World Book Day 2013 – New & Old Love

 

World Book Day??!!  hell yeah. awesome excuse to make book lists.

 

Top 5 Go-Tos for Random Infusions of Beauty 

Sometimes I need icebears and sometimes I need Mario to tell me about the fans’ sounds at night… these are my shelf-grabs for snippet reading or total re-ingestion

1. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller

2. The Strangeness of Beauty – Lydia Minatoya

3. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace

4. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

5. East of Eden – John Steinbeck

 

Top 5 Quickest Reads in the Past Year

There’s no way to list the best things I’ve read, there are WAY too many. But for what it’s worth, I devoured these in just a couple days apiece, and I think that says plenty about them. In order beginning with the speediest:

1. Growing Up Dead In Texas – Stephen Graham Jones

2. Full Dark, No Stars – Stephen King

3. Nod – Adrian Barnes

4. Murder and Other Distractions – Michael Estrin

5. The Sound of Loneliness – Craig Wallwork

 

5 Self-Pimps Because Why Not? I’m Proud to Be In This Stuff

1. Warmed and Bound – “The World Was Clocks” available now

2. In Search of a City: Los Angeles in 1000 Words – “Gilded Bones” available now

3. cutaway – “The Cabbage Muse” available now

4. Cipher Sisters – “Asymmetry” (and co-editor) coming very soon

5. The Booked. Anthology – “Short Tendon” coming very soon

P.S. to this list, still a year in the future so can’t really gloat about it just yet - Burnt Tongues – “The Line Forms on the Right” coming summer 2014

Happy World Book Day!!! READ READ READ!!!

Death Takes a Holiday

Menacing Hedge Spring 2013 Issue LIVE!!

Woo hoo!! The Spring Issue just went up.

Six short stories hand-picked by yours truly, plus awesome poems selected by Kelly Boyker. AND artwork by my awesome friend Ryan Case, that MH was nice enough to allow me to interview.

Click over for brand new fiction by:

Kate Velguth

Court Merrigan

Liz Young

Mia Avramut

Matthew Burnside

Gisella Faggi

Menacing Hedge Spring 2013

Bird of Pray by Ryan Case

Chuck Palahniuk Anthology ‘Burnt Tongues’ Will Include…ME!!

a few years ago i joined a workshop. i was getting long in the tooth and decided it was about time people KNEW i wrote stories all the time, as opposed to just scribbling them down then hiding them in notebooks, folders, envelopes, folding them up and shoving them in books as markers, and what have you. maybe at some point i wanted actual humans to see them. so, other people working to become better writers seemed a good place to start.

fast forward a few years, and it’s very difficult for me to keep ANY of my fiction to myself. and one of those stories – “The Line Forms on the Right” – that i oh-so-fearfully handed over to be judged, praised and shredded in the writing workshop ends up here:

Chuck Palahniuk news release:

http://chuckpalahniuk.net/news/the-cult-anthology-burnt-tongues-has-a-publisher?fb_action_ids=137646729749885&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%7B%22137646729749885%22%3A503271313067906%7D&action_type_map=%7B%22137646729749885%22%3A%22og.likes%22%7D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D

Medallion Press news release:

http://www.prnewschannel.com/2013/04/03/fight-club-author-chuck-palahniuk-to-release-new-book/

Burnt Tongues! Coming Summer 2014!!

 

the wasp

The Ides of March: ‘Cipher Sister’ Table of Contents Floats to the Surface….

 

Cipher Sister

Table of Contents

Darcy and Lucy among the Flowers by Alexander Davis

 Lucky by DB Cox

 The Cipher Sisters and Kid Nosferatu Dance the Bally-Kooch by Edward Morris

 Mickey Slim by Chris Deal

 A Witch in West Kansas by W.P. Johnson

 Mercy by Rebecca Brown

 1951 by Matt McGee

There’s no Business Like BLANK by Xander Stronach

That’s Showbiz by Jason Lee

1971 by Ken Goudey

Real Lookers by Audrey Hare

Dance, Darling by Richard Thomas

Regular Earharts by Andrew McElrath

You & Me by Adam Autin

Saga Sideshow by Tone Baker

 Chance Meeting at the Back of the Apollo Theatre, Harlem, NYC by Sek Han Foo

Asymmetry by Amanda Gowin

 Sister is the Sister by Edward J Rathke 

Cigarettes…

The first cigarette in a pack and the last cigarette in the pack are the only ones that matter – the rest are incidental.

It’s the voice in my head, speaking over the exhale of smoke, the only thing interrupting the quiet of the collective zen – every animal in sight is asleep, stretched in the sun unconscious absorbing the warmth and the good and the light and the cool of the half-dead grass on their underbellies. The trees are sleeping in the fake winter, and the dogs and llamas, and the rabbits in the neighbors’ pen – the horses with droopy silver eyelashes with the perpetual hand of the sun resting on their backs. The only thought and it’s meaningless and meaningful and my mind is the only one not tuned to the day but perfectly tuned to the universe inside each closed set of eyelids, each drowsy mourning dove that waddles in the yard pecking songbird mix from the mud and leaving x-s in their wake.

Every…

I dreamed I was stretched in a field with horses around me, snuffling the grass, and Bingo, the horse that loved me, was sniffling my face, horse kisses, my eyes closed and every horse in the field gave me a pass, their legs a soft corral with light spilling between, the smell of sun and horse and the feel of a smile.

Woke to freezing rain and a dead rat belly up in the yard, batted around all night by irritable dogs, horses that didn’t love me tossing indifferent glances my way to see if i’d be the bearer of sticky sweet corn, not a cigarette to be found.

But this afternoon, the cellophane crackled and the foil caught the light, and the beasts slept and my mind woke, and I thought The first cigarette and the last cigarette are the only ones that matter, the rest are incidental. And I added my exhaled smoke to the lazy clouds above.