My short-short entitled “Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster” — a riff on Sei Shonagon’s style — was just published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 19, the tenth anniversary issue of Small Beer’s beautiful zine. I’m listed in the poetry section of the masthead, which startled me, then made me laugh at myself for being startled. The piece is a prose poem, it’s true, but somehow I’d never thought of it as anything but a short piece of fiction. I spent most of my adolescence writing poetry — and now I think of myself only as a fiction writer. Brains are odd!
The contributor’s copies are in the mail, so I’ll report on the contents of the issue in more detail when they arrive, but it looks lovely and I’m proud to be in such company.
The order page for the issue is here.
- Gotten my head knocked into a doorframe by my landlord. (Accidentally! He was checking a smoke alarm, I ducked under him, it was a bad scene.) The lump is just about gone now.
- Sold my first story (!) — a short-short, to the wonderful people at Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
- Discovered that the dryer attached to my new apartment will function with a maximum load of two (2) pairs of wet pants. Total.
- Read most of Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess. It’s spectacular — particularly the scene in which the two main characters fall in lust over the deathbed of the female character’s father — but it still hasn’t topped the MONKEY FIGHT at the end of Evelina for absurdity. (MONKEY FIGHT. And people say c18 fiction is dull.) Then again, I haven’t quite finished it yet.
- Saw Final Fantasy at the Parish, downtown. Final Fantasy is Owen Pallett, recently described in the Times as “the world’s most popular gay postmodern harpsichord nerd.” If you ever have a chance to see him, do. He does all his looping from his violin live onstage, including crazy percussive sounds made with bow and strings, and shouts into the violin’s belly; he has a strange lovely voice and a great little dorky Ralph Fiennes laugh; he wore a red headband that made him look like an anime character; and he ended the concert with a cover of Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy.” (His cover of “Peach, Plum, Pear” was excellent, too.) Definitely one of the best shows I’ve seen.
I have access to borrowed wireless in the apartment now, intermittently. We’re still counting down the days to our very own reliable connection, though.
The practice reading was marvelous fun, even though we had no functioning lights for the outdoor stage and everybody after the first reader ended up reading by penlight. We had a good audience — maybe thirty, forty people, mostly friends and other writing students (who are also friends). I read “Daphne,” and it was easy and pleasant and fun; I’d forgotten how much I enjoy the act of reading aloud.
Our theses are due on Friday, but everyone was happy and relaxed, talking about parties planned for the next few weeks, looking forward to the official graduation reading next weekend and the excellent Michener-catered outdoor dinner that’ll follow it. It’s summer here already, but early summer, when the air still cools to the seventies at night and the evening breezes feel like cotton. I’ll be swearing at the heat and humidity soon, and then fleeing it for hot-but-dry southern Oregon, but for now I’m enjoying it, remembering how lovely last summer was, anticipating another.
But there are still a few things to accomplish before school ends — so tomorrow I figure out thesis formatting, and try to finish as much of my final revisions as possible. ‘Night, all.
I’ve made a page describing my current fiction projects. The piece I’ll probably read tonight is “Daphne” — I did rewrite the ending of “The Former Hero” last night, and I like it much better, but now it’s too long to read tonight, as we were told to aim for ten minutes, with a maximum of fifteen. If I read “The Former Hero” quickly, it takes seventeen minutes — so I’ll only read that one if everyone else’s times are running extremely short. And if I feel like the mood is right for a weird Shakespearean ghost story. But really, when isn’t the mood right for that?
I think the tagline for my blog, if I had one, would have to be something like “Literature for dorks.”
Projects for the rest of the day: working on the final novel edits; baking a spinach quiche; finding something to wear to the reading; not being nervous. I haven’t read my writing in public since my first year of college, and that was in my poetry days, unfortunately for the audience. My mother said, “Remember, you read at the Library of Congress!” I did, it’s true; and it sounds impressive until you discover that I was in seventh grade at the time. (Much love to the Scholastic Writing Awards.)
Before I go, a few links:
Sherwood Smith shares excerpts from the diary and letters of Agnes Porter, a governess in the late eighteenth century.
A transcript of Stephen Colbert’s remarks at the press corps dinner (via BoingBoing).
More clarification about how book packaging works in the world of teen fiction, by the Harvard Independent here and Lizzie Skurnick here.
In other news, I have a reading to prepare for — the graduating students in my writing program are doing a practice reading tomorrow night (at Club DeVille on Red River, 7:30 p.m., if any Austinites are reading this). I’ve been waffling about what to read all week: the novel prologue, which I’ll read at the official graduation reading next weekend? The four-page piece I wrote last spring? The Much Ado story, with its not-quite-right ending? But T. read the Much Ado story this morning and helped me figure out how to write the ending I wanted, and now I’m tempted to rewrite that last page this afternoon and inflict the story upon my captive audience tomorrow. More on this as it develops.
This morning I slept in a little and then went to Café Mundi, our favorite eastside coffeeshop, only a short bike ride away. I ate a Belgian waffle with fruit and whipped cream and scuffled with the Much Ado About Nothing story, which has been extremely recalcitrant. I have to whip it into shape by Wednesday for workshop — I’ll probably spend most of the day working on it.
The coffeeshop got progressively noisier as lunchtime approached, so I left a little after noon and biked home, stopping to take several pictures. Only a few people out in their yards today; most were either inside, avoiding the humidity, or in church. I had to bike around fleets of Cadillacs parked along the curbs.
I put a few other photos on flickr, but here’s the House of Elegance, a local beauty parlor, which I’ve been meaning to take a photo of since I moved in last spring:
