Welcome
“If I had a magazine I could spend my time filling it up with the best conversation the world has to offer.” - Margaret Anderson
The Flood of the internet has all but swept away the dead trees of literary magazines. Some were buoyed by centuries-old reputations and managed to heave themselves upon driftwood. Others floundered and are lost, while others still were born out of the new waters. Literary magazines today exist in a wide variety of different shapes and sizes, in print and in digital formats, each learning to swim a little differently.
The democratizing nature of the internet presents today’s writers with a million different avenues for publication. Self-publication is now simple and free. The “editor” is quickly becoming an endangered species. The prestige of the elder “little magazines” will likely preserve them for many years to come, but the internet has introduced worlds of new opportunities and challenges.
This subject has been argued ad nauseam for years. Meanwhile, brilliant new literary literary magazines have flourished online. Publishing your own work is satisfying, but having it approved and published by a critical editorial board can be electrifying.
Blink is an experiment. The Tumblr blogging network provides an exciting opportunity for publishing due to its emphasis on reblogging and viral distribution of material. Even better, this rapid reblogging process fosters an inter-blog dialogue that births new ideas and criticisms with amazing immediacy. Blogged material can quickly leave the Tumblr universe and spread to other blogging networks, further expanding the scope of publishing possibilities.
This blogging medium can be translated to a number of different applications. The age-old goal of the little magazine - to bring the best new writing to the masses - fits perfectly with this distribution technique. Still, anyone who spends any amount of time online can attest to the constant barrage of data that demands attention. Nothing online warrants more than a few seconds - minutes, maybe - of your attention at a time.
Blink, and you’re on to the next new thing.
This online publication seeks to marry the exciting, rapid distribution of writing with the immediacy and accessibility that online readers demand. Blink will accept submissions via email of fiction, non-fiction and poetry that do not exceed 50 words. The editors will select the best examples of the strongest, most concise language, and then format the text into a single typographic style, which will then be published as a .jpeg image that links to the author’s blog. Readers will then be able to reblog what they like, praise it, criticize it, and possibly create an ongoing workshop discussion.
This is an experiment that requires the active participation of both writers and readers. It should be fun. Blink, but don’t look away.
