The issue of Folio with my story “The Cat in the Backyard” has gone to print. Look for it soon wherever you get your literary magazines. For more information about Folio, look here.
Publication News #writing #fiction
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Tag Archives: Fiction
February 5th, 2004–Flash Fiction #fiction #writing
February 5th, 2004
The most frightening part of the trip occurred when they ducked into an Asian grocery store and she saw him steal four packages of soba noodles. He plucked them off the shelf and stuffed them into the inner pocket of his coat in one smooth, practiced motion, and she realized that he had done this before, God only knew how many times. The soba noodles were on sale, four packages for one dollar and forty-nine cents, and she knew for a fact that he had over six hundred dollars in cash tucked into his wallet, alongside three major credit cards.
He refused to look at her as they left the store. As they turned onto the sidewalk, he broke into a walk that tried to evolve into a trot. She had to scurry around other pedestrians to keep up with him. That night when he cooked the noodles for her, they tasted bland in her mouth, as if all the flavor had come off in his coat pocket.
February 27th, 2004–flash fiction #fiction #writing
February 27th, 2004
The phone rang at three AM and I knew it had to be trouble. The moon was full and shining through my window; I could see a deep layer of frost on the ground, like the world had been cast in silver. The frigid house enveloped me. I picked up the receiver and mumbled
Hello
and shivered twice, hard, almost dropping the phone. It felt like ice against my face. I halfway expected it to rip away a layer of skin when I pulled it away. The moonlight stabbed into the room, pooling on the floor like blood. From the phone a ghostly voice said
Is this the morgue?
and I said
No. You must have the wrong number
and the voice said
Huh. I could have sworn this was the morgue.
I hung up and rubbed my eyes, feeling the grains of sleep jab into my skin like knives. The house was colder than ever. I wondered who had died and why it had to happen on a frosty night at three AM, when death seemed no more than an ordinary nuisance.
Mardi Gras Flash Fiction #fiction #writing
You say you want some apocalypse? Here’s a glimpse of a personal vision…
The French Quarter was a human junkyard, bodies piled on top of bodies, throbbing and writhing with music no one could really hear and would pay no attention to anyway, the movement less rhythmic than sexual, a collective thrust between the legs of the city. The man pressing against my back gurgled, about to vomit, and I knew it would splatter onto my head and run down the back of my shirt, but I was helpless to get away, to move at all save for the almost-gentle back and forth wahhh-wahhh of the crowd. The woman to my right was topless, her breasts too rigid in the chaos to be real. Beads hung from her neck and both ears, her dead-fish eyes glazed over. I watched as a hand snaked around her waist and began pinching her right nipple. She did not notice. For all I knew she was dead. In the thronging masses she would have had no room to fall.
What Is This, Exactly? #fiction #writing
A seven-year-old piece I found in my files–flash fiction or journal entry? You decide.
February 15, 2004
Quentin Compson once broke the face of his watch and ripped the hands from its face in an effort to stop time, but he could still hear the minute ticking of the second hand as it spoke away the hours even in its own absence. In this house there are six clocks and two watches and three VCRs and three computers and one microwave. They all tell time. Sometimes this fact is too much to bear.
Flash Fiction for Your Consideration #fiction
February 12, 2004
He awoke at seven that morning, knowing that the day would bring him more happiness than grief, and yet he still felt a cold ball of dread in his stomach, sitting there like lead, weighing him down. He knew that swinging his body around and allowing his feet to touch the floor would commit him to getting out of bed, and that standing up and getting dressed would commit him to leaving his bedroom, and that appearing in the house would commit him to staying for her party.
His daughter was now old enough to drive. She could ask for the keys at any moment, and he would have no choice but to hand them over or be branded an uncool Dad. Perhaps he could throw them out the window? But then that would make it tough for him to use the car himself. Maybe he could drop them in the toilet. That would keep any self-respecting teenager at a distance. Hell, that would drive away most adults.
But he was merely avoiding the inevitable. She was growing up. Soon she would be old enough to leave for college, to get a full-time job, to marry and have kids of her own, to follow that career or that husband to some city on the other side of the country. He might be able to see her once a year, if she could get away. They might talk a couple of times a week.
He wondered if she would understand this, that he was not afraid of her driving the car or how much taller than him she might eventually become. He was afraid of the first time that car turned a corner and left him behind, waving, wondering if she were even looking back, the first of many journeys that he would not even be able to watch.
More Flash Fiction #fiction
In catching up on all the things I didn’t do last week, I’m still too behind to post anything new. So here’s another old piece of flash fiction. I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote it. Perhaps you’ll have a theory.
Her lover had come back from the dead and was standing in her kitchen, drinking a cup of herbal tea and eating one of her homemade scones. He was holding the cup with three fingers, as he had done on the mornings after their lovemaking had been most intense and memorable. Steam rose above the rim and drifted toward his face, disappearing in his beard, now flecked with gray and bushier than she remembered. He said
Hello
and she screamed. The fear in her voice startled him. He managed to hold onto the scone but dropped the tea, the cup turning slowly one and a half times before it hit the tile and shattered, the liquid spattering his boots and the legs of the table. It spread across the floor like blood, running into the cracks between the tiles where it formed shallow, linear pools.
February 20th, 2004–Flash Fiction #fiction
February 20th, 2004
I signed an online petition today. I don’t know what it was for. Perhaps I was trying to save something. Maybe I was helping kill someone. Maybe it was a petition against me. I don’t know. All I remember is clicking on a button and then shutting down my browser. It was all over in a few seconds, and it might have been the most important thing I’ll ever do.
We Really Like Your Work, But…
If you look up the word “bittersweet” in the dictionary (or, as most of my students do, at dictionary.com), you should see a picture of a “good” rejection letter to a writer.
Every working writer likely keeps three piles of letters from journals, magazines, agents, and publishers. Pile #1 consists of standard rejections–the kind that begin with “Dear Writer” and go on to explain that your work simply doesn’t meet the editor’s needs at this time. When you get one of these, you’re disappointed, of course, but unless you’re already a household name, it’s pretty much what you’ve come to expect. After all, writing success often seems like one part talent, one part sheer perseverance, and two parts sheer luck. You have to get the right piece to the right reader at the right time, a process that is often rewarding and sometimes maddening.
Pile #3 contains all your acceptances. Some of these come in letter form, others in emails or even phone calls. Unless you’re Joyce Carol Oates or Stephen King, you probably still jump for joy whenever you get one of these, no matter how small the journal or how low the pay. An acceptance means that someone “gets” your work, that they’ve trusted your voice to enhance their publication, that an audience will see your story or article and know your name.
Pile #2 is where “bittersweet” lives. This pile is where you keep your “good” rejections–the personalized ones that call you by name and speak to your work specifically. Sometimes they come in the form of a personally-written rejection; sometimes they consist of handwritten notes on a boilerplate rejection notice. Most of the time, they tell you that while the piece you sent was not accepted, the editors liked your work and would like to see more.
The bad news? No publication. The good news? Somebody liked your work enough to talk to you, to encourage you, to let you know that you don’t suck. I keep good rejections close to my heart–not as close as acceptances, of course, but pretty close nonetheless. When you’re in between publications, they give you enough hope and confidence to keep on writing.
I got a good rejection today. I’ve been shopping a novel for a while now, at a time when agents and editors are understandably gun-shy about taking on new writers. I’ve gotten some boilerplate rejections and a few nibbles, but I haven’t reeled in the big fish yet. These days, it’s a victory when you can move past the query letter stage. I got that far again, and with a New York agent to boot.
In the end, she passed on the project because the kind of story I was telling simply didn’t appeal to her. But she told me that I was a good writer and that she would love a look at my next project. There’s no guarantee she’ll like it better than the first one, of course; you can’t control your audience, and I’ve always felt that trying to leads only to ulcers and bad writing. When you try to please everyone, you please no one, especially not yourself.
But she’ll get the first look. She was professional and personable, and she responded promptly. I’ll remember that, as I hope she remembers her kind words the next time I’ve got a book-length work to shop. If she doesn’t, I’ll be sure to remind her. How? I’ve saved her response. I can quote from it verbatim. I can even forward her the email if necessary. But I don’t think it will be, because she doesn’t view her job as a gatekeeper charged with fighting off bad writers. She seems to believe that her job is to support stories that she loves. I can get behind that attitude, even if she doesn’t love mine this time.
If she ever stumbles across this post and recognizes herself in it, I hope she’ll see this as my expression of my admiration and my thanks. As a writer, it’s part of my job not to take rejection personally, to use any feedback to get better.
I hope we both keep doing our jobs for a long time.