Part 5 of a multi-blog series on how many ways there are for writers of all stripes to make a living doing what they love. Check out #1 here on Fictional Cafe, and #4 on my own blog. Anthologies Anthologies are collections of short stories by several authors, compiled by everybody from major publishing houses to simple Kickstarted projects leveraging the fundraising power of multiple authors. As a reader, chances are you’ve discovered at least one of your favorite writers by encountering her first in an anthology of one kind or another. In a lot of ways, writing a story for an anthology is a lot like writing for a magazine. You find out it exists, you pitch the project, and if they accept you they publish your story in a volume along with several…

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Editor’s Note: Storm season is upon us folks. If you happen to live in one of the states hit by Winter Storm Jonas, godspeed to you. Religion puns aside, it has been an eventful start to the new year. Mine started with a tribute to my alma mater’s mascot. We hope that yours has been joyous, or at least involved a good cup of coffee, tea or hot chocolate. Here’s our lineup for our February Submissions. Our first submission this month is from one of our Twitter friends, A. J. Sidransky. He writes crime fiction and in this two-parter short story we get a peek behind the curtain at police life. Find out what happens when it gets personal. Next, we have a poetry collection from the talented Holly Guran. Holly’s poems are a blast…

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Welcome to 2016 at the Fictional Café! Thanks for sipping along with us into our third year of operation. We’d also like to thank our friend Lloyd Prentice for his Christmas fiction last month. It’s great to hear from our Featured Writers, Poets, Artists and Photographers, whether it’s for an interview, a fun little snippet of what they do, an invitation to a reading or an exhibition they’re in or for a guest blog. We are ringing in the new year with some great creative work, so let’s get right to it. First up, is our January Featured Writer John Martinson. His novella Who Done Me In? is part sci-fi, part detective story. He creates a whole new world and invites you and your imagination to come along for the ride on this five-parter story. Next,…

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From all of us baristas at the Fictional Café, we would like to thank all of you – our readers, writers, artists, photographers and fans – for your continued support of our site. We simply would not exist without you! Thank you for your submissions, for your subscriptions, for your comments and emails, for your “likes” and friendships, retweets and follows, for your invitations to readings, exhibitions or cups of real coffee. But most importantly, thank you for being a part of our community. We hope that you have found some inspiration for your own life on these pages this past year, as we bid a fond farewell to 2015. We are so excited for next year and the offerings we have in store for you all – some familiar, others novel (no pun intended)….

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If summer seems far away already to you, you’re not alone. Much of the country has donned its winter coats and woolen sweaters, like the gals in our cover photo, a floating art installment by Hilary Zelson called “Who Wears Wool,” a tribute to the wool industry of yesteryear in Fort Point, Boston. The sculpture eerily reminds me of a Trojan Horse – a wolf in sheep’s clothing or in this case perhaps a shark in sheep’s clothing – floating toward an unsuspecting city. Speaking of sharks and sheep, consumers this holiday season may be interested in this new invention to prepare for the winter ahead. But I digress… Here are our December Submissions to celebrate the solstice. This month’s fiction comes from Lloyd Prentice, a novelist whose gritty crime fiction caught our attention in…

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I step into the din that is opening night of “Abstracted” at UFORGE Gallery, and am instantly struck by the energy of the small space on Centre St. in the artsy Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. The brightly lit white walls scream hospital sterile, yet the patrons paint the room vibrantly colorful. This is not the pearl-adorned SoWa crowd of those warm, careless summer days. No, the crowd here is salt-of-the-earth artists and art admirers, chatting away about process and inspiration as much as about personal interests and weekend plans. The sheer volume of artwork strikes me. Thirty artists are featured in this exhibit with one to three pieces each, making the walls close in a little and the people stand nearly shoulder to shoulder throughout the room. As I make my first pass through,…

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