End Of An Era

Hi everyone! 

I am Young Adult and Middle Grade author Barbara Binns, writer of contemporary and realistic fiction for adolescents and teens. As my tagline says, I write Stories of Real Boys Growing Into Real Men - and the people who love them.  

This year marks the 8th anniversary of the Romancing The Genres blog. That makes it my 8th year of my nearly uninterrupted writing a monthly post for this blog. I've been a part of things right from the start.

2019 also marks the 21st anniversary of the Arlington Almanac. This journal is sent to residents of Arlington Heights and some surrounding towns. That means people in this predominantly white Chicago suburb gets to read diverse stories about people in Chicago written by me.

I have crafted short stories/flash fiction for the Almanac four times a year for the past eleven years. That means dozens of well received stories of diversity.  This was so important to me, that I have frequently found myself agonizing over a way to tell a new story in the space of 800 words or less only days before the magazine’s deadline.

Never again.

Just a few weeks ago I received this letter along with my quarterly check:

Hey Ms. Binns 

Hope all is good with you!

Wanted to let you know how much we appreciated all your stories that you’ve sent us over the years. We’ve decided that the upcoming Spring book will be our last edition.

The End of an Era for us.

For me too.

This is it. No more deadlines or letters of praise from Mindy and Jim, the publishers. No more checks either.

I met them a dozen years ago at a writer's group held at the Arlington Heights Memorial Library. Jim loves to write, and he is amazing at political satire. So biting and pointed is his satire, that his wife, the publication's senior editor, often refuses to publish one of his stories. They invited some of the other authors present to submit to their publication. At first, I thought it would be impossible. Over the years, I developed a love-hate relationship with the Almanac.  My first story was a memoir type piece about my daughter. That also generated my first piece of fan mail from someone who had had a similar experience with her own child. I have no idea how many stories I have completed for them since then.

Over the years, writing regular flash fiction has taught me  how to write tight. I can now do what I once considered impossible, tell a complete story, beginning, middle and end, in under 800 words. BTW, their limit was supposed to be 750 words, but they never got upset at me when I went over. I only had them refuse one story and that was more for being a little too political than for length. I've written about diverse characters, locations and situations. They told me they loved everything they wrote.

PS, I never confessed this to the publishers, but I guess it's okay to do it now. Those letters of praise meant more to me than the checks that came with them. I might have done it for those alone. From a letter last summer:

Hey B. B. 

Happy Summer, if it ever stops raining! I'm sitting at the Library where I met most of the writers who adorn our little book. Thank God for Libraries! And thank you for your summer story!

One thing I liked most was that the Almanac became a vehicle for me to introduce a largely white audience to diverse stories.  My 2018 holiday story covered a Chicago family celebrating Kwanzaa.  The 2014 story dealt with an overweight teen girl shopping for a baby shower present for a relative and being mistaken for a pregnant teen (An incident that really happened to my daughter once.)  I've given them stories about a child watching his father die of cancer, a white minister dealing with car trouble in the middle of the night while driving through "the ghetto", and my most resent story for the almanac, a black man in prison during a riot helping rescue a prison guard left behind the lines. I've never shied away from diverse stories, and my audience and my editors have always approved.

Not intending to be caught in a vise by another deadline, I had already sketched out the idea for my next story. It was going to be awesome, about kids dealing with the threat of bullying. Now that story will forever be an idea.

I wish Jim and Mindy the best. They are approaching seventy, and it's time for them to rest. It's just that I will miss them and the lessons they taught me, that I could do more than I ever thought I could.

https://www.almanaclocal.com/