Digital Art – OLD SCRATCH PRESS

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It’s Not Too Late for Gravy

Published on September 21, 2025 by diannePLeave a comment

The holiday/end of year issue of INSTANT NOODLES, the issue where we always ask people to try for humor. Do you have what it takes to make us smile?

Submissions for 2025 are open through November 2, 2025.

The Old Scratch Press team asks that all fiction/non-fiction pieces adhere to a word count of 1,000 words or less.

2025 Themes and Topics

GRAVY is our 2025 winter holiday theme. Give us your best holiday gravy fails, mishaps, ridiculous gravy encounters (any December holiday, from Hannukah, to Solstice, to NYE, etc.) or your best wry work about gravy, in general. The point of the end-of-year issue is always to be light-hearted to downright silly. Submissions for GRAVY are open through NOVEMBER 2, 2025; the issue will publish on DECEMBER 1, 2025. Please CLICK HERE to submit. We’re looking for short fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, art, and multi-media.

INSTANT NOODLES is always free to submit to, and free to read. We’re about to announce the pieces that were published that we’re submitting to BEST OF THE NET and PUSHCART, so stay tuned to this station!

Thanks for being an INSTANT NOODLES participant and/or fan! We appreciate you giving indie authors a place to get read!

Join Us! You Know You Want To!

Published on June 21, 2025June 21, 2025 by diannePLeave a comment

SECRETS of a WRITING VOICE

Published on January 30, 2025January 25, 2025 by wyn001100Leave a comment

by ROBERT FLEMING, Founding member of OLD SCRATCH PRESS – a poetry/short-form collective | estd. 2023

So confused. Isn’t a voice linked to speaking, singing, and screaming? What does a voice have to do with writing? What the fu** Robert?

A “writing voice” refers to the unique style and personality a writer expresses through their writing, which is a combination of their vocabulary, tone, sentence structure, and perspective, essentially how their individual personality comes across on the page.

what is a writing voice – Google Search

For poetry, yours truly, defines a voice profile:

Style: traditional, experimental, vs in between
Themes (e.g. love, war)
Forms (e.g., free verse, iambic pentameter)
Devices (e.g. enjambment: 1 line continues onto next), metaphor, simile, rhyme)

CREATE A VOICE to INCREASE PUBLICATION SUCCESS

Most poetry magazine acceptance rates are about 2.4%. In order to increase your chance of publication acceptance success, create a writing voice and then target publications that have published work with your voice within the last two-years.

A writing acceptance rate is like a baseball player’s batting average (BA). Josh Gibson’s 1946 BA of 37.2% is the highest career Major League Baseball BA.

Josh Gibson

My poetry voice profile:

Style: experimental
Themes: masculinity, sexual orientation, sin/virtue, dystopia
Forms: visual poetry, free-verse, Japanese Haiku/Mondo, sonnet, and pantoum
Devices: sound (rhyme, alliteration, assonance), duality, homonyms, multiple-word-reversals, and end-titles

CREATING a WRITING VOICE

Oh NO Mr. Robert, an assignment is coming. Sir and madam, it is, I cannot lie.

A sleepless night, 3/14/1996, yours truly obsessed compulsed, to translate four of his favorite poets to a gay style: Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, John Berryman, and Dorothy Parker.

What I did for each poet:

Select a favorite poem
Analyze and document what the poem is (theme, form, devices) and why you like it
Read the poem out loud
Make an audio recording of your reading
Handwrite the poem
Type the poem
Translate the poem to your style
Place the original poem and translation side by side

What was the outcome impact of yours truly doing this exercise:

In 1997, a follow-up creation of a visual poem that translates Dorothy Parker was included in art show in the District of Columbia

Self-discovery that my style is experimental and an integration of one of the poets studied: Robert Frost and another poet: Dr. Seuss

More Voice Discovery guidelines: make diverse selections

Select work written in different time eras: 50% 1,800 or earlier, 50% 1,900 and later
Gender: 50% men, 50% woman
Style (traditional vs experimental): at least 1 experimental

Discover your writing voice and use it!

Yours Truly is:

Robert Fleming, a contributing editor of Old Scratch Press

OLD SCRATCH PRESS – a poetry/short-form collective | estd. 2023

who published an Amazon best seller visual poetry book: White Noir

white noir: Fleming, Robert: 9781957224183: Amazon.com: Books

an editor of the digital magazine Instant Noodles

About – INSTANT NOODLES

Holiday Noods!

Published on November 30, 2024 by diannePLeave a comment

Happy Holidays for sure when you check out the new issue of INSTANT NOODLES curated by Old Scratch Press. It’s a fun one ’cause we’re in the nood!

Step-by-Step Guide to Making Digital Monsters

Published on October 30, 2024October 23, 2024 by Nadja MarilLeave a comment

By Robert Fleming

For Halloween what are digital graphic artists doing? Yours truly, is making digital images of monsters. Oops! Oh NO, I came out as a digital graphics artist. I will show you how, to make monsters.

My inspiration for monsters is the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley first published 1/1/1818. Since Mary died 2/1/1851 and Frankenstein sells 40,000 copies a year, who is collecting Mary’s royalties? Hmm?

Frankenstein, Mary’s first monster child

HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN MONSTER

One of the computer software tools I use to create digital graphics is Canva which has a free and paid version. Home – Canva. To create a monster:

access a device with www access
choose your image which could be a photograph you took or an image which is free (in public domain) on the www
cut away the parts you don’t want by cropping the image which is like using an electronic scissors
if the image background has a border frame (like white) you don’t want, you can remove it by using computer software to remove background like Adobe Express Free Image Background Remover | Adobe Express
on the www go to Canva
in Canva create a Design
upload your image(s) into Canva (toolbar to the left of your image)
copy/move your uploaded image to your design page
click on the image
duplicate the image page (so you will have the original), toolbar on the top right of the image, click on the +
move your curser to the duplicate image
click on edit, toolbar above your image, left side
on left side of image, click on apps “see all”
click on Liquify (4^th row, far right)
click on Flow (2^d row, far right)
set the flow options: melt amount 1 / melt scale 1/ woble amount 1 /woble scale 1
if you like the image, click on “save”