Blog Archives
APEX REVIEWS ON SKELETONS
Apex Reviews has released/posted its review of Skeletons in the Swimmin’ Hole – Tales from Haunted Disney World. If you’re interested in reading it, you can read it online at authornation.com by visiting here:
…or, just click here for the PDF: SkeletonsSchoonover
Apex will be posting an interview with me in the future. I’ll keep you posted!
NEED TO RE-TREAD YOUR RESOLUTION? CHECK THIS OUT AT READ SHORT FICTION
So…how are you doing with your New Year’s Resolution(s)? Plugging away? Struggling? Or have you given up already?
Joseph Auslander’s “A Goal for Goals” at Read Short Fiction just might put what you’re up against into perspective—or give you that “oomph” you need.
This story quite literally cracked me up when I read it, and I remember thinking I hadn’t read anything this outrageous, clever, and funny in a long time. And yet, in a very scary way, I also identified with this character—I found this piece an excellent example of how an exaggerated character in a story can absolutely work. There’s a little bit of this guy in all of us, probably, whether we want to admit it or not, and he’s one I won’t be forgetting any time soon.
Check it out at
http://www.readshortfiction.com/2011/01/a-goal-for-goals-by-joseph-auslander-jr/
BACK TO WORK? THIS MIGHT HELP…
The Holidays are over, and for many of us that means heading back to work–even if it’s maybe not a job, but a routine. It’s taken me a little while to get things going again, but after having taken a break for awhile it’s also meant the ability to see things with fresh eyes.
This month at Read Short Fiction, we’ve got a great short story called The Limo Driver’s Diary by A.J. Profeta that reminds us a day at work might not always be routine. And it’s also a reminder that we often don’t think about the secret inner lives of Limo Drivers or cabbies, and yet they are the ones on the road every day, all day long, which leaves them with a great deal of time, I’m sure, to reflect on their lives, the lives of others, and the state of the world around them. That’s what appealed to me most about this story. This Limo Driver is very human, and a day on the job for him, on many occasions, means facing his own mortality, fragility, and age. I found this a very poignant reminder that this highway we’re on called life doesn’t always take us where we want to go, but where we’re supposed to go. I got chills reading this piece.
So, if you’ve got the back to work blues, I suggest you go check it out! You can read it here:
http://www.readshortfiction.com/2010/12/the-limo-drivers-diary-by-aj-profeta/
Enjoy, and hope your 2011 brings you safe travels!
“WATERPROOF” IN WINTER 2010 ISSUE OF THE BATTERED SUITCASE!
My short story “Waterproof”—which Battered Suitcase editor Fawn Neun called “eerily touching”—is now available in the magazine’s Winter 2010 Issue! This story was part of my Bachelor’s thesis at Burlington College and was written in 2006. It stayed hidden in a drawer for many years, and after many people who had read early versions of it asked me when it would be available in print, I went in search of a home for it earlier this year. The Battered Suitcase was it!
The great thing about The Battered Suitcase is that there is a version of each issue for every taste and budget. From their website:
Collector’s Edition $42.99
The complete edition – full color art, prose and poetry, glossy,
coffee-table size quality paperback
Journal Print Edition $12.99
Prose and poetry of The Battered Suitcase
Art Print Edition $17.99
Full color art edition
DIGITAL DOWNLOAD
All formats: pdf, mobi, epub, lrf, and pdb $2.99
To purchase any of these print/digital editions, click here:
http://www.vagabondagepress.com/
Winter 2010
Volume 3, Issue Three
ONLINE FREE
To read the online edition (free), click here:
THE LOSS OF WRITER C.L. ROSS—AND WHERE TO FIND HER WORK
Cynthia Wilson at the Cliffwalk, Newport, RI, July 2010. Photo by Melissa Martin Ellis, whom she couldn't wait to meet. The pair hit it off right away.
X
A very good friend of mine, Cynthia Wilson—who wrote under the name C.L. Ross—passed away suddenly on Friday, December 10, 2010. I know that many of you on this list knew her or were familiar with her work.
Cynthia was working on a paranormal thriller series called The Llewellyn Legacy which was set in Ireland, a country she loved very much. She was thrilled to be returning to Ireland this coming February to complete the draft, and while there, she was going to be doing some paranormal investigating with her friends Mick Doyle and Ruth Deery of the Killarney Paranormal Society, of which she was a member.
She had, in the past year, built a website and invited several people to contribute to her blog on paranormal topics ranging from witchcraft to druidism to ghost stories. She was a proud member of the online pagan community WitchVox, for which she wrote many articles over the years; in addition, she had some of her short stories published in magazines and was actively working on polishing others to submit. And she had just recently discovered Twitter and was having a ball with it.
She held an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College, which she had been awarded in January, 2010. Goddard is where Cynthia and I met. And we helped throw the best damn graduation party for the graduating class of January 2009 EVER…I’ll never forget us trekking all over Barre, Vermont to shop in the middle of the most brutal snow. It was me (a New Englander) and Julia (a Chicagoite)—but Cynthia the Southerner was driving the truck. Hilarious.
I decided that I would post links to where her work is available online, and also a link to her website, which for now is still up. She had just purchased the domain this year and I’m hoping against hope her password is someplace—or I can find it, because she gave it to me once but I don’t know if I kept it—so that I can renew her domain every year indefinitely. If anyone else knows where her work might have been posted, please let me know—I wanted to give everyone a chance to read what have turned out to be her last words.
X
“Sunshine and Stones”
Read Short Fiction
March 28, 2010
http://www.readshortfiction.com/2010/03/sunshine-and-stones-by-cynthia-wilson/
X
“Breathing Room”
Voices from the Garage
Spring 2010
http://voicesfromthegarage.com/story/breathing-room
X
“The Eulogy”
The Smoking Poet-Cigar Lounge
Summer 2010
http://thesmokingpoet.tripod.com/summer2010/id7.html
X
“Fixin’ the Blues” (poem)
SWAMP
Issue #2, October 4, 2008
http://www.swampwriting.com/?page_id=31
X
“Purgatory” (poem)
SWAMP
Issue #2, October 4, 2008
http://www.swampwriting.com/?page_id=38
X
“Murder in Frogtown” (poem)
Aquila Review
Fall 2008
http://www.tamut.edu/aquila/Text%20Files/Aquila%20Review%20Fall%202008%20(Second%20Version).pdf
(this also contains the first publication of her poem “Fixin’ the Blues”—SWAMP had retained it as a reprint)
X
“Rebellious Bat” (prose poem)
The Pitkin Review
Fall 2007
http://web.goddard.edu/pitkin/archive/2007_fall/RebelliousBat.htm
X
Cynthia’s C.L. Ross Website and Blog: includes many guest posts about the paranormal, witchcraft, Druidism, and legends; some of her otherwise unpublished short stories; and snippets of The Llewellyn Legacy.
There are a couple of her pieces available in expired print magazines; I just found one that I’m going to order and see if her work is in it. I’ll keep you posted.
If you wish to visit the “In Memory Page” her friends have set up on Facebook, you can do that here:
PUT A LITTLE CREEP UNDER THE TREE WITH CHRISTMAS FEAR
My short story “Bridging Christmas” shares a Table of Contents with speculative fiction writer Daniel Pearlman’s “Household Gods”—which is one hell of a great story—in Static Movment’s Christmas Fear anthology.
The anthology is a collection of creepy stories about Christmas and might just make a unique gift for that impossible-to-buy for short story lover!
You can get it on Amazon here:
WHAT’S UP AT READ SHORT FICTION: $25 AMAZON GIVEAWAY!
Our Read Short Fiction Facebook page is pretty active—we post NaNo Tips, Writing in the News and of course our magazine’s adventures. Right now, we’re running the “25 Days of Christmas Shorts”—we’re posting a link to one classic Christmas short story per day through Xmas Day. There’s no better time to “Like” our page, right? If that weren’t enough, “Like” our page before December 15 at http://www.facebook.com/readshortfiction
and be automatically entered to win a $25 Amazon Gift Certificate. We want to help one lucky winner stock a friend’s bookshelf—or his own!
A winner will be chosen by number using www.random.org on December 15, 2010 at 11:59 p.m.
NANO 2010 WRAP-UP
Congratulations to everyone who attempted National Novel Writing Month—it isn’t whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. If you made it? Awesome! If you didn’t? You’re still awesome for at least trying it!
Anyway, I barely made it this year—I started in 2004 and won every year, but in 2009, I fell 8,000 words short. I just couldn’t do it. Which actually made me nervous, and heading into Thanksgiving week I was sure I was going to fail again. Then, in the last three days, I was luckily struck by inspiration and railroaded the remaining 15,000 or so that I needed.
My project this year was called “Bloom and Other Tales.” Yes, a collection, so to speak, of ghost stories. I didn’t get a collection—I rather got a few toward a non-Disney collection and a couple toward the next Disney collection. They’re all a mess and will require months of clean-up and hard work, but they’re out. The titles of the stories are: “Bloom,” “Below the Birch Trees,” “Can You Hear Me Now?”, “Under the Kudzu,” “Frosting Cookies,” and “Right Now Nothing” (because it doesn’t have a title yet). Not bad. They’re all way longer than they need to be, which means they’ll probably have several thousand words cut out of them. In any case, watch for them sometime in the next couple of years!
FAMILY HOLIDAY? YOU’LL LOVE THIS…
Family Holiday? You’ll probably recognize a few characters in Bob Shar’s “Snapped” at Read Short Fiction.
I thought this story was a unique take on sibling rivalry and what goes on in families—but what I also loved about this was the dialogue, especially the kids’ dialogue. Sometimes in stories like this, kids’ dialogue can sound stilted. In this case, Shar has nailed it. What a fun read.
Take a break from the craziness and check it out at http://www.readshortfiction.com/2010/11/snapped-by-bob-shar/
“SHELL GAME” SELECTED FOR BEST OF ANTHOLOGY
“Shell Game,” which was published in Eclectic Flash’s September 2010 Issue, has been selected for the magazine’s annual Best of anthology for 2010. The volume should be out some time in early 2011.
