illegible undecipherable

is Curio story number 10. It suggests the essence of horror for me, but I'm not sure it will strike anyone else the same way. I mean, it's not even a story. Wednesday will be a real story, regular length, too.

Tomorrow, if class isn't canceled by the ice storm, we discuss chapter one of Steve Himmer's The Bee-Loud Glade, which is available for preorder now.

I feel really privileged to have been a bit on the inside as Steve was writing this book and seeking a publisher, and it seems like I've been teaching aspects of TBLG for a couple of semesters now. Because we’re tight, internet-style, I probably won’t do an official review of the novel (not my ethics, Steve’s, okay?). But I can write about it here and probably goodreads if I ever remember to go there. TBLG is a dreamy yet unnerving pastoral with the focused energy and attention of a novella, and it hits about 16 points on my "Write me this" wishlist.

Onions

Numba Nine went live yesterday, and it's one of the stories from Curio that I was unsure of, along with "Spoon and Blade," but it turns out that those two stories have gotten really great responses.

I have a good excuse for posting notice late--Thursday was my birthday and because of the storm our power was out for 21 hours. We didn't do anything, but waiting for light and heat is exhausting. I still don't feel settled yet.

A Fish Story

"Spoon and Blade"

it's getting too real with the novel. looks like I'm reading with Ig Publishing stable-mate Mark Yakich at City Lights next November. Dean just keeps blinking at me like I grew a new arm.

Bun Fun

Bun likes to watch.

great weekend

got my advance check

got my birthday ipad

got my syllabus done (garson/"captions", denza/"soap", mangla/"retention", and call&call/"snowstorm. . ." will be read in-class tuesday)

got to hear the waitress say to her co-workers: "anyone here see a black book? you know, a book for reading?"

Meet the Grandson of The Ax Man of New Orleans

Here. The Ax Man was real.

Drownded Demonds

The fifth story from Curio is live. "Drownded Demonds" comes from two thoughts I couldn't shake--the fact that Dean kept finding broken knives in the woods, and my friend's mother talking about how they would use a chicken to get a septic tank started. This is one of three or four stories featuring Bun, a mountain man psychopath who has found his level.

Recently James Robison did one of those Fictionaut Five questionnaires, offering an elegant answer to the question, How do you come up with ideas for stories?
He said, "A story must have three ingredients, like, oral surgery, Puccini’s Turandot, and divorce. Or. Hurricane science, a niece, and physics. If I have three large thoughts, intuitions or detections about three varied things, I’ll launch a story."

"Christmas Eve" in Curio

Up today is "Christmas Eve," the first of several West Virginia inspired stories.

Ravi Mangla's Visiting Writers & Uncanny Valley

Very excited by the news that Ravi's Visiting Writers series is slated for serialization by the great folks at Uncanny Valley. Back in March 2010, I was guest ed for Everyday Genius, and I launched my month with five pieces from the series because it was so special.

Ravi's one of my favorite writers, and I've just decided to put him on the syllabus.

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).

Laura's Big Day

Curio is here at last!
If you think you'd like to review it, lemme know.

I've written a review of Erin Kelly's debut thriller, The Poison Tree.

I go back to work today. Haven't seen the old place sine the 23rd.

CURIO is coming

My collection of creepy little stories is due to launch Monday, January 10. Don't worry, I'll remind you. But just so you know what you're getting, there are 21 stories, and one will be posted each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday until they run out. There will also be downloadable versions of the entire collection, with illustrations and design by Mike Meginnis.

The whole shebang is coming at you from Uncanny Valley Press as their debut publication.

ps. I own January.

Writing in public, 2010

I've been trying to write this post for days but threw out my drafts. We're in the French Quarter for the holiday weekend, and I just received the contract for my New Orleans novel by email. Haven't had a drink but I feel pretty drunk right now. Not joking, I'm woozy.

so, details. The publisher is IG Publishing, and we've been working back and forth since last new year's eve. There will be a few more edits and we have yet to settle on a title, so suggestions are welcome. Here was/is the query:

If you had one wish to change the world, what would it be? Now what if it had to be your dying wish?

In post-Katrina New Orleans, final words can cure cancer, wreck economies, and eliminate house cats. Divorced and disgraced up north, Victor hopes to re-invent himself in the French Quarter where he lives with and works for his son in a vintage shop making corsets and capes. All he wants is a quiet, drunken, carefree life,but after a series of eccentric deathbed wishes come true — including the return of the 1967 Elvis, clouds turned orange, and mothers growing third eyes — Death Wish hysteria forces Vic into action. Along with his entrepreneurial son Val, and his libertine friend Martine, Victor must battle the apocalyptics who have seduced his lovely neighbor Pebbles away from her true vocation of singing the blues (very badly). But Victor must also confront his mortal identity: just what would he wish for the world, especially the world without him in it?

Some stories adapted from the novel have appeared in Juked, Barrelhouse, Pank, killlauthor, and Storyglossia. the Juked one probably captures the spirit of the book in the briefest space, but the Barrelhouse story (in print, issue 7) comes closest plot and style-wise.

My students say the book falls into the genre of urban fantasy, whatever the heck that is.


I love you all. Going out for lunch. Going to try not to hug random New Orleans bums and aristocrats. Happy New Year.

Dear Recycling Team,

Yes, that's an empty champagne bottle on the top of all those cat food tins. No, I don't think I'm Zsa Zsa Gabor or even Edina Monsoon. I had/have something to celebrate ahead of the official holidays, but as it's still an unofficial occasion for joy, I'll keep my yap shut-or full of $25 fizzy wine from the Korean grocery. (Back channel gossip welcome, though).

Thumbnail Re-posts

When I saw that the purveyors of brief literary art at Thumbnail Magazine were looking for blog content, I volunteered material from the VIPs on vsf site--pending original author approval of course. Today, they've reposted Tara Masih's sweet little essay "How to String Together a Story Collection," an article I re-read frequently.

Enjoy! again.

In other no-news-yet-news, I will spend these days leading to Christmas peering up at the virtual skies.

What we were doing

One of the least well kept secrets of the summer was that Cami Park and I had put together a group of five women (Cami, me, Erin Fitzgerald, Andrea Kneeland, and Donora Hillard) to collaborate on a dark-themed flash collection that was going to feature a lot of art, graphic novel style. The project was Cami's baby, but she had dubbed me her co-editor, the marvelous benefit being that she and I were in frequent contact. Sadly, we did not get very far in the project before she became ill--as a group we spent the first 6 weeks or so joking and gossiping more than we wrote, time I consider very well spent, regardless. When Cami dropped out of sight, even from our private group board, we didn't question that for some time. Cami was a private person, one of the few people whose "privacy" did not strike me as perversely narcissistic.

But I don't think I have a right to make any sweeping memorial-type statements about Cami; like a lot of folks who loved her, I didn't know much about her, not even what she looked like. We only discussed writing and writers, but we did it a lot. I can say that Cami's fiction did for me what music and poetry is supposed to do--it carved new pathways in my brain.

So what I have to say is fragmented, it's all I know. She gave me fantastic advice on fictionaut. She wrote an amazing mini essay on titles for my very short fiction blog. Sometimes she'd IM me with the latest on one of her dust-ups--she stepped into a few messes at Zoe. She had a fat dog. She was not averse to a bit of priest bothering. Doing all those poetry-book-a-day reviews in September almost drowned her.

Tomorrow her memorial service will be at Circus Circus in Reno. I'm guessing it will take place in a normal, non-clown festooned space, and those of you fortunate enough to go--please send my love. However, I must point out that there will be performances on the midway by JR Johns and his dogs at 12:50 and 2:30. Do what you know is right, and bring back a slanted report.

Goats

We bought our cabin in the WV panhandle in late 1997, closing the weekend after Michael Hutchence died. Not a lot has changed in the area since then, but goats are getting more popular. I'm guessing that's because they are cheaper than alpacas.

Less than one mile from our cabin there is an extraordinary sight on Route 9: an excavation contractor has a couple of medium-small duty machines parked in his driveway, along with hand lettered signs advertising skilled labor. Then in the lawn area:

a genuine beardy, horned billy goat (used to be tethered to a barcalounger, but is now allowed to roam)
a trampoline
two large red dogs, free range with itchy butts
a plastic, castle style kid's playhouse
spiderman, hanging by the neck from a tree (he goes up at halloween, doesn't come down for months)

I can't get a picture because there is no room--this is all happening on a sharp, narrow mountain road. So to confirm to each other and remember, Dean and I speak the inventory out loud every time we pass: goat, trampoline, dogs, castle, spiderman. It's like a Meg Pokrass prompt, but I will never be able to write a story that will do it justice.

Premature announcement

I shouldn't say anything yet, but I'm too excited not to. And yet, I don't have anything to say--except that the kind folks behing not-even-fledgeling-yet Uncanny Valley dig Curio, the ghost/goth story collection that I've been pushing since March. Details are still floating about (I only found out yesterday [best thanksgiving ever, or at least better than last year's ulcer party]), but I can confirm that we are not talking conventional chapbook.

so excited.
too excited. too too.
stoopid happy. got up at 4 this morning for no good reason, that kinda thing.

Old TG story: "The Cool Aunt"

I'm passive/aggressively pretending Blip doesn't exist until they get the Mississippi Review online archive posted. For me, getting published in MR was really important to my progress. Here's a Thanksgiving story that appeared in a politics themed issue from 2004, edited by Gary Percesepe. Al Gore was in that issue, too.

"The Cool Aunt" is about a middle class teenager from PA who decides to wear a burqa to a family gthering. It's a conventional, domestic kinda story, one of the last I ever wrote of that type. The Thanksgiving story I'm working on now is a series of flash sections with crows, ministers, and a dead kid in the attic. And yes, Donna, there is a pie.

idea for a national park

My husband has an Ipad, so one of his jobs is to tell me what's really happening in the world while CNN's John Roberts struggles to curb his impulse to say "you go girlfriend" every 15 minutes during the morning news. But there is coffee involved, and Dean sometimes flits through several stories, so I usually go out into the world armed with a jumbled sense of current events.

For a few minutes yesterday I was seized by the incorrect notion that coyotes were roaming the streets of Detroit, apparently with the blessing of that city's wildlife management agency. But that was wrong--the city in question is actually Chicago.

And I was disappointed. I've been to Detroit exactly one time, under stressful conditions, and I recall that there was an eerie yellow fog hovering over a cracked highway leading into a gray city that was quiet and edgy. In the years since (about 20 now), the Detroit of my imagination is post-apocalyptic. I apologize to the real Detroit, but the Detroit in my mind is a perfect place to encounter a coyote loping down the middle of an abandoned city street.

Not that it's possible, but if we did put aside some stretch of a failed, post-industrial city watched over by the NPS, I'd go.