'S Been A While . . .

This is the 'ketchup edition' because a lot has happened and I've missed it all.

• So first, because this blog is about ME, my story "Afterlife" was a Story of the Week over at Narrative Magazine, and what a joy ride that was! Lots of great comments and I felt like a proper writer. For a week. And now to carry on with my big bad self.

• Farewell to Farah Fawcett. Charlie's Angels notwithstanding, she was brave and ballsy and my heart goes out to her and her family and mostly to Redmond, her kid.

• And Michael Jackson, holy shit! Nothing I can add here to the media voyeur monster machine, but his music was sure a part of my life and my kid's life and his weirdness was always something to marvel at.

Freight Stories, No. 5!

The new issue of Freight Stories is up, with a story by yours truly, "Wreckers", and lots of great reading by some awesome writers. And it's gorgeous! Andrew Scott and Victoria Barrett, the editors, have done a beautiful presentation and I'm all verklempt and shit to be amongst such illustrious company!

Gatekeeping and Vetting for Self-Published Books

So, expecting a rise in self-published books as a fallout from the publishing recession, IndieReader.com is a new business that promises to vet self-published books for the discerning reader (for a fee of course, that the author puts up).
From the site:

"Books will be chosen for inclusion on the IndieReader site by a panel of editors, literary agents, and marketing professionals, and all categories of books (except for porn) will be represented. There will be a charge for membership; in exchange, authors will get a sales venue and a web page with its own URL. Authors will set their book's retail price and receive 75% of the sales (the buyer will pay for shipping). Authors will have complete control over the editorial content of their sites with no general restrictions on reviews, interviews, video, and audio."

It's a brave new world for entrepreneurship, yo. Via GalleyCat.

What I One-Clicked Today

Three books, one-click.

Pasha Malla's The Withdrawal Method, which just won Canada's DANUTA GLEED Literary Award for best first collection of short fiction, and may I mention how adorable and funny Pasha Malla is? He scored $10,000 for this one, drinks on Pasha!

Also one-clicked Dennis Lehane's Gone Baby Gone for particular inspiration, and Jhumpa Lahiri's collection Unaccustomed Earth, whose stories, I hear, are so good they make you slit your wrists and gouge out your eyes.

As always, I encourage supporting independent bookstores (but Amazon is so fucking cheap, whaddareya gonna do?)

Writing News!

The storySouth Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2008 have been posted, and Narrative Magazine takes the top spot for best online publication with 8 notable stories.

Yours truly and humbly got a nod for "Lobster Girl" in SmokeLong Quarterly, and dearly beloved Night Train got two nods for "The Tree That Girdles Itself" by Donna D. Vitucci, and "Dating 101" by Angie Chau. Kudos, yo!

More shout outs to my darling pal Myfanwy Collins for her wonderful story "Liar" in Pank, to T.J. Forrester for his story "To the Bone" in Storyglossia, which also gets kudos for 5 notable stories this year. A shout out to FRiGG for 2 starred stories, and have you seen FRiGG's new microfiction issue? Sweet fancy MOSES it's good. Be sure to read the hilarious microfiction debate.

And in other writing news, 3 recent acceptances for yours truly and humbly.

1. "Wreckers" will be in the next issue of Freight Stories
2. "Fallen" (from my novel-in-stories-work-in-progress) will be in the annual (3rd) annual issue of Pank, along with Matt Bell, David Erlewine and the irrepressible Aaron Burch.
   
3. "Birds, Bees" will be in the next issue of The Los Angeles Review.

If I got all this linking right I owe myself a beer.

WordHustler Redux

So I sent myself a submission of a 4 page story via WordHustler to check it out. WordHustler sends submissions of 4 pages or less in a 6X9 manila clasp envelope, so the submission is folded in half. They charge $.99 to send it, including an SASE. Anything over 4 pages is sent in a 9X12 or 10X13 manila envelope.

It was sent out yesterday and arrived today.

I'm not CRAZY about a folded submission, but, in this economy, if an editor of a journal that still clings to the old ways (snail mail) gets upset about a folded submission, then it's probably not a magazine I want to be in (okay, that's a lie. Or a rationalization).

The envelope came with a thermal printed postage/mailing label, very professional. The return address is to WordHustler's P.O. Box in Los Angeles. At the bottom of the mailing label in very small print: Prepared with care by WordHustler.com - One Click to Destiny.
Very small print. It doesn't bother me.

Zero complaints about the printed submission: very white, 20 lb stock, cover letter is professional and lovely, no signature, of course. They do have an option of adding a photographed signature. The pages are loose, clipped together with a large, high quality butterfly paper clip, again, very professional. The SASE is printed with my name and address, stamped, and has the WH tracking number printed on there as well. My address in the return address, but it would be the literary magazine's return address in a regular submission.

I communicated via email with WH about the possibility of opting for a full sized manila envelope for a 4 page submission, paying a bit extra for the larger envelope. They aren't set up to do that now.

For submissions over 4 pages, they do use a full-sized manila clasp envelope, and I'm now confident that it's more professional than anything I do on my own at home, being that I address my manilas and SASE's in my big loopy longhand, and plaster on stamps all akimbo.

Two thumbs straight up.

Vonnegut!

Delacorte Press, Kurt Vonnegut's long-time publisher, announced that Look at the Birdie, a collection of 14 never -before published stories will be coming out in November of this year! 14 never-before published Vonnegut stories!

And more! Read about it here.

WordHustler

So I'm checking out WordHustler, a submissions service for writers. As more and more and more lit journals have gone to online submissions (!), I've snail-mailed less and less, with the result of ceasing to submit to the places I covet that still only take snail-mail subs. I used to keep a mini post-office at home (because I abhor physically going to the PO) but then USPS kept jacking their rates around making my stamps obsolete, which then made for crazy hodge podges of postage additions, and rows and rows of 1 cent stamps, a giant mess on the manila.

So now with WordHustler, you upload your story (they now take Word.docs and convert them to PDF files for you), you choose a market from their market list, compose a cover letter (which they address to chosen market), they print it all up, stuff it into a manila envelope with thermal printed labels (I do my envelopes in longhand) along with a standard #10 SASE also printed with your address and the return address of the market, and they mail it for you. For a manuscript up to 20 pages it's $5.99. Here's their price list:

Under 4 pages (Query Letters, poetry submissions)	$.99
10 pages (Articles, essays)	$3.99
20 pages (short stories, partial mss, articles, essays)	$5.99
30 pages (short stories, partial mss, articles, short screenplays):	$6.99
50 pages (short stories, partial mss, articles, short screenplays):	$8.99
Over 50 pages (Screenplays, Manuscripts, Novels, Non-Fiction Books)	$0.10/page

All of our prices include tracking, postage, and free SASEs!

If you want to include a receipt/reply postcard, it's an additional $1.29 (or so). If you're traveling the world you can use their Virtual Office and have the SASE's returned to them, and they'll update your profile online so you can see you've been rejected by AQR while sipping chai in Mumbai.

You get a free submission when you sign up. I did it. I sent a story to Black Warrior Review. Pretty cool. And since it was free, I included a receipt postcard, postage paid and self-addressed. If it works like it's supposed to a black warrior will drop that postcard into a postal out-box, and I will know BW got my story.

As an aside, snail-mail/SASE submissions give that mailman-anticipation-buzz. Now that I mainly submit online and have no outstanding SASEs, I have lackluster interest in what comes in the snailmail box. It's kind of fun to anticipate mail, even if the presence of one of your SASEs is rarely anything good.

Anyhoo, now all I have to do is hurry up and wait. I'll update the experience.

More Narrative and a Demand for Pith:The American Short Story

A good article in yesterday's NYT about the short story inspired by near simultaneous new biographies of Flannery O'Connor, Donald Barthelme and John Cheever.

"Reading through their collected stories, you wonder if novels are even necessary. The imperial ambitions of a certain kind of swaggering, self-important American novel — to comprehend the totality of modern life, to limn the social, existential, sexual and political strivings of its citizens — start to seem misguided and buffoonish. More of life is glimpsed, and glimpsed more clearly, through Barthelme’s fragments, Cheever’s finely ground lenses or the pinhole camera of O’Connor’s crystalline prose."

The article by A. O. Scott goes on to say that these three writers "shared the good fortune of writing at mid-century, when the institutions of print supported the flourishing of the short story as never before or since." Well, yeah, maybe, but we've got the world wide web today, and I'll venture to say (without knowing anything really) that the dissemination of pith and narrative is at its height, even if you can't make living off of it like in the days of mass-circulation magazines.

(As an aside, the photo is of Flannery O'Connor's typewriter. How much lower the slush piles must've been back in the days of the manual typewriter and carbon copies! The word processor has generated the writer-wannabe in slush glutting droves, which in turn has spawned the evolution of the low-res MFA program as well as countless other MFA programs, all generating moolah for universities and short fiction like weeds in an empty lot in rainy season.)

Scott suggests that the Kindle might parallel the iPod's effect on music and revive the short story's popularity. I dunno. It's easy to listen to music, something you can do either actively or passively. Much/most contemporary short fiction requires concentration and a high level of reading skills, too demanding maybe, for mass consumption. Literary short fiction tends to be incestuously consumed by literary short fiction writers. Kindle might be conducive in reviving that old conceit: The Plot! Short fiction where shit actually happens!

Anyhoo, anything that touts the short story (and snorts at the novel) gets a solid woo hoo from this incestuous girl writer.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Photo of Carson McCullers

I don't know why I never read this before. It's been the kind of wonderful book that could wholly take me away to another place and time for the half hour, hour that I've spent with it at a time. Carson McCullers was 23 when she wrote this, and that freaking blows my mind.

It's an extraordinary book. First published in 1940, and one of the characters, a black doctor, Doctor Copeland, says this:

"I have a program. It is a very simple, concentrated plan to lead more than one thousand Negroes in this country on a march. A march to Washington. All of us together in one solid body."

In 1940, the fictional Doctor Copeland had a dream. 1940. The enormous empathy and humanity and prescience that McCullers, a woman who grew up in the South, had at that tender age for the plight of the black man freaking flumoxes me. I have McCullers fever.

The book is largely about delusion, too, the delusions humans use to make life easier, to cope with slings and arrows, much like religion. Mr. Singer is singular in that he's a deaf-mute, an "other" that the various characters put their Jesus figure spin on, being as his muteness makes him somewhat ethereal and unfathomable. His quiet, attentive patience makes him like a blank Scrabble tile, played to fill each character's need. And then Singer has his own delusion in the passion he has for his friend, Spiros Antonapoulos, who is presented to the reader as a simple (as in mentally challenged), indifferent boor. And the good Mr. Singer inexplicably adores this oaf, to the tune that when Antonapoulos dies, Singer commits suicide. It's astounding, really, how complex and yet wholly true and heartbreaking it all is, and how this book explores human isolation and despair, and the nimble way we humans scramble to find a way to live with it all.

McCullers titillates, too, with Biff Brannon's inappropriate attraction for 12 year-old Mick Kelly, building tension as you wonder if he's going to go all Humbert Humbert. There's a whiff of pedophilia in the air that dissipates (pedophilia-like) when at the end he begins to see Mick losing her childishness after she gets a full-time job at Woolworth's to help out the family. There's also titillation in the inexplicable fondness that Singer has for Spiro Antonapoulos, as in: are they 'mos? The question is subtly posed; never answered. I love this. It keeps my Curious Yellow gland excited.

Craft note: Anyone wanting to nail dialect should-oughtta read this book. It some good dialect.

I officially love this book.

SmokeLong Quarterly Issue 24 is LIVE. Light up the smokeable of your choice and go there.

Yates Fever

Richard Yates

I found this: Richard Yates hisself reading his short story, "The Best of Everything". It's totally cool to hear him read it. So don't say I never gave ya anything.

Some Writing News

When I'm out and about in my car or grocery shopping* or walking the dog, I think of brilliant and witty blog posts, and resolve to get in here and turn the blog world on end with my shrewd and zany blahgspot observations, my pithy opinions. Then I sit in front of this thing and d'oh.

So, some writing news: I have a tawdry whirl of addiction called "Tango" that just came up at DOGZPLOT, and may I say that Barry Graham is one cool cat.

I'm another bridesmaid, pulling up as a finalist in Narrative Magazine's Fall Fiction Contest, and I'm as happy as lemon meringue pie that they will be publishing "Afterlife" as a Story of the Week in the sometime future.

And a short story "Gravitas" is forthcoming in Hobart 10.

Enough about me, let's talk about you for a minute. What do YOU think of me?**


*In this time of the New Frugality, I'm cooking a lot more and enjoying it too. Tonight I'm-a making a version of pizzoccheri: pasta with cabbage, kale, leeks, potatoes, sage and butter, fontina, Parmesan, gruyere.
Addendum: It was finger lickin' good.

**And apropos of nothing, may Bernie Madoff rot in hell.

SmokeLong Quarterly's 5th Birthday!

The new issue of SmokeLong Quarterly is up, and it's a big, fat beauty! Hearty congratulations to SmokeLong, Dave Clapper, its superfine editor, and to all the staff for this glorious 5th Anniversary issue.

Click on the cover to see the writers gracing this issue (okay, I'm in it), then pour yourself a cuppa Joe, a tumbler of scotch, put your feet up and dig in!

Five Star Literary Stories

It's new and it's swell. T. J. Forrester has put together this new and unique literary site and what I'm sayin is you should check it out.

New Short Fiction Series

I'm up. May 9 at the Beverly Hills Public Library. I'm having nightmares. I dreamt I was dressed in rags and had to borrow the BF's sweater. I dreamt that I looked at my watch and realized I'd missed the whole thing.

The actors are reading 4 of my short stories: "You Go", "Birds, Bees", "Wreckers", and "Toggling the Switch".

Pray for me.

Tobias Wolff at Word Theater

Saturday night I hauled the BF kicking and screaming to see and hear Tobias Wolff read from his new collection Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories at M-Bar in Hollywood where Word Theater hosts many of its events. The book contains "selected stories", including my all time favorite "Bullet in the Brain" ("Short's the best position they is" ... ), and 10 new stories. The readings were of 4 of the new stories.

David Clennon (Miles Drentell in thirtysomething) read "That Room", a short, powerful story where tragedy is avoided via a well-timed puke. It sounds funny, but it opens a door to "that room"—like the Hotel California, once you enter it, you can never leave.

Wendy Makkena (Sister Act) read "The White Bible", a story of an immigrant man who kidnaps his son's teacher because she has caught the son cheating on an exam and has promised he will be expelled. The kidnapper admonishes her not to report his boy because he has dreams of his son becoming a doctor like he was in his native country (somewhere where they name their boys "Hassan"). The shift of power comes soon, and then she's in charge, and yes, she will report the son, who's been cheating all year. She dashes the dreams of the kidnapper:

"Wait—just listen. Honestly, now, can you picture Hassan in medical shcool? Even supposing he could get in? Even supposing he can get through college at all? Think about it—Hassan in medical school. What an idea! You could make a comedy—Hassan Goes to Medical School. No, Hassan will not be a doctor. And you know it. You have always known it."

I mean, girl don't flinch! Then she asks him, "Suppose I'd promised not to report Hassan. Whatever made you think I'd keep my word?"

And he pulls out a little, white, girl's Bible.

Imitation leather. With gilt letters on the cover.

That he got at Goodwill.

"You would swear," he said. "Like in court, to the judge."

Aaaaaaahhhhhh. And by then, you know, Wolff has you. He's reeled you in and you're happy to be flopping on the bottom of his boat. Wendy Makenna did an awesome reading of it.

Robert Forster (Jackie Brown, Mulholland Drive) read "Down to Bone" about a son and his dying mother. It's funny, wry, bawdy, and then, when you least expect it, your heart breaks as the man who no longer knows how to be a son, becomes a father to the dying woman, because that's something he still knows how to do.

And then Wolff read "Her Dog" to completely annihilate and exhilarate. Oh it was a grand night.

I ran into my friend Scott Doyle there, and also one of my early writing teachers from UCLA Extension, Lou Mathews, so that was cool. And I didn't prostrate, fawn and gush even though I wanted to hug Wolff's legs. I wanted to go all Mary Magdalene on his ass, but I didn't. I didn't even get my book signed because of the throng thing. We left and I retold the stories to my darling who hasn't much of an attention span for these kinds of things but whom I cherish for his good sportsmanship and love and who honors me with his company and support.

That's the Tobias Wolff report.

Some Writing News

A couple of nice things to usher in 2008, the first being that my short story "Wreckers" was a finalist in the StoryQuarterly Fiction Contest, and it won a tidy $100 (thank you); and my story "Back Wash" was given a loverly acceptance by StoryGlossia. And a rejection from Ninth Letter, the swankiest literary rag evah, said they were VERY impressed with my writing. VERY.

Happy New Year, by the way. I say this like I have a readerhood. Blogging is so bizarre.

Lorrie Moore Gets Political

My heroine short story writer Lorrie Moore has written an Op-Ed for the New York Times where she asserts that electing a woman is last year's role model. It seems she's making a case for Obama because he'd be a better role model for today's Lost Boys, who are sadly lacking vibrant men to look up to. She says girls have a whole slew of erstwhile role models, that womenfolk have arrived. We're done.

Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired

Okay, this is the title of one of my favorite stories by Richard Yates, and if you haven't read his short stories, you are missing something.

But this post is to rant, because I'm so tired, tired of waiting, tired of waiting for these damn magazines that take for freaking ever to respond to story submissions. You send out your work and then wait and wait and wait, often to be rewarded months later by a fucking form rejection. Every morning I open my computer breathlessly to check my email (all my submissions at the moment are electronic) and all I get are Facebook things and bill statements and ads from Land's End or Amazon.

But it's going to rain in L.A.! Yay! Yay!