Category: literature

Wait, what?



Wait, what? I have a story published in Chicken Soup for the Soul? Yessss!!!
 
Chicken Soup for the Soul: Lessons Learned from My Cat, in stores tomorrow, February 14, 2023



That’s me! Page 191!! “Status Report” is about trying to put a cat on a diet. Lesson Learned? Don’t.


I’ve learned plenty from Dahlia, who was adopted on this day, eight years ago (when she was 4 years old). Each year I give thanks Berkeley Humane for taking care of our girl until we could find her. Royalties from every copy of Chicken Soup for The Soul: Lessons Learned from My Cat go to American-Humane, the country’s first national humane organization.


Uh oh, Dahlia just realized the story isn’t about her. It’s about Gypsy our lovely, naughty, food loving cat who looked a whole lot like the cat on the cover of the book. We miss her, she was a great cat.

Words in Motion

Photo by Corey Agopian on Unsplash

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I am incredibly excited to announce that my story, “Swim, Swam, Swan” was selected by a group of esteemed judges as part of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) first ever writing contest called BART Lines. The writing contest coincided with BART’s 50th Anniversary celebrations.

The winning stories are made available on Short Edition short story dispensers found in some of the many BART stations around the Bay Area and on the Short Edition website. The Short Edition team also pushed my story out to their machines worldwide. Riders can hit a button and have a story dispensed on a long strip of paper, much akin to a CVS receipt, but instead of listing soap and toothpaste, you get my story!

With a theme of motion, the judges were notable Bay Area authors Annalee Newitz, Ishmael Reed, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, JK Fowler, and Daniel Handler.

My story can also be found on the Short Edition website, here’s the link.

The End of a Dry Spell

Photo by Tijs van Leur on Unsplash

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This crazy ol’ 2020 has been weird in a lot of ways. I think we are all getting used to a “new normal,” whatever that means.

During this time of shelter in place a lot of things have changed. Our old routines may be out of whack. How we go about the day is certainly different.

But these crazy days also have a lot of us searching for comfort in the same routines, if they are possible to keep. “Trying to normalize,” is what I keep saying. What did I do before? How did that go? Can do I that now and will it help me to feel normal during a time that is anything but?

One thing I have kept up with is my submissions of short stories. I have been doing my best to keep my work out there for well over a decade, and I didn’t want to let that drop right now. Even as most days I just want to slouch in a big chair and forget about the world outside.

I have found that being creative is very hard for me right now, too many things are occupying my mind. Working on getting submissions of work already complete out to the world is a normalizing process these days.

Despite my keeping the submission train running on time, 2020 has been a bit of a dry spell for acceptances. I had a lovely story published for Valentine’s Day in February (which had been accepted in December) and then the well dried right up after that.

Part of working to be published is knowing that these dry spells happen. They are normal and to be expected, and possibly a little more expected during this time of pandemic as we all figure things out.

So it was with great joy that in mid-September I opened an email from the editors at Bindweed Magazine with an acceptance. Whew! Feels good, you know? I get hundreds of emails with a no, so that yes every once is a while is tonic to a hardworking writer’s soul.

I’m now pleased to share my story “Possibilities. And Turtles.” with you. If you have a moment to give it a read, I would greatly appreciate it. And stay a while over there at Bindweed, there are some beautiful works to find in their pages.

Now more than ever, supporting the arts and artists matters, so I thank you in advance for the read.

Now if you’ll pardon me, I need to go do a whoop and a little click of the heels, then get back to the business of submitting my stories.

 

 

Do You Have To Let it Linger?

Word Sprints for Writer’s Block, With Apologies to the Cranberries

My word of the day is linger. This word was given to me by the good folks at RandomWordGenerator.com, a place I visit when I need to do a word-based workout.

Like running sprints or doing calisthenics, allowing the fates to give me a word then writing something around the 750-word mark is how I keep the literary muscles supple and smooth. (This as my post-holiday actual muscles are quite lumpy and stiff)

Today I was in the bath, where I do all my best thinking, and realized that I hadn’t written anything in days. And days. It’s fine, I have plenty of good reasons for this, but wanting to get back in the saddle and bereft of any really good ideas, I got out, dried off, and hit the random word site.


Screenshot from RandomWordGenerator.com

The rules of my game are: I have to take the word given to me, or in the parlance of golf (a game I know nothing about) I have to play it as it lays. No repeatedly hitting the “Generate Random Words” button to find a word I like. Nope. Get the word and get to work.

So linger it is. As in…don’t linger, get to writing. Boom, done.

Well not really.

The first thing I do is Google the word to see what’s what. Read a definition, see where the word shows up, find some sort of context or concepts around the word that provide a creative spark.

Of course, one of the top hits for linger was that angsty song from the Cranberries that was everywhere and all the time in 1993. A song I once liked but was ruined for me by a coworker who told me the story of her boyfriend standing outside the bathroom singing it loudly while she was doing a number two.

Do you have to let it linger? Well, when it comes to a poo, sorry, it can’t be helped. I can light a match?

Now I can’t think of that song without that memory. So let’s not linger on that to write about, eh?

Next I navigated my way over to Unsplash to see what they had to offer under the heading of linger. The pickings were, surprisingly, slim. Same with Pexels.

Pixabay didn’t have much that I thought fit my own interpretation of linger, but did offer up this very cool photo:


From Pixabay, and the license states no attribution required

I have no idea what’s going on there, but I have never seen a Zen stack made with ice, so there’s something new I learned as I lingered over the Pixabay site (a stretch there, stay with me).

Though as I look at the photo, I wonder why the photographer didn’t get behind the ice to try to get the low golden sun lighting up the slices. It’s a beautiful photo but I feel a missed opportunity.

Unsplash did offer up this one under the tag linger, which, uh…that’s not lingering. That’s walking very fast.


Photo by Chiến Phạm on Unsplash

Lovely photo, nice composition, just not my idea of a good ol’ fashioned linger. So that’s irksome.

Back to the Google, this time I navigate to Wikipedia and try my luck. It’s there I learned that there is a city in Luxembourg named Linger. The population of 577 means the Wiki entry is quite brief, in fact just a stub. So I had to linger over this idea for a moment.

I’ve always really loved towns with weird names like Hell, Michigan or Sandwich, Massachusetts. I mean, I could write a whole story on the weird town names in New Mexico, where I grew up. Actually, that’s not a bad idea, I think I will tuck that story idea away.

See, lingering over Linger, Luxembourg got the ol’ juices flowing.

This random word thing is an almost no-fail writing exercise for me. There are plenty of things that the word linger can introduce into the post-bath, post-holiday brain.

Granted, linger is a pretty good word, lots of ways to go with that. I do occasionally get words that are clunkers and try to make the best of them.

Well, if you have made it this far, I thank you for reading through my writing exercise to ease my writer’s block. Maybe this is helpful in some way? Perhaps if you also have writer’s block, you will stumble across this lingering little story and linger over your own ideas, hit the random word generator and then linger over some fresh, piping hot ideas of your own.

I’ll have you know that the word “own” was word 758.

See? Knocking out 750 words is just as easy, or rather just as difficult, as that.

A Baseball Story of My Own

A few years back, I participated in a flash fiction writing event and drew the genre of Historical Fiction as my prompt. Historical Fiction! I had no idea what to do with that. None. At all.

I believe the full prompt was Historical Fiction, a dentist’s office, and a leather jacket.

Uh. Okay. Sure.

So off I went and wrote a story. My own little sort of baseball story and turns out it did pretty well in the competition, meaning it was good enough to get me to the next round.

After finishing the story, I’d had a bit wish that my sorta kinda baseball story would get to see the light of day, and be published during the baseball season.

Well, my wish came true. “The Dilemma” was published this past April in issue 13 of SLAB Literary Magazine.

My baseball story! Published in April! During Spring Training!!

So why am I telling you this in June?

Well, it came out in the print version in April and I decided to wait for the issue to be loaded up online before sharing. Well, Issue 13 is online, however…..my story is listed in the table of contents but it’s not printed in the online version.

Grr.

I’ve sent a few notes but I think the editorial team is off on summer vacation.

While I love the folks and SLAB and am so very, very grateful they published my story, I don’t really want to wait anymore to share my little story with the world.

So I scanned that bad boy and you can read my little baseball story today, a few weeks before the All Star Break.

Here it is: The Dilemma

You can also find the link in the right side of this page.

If you take a few moments to give it a read, I’d be quite grateful. If you don’t wanna read but just wanna send “yay you” thoughts, also fine by me.

Either way, I’m going to be over here feeling pretty darn proud of myself for taking a bit of an oddball prompt and making something good.




Issue 13