I will be coediting an anthology with Sarah Avery for Drollerie Press.  The details:

Drollerie Press is seeking entries for a pair of short anthologies.

• Trafficking in Magic deals with the sale and transport of magical goods and services, including magical beings, artifacts, fortune telling, communing with the dead, and other spells for hire, or the sale of magical energy itself
• Magicking in Traffic deals with magic in the flow of traffic–which could be street traffic, commerce, the flow of energies, or something else entirely–whether to aid, block, or manipulate the flow of traffic, or simply to play in it

Creative interpretations of the title(s) are also encouraged.

Both will be edited by Sarah Avery (author of Closing Arguments and Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply) and David Sklar (author of Shadow of the Antlered Bird). The two e-books will be sold together as a pair. If sales warrant a print edition, it will be set back-to-back in a single book with 2 front covers.

Contributors are encouraged to send 1 short story or up to 3 poems. Query first if sending fiction over 12,000 words or poetry over 100 lines.

Submissions close January 5, 2010.  Send submissions for this anthology only to magic[at]drolleriepress[dot]com

In addition to a discount on The Chocolatier’s Wife, you can also celebrate Celebrate Chocolate Day with some free prose from me!

Back before Sarah was born, I went and banked some blog posts, figuring that for a couple of weeks when I was too frazzled to write, I would be able to just click “Publish,” and the posts would go out into the world.  Well, it turned out I was too frazzled to just click “Publish,” so I’ve had these things languishing in a file, some of them long past the time when they were relevant.  This one seems to have become relevant again, so:

If you haven’t seen it already, I donated a vignette last year for use in promoting WickedFaire.  To publicize this year’s theme, Jeff Mach set up the virtual Wicked Chocolate Factory, which includes individual rooms written by different authors.  Each room contains a vignette or piece of flash fiction, an illustration, and a link to the author’s Web site.  At present, the factory consists of two stories by Jeff, one by me, and another by the lovely and talented Sara Harvey–who, I might add, recognized “Garden of Dreams” as mine even early on when a glitch had the vignettes up without the authors’ names.

Enjoy!

Not what it sounds like.  A colleague who did programming for Pi-Con last year is now doing an internship for Circlet Press, and they asked her to come up with an idea for an e-anthology.  She picked up the idea for a sex magic anthology from a panel I moderated at Pi-Con (and Arisia, and LunaCon) last year.  I didn’t realize who was behind it, so I was discussing it in a friend’s blog and the person editing the anthology identified herself.  I think it’s the only time I’ve ever been personally solicited for a story in another person’s blog.

 So now I’m on task to write some porn with literary merit.  It’s been a fun little project, and I’m proud of what I’ve written on it so far (about 2,400 words).  I started with a heroine who really shouldn’t seem appealing, and I gradually open her up, let you see who she is and what she’s about–and let her discover herself a bit as well. 

Well, it turns out that the names Rachel didn’t recognize included Laura Boss (editor of the poetry journal Lips and an excellent poet in her own right), Maria Mazziotti Gillan (founder of a couple of major NJ poetry centers and editor of the Paterson Literary Review–which years ago made the unusual decision to accept my poem “Decline of the Beat Poets” but reject my bio).  Also reading were John McDermott, R.G. Rader, and Linda Radice. 

It was good to hear works by Laura Boss (who has a quirky and whimsical style not unlike Sharon Olds–the most memorable poems of the evening included one about her refrigerator feeling unloved because she was dieting and another in which her boyfriend comes back from the dead and her first thought is to get him to write a will and have it notarized before he dies again and his cousin gets the rights to his work) and Maria Maziotti Gillan (who writes powerful thoughtful pieces and reads them with a stern serious delivery, even those parts you would think were tongue-in-cheek when you saw them on the page.  Her very precise insights often mask an emotional sledgehammer coming up behind you as the poem progresses).  I was also impressed with several works by the other featured readers, most notable John McDermott’s poem “More,” about the second word his son learned after “mama.”

The open mic was pretty good as these things go.  There is always some dreck at these things, and this one was no exception, but there was a lot less than one would expect from an open mic, and everyone was limited to one piece because of time constraints.  My favorite from the open mic was a poet whose name I did’t catch writing about how your officemates descend like buzzards to steal your supplies when you leave.  I also enjoyed a poem by Gail Gerwin about the difference between young parenthood and being the mother of adults–though I must admit her nostalgia doesn’t match the stress level of my current experience.  There was a surprisingly moving reading of the lyrics to Don McLean’s “Starry Starry Night,” and a blink-and-you-miss-it epigram by Mark Brunetti, who was giving out free copies of his award-winning indie mag The Idiom. 

The Idiom‘s mission statement emphasizes work that is immediately interesting and intertaining over the stuff that takes multiple readings to sink in.  Skimming it afterwards, I found some intriguing stuff, although their idea of immediate entertainment seemed to dwell much too heavily on Bukowski-type grit (I like Bukowski, but immediate entertainment for me also includes stuff like Shel Silverstein and Peter S. Beagle).  Still, making good poetry in the mold of Bukowski is an impressive feat, when his style has inspired so much bad imitation. 

There was also a flyer for the magazine Lips, and I plan to order a copy and see what sort of stuff Laura Boss likes to publish, since her whimsical style seems much closer to my esthetic sense than most of what’s out there in the literary journals.

I put some Drollerie Press flyers on the table, and some of the business-card-size flyers for Shadow of the Antlered Bird.  Unfortunately, I forgot to shill my book when it was my turn to read.  But I gave a good (IMHO) reading of Wind in the Reeds.  I did lapse into “poetry voice” a couple of times–in part because I was afraid people would object to my reading a prose piece at a poetry reading, but from the comments afterwards and the looks on the audience’s faces, I think I caught people’s attention in a positive way.

I hope to be able to go again next month and both be a little less shy about mingling with the crowd and to bring some other writers with me, including the one whose success inspired the envy that sent me out the door int he first place.

The way cookiemancy works is, before you open a fortune cookie, you ask it a question, and then whatever the cookie says, you interpret that as an answer to your question.  Since it isn’t actual divination, you may alter the interpretation according to whim to make it more appealing, more entertaining, more sensible, or more bizarre. 

For example, when I introduced Sarah Avery to cookiemancy, she asked whether she would be able to sell her first novel (this was the epic-length Hands of Beltresa, which currently remains unsold, although she has since written Closing Arguments, which was published by Drollerie Press), the cookie answered, The world is always ready to welcome talent with open arms.

“Well, that’s not true,” said Sarah, and was about to write cookiemancy off, when I suggested that some reinterpretation was required.  And sicne we’re both grammar nerds, I suggested the problem was a misplaced modifier–that it was not talent the world would welcome with open arms, but rather “talent with open arms” that the world was welcome.  “So, ah…” I said, not really sure where I was going, “…it could mean that…um…you will be discovered once you’ve…uh…given up and slashed your wrists?”

Needless to say, that interpretation of open arms didn’t go over big.  “Or,” I suggested, “open arms could mean you’re receptive–that talent alone is not enough, but your ability to listen well and really capture people is what will put your book over the top.”

Another time, when a question about my book (then still a manuscript in progress) turned up Give a kiss to the person who sits next to you (while at lunch with a married coworker), I read that as a reminder to seek out the advice of others and really listen to their opinions on the manuscript in progress.

Cookiemancy can sometimes happen by accident, if there’s a really pressing question on your mind.  For example, a fortune that said Your happiness is dependent on your outlook in life really restored my equilibrium once, the day after someone stole the radio out of my car.  Another time, I went for Chinese food with some friends the day after their wedding, before they’d left on their honeymoon, and we all laughed when the groom got There is still time to change your path (that was 16 years ago, and they’re still happily married).

So cookiemancy remains a part of my life–not because I believe in it, but like most of my superstitions, because it entertains me.  Because the world is a richer and more interesting place when viewed through the lens of magical thinking. 

So when Antlered Bird was released, and I picked up take out and wrote the announcement, I asked my fortune cookie how my precious book would do in the big, bad world, and I got, A dream is just a dream.  A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline.

So I’m pretty happy with that.  It means I have work to do, but that work still makes me pretty happy.

I have no idea who runs that blog, or why they found my post worth noting.  But apparently they did.  And as far as I can tell, there are no ads on the site, so I think it’s an actual person who read my post and found it interesting, not just a bot that brings things in at random. 

It’s a good feeling, and kind of weird.  And I must admit to having a bit of a knee-jerk distrust impulse (so far, almost all of the comments I’ve received on my blog have been from bots trying to spam my readers).  But, as I said, it seems legit.  And kind of flattering.

Oh, and looking at the “related” posts on CatVeranda (apparently only related by the keyword “bird”), I found another interesting link to somebody’s dream about finding Judy Garland’s cockatoo (or eagle) in a café.