Cuckoos, sea cucumbers, and unsettling shiny hotdogs
Plus, oh yeah—Diachro submissions open again soon! Send us your weird book-length scribblings
It’s almost time for more manuscripts to pile into Diachro’s inbox like unsettling shiny hotdogs! It is always such a delight to see what everyone’s l’il brains are cooking up out there.
With the proliferation of mainstreamed and algorithm-created content—especially AI-written books, which are flooding Amazon (and literally hurting people, yikes)—we (and others) expect people are going to crave more and more idiosyncrasy, undergroundness, nicheosity, grassrootedness, and just plain weird weird weird from their media.
Diachro is very pleased to be on the hunt for all the above.
For Diachroneity Books’ upcoming submission window of Sep 1–Nov 30, along with our usual call for “unhomeable literature,” we seek specifically and only:
Manuscripts from writers belonging to underserved groups.
Manuscripts that fit a few specific descriptions, including funny horror and anithero origin stories, among a couple others.
Our Submissions page holds all the details ye seek!
—Jaclyn & Kirstyn,
Diachro Co-Captains
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~“Your Surrealist literature starter kit: André Breton, Leonora Carrington, Kobo Abe, and More” {LitHub}
Need a jumpstart for your creative brain? It can be truly hard to access it, with all the instant and easily digestible media we’re constantly fed these days. (We’re prone to more TikTok binges than reading binges, too. You’re not alone.) Writer Emily Temple has put together a convenient list of Surrealist and Surrealist-like writings to spark your inner exquisite-corpse machine.
Maybe start with Temple’s favourite, Leonora Carrington:
No one writes like Leonora Carrington. These stories are weird and jagged and enchanting, fragmented and strikingly visual, barely stories at all sometimes, but always oddly compulsive. How else to describe a collection that includes a woman winning the corpse of Joseph Stalin in the lottery and using it to cure whooping cough and syphilis?
“How boredom can spark creativity” {BBC News}
Engaging with others’ compelling art isn’t the only way to tap them creative juices. What we all really need is more boredom, as it turns out. Can someone help us turn off our phones, puhleaaaase.
Agatha Christie […] credits having to find her own ways to entertain herself with kickstarting her prolific writing career. “There’s nothing like boredom to make you write,” she said in a 1955 BBC interview. “By the time I was 16 or 17, I’d written quite a number of short stories and one long dreary novel.”
Meanwhile, David Foster Wallace (cover star of last week’s newsletter)
was so fascinated by boredom he based a novel on it. He set the posthumously published The Pale King in a tax office and, in a note found with his unfinished manuscript, explained his reasoning. “It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom.”
Speaking of nonlinear and associative methods of thinking, check out Eminem’s lyric sheet for “Lose Yourself.” (Get a real good zoom)
Hold up, maybe TikTok is good for our creative minds?? Enjoy this thirteenth-century earworm about the summer and the cuckoo-koo-koo.
How to deal with the cognitive dissonance of “great art” but “terrible artist”: BREAK OUT THE SPOON 🥄🥄🥄
🌊 Co-Captains’ Log 🌊
KIRSTYN: What’s your honest opinion on horoscopes?
JACLYN: Wow, diving into the controversial topics already, huh, Kirstyn. I think horoscopes are a great tool for people to have positive affirmations delivered into their lives. On the other hand, I think folks who believe the stars determine or foretell humans’ lives but not, like, beetles’ lives or hyenas’ lives or whatever are really anthropocentric and need to decentre their worldview. It’d be really weird for the stars to make special plans for humans but not voles, no? Until I see a birth chart for a sea cucumber, it’s a no for me.