Sometimes, you just want to throw all the joy out there: fat roses and exclamation points and my two prose poems in a thirty-year-old print journal that has published the likes of Charles Bukowski, Marge Piercy and William Stafford. Thank you so much, Chiron Review, for liking my prose poems enough to want to print them. Coming your way: “Apartment Move #4” and “Apartment Move #5” in the Winter 2020 issue (or a subsequent one, if they can’t squeeze them in).
So excited to announce my new literary journal, Club Plum. Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. Send me astounding flash fiction. Send me dreamy art. You will be loved and among a select few. I will publish only remarkable pieces, or I will publish nothing.
Come to the house party.
Since major publishers are hardly publishing literary novels these days (read about it here and here and here and here), I’ll soon be spending most of my writing time writing short stories–just like I was doing years ago. For the last six years, I’ve been writing novels in hopes I could get one published by a major publisher. I’m finally ready to let that dream die. I can’t fight the market. I can’t conjure readers into existence. Readers are doing other things now–they are scrolling and binge-watching. And the readers who are reading have so many choices, and most of their choices are driven to their view by careful and pointed Amazonian marketing and other big-money-for-few-books marketing tactics. But that is okay. I will still write the occasional novel and send it to small presses (one never knows), but it’s time to go back to my old friends, literary journals. I visited them a couple of years ago and was welcomed with opened arms as they swooped up my flash fiction, one story after another. All these years–almost three decades since I discovered them–and they are still there, still here, and we fiction writers need them more than ever.
The songbird called, and I answered. Thank you, Half Mystic, for including me in your literary realm. I am pleased to sing that I am the new journal editor.
I’m tickled to be a new reader of prose submissions for Longleaf Review.
Read “Ferry Men” in the Spring 2018 issue of The Broke Bohemian.
Usually, I write my fiction while commuting to and from work. However, I’ve been feeling an urgency to complete my latest novel ASAP for a few reasons that I won’t go into here. For one full week, Sunday to Sunday, I did nothing but write. I had no distractions and no obligations. My fingers swelled from typing and not moving, save for a cup of tea or the need to rise from the story. Below are images from my cabin as well as a few taken on a short stroll on the grounds when I completed my work, on the last evening at Centrum. This time allowed me to surpass my goal and achieve a wish: to write the final 100 pages and to complete the first solid draft of my current work, a task that would have taken me at least three more months to achieve.
For one week in February, I will hunker down in a cabin in Fort Worden, Washington as an artist-in-residence at Centrum. I will write, day and night, working on my latest novel. I will be completely and perfectly happy.
Read my little collection of dystopian flash fiction.
