Went by and checked out the venue with a friend, who gave it three thumbs up. Yay! Still haven’t heard back about the nibbles, oh well. We may just have to order pizza. I’m looking forward to chilling with nearest and dearest, and I can honestly say, maybe for the first time in a while, that everyone who will be there is someone I actually WANT to hug.
PLUS, a new Zombie piece, Z-Day, coming out at Opium.
Reading Seb Doubinsky’s poetry collection, The Little Things that Break, so watch this space for my Holy Shit! comments. Seb’s astonishing triptych, Babylon Trilogy, has just been picked up Black Coffee Press, those cute guys from Detroit.Which just goes to show that good things do happen to good people.
I’m liking LisaLisaLisaLisaLisaLisaLisa, by Swan, at New Dead Families. It’s absurd, but not heartless, the emotion and humor ring true. And funny, like when he does this: ‘Dear Lisa, is it cold there? Do you miss me? You’re so good and pretty and nice. I mean fastidious, punctual and thrifty…’ and he only does it twice. Which is kind of elegant.
I’m hating terrible bosses. Four people have told me stories about their terrible bosses today. Really terrible. Slaverous bottom-line flunkies. Fly them. If only.
Truman Capote likened the finishing of a novel to taking your child into the back yard and shooting it. As a parent, I’m intrigued by the mind that could have created that sentence. Still, I take his point. I was all but undone by the completion of my previous novel, cried for days, became physically ill. Wracked with grief for what I’d created and destroyed. But not with this one. This one felt more like letting go of a red balloon. There was that sense of loss, but also elation. I’d seen its shape from the beginning, knew from the moment I conceived it, that it wasn’t mine to keep. They never are.
The team from Dog Horn Publishing have selected one of my first published stories, Lion Man, to be including in their upcoming international anthology. So very very cool.
Short stories are still so hard for me. I guess they’re just hard. Doesn’t mean they’re not the best best thing. I’m reading some now, and while they’re fun, they just don’t have that ‘crap, what just bit me’ factor. Reading a great story should make you feel like you’ve been tapped on the shoulder and when you look up there’s no one there. Like you’ve been touched by something and changed forever. Short stories should be startling. Period. So starting now, here is the Holy Shit story of the Week.
Twelve Arrows, by Stephen Graham Jones
From Le Zaparogue Editions.
An armless pianist, a demon, a psychopath and other “freaks”… J.S. Breukelaar’s characters could definitely spring out of some acid-fueled dreamscape and yet she manages to give them a depth and a humanity that is both chilling and fascinating. Following the short stories, you will find a small collection of Breukelaar’s poetry, which is as hard as it is sensitive – pushing the reader towards emotional unbalance and satori-like experience. A major new woman’s voice in literature, J.S. Breukelaar’s stories and poetry is an must-have for all those who are dedicated to REAL literature. – Sebastien Doubinsky, author of The Babylon Trilogy.)
Breukelaar conjures a range of associations, from William Burroughs and Kathy Acker to Cormac McCarthy and J.G. Ballard… the forensic tenderness of imagined worlds and forbidden thoughts that seem simultaneously to be both deeply peculiar and disturbingly apt. – Kris Saknussemm, Zanesville.
The great thing about having clever friends who send you their work is that you get to read it ‘in the raw’, half-baked and oozing with promise and hope and so much life that you will remember the joy of reading it in this state—as a .docx or an attachment or as half-toned pages smeared with the remains of the dinner you stopped eating in amazement mid-forkful—long after the plaudits and glossy cover-art and royalties turn it into a hot property.
For a brief few moments before all that, it’s just art.
Union Falls is live, here, at Fantasy Magazine.
‘I finished the story and it was close, but not there. For some reason this disturbed me more than any other story that I’d written. It meant a great deal to me, and it was terribly important to get it right. But I knew it wasn’t. I showed it to two trusted readers, and they asked the right questions, and I started again, and that time it came out as it should, effortlessly, as if someone was telling me, rather than I was telling it. That’s when you know it’s true.’
You can read the rest of the interview here.
The site is happening, slowly. Thanks for your patience.
Along with my story Union Falls. It’s here.
