The Written Word

Recently received notification that my story "Little Man," which appeared in Brain, Child Magazine this time last year, is one of three finalists for the 2008 Texas Institute of Letters Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story. It's in good company, and I'm quite chuffed that it's there.

The Written Word

Yo! The Spring 2008 issue of Brain, Child Magazine is on the stands. Lots of nifty stuff to read, including my story "Little Man." This is a great magazine and I'm really pleased to have a story there.

If you live in Atlanta, you can purchase Brain, Child at Borders, Charis Books and, I believe, Sevananda. If you live in Austin, they didn't have it in stock at BookPeople yesterday morning* but ask them to start carrying it! You can probably pick up a copy at Borders.

If you're keeping track, "The Artists Colony," published last month on the Five Chapters site, is the opening story in a collection of linked stories called Domestic Fictions. "Little Man" is the second one, so some of the same characters are lurking about.


*Read between those lines and you can figure out why I haven't had much to say for myself lately (ie, I was out of town). It's good to be back.

Snippets

1. Been out of town and, since I bought books while gone, the nightstand pile threatens to overwhelm me (as does the laundry, the still-packed suitcase on the living room floor, the preschool emails that came in while I was gone, and the general trivality of life).

2. Obama is ahead by 50% in our precinct as of this incredibly early moment.

3. My story, The Artists Colony, is up and running, at fivechapters.com . I love the way Five Chapters serializes stories. Wouldn't it be great if such ideas revolutionized the always-moribund short story market? If people started reading stories at work the way they check blogs?

4. From the NYTimes review of a new book out (Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, by Lee Siegal):

Siegal argues that the Internet invites people to 'carefully craft their privacy into a marketable, public style.'

Ah, yes, that Pristine Surface . Given my recent online pub, and the fact that a few people from that site may wander to this site, I should be using this space to wax eloquent about something.

Instead, you get this.

The Reveal

A few weekends back, a fellow mom and I headed out to see the new movie The Orphanage, as giddy as prisoners let out for the evening on a work-release program.

The Husband would rather have ground glass shoved in his eyeballs than willingly sit through any scary movie, especially one that involves children of any shape or form (though he can sit on the sofa eating a bowl of ice cream during one of CSI's lovely autopsy scenes), so it was a win-win situation for us all: he was thrilled to be putting the girleens to bed rather than accompanying me, the Girleens were thrilled to get to watch TV at night and I was thrilled to sit back and settle into a ghost story.

After seeing it, I would submit that it's not necessarily the presence of children in such narratives that ratchets things up a notch, but the presence of a mother or a mother-figure, whether she's the haunted or the one who does the haunting.

It turns out that I've been writing stories that dance around that idea for a while.

One of them appears here starting tomorrow. An installment a day, Monday-Friday! You know reading it's really what you want to be doing when you should be working!

(A NYTimes take on fivechapters.com, the site where "The Artists' Colony" appears, can be found here.)