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!

And they’re giving an incentive to spread the word: If you pass word along about The Chocolatier’s Wife and let Deena know by posting a link here, then you’re entered to win a gift certificate from Fannie May Chocolates. As a Drollerie author, I’m not eligible to win, but I want to see Cindy’s book do well, and if one of my friends can get a treat in the process, so much the better. So please spread the word, and you may get something sweet for your efforts.

Subterranean Song (poem) by David Sklar

“Ghosts and Music intertwined: to dance their way out of hell, or fall from the gates of heaven.”

A story set to poetry, literally, and utterly enthralling. I loved the imagery Sklar speckles through his verses. I cackled delightfully over his version of -er-hell. Artists, Musicians and Writers, of course, should get a kick out of this.

To whet your appetite, I give you my favorite lines:

“‘Cause death’s not so bad; I know people who’ve done it/and hunger and cold you get used to in time/but wondering what has become of someone/fills the twilight with shadows and wind.’”

His bio mentions he’s written more poems, I do believe I will have to go find them.

You can read the review in its entirety here.

Needles & Bones is now available in the Drollerie Press bookshop (buy page: http://drolleriepress.com/bookshop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=11&products_id=85 description page: http://drolleriepress.com/needles-bones/)

It will be available at mobipocket.com soon, and at Fictionwise and Amazon as soon as they process it.. . .

I haven’t had a chance to read a lot of the other stories in that book (with work and parenting duties, I manage to finish maybe a page a night of the new novel in progress, and then I’m wiped out), but there’s one right after my poem, called “Sleepwalker” by Darin Bradley, that I’ve started and find really intriguing.

 The Web chat is tomorrow (Thurs 5/21) starting at 10:00.  If I’m not mistaken, the Drollerie Press blog tour also takes place that day.  More info tomorrow on who’s posting what where.

Once you’ve read Cindy’s post, be sure to check out my entry on Fraser Sherman’s blog, and to read the posts of other authors in the tour.  Thanks to Angela Korra’ti for organizing the tour.  And now, without further ado, Heeeeeeeeere’s Cindy!

_____

I’ve been writing since I was in my early teens, but I never felt like a real author until I took a class in college called “Publishing the Magazine.” It was exactly that – a class that took its staff of students (a mix of volunteers and people taking the class…) through every aspect of publishing a magazine. We had to get ads, write a story, sit without twitching while someone edited the story, everything. It was even listed in the Writer’s Market, and there was an actual slush pile.

I remember sitting at the round table, presenting my ideas to the gathered…mostly the professor, Dr. Alan Natali, and the student editor. I kept presenting ideas, and Alan kept rejecting them. “There has to be something interesting…something that only you can write about.”

At which point, shyly, I put forward the fact that my father was a blacksmith and that we used to go to craft shows. This was the first time in my life that a) I felt like maybe I was an interesting individual, and b) that yes, people would think the fact that my father was a blacksmith was really COOL.

It was an amazing experience. I learned that editors are your friends. That I have a voice, and it’s a good one. That non-fiction can actually be a lot of fun to write. And I got to experience that feeling, that pride one can feel, the relief and joy and “OMG ieeee flail!” at seeing one’s words in print.

And I stayed part of the magazine (called Flipside) for the rest of my college years. All my really good memories start from that story. It also taught me a ton of things that I use in my everyday life – how to do design and layout, how to copyedit, and how to get rid of passive voice. So, while it’s not the first real publishing experience, or a story about finishing my first work, I think that it’s the first, honest step I took to where I am now.

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.

I mean, if I went with the manners I grew up with, I’d never post anyone’s name without asking their permission first.  But then, the manners I grow up with would tell me not to read anyone’s journal, either, which would make blogging a pointless exercise in the first place.

It seems like a certain amount of shouting out, as it were, is essential to the exercise of blogging.  Even articles by people who blog for a living will tell you this–that you’re expected to mention other people by name, and give links to their blogs, Web sites, recent publications, and so on.  But it still feels like there are times when you aren’t supposed to do that, like if I say, “Oh, I was at thus and such event last weekend, and I ran into this or that person, and we talked about blah blah blah,” then with some people it feels like I’m giving them publicity they want, with others it feels like I’d be showing off just by saying I know the person in question, and sometimes I just can’t tell.  And, of course, when you’re not sure, then you’re usually also not sure if dropping someone an e-mail just to ask would be an annoyance.

Is there any rule for this beyond just going with your gut?

• Maria Mascaro, whom I know from the “Writers of the Weird” monthly critique group showed up, and when I described her novel in progress, Deena asked to see it (yes, you can actually get your book solicited at a Drollerie Press Web chat–but don’t take that as a promise)
• There exists somewhere a christmas song that is a duet between David Bowie and Bing Crosby 
• One visitor to the Web chat shares a nickname with my stuffed alligator (or small dragon, I’m not sure) Zarf
• One of the visitors to the chat was a writer on the new edition of Changeling: The Lost from White Wolf
• Various discussions of The Muppet Show, David Bowie, Robin McKinley, and the romantic comedy Music & Lyrics (which is, in my opinion, a much better movie than I had any right to expect it would be–but I didn’t expect it would turn up in this conversation)
  • As an odd synergy, the overlapping conversation about muppets and vampires at the same time, it came out that the night before I had seen a T-shirt featuring the scene from the Muppet Show in which Vincent Price and Kermit the Frog both sprout fangs (worn by Leanna Renee Hieber at the KGB Bar in Manhattan)
    • This led to a discussion of whether frogs have teeth (apparently they don’t)
    • I suppose it’s just as well that it didn’t lead to a discussion of the reading at the KGB Bar, because just as the reading started I got a phone call saying my heat was out at home, so I missed pretty much the whole thing
• Free books!
  • Several books were given away as door prizes and for guessing the answers to kind of random questions
    • I won an e-book by naming the longest list of holidays from November and December.  I must admit to a bit of an unfair advantage on that quiz, because 
      • a few years back I wrote a holiday card for a client that included a list of winter holidays in a sort of “seasons greetings” fair balance, like you see on drug ads: “*Seasons greetings include but are not limited to merry Christmas, happy Chanukah, Ramadan mubarak, happy Diwali, blessed Yule, bright Soyal, Yalda mubarak, omedeto [original had about 18 holidays, but I'm doing this from memory]…side effects include postprandial satiety, dendrodomiciliary incursion (tree-in-house disease), and JOY.  Use as directed.”  
      • Rachel and I also put together a joke greeting card that includes all holidays throughout the year on a sort of checklist, but that wasn’t nearly as helpful, because it was organized alphabetically rather than chronologically.
  • At the request of Deena’s husband, Deena posted a link to free e-books from Kealan Patrick Burke
    • (quote of the day: “The man on the porch seemed to have brought his own clouds.” Opening sentence of The Hides, by Kealan Patrick Burke
• Several people in attendance who weren’t Drollerie Press authors
  • OK, I probably shouldn’t admit that I’d considered the possibility that other people wouldn’t show up, but…
  • I think next time I may have to interrupt the freewheeling free-for-all discussion just to check whether any of the visitors have questions for any of the authors.  But this time I was having too much fun just trying to keep up…