"But you said you wanted to see ponies"

That was the most frequently muttered line of the morning as thousands of us stood in the marsh muck awaiting the arrival of some several dozen wild ponies made to swim from Assateague over to Chincoteague to be auctioned off. Pony Penning is a Big Event, but our travel timing is not deliberate, so we hemmed and hawed quite a bit before forcing ourselves out of bed and onto our bikes to watch the landing. I’m glad we did, it was actually kind of thrilling.

But what we also witnessed, over and over, was an almost perfect miscommunication between fathers and daughters—men, bright eyed and grinning with excitement (lookit them stallions fight!) while their little sweethearts lost pink plastic sandals in the muck. A lot of tears, but not a lot of sympathy, not even from me. OMG Ponies indeed. Books are always better than the real thing. At least that’s how I feel right now, cooling my well scrubbed heels in a waterman’s cottage that looks like Dr. Caligari’s vacation home.

Having an awesome time, writing a little, reading even less. The naps are powerful, profound.

rejection beach and stress city

aargh, going away tomorrow, but my work-at-the-beach vacation just went all pear-shaped as my must-get-done list tripled today. now the whole thing is just gonna be tele-work. and yet, I know that if i truly had free time I wouldn't use it to write. with work piling up, just begging to be neglected, I'll feel very creative. We are behind on prepping for travel and final grades though, so i'll be missing the reading at Politics & Prose tonight celebrating the Paycock Press release of Stress City: A Big Fat Book of Fiction by 51 DC Guys, ed. by Richard Peabody. Sorry fellas.

got a big, cold rejection yesterday, but one that occurred at the same time that I received a really swell attaboy from a reader, so the picking-up-and-dusting-off process went very smoothly.

why I’m not a reviewer/bookmarks

done finished that Down River. not as much action as King of Lies, lots of painfully revealing discussions, and then a bunch of neat stuff at the end. one character I thought for sure was going to die, but it didn’t happen. so that’s cool.

bookmarks. I will no longer use uninteresting bookmarks, like bookstore receipts or pieces of paper or leather designed to be bookmarks. I have a pack of drink coasters with British sports and beer logos, and those work great.

bookmarked in this photo--Christy Zink's story, "Taking Cover," from Electric Grace; Still more Fiction by Washington Area Women, and page 23 of ANS's Yellow Medicine. no, i do not plan to read these books simultaneously.

I'm going to grocery store hell

so what i really wanted to blog about today was the culture of privacy and the kerfuffle over at Helix, but I lost my head of steam when I stopped into my neighborhood supermarket and noticed that they were playing Christian pop music--again. What a drag, especially since this is one of those Asian super stores with amazing stuff and colors everywhere, and up until this week, sound tracked with loopy, upbeat tunes including a lot of '80s b-sides. So I worked up the nerve to call the manager and complain--gently. She sounded terribly surprised that the music was Christian at all, asking me a couple of times, "Are you sure?" Which made me feel even worse, because of course it's not so much the Christian-ness that drove me out of the store, it was the major suckiness of the music. Had they been playing Mahalia Jackson, I'd be all over that.

My Favorite New Yorker Story

Too bad so many people are rising to The New Yorker’s bait. New Yorker cartoons can’t provoke for the same reason they fail to amuse. They’re just too obvy.

My resentment for the New Yorker goes a long way back and has everything to do with its influence on literary fiction, especially during the ‘80s. Someone once gave me a stack of New Yorker mags (hey you write fiction, you’ll like this pile of white man sorrow), and one of the issues had some music doodad insert that tweeted out a holiday song, like a musical birthday card. On New Year’s Day (we may have been under the weather) the chime went off on its own, so naturally D grabbed a large knitting needle and pounded it through the stack like a stake through a vampire’s heart. That’s my favorite New Yorker story.

what i'm reading for

urrg. the writing is coming slooooowly, and by slowly I mean three to five word clumps. not even sentences. I think the problem is that I’ve entered a very plot-ty area and I am resisting its obligations.

so I write a bit, then take a break and read a little of John Hart’s Down River. Don’t ask me how the book is, you can’t trust my opinion. (So far the main character is having a lot of cryptic convos with old men. Oh, and he’s recollecting his painful youth) I read Hart because I noticed while reading his breakthrough novel King of Lies that I make a lot of the same writing choices he does, so much so that I can almost predict what the main character is about to notice or reason out. Content wise, I have nothing in common with Hart. And his characters are incredibly humorless and daddy-conflicted. But there is something eerily familiar about the rhythms, the imagery, and the attention. Maybe I’ve read all the same writers he has but came away with a sunnier disposition. Flannery O’Connor was funny, man.

Votin'

Well Obama is in my town today, which has me feeling democratic so I thought I'd go over to the StorySouth Top 10 to consume a few more stories and maybe even vote. Deadline is July 17. But now I'm stuck. I just love that XJ Kennedy story, "Grinder," and I really don't wanna. And I think you know why. Right now the story has 1% of the vote. dang dang dang. Oh, and I miss John Edwards too. I'm a sap.

this story? ends with stuff blowing up

Minesweeper

I took a few years off from writing short stories so I could work on novel projects, and as I ease back into the online fiction scene I am thrilled by the new flavor of feedback I’m getting: I read your story instead of doing work.

4 or 5 years ago response to my fiction was a little more serious, a little more practiced, a little more practical. More about what I’d accomplished than what the reader experienced. Even my rejections are more gut level: an editor recently wrote that my submission “just didn’t do it for me. I don’t know why.”

I’m working on a theory, and it doesn’t have much to do with me.

New story up at Hobart!!!

"From Laura's Pocket Guide to the Americas: Belize City and Beyond"

1968

I’m not sure I want to write about this because I’m feeling both insecure and excited about the Louisiana novel, but I don’t want to be superstitious and I don’t want to forget this moment. Earlier this week I was overcome when I realized several parallels between my plot and that of Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven. I had to do the inventory a few different ways before I convinced myself that the similarities were not so substantial—after all I’ve never even read LoH. What followed then was a rush of new ideas, all of which are careening into the absurd, and as far from serious science fiction as I can scramble. What am I talking about? Well, for starters I’m bringing back Elvis and I’m giving women a third eye. Wish me luck.

stuffed animus

my paid duties are light these days but when something needs doing it announces its urgency like a ghost slap to the face—think poltergeist administration. you’d think the down time would be good for writing, but the randomness of work-work has me on edge, distracted. And more than a little dull. Still, I have it together enough to mix vice with virtue—I added at least three miles to my walking routine by looping out to the bookstore to buy a new noir before going out to the second nearest liquor store instead of the one that’s pretty damned close to the bookstore. On the hike home I was kinda hoping that if I was destined to be hit by a car that today was the day. Imagine the paramedics opening my backpack to find murder book and bottle of Bacardi. Any other day, I’d be carrying student papers.

New Writer: Jody Madala

I just fell for "I HAVE CANCER! I HAVE CANCER!" Hard. The story is by Jody Madala, featured at Anderbo.com and while it covers familiar territory and familiar materials, it seems to do so in a completely energetic, irresistible way. Plus, the story is followed by Madala's long bio which reads like an essay for match dot com. "IHC " is her first short story publication, apparently (way to hit one out of the park), so she probably has no idea what an author's note typically contains. Or, and I like this idea better, she is treating the author's bio as a form worthy of interrogation.

Okay, this question is for the world's workshop: That title?!?! What does it do to your reading?

early summer action

just when i think everybody is shutting down for the season, Smokelong Quarterly comes out with a double issue whopper to celebrate their fifth birthday. All the kool kids are featured, and if you want to know what fiction is right now, read these stories and chase down the writers' links. I have a lovely virtual scrapbook of rejections from SQ, by the way.

Also, two trade paper copies of Anthony Neil Smith's novel, Yellow Medicine, showed up on the Mystery/Crime shelves at my local. I'm going to buy one today. Pretty book, and being named Smith places it in very close prox to Martin Cruz Smith, which has to be a plus. Plot summary on the jacket is almost unintelligible. Cool. Maybe it's a Joe R. Lansdale kinda thing?

Story South Top Ten

they're up and ready fer votin'! I'm a little bummed that Shane Jones' "I Will Unfold You with My Hairy Hands" didn't make the cut, but congratulations to all the fine writers on the list. Nice range of journals, too.

Also, just finished reading Tana French's In The Woods. Dang, it's good, even if . . . sorry, no spoilers here. But I will say that the narrator is a flirty, charming Irish detective who enjoys giving foot rubs to his partner.

Pura Vida

I think I like the idea of being a “regional’ writer, even though my native region—Northeastern Ohio—lacks the detail required for fiction. I have one very long Ohio story that queases me out so much I identify the setting as Indiana. I strongly prefer to write about places I’ve visited, from the point of view of permanent visitors (moved there, or are returning after a long absence)—characters with the privilege of critical margin. I have to admit though, that I favor characters who can vacate their regions without losing identity, and I am keenly aware that my drama is limited by the escape hatches I install.

I learned this week that Hobart online has accepted one of my stories. Don’t know when it’ll go up, but I’m thrilled. The story is about Belize, Guatemala, and the perilous romance of travel. Stay tuned.

Bad Brain

These feel like related issues in that they flirt with superstition and mystic irrationality but really speak to the fact that my psychology hates me—

1) I dreamed about the West Virginia novel being published and immediately turned into an indie film, and conditions I thought were crucial had been altered with no loss of effect—main character male not female, the setting was a village in northern England not rural West Virginia, things like that. The dream bugs me because I’m always harassing my students to make sure, even in their so called genre or pop writing, that their choices are always essential, in-extractable and un-swappable.

2) I’m going back through the first 100 pages of the Louisiana novel and I’m really surprised and pleased at how naturally it writes itself. Even when I don’t want to write, I know that I can open up the file and it will change my disposition.

Check out youtube clips of Derren Brown’s stuff. It helps.

Sort by . . . or the Anxiety of Anthology

The myth of theme as anything other than an open container for intelligence has always interested me. I love arbitrary organization as long as it remains permeable and aware, and the best literary collections tend to be the ones that play with their own assumptions of content or push the extremity of formal restriction. The theme is interrogated from page 1.

At the same time, I’m deeply attracted to narrower venues that promise certain emotional outcomes, as in permanently dedicated horror or crime collections. I wish I could claim to be a reliably “Noir Writer,” but my dark fiction is more opportunistic than it is seriously crafted for excitement.

I have earned other labels though, as I’ll have a story in an anthology for Washington Area+Women Writers. Delightful, but these are two identities I don’t really inhabit or understand from an aesthetic point of view. I know what DC means in terms of food and interior decorating, but beyond that I’m clueless/curious.

I am reminded of my colleague's experience with a library assistant who refused to copy several essays and place them on reserve for students to check out. The librarian wrote that he could not execute the request as the collection "would make an anthropology."

why it's important to google yerself

According to the Paycock Press "Forthcoming Titles" website, I will have a story in the anthology
Gravity Dancers: Even More Fiction by Washington Area Women, due out in Spring 2009. This is the 4th volume in the series, put together by Richard Peabody, whom you know as a poet, fiction writer, teacher, and editor of Gargoyle Magazine since its inception in 1976. Here he is in a WETA interview about the series.

How this kind of thing happens: on the recommendation of The Happy Booker (aka Wendi Kaufman), RP invited me to contribute, and he did say something to the effect of "if you're invited, you're in," but I'm always expecting takebacks. Now, did he like the story I sent him in January? Or is he gonna ask for something else?

it has been a cool weekend, yeah?

an indelicacy

heh--

"what your cat thinks of In Rainbows" up at dogzplot's flash blog.