full time while taking graduate creative writing courses at night. I didn’t quite know what I was doing with myself or my life, but I knew I loved books, with a passion that has run unabated since I was a child sitting up in bed reading, not noticing that hours had passed, the sun had gone down, and perhaps I should turn on a light. Then—and in some ways, even now—writing a book has always seemed like an impossible thing, but taking a class was a smaller commitment that I could handle. I passed my days between work and school with hours of reading and dreaming and thinking, filling the spaces between.

During that time, a friend sent me a message with a link to a Reuters article titled “Check in and Die in Two Weeks, or Get out.” As I read the article, which detailed the death hostels of Banaras, including their function and their necessity, I felt my interest

catch, but I tucked the email into a folder and went on with my day. I was intrigued by Banaras, a city on the river Ganges in northern India, but my knowledge of the place was limited to its appearances in what I had read as a child—the Amar Chitra Katha comic book versions of The Mahabharata, Savitri, and Tales of Shiva; K.M. Munshi’s Krishnavatara series; and the many fairy tale collections curated by Andrew Lang and Joseph Jacobs. Those stories mentioned the city under its spiritual moniker of Kashi, and I confess that I thought of it more as a setting for fairy tales than as a real place existing in a modern world.

I also felt overwhelmed by how much India held that I still did not know. It is impossible for any one person to thoroughly know her country, even if she is born in the place her people have called home—but I think for those who are born away from their homeland, the need to know everything about the place, no matter how vast and how storied its history, can become a mission, a way to earn a place of belonging. I wasn’t prepared to push that particular rock up a mountain.

A few years later, I had left my job and was in my first year of graduate school in an MFA program, and one of my assignments for class included writing the flap copy for a potential novel that I might write. I reached back into my memory and pulled that article out, and I felt that long-ago interest catch at me once again. I was still overwhelmed at the thought of writing about a place and a community I could not call my own, but this was only flap copy—and so I wrote out a 100-word synopsis for a book set in a death hostel.

A few months later, for the same class, I wrote the first chapter of the book I’d envisioned in that flap copy. But that was only an exercise, a place for me to play and dream, never something that might become real, because who was I—a person who had been to India twice, but never to Banaras, and who was Indian in blood and name and spiritual heritage, but perhaps nothing else—who was I to write about this city?

It was easy to bar myself from that space, and so I did. And yet I saved the issue of Little India magazine that came to my house, with its feature story about Banaras. I placed a bookmark in the chapbook of Ramprasad Sen’s poetry to mark “Tell Me Brother, What Happens after Death?”, a poem whose lines ran through my head on an endless loop. I watched Forest of Bliss, an almost wordless documentary about Banaras that showed me a city entirely real and modern, yet—to my mind—frozen in a time unto itself. I flipped through public television channels and somehow landed on a rough travelogue based in Banaras. I bought a copy of End Time City and felt as if ghosts were wafting up from the pages of Michael Ackerman’s photographs as I gazed at each one. I watched YouTube videos of people doing nothing more than holding their smartphone cameras up as they walked through the winding narrow lanes of the city, recording the sights and sounds of all that they passed, a trompe l’oeil of cinematography that made me feel as if I were the one walking those lanes, absorbing the city’s sighs.

Whether by accident or by chance, the city sought me out, and I grasped at everything that came my way. And though I still felt I had no right to create work about a space I did not belong to, my brain continued to hum on its own, with no qualms. More insistent than my fear of not knowing enough were the questions drumming their way through my head, questions I’d pondered for years about death and reincarnation, about forgiveness and redemption, about the capacity of every single person to live multiple lives within the single one they occupied at that present moment.

Finally came the point, midway through graduate school, when my fingers and my pen also thought, as I had more than a year before—why not? Why not write some words down, and see what happened?

And so, I did. I wrote, and the pages I produced by the time I was set to graduate became my thesis. I got another full-time job, and I continued to write. Self-doubt crept in daily, but when the words flowed, I felt that even if I did not belong to Banaras, even if it did not belong to me, at least the story and the characters did, because each day I put pen to paper, I understood a little bit more about them. And I wanted to find out what would happen to them. In the end, any motivation I had to continue writing was driven not so much by self-discipline or any kind of belief in myself or confidence in my understanding of the city. Instead, I was propelled by the thing that made me continue to turn the pages in bed all those years ago, long past the time when the light from the windows was enough for me to see the words on the page, one question at the forefront: What happens next?

It’s a question that took me more than 10 years to answer. By the time I finished, the story I discovered was very different from the one I’d written flap copy for years before. But my intentions, from hesitant first words to sure-footed last lines, remained exactly the same: The City of Good Death is my love letter to the city, a book that I hope holds some seeds of recognition for the people who have been there, and some seeds of wonder for the people who have not.

Priyanka Champaneri received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University and has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts numerous times. She received the 2018 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing for The City of Good Death, her first novel.

A conversation between Justin Sanders, editor of The Horror is Us (Mason Jar Press) and dave ring, editor of Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World That Wouldn’t Die (Neon Hemlock Press).

Justin Sanders is a ghost from Baltimore. His words have appeared most recently on the city’s walls. Find him on Twitter at @ghostmoan.

dave ring is a queer editor and writer of speculative fiction living in Washington, DC. He is the publisher and managing editor of Neon Hemlock Press, as well as editor of the anthology Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World That Wouldn’t Die. His short fiction has been featured in numerous publications, including Fireside Fiction, The Disconnect, and A Punk Rock Future. Find him at www.dave-ring.com or @slickhop on Twitter.

dave: Justin! It’s been almost a year since we last saw each other at Baltimore Book Festival. What a harrowing and wild bunch of months it’s been. But amidst all that, we did some shit, right? We edited these books! I’m excited to talk about them with you. I think I was actually in the middle of reading open submissions for Glitter + Ashes in November 2019, so it really has been a full year. You did open submissions too, right?

Justin: Thanks for putting this together, dave! I’m super excited to talk with you, buddy. Hell yeah, look at us.

Yup, we did open submissions, too. I think we got 350 stories in, that I picked eight out of. So I wanna say I’m so very sorry to the people at Mason Jar who don’t like reading horror. I really put them through a lot. That said, I think all their hard work generated an incredible anthology. How’d that process go for you, my friend?

Hey, they knew what they were signing up for when they asked you to edit the collection, right? Hopefully there weren’t too many nightmares that came out of it. I had a volunteer helping me for a bit, but I realized that my tastes were a little too specific, so I ended up reading the ~225 submissions myself. I had solicited eight (and two poems) from writers that I knew I wanted in the antho and then picked the other sixteen from the slush.

How much of a theme did you end up having in the anthology? Does it explore a spectrum of the genre, you think, or did you end up specializing a bit?

225 is a hell of a job, man. Kudos. That’s really doin’ some work, brother.

The anthology ended up exploring a range of horror—really everything from campfire tales to monster stories. They’re all social horror stories because they’re about things and have things to say. But whereas I originally conceived the anthology as being more overt commentary than stories, these are stories that gave me a lot to think about. So it really worked out for the best.

Your book has a little bit of everything as I understand, from poetry to fiction and even a roleplaying game as well? Is that accurate? I think that’s incredibly fucking cool, and I’m curious, firstly about the RPG, and then, and this totally may be asking you too much, but the choice to focus on queer joy and hope and beauty in the midst of so much ugliness and cynicism strikes me as so poignant. Could you just speak about that choice to focus on hope and community?

Yeah, we’re a little all over the map, content-wise, but I think it all makes sense when you read it, as far as themes. The RPG is Dream Askew by Avery Alder, one of my favorite game designers (if you haven’t played Monsterhearts you are robbing yourself of the closest experience I can think of to being part of the most trashy and meaningful teen vampire show you never heard of). Dream Askew tells stories right on that knife-edge of joy and disaster, which is what we wanted to explore with the anthology. The timing of the ugliness and disaster we’re seeing in the real world is not what we intended, of course, but I think it does make the sweetness in these stories come through even stronger.

What do you think your anthology is in conversation with, in terms of other similar projects? Or is it starting the conversation? Like, for me, Glitter + Ashes is 100% in conversation with Broken Metropolis: Queer Tales of a City That Never Was (that I edited for Mason Jar) as well as Beyond II: The Queer PostApocalyptic and Urban Fantasy Comic Anthology, but I also feel like it had a bit of a niche that I was digging out, as well.

Oh, that’s awesome. I like that term “digging out a niche.” I’m gonna be using that in the future. I guess I see The Horror is Us more as starting a conversation. One lesson I took from the submissions we got is that horror means a lot of things to a lot of people, and I find that fascinating, ya know. It’s a conversation I want to continue.

For the works you picked, what did they have that made them stand out? I guess I mean that both generally and, if you’re cool with it and we can talk specific stories in the anthology, which ones did you read and immediately know you wanted to accept? What are the moments where you were reading and thought like, Oh shit, they just did THAT, or like, Damn, this author’s got some moves on them?

Ooh, good question. One of the first commissioned stories that I read, “When the Last of the Birds and the Bees Have Gone” by C.L. Clark, was an ode to Jamaica Kincaid that really managed to channel the love and frustration of “Girl” with the themes of the anthology. Another piece, “Champions of Water World” by Elly Bangs, took the aesthetics and ridiculous excess of Mad Max and showed how love and community could break it apart. What about you? Any stories that tore you apart?

Oh man, right off the bat I read and loved “The Heroines Eyes are Enormous and Terrified” by Jan Stinchcomb. That story has so much style and atmosphere to it. It’s spooky and the imagery is haunting and the narrator in it recalls for me some of my favorite more melancholic tone-poem type 80’s horror like Ghost Story or Changeling.

“The Enthusiastic Butcher” is one of those incredible horror stories that’s grotesque and monstrous and gross, and I mean all of that in the most complimentary way. For me it does that thing good horror should do: make me keep looking even when I wanna look away.

I remember I read “Rise” by Abigail Teed and I thought it was just a scary, deeply engrossing, fuckin’ mean little story. Just really crawled into my eyes and I enjoyed reading it.

Any upcoming readings? Cool plans to promote Glitter + Ashes? Regular plans to promote Glitter + Ashes?

We’ve had some cool readings already, but I’m looking forward right now to our joint horror reading in conjunction with Argo Bookshop [held in October]! Jordan Kurella and A.P. Thayer wrote the two creepiest stories in my anthology. I think you’ll like them. And then we’re doing an Instagram Live reading [held in November] with our three Baltimore contributors! Saida Agostini (who also has a poetry chapbook, STUNT, coming out from us), Anthony Moll, and Aun-Juli Riddle. What else have y’all got going on?

Yup, it’ll be super cool to read with you again, bud! Taylor Sykes and Laura Walker will be reading on Halloween for White Whale Books. We’ve got our official release reading on [October] 28th with the Ivy Bookshop. We’ve got one with Greedy Reads coming up in November and Scott Bryan Wilson will be there for that one. Definitely some very cool readings that I’m looking forward to.

Rad. Can’t wait to see you there. Thanks for catching up with me!

It’s been great talking with you, my friend!

A chat with the editor of Taco Bell Quarterly

By Amy Freeman

MM Carrigan is the Editor Grande Supreme of Taco Bell Quarterly—yep, that’s a real and prestigious literary journal. TWC sat down with her to find out what goes on in the journal’s backroom.

Let’s start with the obvious question. For the uninitiated, what the heck is Taco Bell Quarterly?

Taco Bell Quarterly is a literary magazine that publishes “Taco Bell-adjacent” and “spiritually Taco Bell” fiction, poetry, essays, CNF, art, and more. We are also a literary movement, encouraging writers to think outside the bun in terms of their writing, their talent, their movement through the slog of the writing life, and rejection. We absurdly approach writing through a lens of Taco Bell to disrupt the writing process, destroy it, and put it back together. We also imagine that is how Taco Bell approaches making food.

There are lots of interviews with you about TBQ’s origins, in publications ranging from Salon to Food and Wine to Vox, so let’s use this interview to instead pull back the curtain on how you make a journal. What happens to my work, on your end, after I hit “submit?” Who reads it? Do you have multiple readers weighing in? What’s the next step, if a reader thinks “yes,” “no,” or “meh?”

First I read it, and then I pass it onto our “day crew,” a volunteer group of talented writers and poets, as well as a few non-writers whom I think provide an important point of view. Everyone gives their thoughts, which I take into consideration. I don’t believe in a meritocracy and ranking when it comes to what makes great writing. I believe every submission has a unique merit worthy of publication.

At the same time, when a piece isn’t working, it just isn’t working.

What makes a submission sing?

A great opening sentence, an established point of view that we can immediately relate to, and a profound truth that makes us sigh.

Conversely, what’s going to get my submission dinged?

You can tell when people are writing with too heavy of hand, when you can really just see the writer working through it on the page, when it’s still a rough draft. We’re essentially a writing prompt about Taco Bell, and writing prompts are actually challenging to do successfully, because you do end up with a lot of plodding and muddling through the prompt. When Taco Bell disappears into the background as white noise, that’s where you should start writing.

How do you feel about writers following up, if they haven’t heard back about a submission and are feeling antsy?

Do it.

Some publications give tiered rejections, as in, a flat “no, thank you” if you don’t like the quality or style of the writing, or a “no, thank you, but please submit again,” if it seems like the writer could be a good fit, but not with that piece, or a revise/ resubmit request if you think it’s almost there? Or in that last instance, would you work with the writer on edits?

I love to publish “almost there” pieces actually. Writing is a spectrum, from draft to “there.” Most writing probably exists within the “almost.” I read books by big name, big 5 authors that I think are “almost there.” We should always be writing to get to that place, and we’ll all be lucky if we make it “there” a few times. When we reject writers, it has very little to do with merit, and much more to do with the overall story the issue is shaping up to tell.

Some publications post new pieces all the time. What factors come into play when you’re assembling a magazine? Do you consider how the pieces work together?

Yes, I’m very interested in the magazine working as a small novel or maybe as an album, with the pieces speaking and singing to each other. Each writer is doing solo material within the entire band of writers.

What’s the worst response you’ve ever received from a writer, after sending a rejection?

Everyone has been cool and professional. Mean people don’t like Taco Bell. Have you ever seen a mean person in a Taco Bell? Nah, everyone is chill, happy, sipping on Baja Blasts. Our writers are like that. We’re not Long John Silver’s Review. I imagine everyone who eats Long John Silvers is having the worst day of their life. That would be a terrible magazine.

What’s your view on simultaneous submissions (where a writer sends a piece to multiple outlets at the same time)?

Do it.

Now three issues old, TBQ is still quite new, but it’s a hot byline. If someone reading this wants to submit, are there common themes you’re seeing and of which you’ve had enough?

Don’t go balls to the wall. You don’t have to start with werewolves, nuclear war, serial killers, and hot air balloons. A lot of people come into it with a head full of steam, writing the biggest, wildest story of their life taking place inside of a Taco Bell. I admire that power move, but it’s probably still a first draft. Serial killers and hot air balloons need to simmer until the 3rd or 4th draft. Take some time to really sit in that Taco Bell.

I’ve seen you on Twitter, doling out free taco coupons to writers who share rejections from other pubs. What’s that about and may I have one, too?

We occasionally have a stash of free tacos to give out from Daddy Taco—I mean, Taco Bell, ahem. We’re not affiliated whatsoever, but it never hurts to ask for free food, so we ask them for it and give it out to writers. Follow us for occasional free food, great writing, and dreaming mas.

@TBQuarterly / tacobellquarterly.org