Posts Tagged ‘48 hour magazine’

A Longshot Tale of Family Debt

Saturday, July 30th, 2011

The third time is a charm, the saying goes.

I hope so.

I’m in Detroit for Kendra’s high school reunion, but it didn’t stop me from squeezing out a bit of writing. Below is my third raw and unedited submission to Longshot Magazine, whose ordained theme for this issue is debt.  The previous two stories I sent in perished during editorial review: one about the New Horizons spacecraft (for the hustle-themed issue) and the next about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (for the comeback issue).

This time I stepped away from science and did a little in-family reporting on my last name. Which may or may not be Mosher, thanks to our gambling-rich bloodline.

I want to be skeptical that the core story is true, but something tells me that it is.

Anyway, enjoy. As an added bonus, I’ve posted the conversation I had with my father.

(more…)

Not by a Longshot?

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

Longshot magazine (formerly 48 HR magazine*) screamed onto the internet/magazine/media experimentation scene in May, and went for round two this past weekend. Never heard of it? The magazine’s maxim is as follows: Produce a full, glossy and finished issue in 48 hours or less(!).

The editors pull it off by decreeing a theme, then granting hopeful contributors 24 hours** to submit their text, photos, illustrations and other content. In the following 24 hours, the mag’s staff selects, arranges, generates art, edits, fact-checks, copyedits, designs and posts a final product to an on-demand magazine publisher called MagCloud.

I didn’t make the cut in issue “zero” (as I lament in another post), themed hustle, nor did I make it this time around in issue one, themed comeback.

But I’m not too bummed about it, seeing as there were hundreds of submissions, many by writers I hold immense respect for. I can also see many reasons why my submission wasn’t published — in a way, I’m glad. To name a couple shortcomings, the piece had at least one three errors (fixed in this version), weird structure (not fixed) and lacked enough context/explanation (not fixed).

In my defense, I hope Longshot manages to launch an issue when I:

a) am not moving at a high rate of speed

b) have a reliable (or any) internet connection

and

c) can commit my full, undivided attention for more than a few minutes at a time

Even if that day never arrives, I’ll still crank out content for them in a frenzied, disorderly way. In the meantime, constructive criticism is welcome:

(more…)

A failed attempt at 48 Hour Magazine

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

- Thomas Edison

Well, I did my best to sneak into the pages of 48 Hour Magazine — a “raucous experiment in using new tools to erase media’s old limits.”

Unfortunately my 430ish words didn’t make the final cut for their “issue zero,” which was themed around the word hustle.

Alexis Madrigal of WIRED tells me that my piece made it far, in fact sailing into the second round. But there it met demise in the face of stiff competition.

Low on battery power, high on hopes, and swimming in motion sickness, I gave it everything I could while crammed into a Ford Escort during a 20-hour road trip to Florida. And regardless of the circumstances, I still think it’s a pretty neat piece. (See below.)

But please don’t mistake my words for whining; that makes for poor company, and even poorer blogging!

This was a hell of a lot of fun, I learned a lot, and I’m extremely thrilled that I even had the opportunity to try, follow through with a submission, and make it as far as I did in the selection process.

I’ll rest peacefully tonight knowing that 48 Hour Magazine appears to be a shining, glorious, smashing success — congrats to all of you guys and gals, contributors included — and that there will always be next time.

That said, here’s my submission:

(more…)