new litmags

Formatting Your Manuscript


Many writers don’t realize that upon online publication, their manuscript needs to fit into three kinds of devices: desktop, tablet, and phone. Often the work fits into none of these, which leaves editors spending hours reformatting it.

Why is this? Because writers format their prose into their own files– usually 8.5 X 11– and use line breaks to make it look good within their own file, even if this means making it look wrong (embarrassing gaps) when it’s published. In effect they type as if they were on an old-fashioned typewriter with carriage return, preparing their manuscript not for online publication, but for print.

SOLUTION #1

The solution is to avoid line breaks, keeping only paragraph breaks.

A TEST

A test I use is to drop a paragraph or two from a manuscript into an 11 X 17 word or doc file. If the lines don’t extend all the way to fill the width (up to a set margin on the right), you have a problem.

SOLUTION #2

Several sites, such as textfixer.com, remove line breaks– but make sure to keep or create paragraph breaks of an entire empty line in the text of the manuscript.

XXXXX

Thanks!

The Disgrace of Using Chatbots


A sign of A.) ineptitude B.) gullibility: using the latest tech gimmick produced via the plutocratic pipeline.

We view chatbots as a form of bicycle training wheels. Or as batting tees used for beginner baseball players– where they need to keep the ball stationary before they take a swing at it.

In sum: If you use a chatbot in any way– including to write your own emails, you’re NOT a writer. You’re not even a beginner writer. You’re a poser. A fake. A wannabe.

Use the word “writer” to describe yourself if you’re a chatbot user and you’ll be sued for misrepresentation and fraud.

Or should be.

A May Day Quote


Thomas Berry in The Dream of the Earth, quoted in In the Absence of the Sacred by Jerry Mander, referring to our technological age:

During this period the human mind has been placed within the narrowest confines it has experienced since consciousness emerged from its Paleolithic phase. Even the most primitive tribes have a larger vision of the universe, of our place and functioning within it, a vision that extends to celestial regions of space and to interior depths of the human in a manner far exceeding the parameters of our world of technological confinement.

Two Prose Poems by Brian Pilling

the daily grind

The other woman, half-crazed in a check-out line at the 7-11, yells at the clerk, “SPEAK ENGLISH!” Laughter falls out of the sky when Gloria Estefan’s “Bad Boy” plays, then fades to silence, replaced by the whirling blades of the ubiquitous news chopper following traffic onto the interstate. The camera focused on the sixth high-speed chase of the month. Within minutes it is over, spike strips flattening all four tires. Suddenly the camera jolts to the right, picking up a convertible, the other woman’s head in her lover’s lap, the car swerving left and right, slowing and picking up speed—a familiar rhythm. The chopper hovers over the golden arches, where the lovers, now famished, sit in the drive-up line, delayed by a distraught child’s grandparents who just explode like a happy meal’s wind-up toy wound too tight—their order missing its fries and the cheap plastic toy. Grandpa pulls his semi- automatic Sig Sauer on the high schooler who screwed things up. Thoughts and prayers in waiting, like wrapped-up hamburgers on warming plates.

ZAP, NORTH DAKOTA

A pimple faced teenager is rifling through boxes of books at his neighbor’s garage sale. He looks over his reading list for the upcoming school year. His neighbor, a dangerous sounding woman wearing a winter jacket with a fake fur collar and metallic copper makeup, haggles over the price of an old toaster oven. Momentarily distracted by the boy, she pulls the list from his hand. She says, “you won’t find those here,” and returns the paper while wagging her other finger. “Nothing you should be reading either, if I have anything to say about it.” He quickly stuffs the list into his back pocket. “You tell your mama I’m running for school board and I’ll be counting on her vote.”

XXX

Brian Pilling has been published in The Main Street Rag, The Berkshire Review, Down In The Dirt, The Droplet Journal, Missive Magazine, and other literary journals. His chapbook The Poet’s Struggle is published by Bottlecap Press. Brian is a recent winner in The Cape Cod Times poetry contest.

Why Fast Pop?


Because we want to change things up as we wait for the AI Chatbot gimmick to play itself out– hordes of simple-minded tech suckers-with-gadgets posing as artists and writers.

We want writing that’s faster to post and faster to read.

We hope to eventually have regular contributors along with ourselves. Maybe even invited Guest Stars, a la old TV series.

The writing should be different, but not difficult. Quirky and/or entertaining. This blog will have more variety in presentation and writing than the numerous too-long stodgy Substack formal essays currently inflicted on readers.

Fast Pop will be possibly a supplement to our main site and possibly a replacement for it. Who knows? We might go offline total analog total anarchy in a week, so disgusted are both of us right now by the insanities of technology.

“A desperate measure,” you say. Maybe! But we’re going to try a series of new measures and all kinds of new writing– mixed with commentary and fragmented rants– as a way to break the stultifying logjam calling itself literature today.