Superstition Review Archives - Elizabeth Maria Naranjo

Posted on December 31, 2018 ·

Since 2014 I’ve avoided declaring writing resolutions and tried keeping things simple with one easy goal—reading one book per week for a total of 52 per year.

This year I far exceeded that goal, partly because I embraced a new-found love of audiobooks. I’ll share my bookish end-of-year recap with you in a few weeks, but for now here’s a list of the writing I published in 2018:

Short Stories

From Autumn to June
A young girl struggles with feelings of loss over an aborted sibling.

I’ve lived all my life without knowing you. Fourteen years. I’ll still never know you, but at least now I know of you. You existed once, and nobody gave you a name, and I’m sorry about that.

The Lost Girls
A six-year-old boy experiences a truly haunted Halloween while trick-or-treating with his sister.

He’d never been to the ocean and didn’t know what the waves sounded like when they broke against the shore, but Timothy knew they didn’t sound like the voices of girls.

Articles

A Different Point of View
In this post for Women on Writing, I reveal a trick to getting to know your characters better.

Start at the Beginning—Using Titles as Prompts
In this post for Superstition Review, I discuss writer’s block and how to beat it.

Essays

Although it didn’t get published, I was thrilled when my essay Pure Imagination won honorable mention in Women on Writing’s essay contest in March.

I may not have writing resolutions for 2019, but I have lots of hopes. I hope to find an agent or publisher for one (or all!) of my three unpublished books. I hope to write something completely different, non-literary, and fun (maybe a cozy mystery?). Above all, I hope to keep scribbling away—preserving memories, creating worlds, and wondering at the magic of it all.

Happy New Year!

A Good Way to End 2016

Posted on December 30, 2016 ·

Image from Flickr by gee gee

Honestly? This has not been a good year for me when it comes to publishing. Part of that is the majority of writing I did in 2015 is tied up in 2 unpublished books. One of the books is a collection of short stories, and I hadn’t been submitting the stories individually because for so long I only imagined them as a collection. That could still happen, but there’s no reason for me not to submit them to literary journals in the meantime, which I started doing this fall.

Numbers-wise, I only had three new publications this year, and I collected more rejections than I care to admit. Still, I believe in quality over quantity, and I’m proud of the pieces I did publish. One of them came out this month in Superstition Review, and you can read it here. “The Woman in Room 248” is the story of a young nursing student trying to reconcile her idealized vision of a dream career with the harsh reality of the job. Superstition Review is a tough journal to get into (this wasn’t my first time trying!) so I was thrilled to join their list of contributors. And I’m relieved that I could end 2016 on a positive note.

Hopefully 2017 will be a more fruitful year; I think it will be, now that I’m not stubbornly hoarding all my newer fiction in the hopes it will be released in the neat little package I’d envisioned. Sometimes dreams need to be let go, but more often they simply need to be re-imagined. I’m a dreamer at heart, so that’s no problem for me.

Sometime in the next few weeks I’ll post my 2016 end of year book survey. I read so much this year (57 books and counting!), and I can’t wait to share some of my favorites with you. Until then, Happy New Year, everyone!