Good tidings,
We here at Sentenced are HARD AT WORK!
This is SENTENCED’s third weekly newsletter, the very first of February.
Thank you for signing up! You will not be disappointed.
If you’re not signed up, and you’re reading this on our website, go ahead and navigate to the JOIN page and put in your email to hear goings-on every Tuesday:
REMINDER: Submissions are OPEN!
Submissions for our web and print outlets are STILL OPEN!
Please submit your static visual art, short comics, and writing ranging from 1 – 4,000 words.
Send your work to sentencedlit@gmail.com
We Are Going to Be Honest
You may notice we now ask people to submit through Gmail instead of our custom-made .org email address. This is because the .org email might not be working properly. We don’t actually know, but the back-end is fucked. If you sent us any work after January 22nd your submission had a very small chance to have been snatched by the specter of cyberspace. Submit again through the Gmail if that sounds like something that might happen to you. Thank you.
We Are Going to Be Honest Again
This week, we have little show for ourselves. But it’s not for lack of effort.
We’ve been working hard not just on getting you fiction, but also on the website’s back-end. Our effort to put a thoughtful, critical eye to each and every submission is paramount to us. We’re working, but the fruits of our labor are yet to be harvested.
In fact, we have been persecuted. Our hosting service took the website down, and though we’ve taken the steps to restore it, it might still be down by the time we send this out.
We have updated our “about” page, and our “editors” page. If the website is up, you’ll see an ever-expanding list of our editors, fellows, and associates. Currently, the fellows section is “coming soon” as some of our fellows have so far failed to provide a photo of themselves, which is fine. As for the associates: we don’t want to talk about it right now.
Now, an apology.
We’ve failed to deliver on last week’s promise of an edited version of Period Live, “Period Live: VOD.”
We haven’t failed to do this just because we were lazy. We failed to do this because of a variety of complicated material and historical factors that have placed us into a bad situation.
“Period Live: VOD” should be out sometime soon. We’ve learned our lesson, and we hope you’ll learn it with us:
Never promise anything on a timeline.
The best way to promise something is by saying it “will happen in the future.” If you haven’t finished it, don’t say you’ll have it done. This is the only way to ensure that no one is ever disappointed when your editor gets a cold and doesn’t feel like doing their job.
We will have incredible stories and articles coming out soon. We will release these through the newsletter. And we will have a prosperous, fulfilling year.
Update RE: Mx. Period
Mx. Period’s family greatly appreciates the flood of support following hir death. The fact is that the police have been incredibly unhelpful in solving the case. They have consistently belittled Mx. Period’s family and asserted that Mx. Period’s cause of death was “self-ending.” We all know it was not. The cracking on hirs body is not consistent with “repeated typographical errors.”
With the support of our readers, Sentenced has hired a Private Investigator named Fluke Dimsworth to look into the matter. The PI costs a lot of money, so we would appreciate more financial support.
For posterity, we’re letting our readers in on the investigation.
Here’s Fluke’s report:
Photos whapped on my desk with the lightest flick of the editor’s wrist: a circle, broken into a flat oval first, then into shards. Edges inside, teeth, a rotund shape with no lines, cracked like an egg. Hir body stayed on the website, but hir soul was somewhere in the source code, the walls of JavaScript on the back-end, rows and rows of words with no periods, only slashes, brackets, commas, all bricks and mortar for a website that could never truly be optimized…
I wanted to know why the Sentenced collective hadn’t taken hir body off of the page. Least they could do was leave the victim with some dignity. They said they didn’t know how to do it, a bit intimidated by my anger— but that they’d made it so you could click on hir to go to a random page on the site.
I suspected the collective right then. Indifferent morbidity always gives way to Moriarty types, the kind of people to challenge a private dick just for the fun of it. My good sense told me there was no reason for a scheme of that caliber. It seemed more likely they were just incompetent, the kind of hands-off editors who’d leave a typo in a story for kicks, publishing just about anything, formatting errors non-withstanding. Still, I wondered why they’d even coded in the violence. Could’ve protected hir, somehow, instead of leaving hir at the hands of a readership as twisted as theirs.
The poor victim, such a pretty and/or handsome shape before hir death, was collapsed in a pile of its own constitution. The coroner ruled it a suicide, motivated by a lack of readership. To the state, the case was simple: a piece of punctuation that thrived on people reading short stories had cracked hirself up like Humpty Dumpty over lack of readership.
Sentenced didn’t believe that angle, but I’m always inclined to. Fact is, most of the time the cops are right about a suicide; but I realized quickly this might have been an exceptional case. Fact is, I knew this particular period. The corpse on the website was too grizzly to make out, but from the screenshots of hir living days they sent me, I knew hir round shape, hir carefully selected color, the way hir could flatten out and rise back up depending on how much you’d just read…
It was a quiet night, twelve years ago, the Chinatown streets shrouded in the fog. I stepped into a bar, tracking down one of my many dirty bastards. Some public clerk who’d cheated on his wife. I was supposed to catch him there with his mistress, but a shape at the bar caught my eye. The first time I saw hir— close to a circle, Arial font, beckoning me to sit on a stool and grab a much-needed drink. Smoke rose up to the ceiling; the way the cigarette stuck out of the side of hir was like a toothpick leg on a New Year’s lemon pig. “Looking for someone?” ze asked.
“No one you can help me with, friend,” I said. I ordered my dirty martini, and two shots of Mallart alongside it. Down the hatch.
“Don’t you think you’re drinking a bit too much too fast?” ze asked.
“I’m not even close to drunk.”
Ze introduced hirself, tried to get me to respond to the drivel ze found necessary to subject me to. The kind of spit that flop out the lips of characters in the kind of mumblecore short story they put out these days; all too wooden in their wishy-washiness, an on the nose message subverted only by a lack of desire to say what ze meant to say. I got the sense Mx. Period was a con-artist hack when it came to delivering a message in an honest way. The kind of period who’d lie to a reader just to do it.
“I’m not here to talk,” I said. “I’m taking photos of a perp with this camera here.” I pointed at my Canon, sat bouncing on its strap right over the edge of my drinking jacket, which in turn covered the revolver tucked in my waistband.
“A private eye,” ze said. “Maybe you could help me. My sister’s missing.”
“And what is she, a comma?”
“Yes,” ze said. “And she’s missing.”
We talked a bit more about the sister— how long she’d been gone, the name, the shape— but when it came down to the finish line, ze couldn’t afford me. I figured the case wasn’t worth my time, either. Probably some floozy who’d slipped away to some secret liaison out in San Francisco.
I didn’t talk to Mx. Period for all that long, but in this line of work you learn to read people. Ze was a bit messy, a bit unoptimized, might have dragged the performance of whichever site ze happened to be on. All the same, ze wasn’t the type to end it all over lack of audience, let alone the typeface.
“She’ll turn up,” I told hir, getting up to track my mark to the bathroom. “Runaway dames always turn up.”
Sentenced Lit said they were in contact with the sister, had a name, a number, an address. Ms. Comma, halfway between the beginning and end of Ink Street. Figure she’s as good of a start as any.
We at Sentenced thank Fluke for providing us with this report.
Remember: the person who did this is a reader of Sentenced Lit, and our readership is not that large. Suffice it to say, one of you will be brought to justice.
Reminder!
“Sentenced Vol. 1, No. 1 – to Death” is out now, and you can purchase it by sending us a message through the official channel which fits best for you– Instagram DMing @sentencedlit, emailing sentencedlit@gmail.com, or tweeting at @sentencedlit on twitter.
It’s ten dollars, plus shipping.
Are you unsure? Well, don’t get it, then. We don’t have room for indecisive people in our readership, so try to focus a bit more and make choices, even if they might hurt us financially.
We’ll be kind, regardless of the fact that you’ve disappointed us. If you’d like, you can click here to read Theo Scheer’s “My Secret”. This is one of six stories in the zine, and you should take solace in the fact that you’re only missing out on the five others because of your executive dysfunction.
Thank you for reading!
See you in a week,
Sentenced Lit
