Woo-hoo! I'm in an Indigo Mosaic Anthology!

Amazing news!

My short story "Blood of Lilies, Blood of Lambs" has been accepted for an anthology titled The Darkness Within, to be published by Indigo Mosaic.  The anthology, as you can tell by the title, is all about ways to represent our dark sides.  This is right up my alley!

Of course, I had to send a short story I've written that features Natalie, the heroine of my third eBook (The Romanov Legacy).  Nat, of course, is schizophrenic.  In this story, Natalie is in France, sneaking into a chapel where an infamous event in the French Revolution took place.  I won't say any more, but if you read the story, you get some backstory on Natalie's auditory hallucination (the angel Belial).  He has a past, you know.  He wasn't always someone's hallucination.

I'm deeply grateful to small and indie presses who are willing to read and accept work from writers who haven't made it big yet.  There are a lot of us out there who work hard, love writing, and put our hearts and souls (and darknesses) onto the page.  Someday we'll have the NYT bestseller under our belt, or a Pushcart, or a nod in a Best American anthology.  Until then, it's wonderful to know that small publishers like Indigo Mosaic will keep publishing kick-ass stories in kick-ass anthologies.  Rock on!!

I'm Going to Be in Gargoyle!

It's not the best gargoyle photo in the world,
but it's the only one I had handy.
Westminster Abbey rocks, by the way.  

Woo-hoo! My short story, "Integers and Atoms," was accepted for publication in Gargoyle #60 (Summer 2013).

If you've never seen it, Gargoyle is an awesome literary journal that's been around for 35 years.  The editors, Richard Peabody and Lucinda Ebersole, have published truly amazing writers, including Rita Dove, Jennifer Egan, T.C. Boyle, and Allen Ginsberg. Now I'm going to be a part of that list, too!  This is mind-blowing and probably calls for some champagne.

On their website, they provide a list of the awards the writers they published have won.  Here's a sampling:

6 National Book Award-winning authors, 3 PEN/Faulkner winners, 4 Pulitzer Prize winners, 2 MacArthur Fellows, 6 Iowa Short Fiction Award winners, 5 Flannery O'Connor Award winners, 5 Orange Prize Long List writers, 2 Orange Prize Short List writers, 2 National Book Critics Circle Award winners, 6 Lambda Literary Award winners, and 3 Firecracker Alternative Book Award winners. 


This is big time.  
This is awesome.
This is motivation to keep kicking ass.

Grad School Is Over...So Now What?

My two-year roller-coaster of grad school has finally come to an end.  Classes are over, and I'm in a holding pattern as I wait for my degree to post.  I'm told this could take as many as 12 weeks.  In the meantime, I'm trying to rebuild the writing momentum I had last summer.  But what does that mean?  Where do I go from here?

First things first.  Let's go out on the deck and have a drink.  Here's the view from my deck, which might explain why I'm so partial to thinking there.

I began the degree with hopes of teaching in a community college.  This still might happen, but since a multi-billion dollar California budget deficit was recently announced, I'm guessing slots will be few and far between at the few local community colleges near me.  I'll definitely apply once my degree posts, but all I can do is cross my fingers, polish my application materials, and hope for the best.

Dude, this really is a killer view.  See that pasture to the right?  Sometimes there are cows in it!  And they trot happily along, grazing in the company of one sheep and one goat.  It's true what they say.  Happy cows really do come from California.  

But seriously, in terms of writing, I've got a slough of to-do items on a list that's sat largely untouched since the semester began.  Publish next ebook?  Working on the formatting as we speak!  Publish romance manuscript that won the Daphne DuMaurier award last summer as an ebook?  Maybe.  Haven't had any luck with agents or queries for it, but truth be told, I haven't tried as hard as I might.  I'm fighting with myself on whether to go it alone here and self-publish or query some more and see what happens.

I have a pile of short stories, some needing to be sent out and some needing polishing before being sent out.  Short stories are so weird, you guys.  My creative writing professor assured me all of the things I've turned in are worthy of being published.  Yet they've all been rejected multiple times.  (Peter Ho Davies noted in an interview that he heard the average number of rejections for a short story before its acceptance is 12.  One of his stories was rejected 25 times before acceptance.)  I'm not near that number yet.  So I guess this means I need to research markets, read more journals, and submit, submit, submit.

I feel torn in several directions.  There's the literary side of me--the one that writes short stories and sends them to reputable journals.  There's the genre side of me--the one that writes thrillers and romances and dreams of mass-market publication.  There's the DIY side of me--the one that's put out two ebooks so far.  But I feel like I'm going to have to choose who I want to be....the writer I want to be.  Either that, or I'll have to start using a pseudonym for certain types of writing.

I feel like, as a writer, we are told we need to pick a market and stick with it.  Genre or literary?  Short stories or novels?  But what if I like all of them?  What if I'm able to write all of them?  Can I do it all, under my own name, without crossing some invisible boundary that the establishment doesn't want writers to transgress?

I feel a little bit like I'm walking a tightrope.  The literary journals I submit to might not want to publish me if they Googled me and see my ebooks.  But those books are just as much a part of me as the literary short stories I'm sending out.  Do I really need to submit literary fiction under a different name?  Or re-do my ebooks under a pseudonym?  I'm not sure yet.  I don't know how to be sure.

Have any of you struggled with this issue?  Do you write under your own name, or a pseudonym?  Do you write in different genres?  How do you get published in each one?  I'm all ears!

   

An Anthology! And I'm in It! Big Applause for Misanthrope Press

Okay, so I've been a little off the radar recently.  That will change in late May, because I'll finally be done with grad school and have way more time to focus on writing.  I cannot wait.  

But until then, I have one super-cool thing to share with everyone.  I submitted a short story called "Croatoa" to an anthology called A Rustle of Dark Leaves, to be published by Misanthrope Press.  The story was accepted (yes!!) and the anthology is now published and available.

The anthology is all about dark tales that take place in the forest.  You'll encounter things that lurk, things that creep, things that terrify.  Primeval things.  Or maybe just evil things--this is certainly true for my story.

If you're at all interested in supporting a quality small press, please consider picking up a copy of this anthology.  The link above will take you the anthology's page at the Misanthrope Press website, where you can get a feel for it.

Cover image by Misanthrope Press

Let's Get Organized

I can't resist it.  The files, the folders, the plastic cartons, the pencil cups...the urge to organize runs deeply in my blood.  I do it for fun.  How sick is that?  I organized my DVD and CD collections into genres.  I organized my dresses by length, so I could double-stack shoe racks beneath the miniskirts.  I group shoes by occasion, then color, then texture.  My stemware is sorted by occasion, then height.  It's a sickness, people, it really is.

Of course, there are always ways writers can use organization to better effect.  So here's what I'm gonna do for the new year.  I'm going to make a calendar that's all about writing.  Not the calendar I use for grad school assignments or things like doctor's appointments or when the propane guy is coming.  A calendar just for writing.  In print.  With a red star placed on every other Friday.  Those red-star days are submission days.  I want to send something out at least every other Friday.  That means I need a steady supply of stories good enough to print, and a list of markets they might be right for.

In the past, my submissions have been sporadic.  Three times a year, I send out dozens of envelopes and then anxiously collect rejection letters in the following weeks.  But I think I like the idea of forcing myself to be more disciplined in the way I collect those rejection letters.  Humans are creatures of habit.  We brush our teeth twice a day.  We go to the dentist twice a year.  We go to the grocery store once a week.  Why can't submitting stories be like that?  Why not carve out a few hours a week to print, stamp, and send?  There's no good reason not to.

So let's do it!  Hop to it.  Friday's getting closer all the time.