Happy 2009

This morning, I switched on CNN to wake myself up before work and caught a segment with a reporter asking people on the streets to sum up 2008 in three words.

Because I too like brevity, here are my three words to encapsulate the past year:

“totally fucking sucked”

Here’s to hoping ’09 gets better.

Slap Me, Pinch Me, Make Me Squeal

So I don’t know why this is, but I’ll be the first one to admit that for some reason, I don’t like to submit fiction. For every 10 submissions I make to journals, only about 0.5 of them are fiction submissions. Yeah, that bad.

My poor submissions habits aside, there’s this one story that I’ve been trying to get published for about 2 years now—not regularly, but intermittently when I find a journal I think would fit it—without any luck. And I do mean luck, because that’s what publishing—whether indie or commercial—is all about. In fact, I probably even whined about this story here before.

But now I’m not going to whine. I’m going to give it to you starting Friday. In installments. You’re welcome.

Then you can tell me what’s wrong with it, other than the obvious. One editor told me it was “kind of a little bit hot.” If I were going for hot, there would have been no “kind of a little bit” about it and our editor would have had…well, that’s for another blog post far, far away. But you get the point. Okay, I’ll stop with the bad puns now.

You’re not an editor. Or maybe you are. But either way, my story wants you. Oh yes, it does.

Laziness, (not apathetic)

I’m back, having emerged from the turkey coma, and having accomplished zero work during the long Thanksgiving break.

Now it’s time to rework the chapbook.

I have something exciting and (reasonably) original in the works for this chapbook. If all goes as planned, there may be some unique projects happening for me (and others?) in ‘09. I’ll keep you posted as it all unfolds.