Posts Tagged ‘longshot 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.

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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:

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