The Best Man

Here's a great story by Timothy Raymond, up at Necessary Fiction:

"Frank cut out his own tongue so that he wouldn’t have to give the best-man speech. I heard from Kate. She didn’t believe it, either, not until we saw the caterer wringing blood from his apron."
read the rest at Necessary Fiction

Also, check out this short-short from their current writer-in-residence, Peter Grandbois:

"You wouldn’t know it from looking at her but the girl in the green dress is a dancer. She doesn’t carry herself like one, at least not on the bus."
read the rest

My news: I'm as busy as ever, the novel is coming along VERY slowly and Bill and I recently joined the local Search & Rescue team. So now we have training every Thursday night and I feel even busier than before. Ummm . . .

MooseBlind

After climbing Mt. Elbert earlier this year, Bill and I managed to knock out Mt. Rainier in August. Trip report and photos here.

Now that mountain-climbing is over for 2010, I can finally catch up on my online reading! I haven't written a short story myself since the beginning of the year. I'm totally focused on my novel. Still hoping to finish it by the end of December.

Here's a memorable short-short that I found in the Kenyon Review Online:

MooseBlind, by Melinda Moustakis

The Last Pool Party

This week, Necessary Fiction posted an incredible story by John Minichillo:

"Clusters of Home Depot deck furniture, ambience of chlorine, of eighties music murmured from rock-shaped speakers, iced upscale beer and cheapish wine, a no lifeguard on duty sign, a no peeing in pool sign, the pool kidney-shaped and sensible, the too-blue water refracting a vinyl pool liner, platter of splayed white and yellow cheeses in the pool house, the Moores’ screendoor slowly creaked open and clanged shut, a small dog continuously yapping two houses over — all so familiar, like three years hadn’t crawled away and the Moores’ daughter, Candace, had never drowned here. In this pool. The invitations went out weeks ago, and we all thought what we thought, but none of us could say no, with their back patio crowded and an hour of summer radiance left before the sun would refuge behind the tall maple."
read the rest at Necessary Fiction

Last week, I fulfilled one of my New Year's goals by reaching the summit of Mt. Elbert, the highest peak in the US Rockies. There's a trip report and some pics here. Still working on the second goal, which is to finish my novel by the end of the year.

Mucky

My short story Mucky is now up at Night Train:

"When I met him, he was thin and shifty and he did things to my body that no other man had contemplated. I called him the Mucky Man, blushing a little to think where his tongue had been. No crevice on the body too dark and fetid for him. I fell in love with his persistent fingers." read the rest at Night Train.

I've fallen woefully behind in my online reading, though I'm still plowing through novels at a good pace. I'm back in school part-time, working, writing a novel and training to climb a mountain. Also in physical therapy to rehab a torn rotator cuff. As you might expect, I have no social life and am sometimes twitchy.

Dredge

Here's a story you'll never forget, though it might give you recurring nightmares! Stay away from this one if you're sensitive:

Dredge
by Matt Bell

"The drowned girl drips everywhere, soaking the cheap cloth of the Ford’s back seat. Punter stares at her from the front of the car, first taking in her long blond hair, wrecked by the pond’s amphibian sheen, then her lips, blue where the lipstick’s been washed away, flaky red where it hasn’t. He looks into her glassy green eyes, both pupils so dilated the irises are just slivered halos, the right eye further polluted with burst blood vessels. She wears a lace-frilled gold tank top, a pair of acid-washed jeans with grass stains on the knees and ankles. A silver bracelet around her wrist throws off sparkles in the window-filtered moonlight, the same sparkle he had seen through the lake’s dark mirror, which had made him drop his fishing pole and wade out, then dive in after her. Her feet are bare except for a silver ring on her left pinkie toe, suggesting the absence of sandals, flip-flops. Suggesting something lost in a struggle. Suggesting many things to Punter, too many for him to process all at once."
read the rest at Hayden's Ferry

I got some good news last week - my short story Dirty Girl has been selected for an upcoming anthology by Press 53. The anthology, called What Doesn't Kill You . . . will feature stories about struggle. It's edited by Murray Dunlap and Kevin Watson and due out in June. It's sure to be a wonderful collection!

Dirty Girl

My short story Dirty Girl is now up at Storyglossia:

"I'd known Tina for less than three months and she already owed me two hundred dollars, money I needed for next semester's books. It was on my mind constantly, but I never mentioned it because no-one else had ever invited me out. I envied her bold clothes and loud, mouthy personality—the way she was good at attracting attention. But now I wished that I hadn't agreed to go gambling with her."
read the rest at Storyglossia

Anne Valente interviewed me about the story here.

Storyglossia is one of my favorite online literary journals, so I'm thrilled to be in February's issue. I've featured several stories from Storyglossia on this blog in the past year - here, here and here.

Baby Love

This story, written by Sara Levine and published by Necessary Fiction, has been selected for inclusion in Dzanc Books' 2010 Best of the Web:

"I had a baby.

“Why’d you have to have a baby?” Denny wanted to know. “There are so many babies on this block already. You know this neighborhood’s really changing. First the Starbucks and then we got a Gap.”
read the rest at Necessary Fiction.

Last week, fellow blogger and writer Dorraine Darden surprised me with a Sugar Doll award. The way it works is that the recipient has to reveal ten things about herself that readers of her blog may not know. So, with no further ado, here are ten little-known facts about yours truly:

1. I was born in Western Australia.

2. My husband and I met in a canyon in Utah on a climbing trip. At the time, I was living in Tennessee and he was living in Wyoming. For our first "date" we rendezvoused in Denver and went out to climb a mountain in the Wind Rivers. We had a terrible epic and I was so impressed with his calm demeanour throughout that I looked forward to climbing with him again. Roughly 3 years later, we spent our honeymoon ice-climbing in Alaska.

3. If I go too long without a run, I get extremely irritable.

4. I gave up my dream of being a professional writer many years ago and became a software developer instead. I dragged my old manuscripts all over the country with me and one day I read a few of my stories to my husband. With his encouragement, I started writing again and submitted two of those old stories to the 2009 Writer's Digest Writing Competition. They placed 1st and 4th in the Literary/Mainstream Short Story category.

5. I used to be fluent in French, but now can barely string a sentence together. I'm not happy about that!

6. I love Reggae music.

7. My two favorite books of all time are The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, and Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham.

8. I'm crazy about birds, especially penguins. OK, I'm crazy about ALL animals. When I was a kid, I went back and forth between wanting to be a zoologist and a marine biologist.

9. I love to cook dishes from all over the world. A typical week's worth of dinners at my house might include Ethiopian curry, Greek moussaka, South African meat pie and Sri Lankan sates. I make an Afghan sweet bread called rhote to take with me when I travel.

10. I drink home-made redbush chai all day long. Because I cook a lot, I order spices in bulk from The Atlantic Spice Company. To make the chai, I grind 3 tsp black peppercorns, 1.5 tsp whole cloves and 5 3-inch cinnamon sticks in my spice grinder, then mix with 6 tbsp loose-leaf red tea (redbush) leaves. Sometimes I add whole cardamom pods and/or Jamaica all-spice berries to the mix. Good stuff!

Hunger

I ran across this story by Lily Brent last week:

"They couldn't get her to stop doing it. Crusts of bread, leaves of boiled cabbage, twenty-six grapes, flour in small plastic bags choked with red twist ties. They couldn't get her to stop doing it until she stopped doing everything, and after that it wasn't long until the end. Half bananas browning in their peels, dollops of sour cream in drawers, potatoes in slippers under the bed, red beets bleeding through the pockets of her pale yellow bathrobe."
read the rest at 42Opus

My good news for the week is that my short story The Shock Is What Kills You has been nominated for the 2010 Million Writers Award. I'm very honored by the nomination!

Happy Valentine's Day!

In Search of Biswas

My short story, In Search of Biswas, is now up at Amarillo Bay:

"My husband, Leo, loved me far too much. His face when he gazed at me in the silent evenings wore the patient, imploring expression of a good dog left out in the rain. And, like a good dog, he never barked, but simply sat on his haunches prepared to be saved. I didn't want to save him."
read the rest at Amarillo Bay

The new issue includes short stories by Lora Rivera, Timothy Reilly, David Regenspan and Robert Wexelblatt.

Due to the nefarious activities of a few unsavory characters, I've had to turn on comment moderation for this blog. This simply means that all comments have to be approved by me before being posted. I'll approve anything that doesn't include links to porn sites. In the meantime, don't click on any questionable links that you see in the comments.

What Shark Attack Can Teach Us About Love

This beautifully written story, by Caryn Cardello, is the author's first publication:

"The room is full of candles and the apartment is too small, making everything seem aglow and also slightly dangerous. We’re here for dinner and girl-talk in this empty desert town, all of us miles from home. The ex-Catholic from Louisiana makes gumbo at her graduate student stove while the atheist from Alabama talks to the Mormon about sex. Alabama married her high school sweetheart and—maybe it’s the accent—often sounds the most conservative among us, despite the fact that she isn’t, that none of us are, that she’s the only one brave enough to breathe the word “atheism” even after all these university degrees.."
read the rest at Spork Press

Last week, Necessary Fiction asked contributors to send in a few words about what inspired them to write in 2009. This is my contribution.

Also last week, Night Train accepted one of my short-shorts. I'm a huge fan of Night Train, so this is very exciting for me. Check out this amazing flash currently up on their site (by Laura Valeri):

"You were always too slow, your father used to say, too slow dodging the other girls' hands blocking your shots, slow to move out of the way, slow to catch up, slow to make the basket—just like when you were ten, at ski camp, he'd remind you, where you were sent in hopes you'd learn some self-preservation skills, hopes all but lost the day of the storm when the competition was canceled. . . ."
read the rest at Night Train

Happy New Year!

New Year's is my favorite holiday, though I no longer celebrate it by drinking vast amounts of alcohol and staying up past midnight. What I like about the beginning of the year is the chance to set new goals for myself. I'm a very goal-oriented and results-driven person, so New Year's Resolutions are right up my alley. Sometimes my resolutions are about bettering myself, but this time I have simply set myself two goals for 2010:

1. Finish my novel
2. Climb Mt. Elbert, the highest peak in Colorado (14,433ft). We will ascend via a 3,000ft snow couloir on the West Face.

Which of these two goals will be harder to achieve? Tough call.

Writing a novel is similar to climbing a mountain in many ways. There are (occasional) moments of bliss and moments of great suffering. You have to go into it knowing it will hurt. There will be times when you lose all hope and want nothing more than to just give up and admit defeat, and that is when you have to make your greatest effort and keep plodding on.

The nice thing about climbing a mountain is that once you've made it back to where you started, the journey is over. You can sit on the couch for a few days and eat as much pie as you want.

Finishing a novel, however, is just the beginning . . .

Best of the Web 2009

Best of the Web 2009 is a must-read collection of short stories, flash fiction, poetry and a few essays, all originally published online.

Not all of the pieces were to my taste, but I enjoyed being exposed to things that I might not have read otherwise and I love the whole idea behind this book. I'll definitely be reading next year's collection when it comes out.

One of my favorite stories in the book is Mandible, by Donna D. Vitucci:

"His license named him Manfred, but my little sister and me, we called him “Mandible” from the time he started hanging around. He’d sleep over with Mama, this scary, big-headed, sharp-jawed cartoon guy, who we imagined was made of metal. The guy’s face was all jaw. He was too long of arm, with a slick, black pompadour. Who, in the 21st century, still worshipped Elvis? Manfred did, and other guys in Hebron, Kentucky. So me and Jennie nicknamed him “Mandible,” and we cracked up whenever we said to his ugly mug: Hey Man, yeah, we’re good. How ‘bout you? He had a shameless smile, and he flashed that grin at us—probably thought he was buddying up with his woman’s wisecracking son and daughter."
read the rest online at Front Porch Journal.

Dzanc Books, the publisher of this collection, is currently having a 50% off sale, so this is a good time to snag a copy of the book.

Other News: Last week I had another piece accepted. My short story, In Search of Biswas, will be in the February issue of Amarillo Bay.

Dogs and Refugees

My short-short story, Dogs and Refugees, is now up at Necessary Fiction.

Necessary Fiction is the web journal of So New Publishing, a small press based in Eugene, Oregon.

Necessary Fiction publishes a new story each Wednesday and is currently serializing the novel New Hope for Small Men, by Grant Bailie.

Passages North Acceptance

Yesterday, I received a phone call from Passages North to let me know that they wanted to take my short story Oh Tree.

Passages North is an annual literary journal that has been publishing for thirty years. They sponsor the Waasmode Short Fiction Prize, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize and the Thomas J. Hruska Memorial Nonfiction Prize.

Essays published in Passages North have appeared in the anthology, Best American Essays, on numerous occasions.

It's a wonderful journal and I'm honored that my story was chosen for the next issue.

Writer's Digest 78th Annual Writing Competition

This year, I decided to enter the Writer's Digest 78th Annual Writing Competition. I sent in two entries, both in the Literary/Mainstream Short Story category, and they both placed! The Nomads placed 1st and Over The Wall placed 4th. I won a total of $1,100 and $150 worth of books, plus a copy of the 2010 Writer's Market Deluxe Edition. The competition had almost 14,000 entries so this was quite a confidence boost!

The Nomads will be published in the Writer's Digest Competition Collection, an anthology featuring the first-place winners in each category. Other categories included poetry, screenplays, stage plays, memoirs and articles.

1st place won me one hundred dollar's worth of WD books and 4th place got me another fifty dollar's worth. Not sure yet if I'll be able to pick which books I want, or if I'll end up with duplicates. If I do get duplicates, or books I've already read, I'll probably give them away here on this blog, so check back for updates on that if interested.

Two More Stories Accepted

Two of my short stories have been accepted for publication in the last week. The first, Dogs and Refugees was accepted by Necessary Fiction, the web journal of So New Publishing. The second, Bus Man, was accepted by Cantaraville. It will appear in Cantaraville Ten, due out next year. Cantaraville is a PDF quarterly, which can be purchased for $4.95.

The Shock Is What Kills You

I have another story published online now: The Shock Is What Kills You in the Clapboard House fall issue.

When I lived in Memphis, Tennessee, I would take holiday dinners to a small group of homeless men who lived under an overpass in an industrial area. I was quite scared to be there so I never stayed long, but what I saw made a lasting impression on me. Henry, the homeless man in The Shock Is What Kills You, appeared in my mind as a result of those experiences.

Room Seventeen Published

My short story, Room Seventeen, was published today in the new issue of Writer's Bloc. Issue #3 looks like it will provide plenty of good reading, with 15 short stories, tons of poetry and some nice photography to look at as well. I haven't had time to read through all of it yet, but will post later about my favorites.

Room Seventeen

My short story, Room Seventeen, was accepted for the next issue of Writer's Bloc, a great new web publication. I'll post a link to the story here when it's available.

Check out Writer's Bloc here. They publish some neat stuff.

In the current issue (#2), I especially like Highlands, NJ by Scott Shanley.

The Insurgent, by Sarah Coyle, is quite riveting.