Writing Update: April 2025
Three new pieces, a microromance, a long form sci-fi, and a collaboration, brings variety to April.
April has been one of my favorite months of 2025 so far and included landmark events such as a trusted editor, Jaime Dill of Polish & Pitch, reading the third revision of my novel. If you need a professional, hire Jaime. Her keen-eyed and kind read set me up nicely with what I need to improve in the next version, so who knows, maybe we do have a book on our hands here! F(r)iction magazine, which published an interview with one of my favorite authors in their “Gods” March issue, announced the results of their Fall Flash Fiction competition that I won (!!) and where my two other entries made the finalist list. Anyway, onwards into publication and recommendation land for the month.
What was published in April
In April, my published work had a wide variety of micro pieces to longer form sci-fi as well as an interview. We’ll go in increasing order of length below.
Unlike Ships In The Night - Microromance
Read time: <2 minutes (100 words)
2025 might be the year of the romance story for me as this marks my second publication of a romance story this year. It’s short and sweet and involves some date night art.
Moorings - Moonlit Getaway
Read time: <7 minutes (1,000 words)
Leigh Loveday and I were paired up a year ago in April for a collaborative piece in Icebreakers Lit’s architect and haunter issue. Since then, we’ve written three stories together, and hopefully more to come! This one is a speculative flash that place around with narration and memory. Always grateful to work with fellow artists and explore new forms and ways of structuring our words.
Maybe We Can Be Just Two People Talking - The Colored Lens
Read time: <15 minutes (3,000 words)
This science fiction based piece was actually published last March with The Colored Lens in their print magazine, but they’ve recently rereleased it for free on their website. I dreamed of appearing in The Colored Lens since college so it was wonderful to have that goal realized last spring and, once again this year. It’s about a therapist who does memory erasure work in a not so distant future.
An Interview - Pictura Journal
Read time: <3 minutes (500 words)
I had a lot of fun doing this short form interview with Pictura Journal and some of my responses I wrote as mini vignettes about my creative process, where I find myself writing, and how I get through writers block (which also, in that last answer, shows I can’t count).
My favorite reads of April
Another month, another wonderful set of reads. Balancing my feature of two nonfiction books from last time with two fictional novels this time around.
Fiction (Literary): Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
Ok so, I have a deep and abiding love for Coleson Whitehead - Underground Railroad is still one of my favorite books of all time. With this novel, I actually saw the movie first before I read the book and loved both for similar reasons: namely, they have cinematic, almost film-school qualities to them; the sentences are sparse but punchy, the scenes and stills instill fear in the viewers just with sound and motif. The novel follows two young men who, by bad-luck, circumstance, and just plain racism, end up in an abusive reformation school for boys in the 1960s. Set against the backdrop if the horrific, real-life Dozier School for boys, the novel follows a friendship that unfolds amidst heroism, suffering, and the civil rights movement.
Fiction (Mystery): The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
This one was a slow burn for me, so much so that I probably didn’t find my full footing as a reader until about a third of the way into the book. A part of this was due to the narrative structure and constantly shifting POVs as well as shifting time periods. The novel follows the disappearance of a camper in the 1970s whose own older brother had similarly vanished a decade before. The novel deals with themes of class stratification and sexism and does make you feel like you’ve been transported to the woods of New York in the 70s. That being said, in contrast to the Nickel Boys which takes place around the same time period, it’s one full of the first-world problems of white people, albeit some of whom are working class.
Other things of note & the look ahead
Right now, most of my pieces for 2025 have publications dates of June and July so we might have a doldrums in May in terms of published work (but who knows)! I’m currently planning my fourth revision of my WIP and meeting with an agent via Grub Street in mid-May. Once I’m through this next (maybe final?) version, I’m hoping to turn my eye to a novella I have waiting in the wings that needs a good rewrite, and maybe even start on my next novel (the idea of which is all credit to Dan).
A few statistics
Year to date: 22 pieces slated for publication in 2025 with 14/22 paid. 9.9% acceptance rate.
Total submission sent in 2025: 74
Submission pending in 2025: 28
Rejections received in 2025: 58