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This week, we bring you a very special episode of Week Links. Instead of a link to a classmate’s story, I’m sharing one of my own, “The Language of Hairzilla,” and tracing it from its start in class to its publication in the online journal SmokeLong Quarterly.

“Hairzilla” had a shorter journey than most of my stories. Here goes…

April 2011
In Eric May‘s Advanced Proseforms class, I was writing what I thought was one essay, using my nappy hair to symbolize my relationship with my biracial identity. The middle section was about being one of few people of color involved in punk rock in 1990s Richmond, Virginia, but at 3,000 words, it was far too long. I got caught up in finishing my semester, and set that first draft aside.

May
I isolated the punk material from the rest of the essay, hoping to trim it down and plunk it back in. As I edited, I heard my Fiction 1 teacher Joe Meno‘s voice in my head going, “Writing a story is easy! All you need is a beginning, middle and end!” As I followed Joe’s simple but great advice, I realized that the punk section of the essay stood on its own as a short, short story. I thought, This could be some flash fiction.

I was pleased. One of the things I’m proud of learning at Columbia is how to get to the point and write short. My favorite piece from my first workshop was over 5,000 words. “Hairzilla” is under 1,000. Here’s to trimming the fat!

June
I’d been looking at the story for so long that I couldn’t tell if it made sense to anyone living outside of my brain, so I took it to the streets. I read “Hairzilla” at Two Cookie Minimum and the audience listened instead of ordering more beers, laughed when I hoped they would, and even laughed where I didn’t expect them to.

I felt like I was nearly done, so I emailed it to two of my most trusted writer friends for a second opinion, and shared it with a writing group that I was in over the summer. I considered all of their advice, used what I agreed with, made sure I had a good reason to not use the stuff I disagreed with, and wrote another draft.

Then I did what I think is one of the most important things a writer can do: I set the story aside for a couple of weeks. This is as necessary as showing the piece to someone else, because time creates a distance between you and your work, giving you a sort of outsider’s perspective. That fresh look at a piece that’s been sitting in your desk drawer for a month is when you realize big picture things like that you used the same descriptive word twice in a paragraph, or skipped from present to past tense for no reason.
After looking at the story with refreshed eyes, I submitted the story to the few journals that I had researched, where I really wanted to see the piece. And then I played the waiting game…

July
For the first time in my life, I got an acceptance before I got a rejection. I was almost mad, like “Hold on, who else might have wanted this?! Hello? New Yorker, you there?” SmokeLong Quarterly wanted to run “The Language of Hairzilla” in their September issue. I said “Hell yeah!” and went back to the waiting game until it got published in late September.

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I had heard of SmokeLong as one of the premier flash fiction sites, and had seen their name on different writers’ publications lists. Those lists in writer bios (Ethan Storyworth has an MFA from Turkey Bacon University. His stories have appeared in Chicken Switch Review and No Humor. His chapbook “Dense, Unrelated Paragraphs” is forthcoming from Obtuse Press. He lives in Illinois with his dozen cats.) are great ways to find places to submit work. There’s an overwhelming amount of journals out there, but if they’ve published a writer that you like, they might be the place for you.

It’s wise to read a journal before submitting – your style might not fit theirs at all, or worse, the style of the piece you send in might not fit…while another story that’s sitting on your hard drive does. This research becomes easier to do as lit moves online, and even print journals include archives or excerpts on their sites.

Something that attracted me to SmokeLong is their interviews with the writers that they publish. Web fiction can be boundary pushing, so it’s great to have the chance to see what was going through a writer’s mind when they wrote a strange piece. No promises on my interview being all that fascinating, but if you want to see the words “jive” and “wigger” on a lit site, then check it out.