Curio Week One, Three Stories Up/Down

Today Uncanny Valley Press posted "TheBrewsters," originally published in Moon Milk Review # 9, October 2010. The image here is Mike Meginnis' hilarious/ appalling interpretation of the Brewster children--I hope you love it as much as I do. Wednesday's post was "Bog Redaction," from last January's Wigleaf, and the first post on Monday was "The Second Prettiest of the Daughters," a new story. For the next two weeks plus, the stories will all be previously unpublished in any form. Seeing as the postings will continue through the beginning of March, I'm not sure how I will avoid seeming spammy with my updates, especially since the novel situation is developing very quickly: Death Wishing is slated for an October 2011 release by Ig Publishing, and right now I'm doing some final but substantial edits, gathering blurbers (you won't believe who I got), and eating lots of celebratory dinners with my friends.

Somehow I'm supposed to put my syllabus together for my first class on the 25th, but I think I'm going to mess up my blog first. I know, I know. I should get a Big Girl's blog soon, along with a douchey author site and a douchey author pic. (The word "douchey" is brought to you by my 15 yr old nephew. I think it's hilarious, seeing as he probably knows as much about douches as he does merkins).

"The Brewsters" at Moon Milk Review

Rae Bryant gets me. I'm really thrilled to see my story in Moon Milk Review # 9, an especially creepy issue, with my new buddy John Minichilo and my old buddy Eddie Poe.

Storytime! for cats and tots

The party boys of Barrelhouse hosted a reading of Moon Milk Review writers last night in DC, and it was great fun.Very well attended and I finally picked up Molly Gaudry's verse novella We Take Me Apart, as well as the latest issue of Barrelhouse (#8, "Office Life"), which I'd been resisting out of petulance. I failed to convince Dan Brady that they should use the cover art for issue 7 as their permanent profile image.

I'm not sure if this was her first reading, but my 2 & 1/2 year old gosh daughter (fave quote from dinner: "Oh yeah, remind me to get you a copy of the will") squirmed quietly and charmingly during the first set of readers which included Randall Brown. She really likes the clapping part. After she and her folks cut out at half-time, several people commented on how good she was--and she was very good--but just minutes earlier we were chasing her through a restaurant, trying to stop her from running out into the street with about four twenty dollar bills she managed to snatch from the cash machine.

This morning I woke up to find that the gorgeous card that Rae Bryant distributed to promote the latest MMR issue had been mauled by Harriet. She loves Ben Loory, is my guess.

Can we write off our booze to Smokelong and Prick of the Spindle?

This reading is at the Black Squirrel tomorrow night, same location as the Smokelong/Corium/Prick of the Spindle AWP offsite reading in Feb 2011. Tara Laskowski and I feel duty bound to check it out. Thoroughly. We even lined up drivers so we can get ripped.

Updates

Just putting this pic up to provoke Jason J. Harriet is doing well in her second week of broke-leg boredom and has been upgraded from the pink to yellow bandage (not really an upgrade, but don't tell her that). She has at least 3 more weeks of this crap. The vet told us to keep her "still". Oh yeah? she's a 10 month old kitten, with an 11 month old kitten soul mate. She is still an expert climber, but not such a good getting-down-er.

In other news, it looks like I'm going to be in the year end Moon Milk Review anthology, which is thrilling. I met MMR editor Rae Bryant at the Dzanc National Workshop Day fund raiser workshop sponsored by Barrelhouse back in March, where we discovered we shared a lot of common ideas about new fiction. I LOVE MMR, and I'm really stoked about this.