micro fiction – Andy writes!

The year in numbers

Another end-of-year wrap-up that nobody asked for.

I’m not going to bore you with some tale of woe about all the personal life challenges 2025 brought to me and my loved ones. We all face those, year in and year out, and some years are tougher than others, and in the end, it’s all relative. Suffice it to say that I’m a fortunate person and I try to be grateful for all of life’s blessings.

So instead, I will bore you with a listicle about my year in writing.

Friday Five: lessons from a lit mag first reader

What I’ve learned from the past six months of reading submissions for a literary magazine

For the past six months or so, I have volunteered as a first reader for a literary magazine. In this role, I’ve been one of the first people to read some 150 flash and micro-fiction submissions to this magazine. They come from writers of all kinds. There are the newcomers seeking their first acceptance, the veterans with several publications and awards to their credit, the MFA graduates and PhDs, the college professors, the undergraduates, the college dropouts, the writers of science fiction, horror, humor, crime, romance, fantasy and just about every other genre, including literary, and writers from every continent except Antarctica. I’ve read pieces submitted for contests as well as regular submissions to the magazine.

The experience of reading all of these submissions has taught me a lot about writing and the submission process, and I hope these five lessons will help you, too.