JournalismThough I never meant to get into the news business, my career has meandered that way. I covered sailing for the sports department of the St. Petersburg (now Tampa Bay) Times for the better part of a decade.
Other gigs included Sail magazine, Sailing World, and a handful of regional and specialty publications. Big lesson from journalism: nothing inspires quite as sharply as a deadline and a dangling paycheck. Sailing magazine published an article I wrote about Frankenscot and the Everglades Challenge –– with plenty of photos –– in the June 2014 issue. It's a proud moment when my blog gets a nice re-post in a publication like Scuttlebutt Sailing News. Or when I get a bunch of coverage in the Flying Scot Association magazine, Scots n Water. Book Reviews
I reviewed books for Publishers Weekly, and The Tampa Tribune (now also The Tampa Bay Times) and a local sailing magazine called Southwinds.
What could be better than picking up a sachel of books and then talking about which ones were great? How about –– getting paid for it? The book reviews have since disappeared into the Tampa Bay Times website, but sometimes a phrase from one of my book reviews shows up elsewhere. In an article like this or appearing, usually without attribution, on the paperback version. Seeing my own words on the cover of a book –– even not my own book –– gives me an electric jolt of ego-gratification. Sadly for me, the next steps of evolution in the publishing industry and changes to local newspapers have meant an end to most local book pages –– publishers aren't sending as many review copies out, and newspapers are relying more on wire-service reviews rather than home-grown opinion. Hence the growth of sites like Goodreads.com, I suppose. |
Long FictionMy debut novel is out! It's been a thrilling adventure. Check my many many thoughts about the process on the blog about it: http://www.amysmithlinton.com/she-taught-me-everything
I'm presently at work on a short-ish fantasy novel about true love set in a pre-industrial world where magic exists, and also a sprawling, larger, darker novel set in the same world. Short StoriesRosebud magazine published "At the Crossroads," a short story about a kid from New Jersey named Pinkie Johnson who hopes to rescue the soul of legendary bluesman Robert (no relation) Johnson back from the devil. It appears on page 99 of the April 2004 issue, though not in the Table of Contents, which makes the story kind of invisible to browsers.
The audio magazine 4'33" published a flash-fiction (under 500 words) "In Which I Propose a Handful of Questions to Three of the Citizens Who Are at Present Unable to Answer" in September 2014. The title pretty much sums up the content. A story called "Cleaning Up" was short-listed in good company in The Fiction Desk's Newcomer Contest in February of 2015. It's a gloomy story I plan to anthologize for a short-story collection. Likewise, "Pete and Jenny at the Starlight" was short-listed on the The Fiction Desk's Newcomer Contest in July 2018. "At My Back I Always Hear" appears in Stonecoast Review Issue 3, 2015. That title is a reference to the Andrew Marvell poem and proves the rule that, as Hemingway said, "If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it.*" (*from Death in the Afternoon.) The quarterly literary journal Halfway Down the Stairs published "Waiting at the Bus Stop," in March of 2019. That story is kind of an homage to Jim Kjelgaard. "A Bedtime Story" was published in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature online journal in July of 2019. Additional stories are wandering around looking for publication homes even as I type. |
