Friday, December 31, 2010

I'm in Fried Chicken and Coffee



Word of the week is "old". The old year is soon to be gone with a large amount of work published within it (22 stories, 28 poems, 2 works of non-fiction) . 2010 gone with a lot of old things, old habits picked at and examined.

 Here's the story The Old Place published by Rusty Barnes in Fried Chicken and Coffee.

It's been a year of personal struggles and also personal struggles identified to be dealt with. Happy New Year. Don't waste life's time, you never know what you might miss.

Monday, December 27, 2010

I dissect my story from Smokelong Weekly! Everyday There is So Much About Elephants.




Art by Sue Miller






READ IT HERE:  Everyday There is So Much about Elephants.

---------------------------------------------------------

Now to the promised dissection: The story is titled, Everyday There is So Much About Elephants because the week I wrote it conversations and references to elephants were occurring at an abnormal rate.

Here's some specific lines and why they got placed in the story:

I'd been told that elephants could change your life. I also had been told that I could change the life of an elephant by protesting the circus.

I have many friends whom champion causes. This was the week Jess Barnett and Laura Kiesel both happened to mention this fact.

--------------------------------------------------------------
How did I know an elephant had been in the refrigerator? He left his footprint in the cheesecake

The paragraph this appears in is a set up and perhaps totally written for that cheesy punch line. Art imitates life. If I'd used all the jokes from that link I think the story would have turned out different.


I never heard, "You look great today" or, "Why don't you take a drive to the Cape?" The voices never said, "Have another donut." or, "Your professor loves your work." They only told me to kill my parents or someone important like John Hinkley Jr. The voices never said, "It's a sunny day, you should wear shorts."

These line were spun off an old poem of mine. "Hearing Voices"  appeared in We Needed a Night Out and in the  63 Channels Fall-Winter Print Issue. The anniversary of John Lennon's murder reminded me of this poem.
 
 
--------------------------------------------------------------
 
 
The job paid well but when the company had a Team Building Exercise at Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus my boss introduced me to Billy Barnum, a friend of hers and a poet.
 
Billy Barnum exists in this capacity. He has ties to the circus He's also friend of mine.
 
 
--------------------------------------------------------------

 I recited the only poem I knew about a gay horse pulling a carriage
 
Perfect opportunity to note the ignorance of this character.
 
 
--------------------------------------------------------------

 On Monday night I watched "Fatal Attractions," the show on Animal Planet where people raised exotic animals that grew up and killed them. That night it was about someone that held a baby elephant named Sophie
 
I'm a little obsessed with this show. There is NOT an episode about an elephant named Sophie. Sophie is the name of the pet rabbit owned by my children.
 
 
--------------------------------------------------------------

It was interesting timing because usually people were fired on Fridays. That's why suicide hotlines were their busiest before the weekends. If you're fired during the week there was a better chance you'd come back to the office with a gun.



I learned the fact about suicide hotlines from Ned Vizzini when I read with him in November. Ned wrote that in his fantastic book, It's Kind of a Funny Story when the protagonist is being screened for a psychiatric hospitalization on a Friday.

 
--------------------------------------------------------------

 
"I'm buying this gun so that people won't forget me," I said. In life, people aren't good enough. They'll light candles. The elephants won't forget anything.


It's good when the last line wraps it all up. I'll wrap this up by saying, "Thanks for reading!"


Thursday, December 23, 2010

Closure (the story) at In Between Altered States




The year ends and In Between Altered States publishes something of mine called, "Closure" which means I have to explain that it's a story in metaphor rather than a statement about the end of the year or about any incident. Oh good, I think I just explained it.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

2010 in Review: Out There and Naked (with perhaps a few that'll slide in before 12/31)





  SHORT, FLASH, AND MICRO FICTION


"Bipolar" , November 30, 2010 MiCrow

"Where Did You Come From?" , November 15, 2010 Night Train

"We Measure All This Distance in Longing" , October 13, 2010 The Blue Lake Review
"A Dedicated Customer"

"About a Million Punches" , October 9, 2010 Waterhouse Review

"After She Left a Note" , September 1, 2010 Negative Suck (view September 2010 archive)

"You Deserve Somebody" , September 1, 2010 U.M.ph.!

"You Have To Splice It Together" , June 27, 2010 In Between Altered States

"How It Went Down", April 28, 2010, Six Sentences, Volume 3

"Arms up to the Sky" , April 24, 2010 The Criterion

"Eight Years Later, Charlie Goes to Omaha" , April 22, 2010 Metazen

"I Look at You Through Glass and Water" , April 4, 2010 Litsnack

"Bigger Than Charles Atlas" (written with Elizabeth Rawlins) , March 30, 2010 Metazen

"How to Give Dating Advice as a State Social Worker" , March 15, 2010 JMWW

"Tenth Frame Spare" , March 3, 2010 Fried Chicken and Coffee

"Somewhere on the Edge" , February 24, 2010 Shalla Magazine

"Joe the Salamander" , February 21, 2010 Air in the Paragraph Line #13

"Channeling" , January 31, 2010 Big Toe Review
"Grubs"




POETRY

"Lovemaking Advice From A Serial Grape Eater"
"An 18 Year Old Searches For Her Soul"
November 20, 2010 Polarity

"The Next Better Place"
November 1, 2010, Ibbetson 28

"Goodbye You"
October 7, 2010, The Long Islander Newspaper

"Unwelcome Guest"
"We Are Not Talking"
"at eleven-fifty-nine"
"About Alison"
August 20, 2010 The Legendary

"A Girl in A Loft"
July 22, 2010, Bagels with the Bards Anthology 5

" Like The Moths in the Night"
July 13, 2010, Curbside Splendor

" Recipe for a Great Poem"
July 2, 2010, Gutter Eloquence

" Ode to Woodworm"
June 30, 2010, Riverbabble 17

" Full fledged neurosis uncovered in my dreams
"Failed Marriage Camping Trip"
June 9, 2010, The Somerville News

"Comfort Food Menu from the Emotional Café" (written with Elizabeth Rawlins)
May 27, 2010, McSweeney's

"County Fair"
"Second Hands"
"Old Man in this Bar"
"Conversation about Mike"
"Relapse"
May 28, 2010 Lit Up Magazine

"Hungover for Jury Duty"
May 14, 2010, Spoonful Journal

"Funeral With No Music"
April 28, 2010, Night Train 10.1

"these days I worry"
"Elementary Physics"
March 28, 2010 Screw Iowa

"Boston to Providence"
March 1, 2010, Gutter Eloquence

"Seasonal Affective Disorder"
February 27, 2010, Durable Goods #13

"April Ends"
"Here's to your new life and Those Who Didn't Know You"
January 7, 2010 Istanbul Literary Review


NON-FICTION


"The Truth in Fiction and why you always hurt the ones you love"

June 9, 2010, Screw Iowa


"Wait, who's in the Super Bowl again?"

February 4, 2010,Food Shenanigans!

Monday, December 6, 2010

Founder of Web Digest Weekly has some nice things to say.

I'm honored and humbled that in his blog, Monday's Author, Carey Parrish has some very generous things to say about me. Read it HERE





Carey Parrish was born in Dalton, Georgia. He attended Southeast Whitfield High School, graduating in 1985, before first pursuing a career in nursing. After traveling quite extensively during his twenties and early thirties, he began to use the experiences and adventures he had globetrotting to fuel his ambitions to become a writer. He began writing professionally in his late thirties, shortly after the death of his maternal grandmother, an event he credits as "the single most life changing event in my experience," and he was soon selling articles to British based reFRESH magazine as well as in American publications such as JL Foster's Within His Castle, Entertainment Weekly, Crime Rant, and various other magazines, both in print and online.


In 2006, Parrish founded Web Digest Weekly e-magazine. After being involved in various writers groups online, he was very impressed with the talents of his many of his peers and he wanted to develop a forum through which they could reach as many readers as possible. Web Digest Weekly was an immediate success, due to his first interview guests being bestselling horror novelist Rick R. Reed and Susaye Greene of The Supremes. The e-zine is currently approaching its third year of publication and attracts over 100,000 hits per month. Other notable guests on the site have included musician Jim Brickman; bestselling author Barry Eisler; Survivor winners Ethan Zohn, Jenna Morasca, and Aras Baskauskas; The Amazing Race winners Alex Boylan, Chip Arndt, and Brennan Swain; astronaut Mike Mullane; and celebrity biography writer J. Randy Taraborrelli.


Parrish is the author of the books Into The Light: Experimentations In Poetry & Prose, the short story anthology The Moving Finger Writes, and the novel Marengo. He attributes his success to "taking all the things that were wrong in my life and replacing them with things that were right." He presently resides in the mountains of Northern Georgia

Other famous folks from Dalton. Deborah Norville.