Hi there! Welcome to November 2024!
Here I am, eating Halloween candy, wrapped in my dogs-dressed-as-witches blanket and feeling Novembery as all get out, ready to update you on things since…whoa, October 2022?
When last we chatted, I was still in the midst of my creative writing and literary studies degree at UMass Amherst. I graduated with honors in May 2023, and met a delightfully gigantic snapping turtle in the UMass Amherst pond while strolling giddily around in my cap and gown. Education: achieved!
The largest and loudest thing to say today is that I’m now in my second year of the Pop Fic MFA program at Emerson College, and I am loving it. The official name of the program is Popular Fiction and Publishing. I will finish my penultimate class-taking semester next month, followed by my final class-taking semester, then a well-earned summer break. Finally, from September to December 2025 I will dive into and complete my thesis semester, which in my case means completing my first novel. I’ve been getting a lot of wonderful encouragement and feedback from my classmates on various excerpts, so I know I’m heading along the right path through the word forest.
(Don’t tell anyone, but I’ll most likely spend my well-earned summer break writing the novel too.)
And then, you may address me as Master of Fine Arts.
Excitement!
My next publication will be a short story in Page Turner Magazine, Emerson’s graduate student-run genre fiction magazine. I’m a PTM staff member, acting as both a reader of short fiction submissions and an art judge.
Other big, fun and profound changes are on the horizon, so stay keen! I anticipate a fun and surprising announcement in the coming days.
Oh! Almost forgot—my speculative poem Heart Like Switchgrass got an honorable mention in the 10th annual Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest back in the beginning of 2023. I’ll be submitting that someplace else soon. I’m going to start putting together a speculative poetry collection very soon, so that’s something fun to look forward to.
Okay! November update: achieved.
See you in December!
I remain,
your Jen Sexton-Riley
October 28, 2022
Halloween Is Nigh
Hey there. Welcome!
It’s been a busy autumn. I’ve been juggling a lot. The important thing to note is that I’ve just finished writing a short horror story that I’m quite fond of, and I’m about to start a longer speculative piece which contains a lot of near future science fiction (fiction for now, anyway) and a degree of homespun elemental magic. I love the characters. I love their goals, their dreams, their fears and their transformations. I hope you do too. I hope to have it for you by sometime in the tail end of autumn or maybe in the whiskers of early winter. We’ll see how many stray minutes I can scrape together.
For now, let the Halloween preparations begin! I’m ready for a cathartic bonfire. What about you?
I remain,
your Jen Sexton-Riley
Almost Through with August '22
Hey! Hi!
I just wrote a big blog post and then magically made it vanish into the ether somehow, so I am trying to be cool about it and just say what needs to be said rather than try to recapture the great things I said about the changeable nature of time during the pandemic, stretchy seconds, sticky hours, days zipping by like the Formula Rossa roller coaster at Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi and months lolling and soaring past like a herd of sizzle-hippos.
That post is gone!
Anyway. I have updated the interplace, and things are current. Please click “work” if you haven’t already to read some of my published words. There’s even an audio drama, if you’re so inclined. Please notice that I have disbanded the Patreon.
See you soon— I’ll be updating with more frequency. Enjoy the end of summer, and all hail the return of spooky season!
I remain,
Your Jen Sexton-Riley
August Goes the Way of Augustus Gloop... Down a Chocolate River and Into the Boiler!
Welcome to the End!
The end of August, that is. I can’t say I’m sad to see the backside of this little pressure cooker of a month. It’s been everything a summer on Cape Cod threatens to be and more: Hot? Check. Humid? Check. Buggy? Check. Full of tourists desperately searching for driving lessons and a refresher course in manners? Triple Check. Let me float away into a vivid September sky on a raft of orange, red and yellow leaves to the sound of cackling witches as a rainbow of tourist tail lights— crimson, cherry, scarlet, vermillion, russet and ruby— arc over the Sagamore and Bourne bridges and spiral off to their various New Jerseys and Connecticuts and beyond.
As for me? I will be planning my Halloween costume and spinning spooky stories for you.
Oh, hey! I launched a Patreon. This allows me to scale back the freelance just slightly and yet still pay my bills with the old day job. You know what that means? More energy and creativity for writing. Won’t you consider stopping by and becoming my patron? It will mean the world to me.
https://www.patreon.com/jensextonriley (**Edit: As of August 2022, the Patreon is no more.)
I set a goal at the beginning of 2019. One hundred story rejections would be mine! In the process of writing and submitting enough stories to gather 100 no-thank yous, I thought maybe, just maybe I would sneak a few sales in there as well. And guess what? It worked! As of the end of August I have some serious catching up to do to meet my goal— I’ve only racked up 29 rejections so far. And I’ve managed to sell three stories, receive one honorable mention, and nearly make it through to the last round of voting in a fantasy flash fiction contest.
Let’s see what September brings.
December, January and February ≥ Magic Again
“Your great grandfather must have loved the drink as much as you do, Jasper Soule. He was a faker. There’s no top of the world. Where is it? In the trees?” Keen widened his eyes and looked up, craning his thick neck left and right as if searching the firelit ceiling for the top of the world. The place roared with drunken laughter. “And when it rains, the moon has babies in all the puddles, right?”
Hello! How are you?
The scene snippet above takes place in the Starboard Watch, a cozy and sometimes volatile public hearth and village watering hole in my novel in progress, The Afterlife of Ink. Jasper Soule has made the mistake of waxing sentimental over drink and song, sharing his great grandfather’s stories of what the world was like before the Big Winter. Fanciful tales about things that aren’t here and now don’t fly with pipeman Keen Mingo and the rest in the riverbank village of Duskside. Watch out, Jasper.
It feels great to share this with you. I’m happy with how the work is coming along, and I’m eager to find ways to ensure that I have the time and energy needed to bring this novel to completion in a satisfying timeframe.
I recently posted the following or similar on my Facebook writer page, also known as https://www.facebook.com/jensextonrileywriter/. (Please do visit and follow.)
“For those who are not in the know, after a solid December of preparatory work, I began my new novel in earnest on January 1. It's coming along. I'm hitting my word count, dreaming the setting and characters when I am asleep and waking up ready to write.
The Sexton-Riley-Hischak household has experienced a few challenges lately in the form of illness and The Incredible Exploding Water Heater, but we are surviving and thriving. In addition to my day job and Dan's two day jobs, I am juggling my usual necessary supplementary freelance work to keep the lights on and the bodies and souls together, but as so many of us know, paddling like crazy under the surface is not conducive to cohesive long form creative expression. That's why so few ducks write novels.
After lots of thought, I've decided to follow in the footsteps of many non-duck artists and writers I deeply admire by launching a Patreon to help ease some of the pressure and facilitate the energy, brain space and awake time required to pull off this incredible feat. Stay tuned for launch!”
So! After several years of slow-mo consideration, I find myself preparing to launch a Patreon. This means I am deciding exactly what that means, what my Patreon goals are, what success will look like, what the doable perks are for patrons at various levels which will not take too much time and energy away from writing and so on. I’m excited!
But wait a second. What’s that you say? What’s a Patreon?
First let me emphasize what a Patreon is not. To me, Patreon is not charity or crowdfunding, although some people may use it and view it that way. Patreon is a return to the rosy days when artists and writers---creative types like myself--- were valued as contributing members of society worthy of patronage, defined as support, backing, encouragement, protection, guardianship. Remember the 18th century? You don’t? Well, I don’t either so I’ll skip to the point: Patreon is a way to buck today’s capitalist nightmare, cut out a few middlemen and bring creators and supporters together in harmony and golden symmetry so that books can be written AND bills can be paid.
Deadlines can be met AND roofs can remain over heads.
Brains can take a minute out from juggling eighteen freelance jobs to do that ever-important daydreaming, suppose-iffing and I-wonder-what-would-happening that results in inspiration and literature AND food goes on plates and into dog and cat bowls and bills get paid.
I do not live high on the hog. I have been an adult for a long time and I have yet to own a proper bed of my own with a bed frame, for example. My 1999 Toyota sits dead in the backyard because I can’t afford to have the brakes fixed, so I am driving my mother’s 1992 Dodge Colt, whose transmission is failing. I haven’t had my hair cut in at least a year. I tend to wear one pair of shoes until the soles separate and my feet get wet in the rain, at which time I replace them with one new pair, which I then wear until they disintegrate. Our 30 year old water heater finally gave up the ghost last week, to the tune of exactly our entire tax refund amount.
I am not looking for caviar money.
I just don’t want to have to work so hard at freelance in addition to my day job that I have nothing left to give to my writing.
Who is more often quoted than Shakespeare? Polonius gave his pep talk to Laertes in Hamlet: “This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.” Malvolio read from a letter in Twelfth Night: “…be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.” We hear a lot from The Bard, but we don’t often hear these words penned to his patron, the Earl of Southampton:
“The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety.”
I do not compare myself to old Uncle Will except in what I offer, as he did, to my beloved patron: love without end and many, many superfluous moieties. So many moieties.
If I may humbly ask,when I do launch, please become my patron. It will mean the world to me.
Stay tuned for launch announcement.
See you soon!
Jen Sexton-Riley
November Spawns a Monster
Or, you know, a new journal. And some other things.
November is here.
The portion of Halloween decorations that we don’t keep out all year round have been tucked into their beds for the long wait until next October, and 2018 is starting to feel a bit creaky and stiff. She’s got leaves in her hair. Her fingers are icy. The whole place yawns toward winter, and dreams had within these walls now take place in underground museums and odd, subterranean banquet halls with platter after platter of mysterious delights carried in by snappily attired waitstaff who aren’t quite human. It’s a good time of year. We’re alive. Stories are making themselves known, demanding attention in the way that stories do.
In addition to writing lots of short fiction and constructing the skeleton of a new novel, in November I am preparing to do something I’ve never done before. I’ll soon launch a Patreon featuring the short, serialized science fiction and fantasy adventures of gastronomic critique columnist and speculative fiction bon vivant Astrid Ata, a character I enjoy writing about. My first Astrid Ata story was published by Daily Science Fiction, where it received a respectable 4.6 rocket dragons. I've written a few more of Astrid’s exploits since then. I hope you’ll visit my future Patreon to read "The Unusual Adventures of Astrid Ata, Gastronomic and Otherwise". Coming soon.
I can’t finish a First Journal Post Ever without mentioning Clarion West. It’s been three and a half months now since my return from Clarion West 2018, and every day I am struck by the number and variety of ways the place, the time, the experience changed me. I am delirious with both anguish and relief because I can never, ever go back. To that time. That place. Those people. That one, unique circle of faces. I hope to see them ringed around me again in different places, in times to come.
I’ll say more about Clarion West in future journal posts. The experience is a lot to process, and I find the memories difficult to coax down and wrestle into words.
I’ll get there.
Until December.