Every Day Poets

Every Day Poets, the on-line sister publication to Every Day Fiction, launches tomorrow morning.

According to Oonah V. Joslin, managing editor of Every Day Poets, she and her fellow editors, Constance Brewer and Nick Ozment, have "tried to offer a contrast of style and content, day to day."

"What the poems have in common is that they are all well crafted; words charged with the full power of their meaning," she said. "As they are presented one by one, you can savour their intensity, wit, beauty and energy."

A couple of my favorite writers have poems to present in this first issue.

Jonathan Pinnock's School Uniform will be available to slip into on November 3; I have hopes that Jonathan's poetry is as droll as his fiction. He blogs at Jonathan Pinnock's Write Stuff.

And Erin M. Kinch, who rocked Every Day Fiction on October 25 with A Million Faces, will offer Inspiration on November 22. Erin's dynamite blog is at Living the Fictional Dream.

I have a poem in the first issue, too. Murphy's Flaw is epic poetry that presents the adventures of one Obadiah Murphy, a competitive drinker of prodigious appetites and capacity. Murphy will lift a glass on Monday, November 10.

Here's a link to the entire month's line-up. Every Day Poets November Table of Contents. Stop by every morning, why don't you?

November at Every Day Fiction

Lots more good stuff coming in November at Every Day Fiction.

I am looking forward to reading stories from some of my favorite authors. We will be introduced to Krupper and Jons by Kevin Shamel on November 11; Oonah V. Joslin will work her magic November 14 with a Sleight of Hand; Sarah Hillary presents Me and the Mouser on November 17; Jens Rushing's Ars Draconia will launch on November 20; November 25, Sylvia Spuck Wrigley offers Coffee or Tea and Jason Stout's And the Well Runs Deep will round it out on November 27.

I've got one in there, too. I consider Oh, Woman of Easy Virtue a performance piece; you'll see why when you read it on November 21.

You can check out the entire month's lineup at the Every Day Fiction November Table of Contents.

Number ten

Adam Bradley, editor of Morpheus Tales, a British print publication that features all sorts of speculation fiction and poetry, has accepted my flash fiction, To Each His Niche and Task, for publication in the magazine's July 2009 issue.

It's my tenth fiction acceptance since June 2008; my second in a print publication.

As my friend Sarah would say, I am fairly chuffed about this one. Ten acceptances by the end of the year was the goal I set for myself last January; the story is also one of my favorites. It is the tale of an old man, who may or may not be a super hero, and it explores the narrow line between reality and dangerous fantasy.

Copies of the magazine can be purchased at Morpheus Tales I'll put out a reminder when July arrives.

I swear we just got here

Today is the first anniversary of our arrival in Seattle. (We got here on a Saturday, but it's the date that's important. October 27).

It was a seat-of-the-pants, leap-of-faith move; we showed up with a few thousand dollars in our pockets, everything we owned in an eight-by-ten trailer hitched to the SUV, hardly any income flow and no place to live.

That wasn't how we planned it, of course. Rachael flew to Seattle, from Miami, twice last spring to test and interview for a job with the King County Correction Department. We thought it was a lock; she was a Florida-certified corrections officer with almost four years experience, she passed all their tests with room to spare and got good recommendations from the folks at Monroe County Detention Center.

But September rolled around and our lease was up the end of the month and we still hadn't got the yes from King County. So I said, "Let's drive to Ohio and visit my family for a week or two." And we did.

I'm not sorry we did that; my Dad is eighty-seven and every second that I got to spend with him was golden. But October twenty second came around and we were still in Ohio. We didn't want to hit snow in the mountains, so we decided to head west. We had an apartment set up, and we figured we would just wait it out.

"We can both get temporary jobs,if it comes to that," I said. "Just until the county calls."

We decided to leave Thursday morning, the twenty-fifth. And then the bubble burst. Two letters showed up in the mail Wednesday. One from the apartment complex and one from King County. The apartment had, by accident, been rented and they had nothing else available until December first; even worse, King County said they would not be tendering a job offer.

What could we do? We both had been dreaming about Seattle for months. Thursday morning, we said goodbye, climbed into the SUV and drove toward the sunset. And drove and drove and drove. We didn't want to spend money on motels, so we just pulled over when we were tired.

We drove down out of the Cascades sixty hours later. I cried when we saw Mount Rainier; it felt as if I had come home.

It's been a struggle, but God has blessed us. We found an apartment we both loved that Sunday and moved in on Tuesday. Rachael found work, at a Barnes & Noble, less than a mile from us. Somehow, the money stretched.

Now, Rachael is driving a Metro Transit bus, and loving it. We are in a larger apartment, in the same building we found that Sunday, with a spectacular view of Puget Sound and two restaurants we adore a short walk away. There is even money left over after the bills are paid, so that we can go out for a bit of fun, now and then.

And for me, my fiction is flowing, almost faster than I can write it down, and it is selling. Ten stories since the first of June, five of which have already been in print. I have edited my novel, Lifting Up Veronica, and sent it out to be considered for publication, and my son and I have written a screenplay, Black Rock, working via the internet.

Best of all, Rachael and I have each other; she swears we are halves of the same soul. I think she is right. Life in Seattle is good, it gets better day by day, and I swear we just got here.

Vroom, vroom

Got an e-mail this morning from Terry Martin, Managing Editor at Murky Depths, the British quarterly print anthology. He said I hit his "weak spot" with Nosing with the Four-Stroke Kid, and he offered me a contract for publication.

The story is scifi/horror flash that involves dirt bikes and weird pickup lines; I wrote it and it creeps me out. It's my tenth sale since June (nine pieces of fiction and a poem); not a lot compared to other writers I know, but still a big deal for me.

If it makes it into the first-quarter 2009 issue, it would be a great birthday present.

Copies of the magazine can be purchased at Murky Depths I'll put out a reminder when the issue is out.

Like a fine wine

I called a friend in Florida this morning. Helen and I are of an age, and we both like to rattle on, so we were on the phone for a couple of hours; God bless unlimited dialing and roll-over minutes!

The conversation rambled, as I said, we both like to talk, but it kept coming around to the issue of age. At sixty-two, we are both starting to experience more than the normal aches and pains of life; Helen is having some mobility problems, due to her knees, and the eye doctor told me last week I am showing the first signs of cataracts. Bummer.

But one of the things that we spoke of is the idea of three ages. Maybe you've heard the theory, maybe not. It suggests that there are three ways of measuring a person's age: chronological, physiological and intellectual.

Chronological age is the easy one; it's the measure of how long it has been since we were born.

Physiological age is a little more complicated, but still easy to touch; it's how old our body says we are. We've all had the experience, I am certain. We see someone we haven't seen for a time and say, sometimes just to ourselves, "She (or he) looks so old!" The opposite is true, too; some people just age well, like a fine wine.

Intellectual age is the sticky one.

Growing up, we all heard our parents or grandparents or teachers say, "Act your age!" We talk about the Peter Pan syndrome or say that some one is young at heart.

There's an apocryphal story, usually attributed to Charles Addams, creator of the Addams Family, or scifi/horror author Robert Bloch, which says, "I have the heart of a teenager -- in a large jar on the top shelf of my bedroom closet."

Wherever his heart was, my grandfather used to say, "You're only as old as you think you are." I think he was right. I know it puzzles me why baretenders serve me these days without asking for proof of age.

Today at Every Day Fiction

Another piece of my short fiction, In His Prime, was published today at Everyday Fiction. It is the fourth in as many months.

It's a story that involves time travel, but that's not what it's really about. The idea came to me a couple of months ago, during a series of posts at one of the EDF forums. Someone wondered if there were any new takes on time travel, and I was goofing, jotting down silly ideas, when one of them grabbed me and whispered, "Look at me!" The result was In His Prime.

I'd loved to know what you think of it; leave a comment here or at EDF, if you would. Anyway, the link below will take you to EDF. There's a spot to leave comments there or to give the story a rating up to five stars.

I hope you like In His Prime. If not, I offer my apologies and the promise that there will be another story along tomorrow to takes its place.

In His Prime at EverydDay Fiction

At Fear and Trembling

Good news today!

Two pieces of my flash fiction, Hostel Intent and Hack, have been accepted for publication at Fear and Trembling, an online horror magazine; no word on publication dates yet.

Hostel Intent is a tongue-in-cheek tale of a haunted college dormitory; it introduces Babbu Singh, assistant hostel proctor, and his boss, the Bhagwan Shatrunjay, a holy warrior and the twenty-fifth Teerthankar of the Jain. I like these two and may visit them again.

There is nothing funny, though, about Hack; it's a nasty cautionary about the hazards of townhouse living.

I'll let you know when I get confirmation of appearance dates.

A moving line: about writing

A lot of really great words aren't used much anymore. One of them is malarkey. Malarkey is exaggerated or foolish talk, usually intended to deceive.

As I grow older, it becomes easier to recognize malarkey and more and more difficult to put up with it. And even though the word isn't used much these days, there certain is a lot of it around; particularly during a presidential campaign.

My grandfather used to say, "What a load of malarkey!", but then he was a gentleman and too polite to call it what it really was.

A moving line: about writing

Last Friday, I mentioned the on-line writers’ critiquing group some of us are building at Every Day Fiction, and suggested that such a group, when it works well, is one of the most important tools a writer can use.

This week I had that notion come back to me from an unexpected direction.

My son and I wrote a screenplay last winter, it’s called Black Rock. He works for a film production company in Ohio, and so he brought a bunch of actors together to read through the script. I’m almost three thousand miles away, in Seattle, so I wasn’t able to be there, but he filmed the get together and promised to send me a DVD, once he had it edited.

That was in July; we’ve both been busy and so I figured it would get here when it got here. It showed up in the mail on Tuesday; I watched it that night. Hearing your words read aloud can be enlightening for a fiction writer; for a screenwriter, it is what it is all about. You get to hear someone else’s interpretation of what you intended, you get to hear what flies and what falls flat, and sometimes you get to hear the unexpected.

I sat through the reading, making notes, trying to filter out my own feelings and, when a scene did fall flat, to determine whether it was the fault of what we wrote or the fault of a poor reading. That happens; it’s one of the handicaps of working with unpaid volunteers.
It was during a free-for-all discussion after the reading that the unexpected occurred. The actors were offering their thoughts on character motivation and plot weaknesses, and then one of them said, “Well, it’s all about fathers, isn’t it?”

My son was there with them, on the screen, and I was thousands of miles and months away, watching, but we both said, “What?” at the same time.

“It’s about how fathers influence the actions of their children, particularly when they’re not around,” the actor said. And then he began to tick off points on his fingers.

“Frank and his dead father; Liz and her rich and doting daddy; Bob Shavers and his retarded son. Even the surrogate father relationship between Frank and the newspaper editor. It runs all through the thing.”

What he was talking about was theme, and he was right; we just hadn’t seen it; at least not that particular theme. The theme we identified, and had woven throughout the script, was that a child grows into the adult they will become as a result of a series of situations in which they are put under pressure.

Theme is the universal truth behind a story, and it’s one of the three elements that have to be developed, as a story unfolds, if an author is to succeed. The other two, of course, are character and plot.

Of the three, theme may be the most difficult to examine. In most cases, an author comes to a short story, novel or screenplay with some idea of her characters’ identities and what it is that will happen to them. But one of the quickest ways to kill a good story is to begin it with a theme in mind. Unless you are really, really good, you run the risk of preaching; and no one wants to read a sermon or a lecture.

But as a story progresses naturally, theme will show up as a conflict of values or morals. It most likely will be a strong opinion that the author holds that comes out in the mouths of her characters. And it almost always presents itself as a recurring symbol.

When I called my son, after watching the edited DVD, and asked him why he hadn’t told me about the father theme, I could hear his grin.

“I wanted you to see it for yourself,” he said. “Good thing I had the reading, huh?”

Indeed.