Opportunities

Ethan Vaughan is open to queries now for his May project. If he picks your manuscript he will give you an indepth reader's report and then do an interview with you on his blog. I can attest to the value of the report. His attention might not jettison you into superstardom, but it will definitely give you a nudge in the right direction.

April was poetry month and that's the only thing that was good about April. (That and eating the first asparagus from my garden.) Goodbye April. But we can and should keep poetry alive year round. Dare to eat a peach!

May is short story month. There are tons of markets out there for short stories, as you will see here. I've had a small measure of luck with placing some as you can see from my sidebar.  May is also planting season so you might see a little less of me. I'll be torn between editing my beloved BLACK RIVER, keeping a journal, planting lettuce, spinach, and French breakfast radishes, and blogging. Something might give unless I give up sleep. I already gave up television, like eons ago. What do you give up to create writing time?

Good luck if you query Ethan. Write a short story for May. See you around!

Do I Dare To Eat A Peach?

April is poetry month and I almost let it slip away without a tribute to the oldest form of writing. As a writer, poetry was my first love. It was like little pieces of flash fiction without the fiction, the baring of flesh without the embarrassment. Some of those early poems make me cringe, but I always remember what my esteemed creative writing teacher from Edison State College once told me, “All writing is good.” I realize now what she meant. The effort is good. Even a first attempt is good. All writing needs editing but first you have to have a draft, a first line, a cheesy poem.

One of my personal favorites is The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot. I believe it is his best.  If you listen to this read aloud, you’ll discover that a poem can cause visions.

Eliot’s masterpiece has many compartments, like the galleries in which “the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.” It’s about mortality and growing old and why is it so hard for us to accept that?  “There will be time, there will be time. Time for you and time for me.”

Read aloud, it is a gift to give someone who will listen.  From the first stanza:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells. 

April has been cold and unfriendly. I’ll be happy to see it leave. Maybe May will bring love songs, “And time for a hundred visions and revisions.”

Adieu

Drones Over America

Yesterday, on my way to work I saw two drones circling the highway. They were flying low in a menacing way. I had no choice but to drive underneath them. 

The creepiest thing about The Hunger Games was the constant surveillance that citizens were subjected to, the hover crafts that dropped out of the sky without notice at their doorsteps. Lois Lowry used a similar device in The Giver, though of course she did it first.  

It surprised me to see drones in the relatively rural area I drive through. According to the Washington Post, there was little to no opposition this winter when Congress quietly opened up U.S. airspace to aerial drones. A big push came from the military, which is preparing to bring home drones that were used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I don't care what "experts" say. I see their only purpose as surveillance and I don't like it. Law enforcement is using them under the banner of "keeping us safe". But sinister aircraft operated by unknown entities in remote locations seem to have an ulterior purpose.

I think it's that element that makes them seem creepy. Give me the thrill of watching a kid fly a kite, or a hot air balloon floating overhead with a person at the helm, or a fighter jet steaming through the clouds under the command of a gutsy pilot. Give me the human element, someone invested in the risk and the thrill of human achievement. A drone does not convey that. It doesn't feel like the sort of achievement we will be proud of in the future. It seems ironic that at the same time our manned space program has stalled, unmanned drones are flying overhead.

Have you seen a drone? What do you think of them?

An Interview!

Ethan Vaughan, editor extraordinaire and agent intern has just posted an interview with me!! Very exciting...a real interview. He asked some pretty tough questions on controversial issues, and I feel like I've really put myself out there, like my skin is getting thinner by the nanosecond when it's supposed to be getting thicker. Please stop over there and say hi. 

After reading my manuscript, Ethan gave me a "reader's report". It was an in-depth review of the entire manuscript, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses with suggestions for turning those into strengths. He uncannily pointed out all the areas that could benefit from reassessment, scenes and elements that I myself wasn't entirely happy with. He obviously read my novel closely and picked up on things that other advance readers had missed. As he pointed out to me, "All manuscripts have to go through editing, usually of a pretty hefty nature, but they emerge better for it and I'm sure yours will too." If you need any editing help, you should consider Ethan Vaughan.

Magpie Tales - Emptied Of Our Pearls

Women gather at the riverbank
to wash their hands and look at themselves.
They gather wild lilies and herbs
and bare their breasts to the sun.
They gather at the river,
teacher, musician, hunter and grower.
Far from the withering gaze of the preacher,
they bare their breasts to the sun. 

The women gather at the riverbank
to wash their underthings and wonder
at the image they present in the mirror of the water.
Ancestors embedded in the river bottom,
like snails in the stone of an aquarium,
are loosened from their shells. 
They swell up like desert sponges in a storm.
The houses of their ancestors float by in the reel of the river,
like shells emptied of their pearls.
They gather them up and refill them.


Image compliments of Magpie Tales,

(Red Roofs, Marc Chagall, 1954)

Words of my own rendition. Thanks for reading them.

Mary Magdalene

It was she who believed
that  a man walked among
them who could push back a stone.
It was she he showed himself to-
a peasant in a hood with a hoe.
It was she who knew him.

If the gospels had been written by women instead of men how much more would we know about this woman?

Inmate Work Crews Beautify the Highway (Fri.Flash 55)

The bus idles on the side of the road
and I know what’s coming:
stooped bodies in fluorescent vests,
young and colored and doing time.
Cool Hand Cop lounges by the bus.
He doesn’t have to wear a vest.
Trash flies from an open window.
They don’t look up. There is no temptation.


The G-Man wants to know if you can tell a story in 55  words. It's supposed to be fiction. Maybe  it is.

How To Keep Your Memory In Good Writing Shape

This blog is about the art of writing poetry as much as fiction. I started writing poetry long before I tackled fiction. For me, it was a natural progression. Now it turns out that poetry is good for our brains, at least the memorization of it, and I'd like to share with you Ten Compelling Reasons To Memorize Poetry. I'm all for anything that will help me keep my memory and imagination in marathon shape, anything that will help me come up with that perfect word when I need it. For as Mr. Franklin advised, "The difference between a good word and the perfect word is like the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug."

The first poem I ever memorized began,

"Under the spreading chestnut tree,
the village smithy stands..."

Anyone not know that? Do you have a favorite from school? Sadly, when I got to high school, English class was all about diagramming sentences. I wish there would've been more emphasis on creative writing and memorizing poems.

On another note, I've received some awesome feedback from a most awesome editor/freelancer by the name of Ethan Vaughan.  He will soon be posting an interview with me on his blog and I'll be sure to kindly point you in that direction when it's up (though it's kind of a gut-wrenching reveal.) The guy is wise beyond his years and asked some deep, difficult questions. Interestingly enough, I found that in composing my answers (and it took several days) I learned something about my novel. I learned what was important to me, what I have to keep, and what I can let go. For me it was as valuable an exercise as mapping out the arc of the story to see if scenes follow each other logically to a satisfying conclusion.

Enough said for now. Time to memorize a poem.

Catfish Dreams - Friday Flash 55

A turtle breaks the surface of the pond with his ancient head and swims silently along the bank. The water level is up. He leaves a wake. Catfish float on the bottom, dreaming of summer. The turtle suddenly dives with a flip of his tail. Overhead a young eagle soars across the water looking for food.



This is a flash fiction piece in exactly 55 words for the G-Man. Write the same and let him know. Why? Because it's fun. And it's good for your writerly brain, like crossword puzzles and scrabble.

TFIF and time for writing.

Erasure

I've been tweaking my blog's template lately so if you've stopped by and thought you were at the wrong place, I hope you didn't leave or roll your eyes. Please don't go! Please bear with me. Actually, I wish there was a way to revert back to what I had, but it doesn't seem possible. Oh well....the big picture in my header now is one I took last summer on Lake Huron. I love the way the water foams and pools and how the sandy pebbles in the foreground stand out in sharp detail. Doesn't it make you want to pick one up and skip it? What I also liked about this photograph is the way the watery horizon seems to gently follow the curvature of the earth. I can't wait to walk that beach again.

After a week of summer weather it looks like March has returned. I put the plastic domes on my seed trays last night and hope the greenhouse stayed above 40 degrees.

If it rains, I'll sharpen my pencil and work on my manuscript. I love editing with pencil, the ease of erasure for a change in direction, the tweak to a minor character and the shrug of a shoulder, crossing out a pesky adverb or a redundant phrase or an uncharacteristic bit of dialogue. Those things are easy and fun to fix. It's the big changes that are hard: rewriting an ending, or correcting a major flaw in the narrative. It'll take a week of rainy weather to get a grip on that. And pot after pot of coffee.

Have a good week.

VARIATIONS ON A THEME

The Literary Lab has just announced that their new anthology, VARIATIONS ON A THEME, has gone live on Amazon. The collection of short stories is available in beautiful paperback form for only $8.56, a very good price for a nice print book. Isn't the cover awsome? It makes me think of Jack In The Beanstalk meeting Hansel and Gretel.

Writers were asked to create work inspired by one of two stories: “The Tinderbox,” a classic fairy tale, or “The Huntsman,” by Anton Chekhov. I'm excited to see how all the stories fit together in what I've been told is a tight collection of magical storytelling. As always, the proceeds go to a charitable cause.

Gaitskill's Camera

VERONICA, by Mary Gaitskill is horrifying and cruel, and impossible to put down.  It’s a raw, disturbing critique of the modeling industry: the pimps and photographers, the exploitation and narcissism. But it’s also the tender story of an unlikely friendship between two disparate women in 1980s New York. Throughout the novel, Gaitskill moves seamlessly back and forth between past and present, so effortlessly you barely realize she’s doing it.

The story begins when Allison is middle-aged and cleans offices, but with a body so wrecked she can barely wash windows. Gaitskill then takes us back in time to a sixteen-year-old girl who is oblivious to fashion. She runs away from home and meets a fashion model and is drawn to the lure of modeling.

From Allison’s first shoot with an agent:

I didn’t know how to pose but it didn’t matter. Then he said he had to see me naked.

“We aren’t taking any more pictures,”he said. “No one ever shoots you nude. I have to look at you because I’m the agent.”

He turned the music off and looked at me. “You’re five pounds overweight,” he said gently. “And your breasts aren’t that good.” He touched my cheek with the back of his hand. “But right now, that doesn’t matter.”

Veronica is the eccentric middle-aged office temp Allison first meets while working between modeling jobs as a temp doing word processing for an ad agency in Manhattan. Plump, with bleached blonde hair and a loud sensual voice, Veronica is the complete opposite of Allison. She proofreads like a cop with a nightstick, and her voice resonates with "been there, done that". 

"Excuse me hon, but I’m very well acquainted with the use of the semicolon.”

Then Allison gets a chance to go to Paris to work the runway. This is a passage from shortly after she arrives:

He said I needed a haircut. Called a hairdresser, told him what to do, and sent me to the salon in a taxi. The salon was full of wrinkled women staring fixedly at models in magazines. When I walked in, they frowned and glared. But the girl at the desk smiled and led me through rows of gleaming dryers, each with a woman under it, dreaming angrily in the heat. The hairdresser didn’t even need to talk to me. He talked to someone else while I stared at myself in the mirror.

This is one of the more caustic scenes from a shoot with a photographer who was considered an artist:

The girl was fifteen and he spent the whole day telling her she was bloated and fat.

“The lips are too thin, Andre. Can you work with that? And while you’re at it, do something about those bags under the eyes.”

I was drinking orange soda and giggling with a stylist.

“My God!” cried the photographer, throwing another Polaroid on the ground. “Can’t you do better than that? Do you even know what fucking is?”

The girl’s mouth quivered. She was thin-lipped for a model.

I tipped my head back to look at the deep and bright blue sky.

“Okay,” the photographer sighed. “Look. We’re going to be shooting from the waist up only. Just put your hand down your pants and make yourself feel good.”

The girl’s mouth was twisted with embarrassment. Tears shone on her face.

“You haven’t got the lips!” yelled the photographer, “so use your eyes! You’ve got the eyes! Use them!”

Paris doesn't work out. Cheated out of her money and locked out of her apartment, Allison moves back to New York. Her career takes off again. She gets a larger apartment. As soon as she does, the work falls off. 

I was supposed to be in a swimsuit spread, but I stood next to a girl with big boobs and a butt like a mare and the photographer said, "You look like her twelve-year old sister!" During an evening-wear shoot a client suddenly appeared with a tape measure and held it to my hips and said, "Look at this! We can't have this!"

Later, over sushi, a friend asks her, "Were you about to have your period, by any chance?"

And finally, this is from a conversation that Veronica and Allison have much later about pleasing people:

Veronica drew on her cigarette, blew out. “Prettiness is always about pleasing people. When you stop being pretty, you don’t have to do that anymore. I don’t have to do that anymore. It’s my show now.”

It’s her show, and it’s her story as much as Allison’s. While reading this, I kept thinking about all the beauty pageants little girls are entered in: Princess this and Princess that, pitting them against each other to see who’s the cutest when they’re barely out of diapers. I wish that anyone thinking to subject a little girl to that would first read VERONICA.

Kiss Me I'm Irish

Every time I peel potatoes, I think of the Irish. I don't know why. Maybe it's the old stories about the Irish potato famine that I heard from my mother and my grandmother and have never forgotten. I like potatoes as much as the next person, and it's one of the most versatile root vegetables, but I can't imagine having a diet solely based on potatoes. I can't imagine if that were the case and the crop failed.

Everyone is Irish today, so I wanted to post a little tribute to a resilient people by sharing a list of common English words that come from the Irish. Credit goes to the Scottish for words like whiskey, loch, and clan, but according to Emma Taylor's article at Accredited Online Colleges, Scottish Gaelic grew out of Middle Irish. Thanks Emma. I didn't know that! 

Check it out and amaze your friends with your knowledge of word origins whilst tipping back a pint (I can't do green either). And doesn't hooligan sound nicer than criminal?  A hooligan can be almost charming. Haven't you ever wished that you'd said "yes" just once to that hooligan in your past?

Here's to the "water of life" and a day of fun with the hooligans in your present.

Friday Flash 55 - Tick Tock

The man was a clock.
Tick Tock.
He threatened the teenager who quit without notice.
He punched the migrant worker for no reason at all.
He threatened to kill the irrigation man
who forgot the couplings
Tick Tock needed for his strawberries.
They thought he was all talk
but now they're all sorry.
Tick Tock.


The storm surrounds us and knocked out the power a place away. The woods across the road are backlit by strobes of  lightning, and I try not to put too much stock in what might be seen outside the window on a night such as this. Beware the Ides of March. The man on the loose.

If you write a flash 55 for the Ides of March, make sure you let the G-Man know.

Did you buy your man a silver tie for Christmas?

What has 16,000 reader reviews on Goodreads, 100,000 e-book sales, and is No. 1 on the New York Times e-book fiction best-seller list for sales in the week ending March 3? This is all everyone is talking about.

And I've been advised by some critters to tone down the sex a bit. Now I want to put every erotic detail back in. Sex sells. Big and simple.

Their bottom line in the review: "Our consensus: the book is pretty ridiculous — for every lashing there's an "OMG!" — but if it's making more women feel comfortable discussing their sexuality, we're all for it."

At a time when women's sexualty and reproductive health are under attack,  I can't disagree with that.

The Funeral

His eyes were on me
like an owl in the barn on movement below
and I'm struck by an old emotion.
You see, I met a man who knows
that the highest point in the Great Lakes Basin
lies not far from a bluff where water drops 900 feet
to a river bottom untrespassed.
Who knows that?

Others eat shrimp and drink wine
and don't know they don't know
while he takes me into the forest
and we listen for the loons.

A man who would
rather hunker down at a campfire
than eat shrimp and drink wine
knows things I don't know.

You see I met this guy who pays attention to words
like a tiler to the blade slicing through water.
When I talk I feel his eyes
listening, listening.
And I want to go on and on about something
so he'll keep looking
and looking.

Was it the sound of water falling
or the whirr of a whippoorwill I heard
in the inflection of his voice—in his story of kayaking
on Lake Superior in a storm.
The cry of the loon is interrupted

by the clap of the skeets outside the yacht club.
They punctuate our conversation like a grammarian.
Shooters send their clay targets flying across the water
on the simulated angle of birds in flight
with no mind to the wake inside. Life goes on.
You have to hit your target.

The first time you hear a loon, you know what it is.
Like the first time you meet someone
you already know.
Draw me a map on a napkin
and I'll follow.
Take me kayaking on open water,
I'll follow.

When the silence amplifies what we won’t say or ever do
clay pigeons fly across the water and we look and look.
Only the loon in a lonely decibel
says what we won’t say.

Friday Flash 55 - Catalog Of Last Resort

He’s looking at a catalog for canes
because he can’t afford the shots.

The house is cold—
propane at fifteen percent.

He claims love is not a consideration
in his life anymore

but he waits for her to get home
to turn on the heat.

He looks for the cheapest
and circles it in red.




If you've written a piece of flash fiction in 55 words, go tell the G-Man and enjoy a flurry of attention from his bevy of FF followers.  The temperature is dropping and now I'm seriously freezing. Wonder if I can turn up the heat....

TGIF!

RUTH

The Central Plaza bustles with vendors.
A small woman trails necklaces for sale from both arms
and implores me to buy from her.
Remember Ruth, she says with a smile.

I remember her.
People brown and sturdy as earth,
travelers of space and time,
owners of the maize—
red, black, and gold.

I wish I had something of Ruth’s . . .
jade at my throat or a runner for my table.
A blanket for this winter night.
Eyes like that to lift a glass to.

Breakthrough Novel Award Contest

I made the first cut in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest in the General Fiction category. It was a shot of adreneline to find my name on the list. There were ten thousand entries so I guess that's pretty cool. If nothing else, I know my query is effective. I have the folks at Agent Query and She Writes to thank, as well as the amazing Mindy McGinnis at Writer Writer Pants On Fire, who also just so happens to have a short story in SPRING FEVERS. Her debut novel NOT A DROP TO DRINK is coming out in 2013 but you can add it to your Goodreads shelf if you have one. While you're there, you might as well add SPRING FEVERS too.

I've decided that Twitter might be a cool way to connect with people. If the creator of Spring Fevers can find time to Twitter, than I can too. One can only buck the current for so long. So if you see me out there floundering in a headwind, please offer me shelter on a branch.

I hear sleet against the window. Dare I wish for an "ice day". A free day to sit at my computer and make up stories? Delve deep into my imagination and bank of memory? This brings up an interesting discussion I started with Tricia over at Talespinning.

Do you think memory can be imagined? The mind is a fascinating thing. Dark and beautiful and mysterious. How do you know you don't know something and how do you know that that embellished memory is authentic? We all embellish memory, tweek it and edit it. Then there's memory loss. How much of your self do you retain if you lose your memory?

Keep a diary. It's the only sure way to remember the past with accuracy. That or sit down with an older family member or an old friend who can set you straight. But you might not like what they tell you.

Off to imagine some stories. Come on sleet. Come on.


P.S. I posted this accidently before all my links were in place. Sorry Mindy. Corrections have been made. And, no, I didn't get that free day.

SPRING FEVERS - It's Contagious!

Just in time for spring,

is hot off the press!

Hot in more ways than one, the anthology is a collection of tales that explore relationships in all their forms. Created by Cat Woods and Matt Sinclair, SPRING FEVERS is the debut publication of Elephant's Bookshelf Press. The ten writers featured are: MarcyKate Connolly, S.Q. Eries, Robb Grindstaff, J. Lea Lopez, Mindy McGinnis, R.S. Mellette, Matt Sinclair, A.M. Supinger, Cat Woods and myself. Yes, I am very proud to have two of my short stories included with such a fine group of writers.

The cover design was done by Calista Taylor. Isn't it pretty?

She just launched a new site for her ebook covers. If you need a cover, check out her gallery here.

SPRING FEVERS is available at Amazon or at Smashwords.

Catch a fever!