Fracture – short story

leaf

Tue, May 31 2022, 6:27 am

wow! thank you for sharing here!

ml6

Tue, May 31 2022, 7:23 am

Thanks! I’m glad everyone has been enjoying it!

amother [ Royalblue ] wrote:

Great story!

The frum magazines don’t discuss choosing to have less or more or specific numbers of children.

This was my first guess for why, too.

amother [ Butterscotch ] wrote:

I would love to know who you are so I can read more of your work! Thank you so much for sharing this.

I don’t really have much else to show, unfortunately. This was my second story submitted (aside from nonfiction I ghostwrote for my sister a few years back). Hopefully there will be more once I have the time to write more. Smile

amother [ Blush ] wrote:

(One minor nitpick: Aliza supposedly has two boys but one is named Laya. Is that a boy's name? I've only ever heard of it as a girl's.)

Sorry about that! I did a very cursory edit and must have missed that.

amother

NeonBlue

Tue, May 31 2022, 7:48 am

Thanks for sharing! Very well written and I really enjoyed. My mil has no daughters and this story resonated.

PinkFridge

Tue, May 31 2022, 8:06 am

It was well written and well structured. Maybe it could use a few minor tweaks (think proofreading type). Welcome and love your sn!
P.S. Yes, the limiting children thing, and just one child to boot, made me think red flag even though there's more discussion about this out there.

amother

Tangerine

Tue, May 31 2022, 8:26 am

PinkFridge wrote:

Welcome and love your sn!.

I don't understand the significance of the sn - what am I missing? Question

PinkFridge

Tue, May 31 2022, 8:28 am

amother [ Tangerine ] wrote:

I don't understand the significance of the sn - what am I missing? Question

Well, most spooks aren't so obvious.

ml6

Tue, May 31 2022, 8:34 am

amother [ Tangerine ] wrote:

I don't understand the significance of the sn - what am I missing? Question

I don’t either 😅 It’s my initials and my birth date.

PinkFridge

Tue, May 31 2022, 8:41 am

ml6 wrote:

I don’t either 😅 It’s my initials and my birth date.

I assume this site's legit: https://www.sis.gov.uk/

ml6

Tue, May 31 2022, 8:43 am

PinkFridge wrote:

I assume this site's legit: https://www.sis.gov.uk/

Ha! Sadly, that middle letter is an L. I think I’m going to pretend otherwise from now on, though.

PinkFridge

Tue, May 31 2022, 8:44 am

ml6 wrote:

Ha! Sadly, that middle letter is an L. I think I’m going to pretend otherwise from now on, though.

Funny, I was thinking, wait, lower case m so is that an ell? But the sheer funness of em eye six won out.

amother

Tangerine

Tue, May 31 2022, 9:03 am

LOL thanks!

shaqued_almond

Tue, May 31 2022, 9:28 am

I'll print it and read it over Shavuot. Thank you!

Oldest

Tue, May 31 2022, 9:44 am

Wow! This has got to be one of the best pieces of frum writing I've read in a long time! Thank you for sharing! I was hooked from the first word

Meatballs

Tue, May 31 2022, 9:50 am

So well written!

Thank you for sharing!!

ShaindyShushan

Tue, May 31 2022, 10:04 am

I, too, found this an enjoyable read.

Are you hoping to revise and submit the story to one of the other frum mags?

I had one problem with the story: I found it unconvincing that a woman in this kind of family and community would openly claim that she's stuck with one child "by choice". If you could find a workaround for that, it would both remove some of the "sensitive content" and resolve a flaw in the story.

Don't take this the wrong way - I like the story a lot, I'm grateful you posted it, but you may be selling yourself short. Just because one mag turned it down, doesn't mean you can't get it published elsewhere. Rejection can be a spur to improvement. And this piece is so good, it deserves to be polished a little more and published somewhere.

As an aside, I'm wondering whether posting an entire story in this forum would make it "already published" from a magazine editor's point of view.

ml6

Tue, May 31 2022, 10:13 am

ShaindyShushan wrote:

Thanks for your feedback! I actually think that a character like Sara Leah would do that because she’s written to be kind of superior and aggressive about it. So this kind of defensive posturing works perfectly for her.

I’m not bothered by rejection! I do most of my writing in the non-Jewish publishing world and that’s 95% rejection, 5% joy lol. In this case, though, I was only interested in submitting to one particular magazine- I started writing frum short stories in the first place because my mother is a huge fan of one magazine and publishing in it would make her happy. Smile

So I don’t mind sharing a couple of hours of work here now that it’s not going to be there! I have some other ideas to work on next, and I’ll get to them when I have the time.

And yes, I imagine that this is considered published!

PinkFridge

Tue, May 31 2022, 10:27 am

And they all fit into the parents' house?

ml6

Tue, May 31 2022, 10:38 am

PinkFridge wrote:

And they all fit into the parents' house?

That’s the part that requires the most suspension of belief to me! 😂 Then again, we’ve crammed twenty-plus people into my in-laws’ tiny one-bathroom house, so maybe Riva has done some extensive renovating in her fabulously large house, lol.

iyar

Tue, May 31 2022, 11:14 am

ml6 wrote:

Making a mother happy is a big mitzvah! Here's some advice for writing a short story that will get her daughter's name into her favorite magazine-

Start with a happily married couple with a good number (5.4 - 9.2) of children. Make sure that if you must have the dh be a professional or (gasp) working, you put in lots of references to him going to mincha, going to a shiur, or even better- giving a shiur. If mom works put in an equal amount of references to her toiling diligently in the kitchen taking challa, peeling vegetables and baking a many layered cake for someone's birthday. Offspring are delivered by the stork without consideration, calculation or other input on the part of adult characters (a few strategically placed labor pains are all right for dramatic effect). Preferably all characters belong to an unidentifiable, very machmir sect of Judaism with no discernible affiliation to any particular derech. If you want to add conflict by having someone wear a different kippa, headcovering, or work when everyone else is learning all day, the conflict must eventually be resolved by everyone getting along famously. If you add conflict with someone going (very slightly) otd, they must see the light before the end. Better and more reliable ways to introduce conflict are- shidduchim (make sure to describe actual dates as briefly as possible or not at all), or a neighbor who can afford the wealthy lifestyle the protagonist can only dream of (but who turns out to be deeply troubled).
In your little town all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
(Yes, I plagiarized that last part.)

PinkFridge

Tue, May 31 2022, 11:19 am

iyar wrote:

You must be talking about Lakewoodbegon.