Free-style (what what)

Hey Tom --
Can you post some tips for beginning freelancing?
I want to start submitting to local papers/websites while I'm working my 9-to-5 (which is, thankfully, no longer Borders. I'm in the Biomedical Engineering department at Washington University now, yeehaw).

I know I addressed Tom specifically, but don't be shy, feel free to join in everybody.

I'm not sure if it is because I'm working or lazy, but I am currently only reading one book, the title of which I could not remember, but one that I recommend. I looked up the title: "The Indian Clerk" by David Leavitt. It is historical fiction, which is not really my cup of tea, but is very well written and reminds me of strolls though Oxford.

Burn Before Reading

Hi Writers,

Yall read a lot. I, on the other hand, spend hours in the book store, buy lots of books, and read them entirely too slowly.

I'm currently reading Until I Find You, by John Irving. I will soon be out of Irving books to read and this makes me have a sad face, but not sad enough to type a sad face. So I've still got my dignity. Most people often extol the virtues of A Prayer for Owen Meaney, but I'm much more a Cider-House-Rules kind of guy (though the subsequent movie makes me throw up in my mouth). (Okay, there goes my dignity.) :(

Our blog, sparse as it often is, needs more pictures. As such, and in no part due to any laziness within myself, I am going to pop in a picture of one of my "To Read" stacks instead of typing. My laziness is only a coinicidence.

On the writing front, I am inactively working on two different pieces of fiction. In one, there is a pregnant woman. I've now written scenes wherein the character miscarries, where the baby is born and the mother dies, and where the baby born and the mother lives. You can imagine how this will be confusing for any potential readers.

For that reason, I have registered for a creative writing class at Boston Adult Ed. Though I often mistrust strangers on principle, I've decided to surround myself with ones that want to write and see what happens. Hopefully magic.

Burn After Reading

No writing? There's always reading.

Recently finished:

Emperor of the Air, Ethan Canin. (I went to a reading of his at a local college, and Curtis Sittenfeld was in the audience, which makes no sense to me- why is she in St. Louis? Anyway, his short stories, especially the title one of this first collection, are pretty great, but he read from his most recent novel, America, America. It seems age and years of listening to himself talk at Iowa has made him expansive bordering on just long-winded.)

The Hunger Moon, Suzanne Matson. (So good! Beautifully drawn characters and climactic tension. And I'm not biased because she was my thesis advisor.)

Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins. (Re-read for about the twentieth time and it blew my mind all over again. Possibly- no, I think it is- my favorite book of all time.)

Currently reading:

Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut. (Awesome, as per usual.)

Of Love and Other Demons, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (A girl bitten by a rabid dog, a corpse with flowing red hair, a smitten priest? I don't know, I can't really get into it yet.)

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace. (Oh, my God, I'm in love. "Forever Overhead": re-read, and omg what an f-ing gorgeous story.)

Whitman. (If I'm sending off an application or going into an interview, for some reason I keep repeating the first few lines of "Song of Myself." It seems to help.)

I miss the blog, Attic-addicts. Let's get it goin. How's everybody doin? I've been slinging books at Borders, got a job today at Wash U, and last night I learned to country two-step. That's about it.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Is this thing on?

Hey everyone,

So I'm sure we're all busy now that the holiday season is here. But I'm hoping we can all take some time to post and discuss new work over the break, so start gathering ideas! In the meantime, what's on everyone's reading lists? Here's a few I'm hoping will turn up in my stocking:

* Reborn: Journals and Notebooks of Susan Sontag
*Frisk by Dennis Cooper (or anything by him, because he's terrifyingly twisted)
*Louise Bourgeois (biography) by Julia Kristeva
*Rrose Is a Rrose Is a Rrose : Gender Performance in Photography
*My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands by Chelsey Handler (come on, you know you wanna read it, too)
*Writing New York: A Literary Anthology by Phillip Lopate (he's my workshop prof for next semester! Kim, he's featured in Tell It Slant, which is currently on my desk)

Ok, that's all for now. Keep the writing coming!

~Stace

late on the deadline . . . been a bit overwhelmed

perhaps due entirely to my technological ineptitude, I've yet to figure out the google group . . .

They moved to Albuquerque from Ann Arbor in summer of ’95, at the onset of Dave’s sophomore year of high school. It was also the summer preceding pretty-haired Susannah’s entry into Vassar, the summer that Amy turned six, the summer after their mother had married Jack.

Dave noticed first the way the water didn’t hit his skin; the way that this sun sucked every drip of moisture out of him. It pulled even the snot from his nose and by the third day there he woke up with a nosebleed that stained his blue sheets brown and red. He pulled the sheets from his bed, gathered them in his arms, and walked across the hall to Susannah’s and Amy’s bedroom. He rapped twice on the door and heard Susannah moan, then pull herself out of her bed. She answered wearing a tanktop and shorts, her face flushed with the unbearable night heat.

“Gimme Amy’s sheets. I gotta run my own load,” Dave said.
Susannah, infamous for her inability to wake in the morning, walked to Amy’s twin bed and pulled her out. The smaller girl stirred, but her breathing slowed and her limbs relaxed as soon as she and Susannah were safely in Susannah’s bed, curled into each other. Dave put his own sheets on the floor, pulled off Amy’s, and carried both sets down to the basement.

Both girls were tied in their dark blonde hair, their curls looser in New Mexico’s aridity. Amy wore hers long and graceless, a tangled imitation of her older sister. Their hair was where their similarities ended: Susannah had the sharp and angled features of her father; Amy the full cheeks and green eyes of her father.

Hey...You...Guys...

Ho-laaa mis amigos de literatura,

I'm gonna throw it out there first thing, in case you don't read the rest of this post (have I already lost you?): Posting Deadline #3 this Friday. Let's make it happen.

Of course, Stacey and Sara are ahead of us all, posting wonderful stuff in between pseudofficial deadlines (coloring outside the lines, I like it). But for the rest of us, let's post a little something by Friday. Awesome turn-out last time. And don't be shy about commenting! I'm gonna vomit reactions all over your work (you can try to stop me, but it doesn't usually work...ask my friend Steve how the backseat of his old car is doin after he drove me home after a long tailgating weekend at Mizzou...we call his two-door beater the Black Panther, and now it smells like the similarly-named cologne in Anchorman), I just have a lot of feelings.

My past week was spent making a scrapbook for my mom's friend's 60th birthday party. Collecting stories and photos from everyone who's ever known her and recreating a life over more than half a century of jobs, cities, love affairs and shenanigans, was quite a job. But I did some lovely nostalgic anecdote writing, so I should be in fine shape when Hallmark comes calling.

I also applied for a few jobs and submitted creative work to a couple of journals. The journals were sweet because there was no fee, not even for postage since I was allowed to submit online. And they were both new start-ups, so there's a better chance my stuff will be read, at least. They were Broken Plate, out of Ball State U, and the Oklahoman Review, out of Oklahoma State. I think the deadlines have passed for those now, Stacey and everybody, but venues like that seem like a slightly better bet.

Today, I took my mom's other friend to the hospital and waited while she got new breasts. She had a double mastectomy in March, and says it feels like she's been wearing a metal Madonna-style cone bra under her chest-skin for seven months, so the real-er thing has gotta be better.

And finally, the last piece of good goings-on news in my life is that Mike, one of my best friends since junior high, who was hit by a car and suffered severe brain damage in March (that month kinda sucked for me), has started using his vocal chords to talk to us (he's way ahead mentally of what he's capable of expressing physically)... The cool, and naturally, typical Mike thing about it is that most of what he vocalizes are movie quotes. He does a mean Darth Vader impression ("Luuuke"), and also Sloth, from The Goonies, hence the title of this post.

And so. I just adjusted Barb (new boobs)'s pillows and am going to bed myself. To Stacey's question of what we're reading, I just finished Steinbeck's Travels With Charley and loved it. Now I think I have to read my uncle's teenage copy of A Clockwork Orange before I have to return it at Thanksgiving. But I'm open to suggestion.

Lastly, what was everyone for Halloween? Post pictures. I couldn't come up with anything and pulled something together at the last minute, a play-on-words costume. How very English major of me.

If you held on til the end of this post...sorry. Ruth! Ruth! Baby Ruth! Goonies never say die!