34P No.4 IS COMING SOON!!!

We've got an EXCITING fourth issue lined up NEARLY ready to publish!!! Stories and poetry you will want to read again and again!!! Great art and photography too!!

Like here's a sound bite from Mel Fawcett's short story Blue Note --

‘Hi, Eric,’ I say with a smile. He glances at me, rocks slightly, and starts to go into the club. Then he turns back and approaches me. This has to be one of the greatest moments of my life. ‘Hey kid, you seen Ross?’ The sickly-sweet smell of dark rum nearly floors me.

And then this poem by Diana Der-Hovanessian --

After your funeral
I came home wanting to talk
to you about it.

Just some teasers to MUCH MUCH MORE!!!!

34thParallel Online...Up and Running

Friends of 34thParallel--Our online magazine is up and running! Yes, we hope that having an online version will give us the freedom of publishing more outstanding work from emerging writers and artists. Visit the site at http://www.34thParallel.blogspot.com


Attention 34thParallel Contributors--We're interested in what you're doing! Send your updates, book release dates, book signings, readings/appearance dates to us to be featured on the blog.



34thParallel in Print
Look for our next magazine 34thParallel Issue 3 in print and ready to read in April. We're excited and hope you'll get a copy and tell your friends! Visit our site for more info:
http://www.34thParallel.net


34thParallel Featured
Looking to find us elsewhere on the web? Look for our profiles at the following excellent sites:

Duotrope's Digest is a database of over 2125 current markets for short fiction, poetry, and novels/collections. Use this page to search for markets that may make a fine home for the piece you just polished. Use the menus at the top and right to explore the rest of the free services we offer writers and editors, including a free online submissions tracker for registered users. Here's our profile:

34thParallel Duotrope Profile -- http://www.duotrope.com/market_2211.aspx



editred is a writing community & writing forum, providing the best networking platform for writers, poets and authors available. Post your writing, get peer feedback, hone your skills, write on! The site also has great resources, a bookstore specifically geared to writers, and allows writers to sell their books from the site for FREE! YES FREE! An excellent policy in our view!
View our profile at: http://www.editred.com/34thParallel


New Pages: Good Reading Starts Here! News, information and guides to independent bookstores, independent publishers, literary magazines, alternative periodicals, independent record labels, alternative newsweeklies and more.

Visit our profile at: http://www.newpages.com/npguides/litmags.htm

The Power of the First Line

34thParallel Online Issue in March

Recently I was reading a blog by a literary agent about the importance of the first line of the first page. When you think about it, the first sentence on that very first page may be the most important one in the entire book. Some have argued the first sentence should grab the readers attention and compel them to continue beyond that first page, but whether that first line is an indicator of the merit of the rest of the pages that follow is surely up for debate.

While some of the greatest masterpieces in literature and popular fiction succeed with their first line, there are probably just as many that are too long, too subtle, boring, and the reader might as well skip them for the second or third sentences.

For example not many of us don't know this one:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so."

Dickens's classic first line from A Tale of Two Cities is memorable to most if not for the length then for the fact that the book is required reading for almost every secondary English class on the planet.

Here's another classic first line:

"On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor."

As enticing as the plot of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles is, his first line pales in light of the rest of the book.

And one of my favorite books of all time, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen starts with:

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

Here are some others that do the first line quite well:

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
--Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into a giant insect."
--Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

And then some first lines that...well just go on...and on, and on:

"Isaac McCaslin, 'Uncle Ike', past seventy and nearer eighty than he ever corroborated any more, a widower now and uncle to half a county and father to no one ---- this was not something participated in or even seen by himself, but by his elder cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of Isaac's father's sister and so descended by the distaff, yet not withstanding the inheritor, and in his time the bequestor, of that which some had thought then and some still thought should have been Isaac's, since his was the name in which the title to the land had first been granted from the Indian patent and which some of the descendants of his father's slave still bore in the land."
--Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner

There are a few other's that would work here in the "going on and on group," but reading them online is just shy of torture.

Which brings to mind the fact that some writing is better suited for the printed page and needs to be printed. While other writing works better (and by working we mean reads better) online. With this in mind, we've decided to create an online version of the magazine. Yes, we'll still have the printed version also available in downloadable digital format. But, we think that there are some pieces we'll publish online, which for whatever reason aren't suited for the print mag and vice versa (other works won't work online).

Stay tuned for the new online version.We hope you'll enjoy the new format! Take a look at our modified guidelines, the word counts are shorter for online. Look for the first issue in March.

Keep working on those first lines, but remember what comes after it is just as (if not more) important!

All the Best,

Les éditeurs,
34thParallel