Deborah Adams's Blog, page 7

10 places to submit your writing in May 2025

I’m usually swimming in great places to submit—more places than I can write for, anyway. For 2025, I’m going to share a few of them every month. None of these charge fees (according to the information I have), and all should be open for submissions at least through the end of the month.

Hippocampus anthology themed issue

Theme is personal histories.

Boomer Lit Mag themed issue

Theme is resilience Note: they accept submissions from all ages, not just Boomers.

Luna Station Quarterly

They publish short f...

Showers, Flowers, And The Power Of Many Small Acts

I’ll include some links with each monthly recap, and I hope some of these will be of help to you. Please let me know if that’s really so.

NOTE ABOUT SUBSCRIPTIONS TO MY NEWSLETTER

Any money I receive from paid subscriptions will be donated to an organization or organizations that do good in the world. This includes some that take care of the earth, animals, and people who are experiencing extraordinary challenges.

Some of you have already opted for paid subscriptions to my Substack newsletter, and ...

Real American Hero: Lt. Kara Spears Hultgreen

What’s this about?

Kara Spears Hultgreen[was the first female carrier-based fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy. She was also the first female fighter pilot in the U.S. military to die in a crash.

Hultgreen was a Distinguished Naval Graduate of the Aviation Officer Candidate School at Naval Air Station Pensacola. She was one of the first female pilots to complete F-14 Tomcat training at NAS Miramar, California.

According to a Wikipedia entry, “Her call signs were “Hulk” or “She-Hulk“, for her ability to...

Find Your Fictional Character’s Energy Motivators

A few years ago I put together a seven-part series about energetic motivators, and spread the parts around to different blogs. I’m bringing all those ducks home, and will be sharing one per week in this newsletter beginning next Friday. I hope you’ll find this concept helpful for writing and maybe even for life.

Here’s a brief explanation of what this is all about:

It doesn’t matter what genre you’re writing, characters are the lifeblood of your story. No matter how perfectly-plotted, tightly-st...

b.read.crumbs : Truth or Dare

Julie and I changed horses in the middle of the creek, moving from fairy tale prompts for our b.read.crumbs posts to Truth or Dare prompts (these come from a card deck provided to attendees at the 2022 MTSU Writers Conference. I recommend it for many reasons, not just the cards.)

This month, I drew a Truth card with the prompt: How have you changed over the course of your life? Write a scene from your teenage years that epitomizes the type of person you were, then write a scene from now that show...

3 Questions & a Pose ~ Susanna Barkataki

Question 1

Which came first, your yoga or your writing?

Yoga definitely came first for me. I began practicing as a child through the teachings of my family. Long before I ever wrote about yoga, I was living it. Woven into daily life not as exercise, but as ritual, ethic, and way of being. My father taught me visualizations, mantra, mudra, body relaxation practices. All of which I later use in my writing!

Writing came as a natural extension of that lived practice. I often say, “You can’t live what y...

Brandi Bradley – 3 Questions & a Cover

Question 1

In what genres have you written, and which one of them gives you the most satisfaction?

I feel like I’ve tried just about every genre. I was a reporter writing on the events of the day. I’ve written creative (or literary) nonfiction, processing certain events of my life. I’ve written a ghost story, a fantasy, and tried to write a few sexy romances. But the genre that I’m most satisfied writing is crime/mystery. I like stories that explore the choices of humans – often poor choices, but ...

Ann Fisher-Wirth ~ 3 Questions & a Poem

Question 1What do you consider the three most important elements of a poem?

“A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words,” William Carlos Williams once wrote. When I first encountered this remark I was put off, because it seems so opposite from Keats’s organic view of poetry as coming as naturally as leaves to a tree. But Williams is not really opposing Keats, and he is right: poems are made of nothing but words—not fine sentiments, not abstract truths. And so the words need to be aliv...

Real American Hero: Technical Sergeant Peggy Jo Hervatine

What's this about?

Sgt. Hervatine dedicated twenty-eight years to military service. At the time of her death, she was serving with the 144th Fighter Wing of the California Air National Guard, based in Fresno, California.

I’m Not Making This Up

I’ll include some links with each monthly recap that I hope will be of help to you. Please let me know if that’s really so.

A group of mystery writers I know were enjoying an exceptional meal at a fancy restaurant while quizzing a forensics expert on the life cycle of maggots.

Convention-going writers were convened in the bar (where else?) and mulling over a particular book club's rule about not carrying books in which a child was killed. One of the writers demanded (loudly) to know, "How do they ...