Night Train 10.1

The new issue of Night Train is up and contains some mind-boggling fiction. Two of my favorites are Spanish and King by Murray Dunlap and Run Little Girl by Sheryl Monks.

Spanish and King
"I want to tell you my fishing story. If you think you've already heard it, you probably have. But don't worry. It's different every time."
read the rest at Night Train

Run Little Girl
"Brother Harpy delivered serpents to their house, to her daddy, the minister of Lick Branch, who put them in the icebox so they'd grow sleepy enough to handle next day at church. "Takes just as much faith to reach into a bag of sleepy serpents," her father said, for the congregation was unaware, if she wasn't."
read the rest at Night Train

I also loved This Is Who We Really Are by British writer David William Rea.

Interference

There's a great story by Brad Green up at Night Train:

"The cops took Cora's daddy away the day he kept putting out cigarettes with his fingers. With a forefinger and thumb calloused as cowboy leather, he squished the orange embers and she marveled at the sizzle."
read the rest at Night Train

And if you like his writing, check out this gorgeous post on his blog:

"I once watched a girl burn herself with a cigarette. With her left palm she carefully raised her right breast and twisted the orange ember into the folded flesh underneath. Her foot shook and her face came alive with maniacal bliss. She was a beautiful girl, able to look in one moment as pure as an apple on a plate and in the next distraught as unraveling rope. Those behind-the-knee tendons quivered whenever she hummed in the shower. Her beauty was a terrible force."
read the rest at Brad Green's blog

There are six weeks left now until our attempt on the West Face snow route on Mt. Elbert. I'm training so hard that at times I can barely stagger out of the gym. People keep commenting on my workout routine. Yesterday someone asked if I was training to climb Mt. Everest. Not yet, I said. Everest is a bit too crowded for me. I want to climb K2 one day.

My novel and my training are largely consuming my whole life.

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!

A Shot of Whatever

I'm obsessed with working on my novel right now, so I've fallen a little behind in my reading. Luckily, I received a link to this great flash by David LaBounty, now up at Smokelong Quarterly:

"Stella was the first to arrive and she kissed me on the lips as I walked through the tavern door. I think the kiss was supposed to be passionate, intense; cinematic even.

It wasn't quite that."
read the rest at Smokelong Quarterly

David LaBounty is the author of Affluenza, a novel I reviewed on this blog last year.

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!