Several of my Facebook friends feature "good news Friday," and while that's more of a collaborative effort, I'm going to take over my own blog (which I think I'm allowed to do??) to share three bits of good news in my writing life:
~I don’t think I ever posted the link to my new story in The Hudson Review…because why? Either I’m
lazy, which is likely, or I’m still feeling so overwhelmed at seeing my work in
this journal, which is iconic and historic and a place I once worked at as a
lowly editorial assistant way back when, so to see my own writing in these
pages, in this font is, well…overwhelming.
Excerpt from "The Shadow Daughter":
In college, in the early eighties, money was why I didn’t smoke, drink, or do coke. If I wanted to, I found boys.
“He’s not good enough for you,” my best and only friend Jess might suggest, her suggestions always commandments. “His face is boring. And that bad breath. Like a dragon. What do you see in him?”
I spouted clichés about still waters running deep while remembering how the boy drove me to a blues bar on Howard Street, putting down a twenty for as many shots of Wild Turkey as I wanted while the music pulsed my skull. If I thought about that, I wouldn’t think about later, kissing him in his car, when he panted his dragon-breath into my ear and across my eyelids. Or when, with the sun coming up, I trudged to my dorm and its fluorescent-bright, group bathroom, where I jammed two fingers deep into my mouth, crushing hard against the back of my tongue to make myself puke, the way to avoid hangovers, to not feel rotten the morning after.
Link to read the rest: http://hudsonreview.com/2017/01/shadow-daughter/#.WJTislMrK70
(I’m also oddly shy to reveal that the story took second place
in the fiction contest!)
Note: Part of this story is taken from one of the writing prompts in my prompt group..."a ton of luck."
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~THIS ANGEL ON MY CHEST is now available in paperback! This
development was not an automatic thing as general readers may assume; rather,
both printings of the hardcovers sold out and so the demand was high enough to
call for a paperback edition. So, THANK YOU everyone who bought a hardcover…now,
feel free to buy paperbacks for your friends!
University of Pittsburgh Press link: https://www.upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=36596
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~Much more about this later, but my novel, REVERSING THE
RIVER, set in Chicago on one day in 1899 when years of engineering resulted in
reversing the flow of the Chicago River, will be appearing on the Great Jones
Street literary app!
Read more about the app here (and download it for free to
your phone): https://www.greatjonesstreet.press/
I’ve already got a couple of stories on the app—which bills
itself as “the Netflix of short fiction” and boasts “1000 stories in your
pocket”—and it’s exciting to be part of the vanguard, as Great Jones Street pushes
us into thinking differently about our relationship with story and reading. The
future is going to be so much more than drones and driverless cars, folks!