How to, by Charli

Louisiana Stories

My review of Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and The City of The Dead went live late last night on Art Taylor's blog, Art & Literature: the Literary Blog of Raleigh's Metro Magazine, and today he interviewed me about Death Wishing for our department newsletter. I just finished a writing up a Q&A to go out with review copies, and I guess I'm relieved that the questions Art asked me were pretty close to the ones I asked myself. Like, "Why New Orleans?"Because that's where I want to be.

Of course the reason Art gave me the Gran book to review was because of the NO connection, and Claire is a wonderful, original book, and I hope there will be a Claire DeWitt series. Gran's New Orleans is a scarier place than my new Orleans, but we both ended up with major characters named Vic. Weird.

Here's an ad we threw together--might appear in the latest issue of Gargoyle if we got it to the editor on time:

back to work

today is the last day of vacation--we went to ocracoke last week, and both of us got colds. I'm still coughing, making really ugly noises in my chest. oh well, seeing as I've not had a cold since Nov 2009, I think I got off easy. We went out to a Louisiana music fest thing today, headlined by Trombone Shorty. Chances of him being referenced in tonight's ep of Treme, about 70%. "Show me something beautiful . . ."

Apparently the book galleys are going out to potential reviewers this week. As part of the package I was asked to write up a Q&A, and that was tough, but I think I'm happy with the result. I wish it was funnier, tho. It's all about the gags, as far as I'm concerned. Screw literature.

We're now turning our attentions to making my big girl's website. I'm really loving Ethel Rohan's page as well as the new Lit Pub deal. I'm pretty sure I want something super simple and clean, at least to start with. But maybe that urge is at odds with having a site that people find interesting . . .

also? my vacation was 2 weeks long, and I had plenty of net access. two things I didn't do--answer work email or check htmlgiant. weird.

Can I catch a break?

How about if plot is just time?

shaping up

So here at Mason, May 21 is Graduation Day. This year that's also Judgment Day. I don't remember Judgment Day from last year, was there a lot of traffic?

I've known it for a while, but I'll be debuting Death Wishing at the Fall for the Book festival in September, somewhat ahead of the official release date of October 11.

Then at the end of October, I've been invited to the Louisiana Book Festival, to be held in Baton Rouge.






November 9 will be the City Lights reading.


I've got about four and a half toes in the door of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival for 2012. The Louisiana love comes courtesy of my friend and mentor, Darrell Bourque, who is just concluding his tenure as the Louisiana Poet Laureate. It also comes from Dorothy Allison, who blurbed the book and has been supporting my fiction for a while. They love her down in LA. I"m super excited about doing festivals, and the people who run them are so damn sweet.


So those are massive gigs, right?

Curio, reviewed by Ethel Rohan

Early this week Ethel Rohan posted a beautiful review of Curio on her blog. I am very grateful for her kind words and careful read, but also for her honesty concerning her reluctance to read the collection. She was worried that the stories included wouldn't be "storied" enough, an anxiety I share about many contemporary collections. It's definitely true that along with a few conventional narratives, Curio includes some pieces that as stand alone might seem fragmentary or even slight, but that's why I was so eager to get the collection out there. The pieces were written with dependency and accumulation in mind.

As a result of Ethel's kind attention, it looks like a new batch of folks have visited Curio.I hope they enjoy it.

Wigleaf Top 50 izzup!

So my Wigleaf Top 50 news is complicated:

1) I've got two stories on the long shortlist: "The Brewsters" & "Last Seen Leaving," which appeared in Moon Milk Review and Smokelong, respectively, and are also collected in Curio.

2)Next year I will be on the Top 50 team, along with Ravi Mangla and Greg Gerke, and the new guest ed. (I know who it is, but it doesn't look like Scott has made a formal announcement yet). Being part of the team means that I have been handed a massive list of sites to follow and pick through.

3) Though I didn't make the Top 50 this year, stories I selected for Everyday Genius and helped select for Prick of the Spindle did:

Roxane Gay's "Boys in Drag"

Barry Graham's "13 ways of looking at a roadtrip"

Simon Smith's "Things I've Eaten That I'm Not Proud Of"

Valerie Vogrin's "Apologies"

4) (takes big breath) Plus others I selected/helped select made the long list:

Erin Fitzgerald's "At Grayfield Keep"

Jen Michalski's "The Turn of Things"

John Minichillo's "Working Halloween for Christmas Money"

Cami Park's "When You Heard"

Congratulations everyone--it was a pleasure working with you!

Well alrighty. Galleys ahoy

Looks like the publisher approves the revisions, has completed the line edit, and is rushing the copy off to the galley printers by the weekend. I get passed by this go-round because we're a tad behind schedule, but that's fine with me. There'll still be time to work with the galleys.

Actually, they really liked the revisions, to the point of using four exclamation points to say so, and this makes me very happy.

Keep an eye out for Donna D. Vittucci's cameo appearance as a very friendly French Quarter waitress.

Hope no one was expecting me to get any work done this weekend

Because I may be getting the pre-lim galley copy this weekend. To be sent on to the galley printers next weekend.

Gulp

Plus, we just started a weight loss program. Mainly in preparation for the book tour. How doomed are we?

The main character of Death Wishing is a guy who is trying to lose weight in New Orleans.

beelines & pinballs

Looking forward to a weekend at the cabin where I don't have to talk to anyone but Dean. I'm still talk-tired from last weekend's admissions event where not only were we swamped by potential English majors and their fams, but engineering and business and everyone else, because we're offering a new writing and rhetoric minor. They'd beeline to the communications table then pinball over to us--I sure did get the impression our program looked hot.

Then there was the 17 year old who stopped by to show us her new book (quite pretty) and to let us know she's convinced the campus B&N to stock it. I hope she was 17. She mighta been 16.

Last weekend was also Conversations & Connections weekend. It was very cool, and sort of by design an indie-first event. I talked to Dave Housley about it at Plumb, and Rae Bryant did a great break down over at the Patasola Press [Caper Books] site.

All the sessions I attended tended to come back to addressing the meaningful use of social media, or meaningful promotion in general. Interesting as hell, and a philosphy we should see in action, soon--these concerns are at the heart of The Lit Pub, LLC enterprise to be formally launched late spring/early summer.

Death Wishing listed on Amazon.

So my friend's mom asked her to check out Amazon to see if my book was listed yet, and it was so she posted it to Facebook. Which is how I found out.

Yes, that is THE Dorothy Allison blurbing me.

I'm buzzy and my ears are hot.

The cover art is awesome, check out the wee little rats in the background.

Purring

Writer Tim Dicks said a couple sweet things about Curio in an interview over at Flash Fiction Chronicles. But he also talks about writing flash every day, which should drive you over to his blog where you'll see his "Story every Day" project unfolding. Really interesting stuff, and it looks like he's up to #160.

People should be talking about this project. I'll try to get to work on that.

Over at Plumb, my latest post is about trippy pinball machines. Yes, I left off Orbitor1 and Cirqus Voltaire. But those are a little on-the-nosey, aren't they?

Still not sure what Plumb's identity is. It's fun to write for, but there's a lotta WHITE DUDES on staff, and they like WHITE DUDE stuff. It's not clear where I fit in, tone-wise.

Making the list

Erin Fitzgerald's Storybucket 2011 is a compilation of suggestions, and for the time being the suggester identities are being withheld. Insanely I was dreaming about this thing for the past few days, really working up a lather. And today? Delight and confusion. Yes, one of my stories made the list, but it's a really random one from Curio called "Crimson." One that I almost cut, as a matter of fact.

Prick of the Spindle 5.1 is live & my last

The latest issue is live and chock full of features by me, mainly because Cynthia Reeser encouraged me to initiate a lot of projects last winter, and now they've come into being. Check out

My interview with Steve Himmer.

A round up of silly questions for Steve, Matt Bell, Paula Bomer, D. Harlan Wilson, Lee Papa, Ethel Rohan, and Joseph Young.

A review of Joe Young's Name, where I seek assistance with the vampire genre from a 14 year old expert named Maggie.

So with my fingers all over this issue, it probably seems weird for me to announce that this is my last go round with Prick of the Spindle. It has been a wonderful experience, but I'm just not able to manage the reading load, and with other events on the horizon, my head is not in the game.

My sincere thanks to Cynthia, Erin, and Trish--I've learned so much this year, and you all have been terrifically supportive. Congratulations to the incoming fiction team--they're already doing incredible work and are largely responsible for the fine selections that appear in 5.1: Cynthia Hawkins, Peg Alford Pursell, and Sarah Fruchtnicht.

Curio Reviewed (at last!)

Well, mini-reviewed, but damned sweet. David Barker was an early supporter of the project, and now he's the first reviewer. But the best part? (And here Robert Swartwood needs to listen up.) I don't know this person. We're not even FB friends. I don't think--hafta check.

Also? A CANADAIAN OPINION. C'mon US, what're you scared of?

Why, it's revision-fest!

Welcome to the fourth annual (fifth? we may have skipped a year)re-write of my West Virginia novel. This year we're working on making it sure it "jells" and features a "plot."

At the cabin right now, and the peepers are outraged.

Exploiting my gosh daughter to further my fabulous career

Rexine reads Garson over at Plumb.

Btw, the url keeps sitting in my mind as "plumbdognet." Zatta prollem?

Curio the ebook has arrived

Woweee, respect the tweet. Last night Curio was set free in ebook format, and we're using pay with a tweet or FB update, which has been pretty successful, especially after the support of some heavy taste-makers.

I've been getting a couple of questions about the "free" status. It's not that I don't value my work. My thing is out there the way I want it, Dean taught himself how to do e-pubs, Mike will teach himself e-pubs, and the privilege of being the first representative of Uncanny Valley's vision is an honor and a thrill. Right now that's the pay-off. Money, or the work of collecting it, would mess with the energy of what we're doing. That said, I can totally imagine throwing Curio up for a 99 cent sale on amazon at a later point closer to the release of my novel next fall. If I do that, I'll probable create a modified edition with added stories--turns out I'm still writing itty bitty creepy stories.

PLUMB!

PLUMB is a lit & culture blog dreamed up by Charles Dodd White. My debut post is up today--it's about some DIY Katrina lit titles that I like.

Other contributors include:

Matt Baker
Matt Briggs
Kirby Gann
Robert Kloss
Sheldon’s Lee Compton
Lavinia Ludlow
Cynthia Reeser
And The Terrifying PH Madore

Too early to tell what flavor this project is, especially since I've been caught up in the technicals of wordpress. Bot so far the posts have been pretty fun.

P.U.

Last week one of my students came back from a job & internship fair with a dismal report: Upon entering the site a suit-clad woman jumped up and demanded to know, “Are you a SHARK!?” (I suppose that counts as whimsy in the world of biz.) My student’s honest repulsion at how the professional world/professionalism was depicted at the job fair reminded me of when, in a moment of stress, I bitchily let it slip to a third party that a colleague of mine was not tenure-line (I’m not tenure-line either, but the difference is I don’t care. And it’s public info anyway. So there. Yeah, I’m still defensive seventeen years later). When the colleague got wind of my indiscretion, he wigged and demanded that I be punished for my lack of professionalism. Nothing came of it, because at the end of the day, I do my thing pretty well. I am not necessarily unprofessional, but I am aprofessional, if the a- prefix means what I think it does. I should look it up some time.

Actually, that last part is a lie. I am often deliberately unprofessional. For example, I chew gum and blow bubbles at meetings so I don't speak up too much. The main thing I’ve learned about professionalism is that posers and bullies love it. And in the dark corner of the writing world that I inhabit, professionalism offers a comfortable domain for talent-challenged, anti intellectuals. Professional behavior is powerfully attractive; it is easy to produce and measure, and we all have a story about failure that resulted from a technicality. The thought that we are a checklist item away from success is intoxicating. Do you remember cracking open your first Writer’s Market? Suddenly being successful was merely a matter of research, routine, and tidiness. They still sell those things, you know.

I know that at 48 years old it is unseemly for me to be growling eat-the-rich-type slogans, but if I’m honest, the professional urge has sent me down too many blind alleys. The only successes I have ever enjoyed came from doing what I want to do when I want to do it.* Slapping on the pantyhose never got me anything except a uti.

I’m going on about this because with my novel coming out in October, I’m starting to feel the PU (professional urge), and it’s making me nervous. Gotta lose weight, gotta buy clothes, gotta dye my hair, gotta what else? Grace comes so easy to everyone else.

*It’s true that when I’m thinner people are nicer to me. So there’s that, I suppose. But when I’m thin I wear shorts and t-shirts, so not exactly profesh.