Text. Friend. Follow.
#storiesFromLivingOnline

(Former working title: "Only Interconnect")
Call for Submissions: April 30, 2013

Have you penned fables featuring Flickr? Tales told through texting? Pinterest prose, Reddit reading, LinkedIn lit, irony over Instagram — or flash fiction in the framework of Facebook? If so, your work may have a place in Text. Friend. Follow. a print and e-Book exploring the intersection between social media and literary fiction to be published in October 2013.

Digital media is now an inescapable aspect of how our lives are lived, and it influences who, what, where, why and how we read — and write. Increasingly, writers not only invoke emails, iPads and even good old MySpace in our plots, but integrate interactive conventions into the actual form and structure of our work.

Text. Friend. Follow. is being curated by Shawn Syms (@shawnsyms), an writer, critic and editor with a keen interest in how short stories are increasingly informed by digital-media platforms — from blogging to YouTube, DeviantArt and eBay.

Text. Friend. Follow. seeks highly creative work whose content and/or form are inspired by social media — great writing that moves beyond using digital forms as mere quirks or gimmicks. In essence, we’re looking for effective, provocative storytelling whose form and content just happens to be pretty damn innovative, too.

We'd love to see new, previously unpublished work but we're open to giving a wider audience to reprints aligned with our theme (please indicate if your work is previously unpublished or if it has appeared somewhere already.)

(PS: We have enough pieces centred on Facebook at this point! Thanks.)

(PPS: More literary fiction, less essays or poetry, please!)