Sunshine in the Valley / Mendacities (My Last Amazon Reviews)


Here are the two remaining Amazon reviews, which I’ve been posting to this blog in the event that Amazon goes belly-up or decides to suppress all customer reviews or suppress just mine! I’m less and less a fan of Amazon. I did like them for the ability to buy hard-to-find items, but I’m less and less enamored of their evil. (These days, when I purchase books on the Internet, I try to do it from the publisher’s website or from Barnes & Noble. And I don’t post customer reviews anymore.)

Looking at my review of Sunshine in the Valley, I think it’s clear I had no idea what I’d read. I was way out of my depth, couldn’t make heads or tails of it! So I adhered to the ancient scholastic principle of Fake-It-Till-You-Make-It. In my review of Mendacities, well, I was just kind of an asshole. A smiling one, but still a stinky one. In fact, I wrote to the author afterwards to apologize and offered to take it down, but he seemed to find it amusing and told me to leave it … so I left it!

Oh, and I see that I read Mendacities on my Kindle! I’ve had this device for years, and I’ve never been able to read anything on it. I can’t sustain a sitting for more than a few minutes; the thing activates my incipient ADHD in a big way … but apparently, I did manage to wade all the way through this particular ebook. I’m not sure why I was so motivated: the text is not what you’d call remarkable. Consciousness (aka the habit of being human) is complex and arbitrary.

 

Sunshine in the Valley

by Kyle Muntz
pub. Civil Coping Mechanisms
Review posted October 25, 2011, 5 stars
Review title: Ghost and Language

Disclosure: Kyle Muntz is a Facebook friend and a colleague at the Step Chamber. He provided me with a review copy.

Sunshine in the Valley is an intriguing novel that explores levels of reality. Characters hover between existence and idea, never quite coalescing into a fixed notion. At times, they seem petty and self-absorbed, whereas at others they seem almost blended into non-self. The world itself seems neither to contain them nor to exclude them; rather, it is a kind of “meta-character” in itself, its identity radiating from “the Sun,” whose light is mysterious, eternal, and unknowable.

Interestingly, the main characters are children, and the energy of childhood serves as a driving force in the narrative, as if the Universe itself is focused on its children, neglectful of those who have moved on into adulthood.

One character is a ghost (a child!), and she seems to be a kind of “narrator,” a disembodied expositer and commentator on events, yet she seems not to remain entirely aloof from what she observes, indeed she interacts with and existentially depends upon the story she is telling … And of course, she herself is part of the story she is telling! My sense of her, thematically, was she stood in for language: the desire of language to become the world it can only evoke.

A mindbender of a novel! :) Reminds me of those beautiful Tarkovsky science fiction movies, Solaris and Stalker, in the sense that while I couldn’t understand everything that was happening, I was always imbued with a sense of ramifying ideation, an enlarging vortex that never quite coalesced, but always drew me in as I attempted to grasp at some profound insight. And of course, everyone’s response to this novel will be quite individual—I’m sure my take will differ profoundly from that of others … Kyle Muntz has mined a rich vein of literary mysterium and beauty.

I think, in the end, this is a novel of pure Language. The world, the characters, the ideas, all are bound inextricably with the vocabulary and grammar employed to create them. There could be no other words, or everything would be different. The ghost haunts the world and the world haunts the ghost.

In sum: A pristine, hermetic, aesthetic engagement of the mental and appreciative faculties.

 

Mendacities

by George Berger
pub. Self (Out of print, apparently!)
Review posted April 25, 2012, 4 stars
Review title: Nostalgia

My rating for its entertainment value would be three stars, but I give at another star for effort! (I’ll explain that below.) Plus, I don’t want to mess up that lovely array of four stars already fanned out up there … And it really was a very enjoyable experience!

The style is entertaining, and I was intrigued by the initial promises of the plot as it unfolded, but the author loses track somewhere around the 60% mark. (I read the Kindle Edition, can you tell?) As in, the plot drops off a cliff at that point and makes a faraway “splat.” Nothing much happens for a long long time. The characters kind of disappear into vague exposition … So let’s not talk about it, okay? :)

Which leads me to my next point. The author, on his website, says the book was written in 2010 by a man with a wife and two kids, but uh, that would be pretty hilarious if it were true! Because it reads as if it were written by a very precocious 15-year old boy sometime in the mid- to late eighties. Early nineties? (Don’t get me wrong, the style, grammar, and editing all deserve high marks!) If these are contemporary kids, then where are the cell phones, the internet, computers, etc? Do people still use rolls of film?

Nothing wrong with all of that, I think it’s great! That’s one of the beautiful things about the Kindle and the new self-publishing movement—you can pull out those old novels moldering in your trunk (or hard drive) and give them a new lease on life. And that’s really the only reason I stuck with it after the author lost the thread (or rather, I skimmed—trust me, you’ll need to start seriously skimming once you hit the 60% mark). I was simply curious about this high school kid’s project as an artifact, and it aroused a certain amount of nostalgia in me for a bygone age.

So, an A for effort, and the first half is quite good! Promising and reasonably original material, lots of laughs. I was thoroughly entertained and touched. Certainly worth the price of admission!

How I Became a Nun (My Amazon Review)


This is the second of my Amazon book reviews, which I’m posting to spite Amazonian fate.

 

How I Became a Nun

by César Aira
tr. Chris Andrews
pub. New Directions
Review posted May 28, 2011, 5 stars
Review title: Painfully precise insight into the mind of a certain kind of childhood

I found myself utterly wrapped up in this book. The beginning and end are both cheap gimmicks, which I would have enjoyed more if the interior portion of the novel had also been a gimmick, but what other reviewers on this site have called “vignettes” or “set pieces” I saw completely differently—as the staggeringly accurate evocation of a state of mind, a way of being.

I’ve rarely seen an author “get” childhood in this way. These “vignettes” are not disconnected from each other, but rather supply a view from different angles upon the same consciousness. It isn’t necessary for a novel to provide a linear plot to convey a sense of narrative or momentum. In this case, the plot is accretional—we are given a series of windows into this child’s intellect and emotions at a particular point in his/her development, and it’s the experience of this consciousness at an early stage that proves so gripping. It’s a novel of the inner life. The gimmicks are actually rather disappointing in this context—if the psychology hadn’t been so poignantly true, the bizarro elements would have given more pleasure.

The child is six, so the gender “confusion” actually fits right in. At that age, a child is still discovering the differences between male and female, so it’s understandable that sometimes the child might internally “wear” the other gender, if only to figure out the difference. It’s really beside the point, since the character’s gender identity has very little bearing on the events of this novel.

I think this novel portrays a stage of innocence through which we all must struggle to transition—that strange time that comes after the acquisition of language and self-consciousness, but before the “rules of the game” have been established. We normally learn these rules from the culture in which we are immersed, but conditions may arise that frustrate this process. It may be circumstances beyond our control or it may be something in our makeup that gets in the way, so that instead of following along with the progress of other children, we may become immersed in odd pastimes or compulsive mental spaces that seem strange to outsiders but perfectly rational on the subjective level.

Just as one example (among many I could have chosen), this little girl (I’m picking one for consistency, and also because the character felt like a girl to me throughout) is constantly constructing a narrative of her life as she lives it, issuing “instructions” to some imaginary pupil for every mundane activity which she performs—eating, walking, opening a door, looking out the window: in her mind, she will be saying, “Do it like this… never do it like that… once I did it like this… be careful to… some people prefer to… this way the results are not so…” She creates a world in her own head, in which she is the master of imaginary others, which gives her the sense of mastery she is lacking among real others. But of course, this construction is a limitation, a compulsion, a mental prison, not at all a means to freedom. It is almost painful to witness, since she is so unaware of the nature of her compensations, whereas the reader, as an adult, knows full well what she is missing and wonders how she will emerge from this childhood labyrinth. It’s not inevitable that she will—many people stay mired in their childish eccentricities, never finding the way out.

There are many more examples like that one, but the gimmicks purposefully explode all of this. I’m not sure what the purpose is, if there is one. I got the sense that the author began with the introductory gimmick because it was fun, but then found himself exploring all this interesting stuff, then got bored or ran out of ideas and needed a way to finish things off, so he came up with another gimmick and that was that. Too bad, but forgivable to me—chapters 3-9 were brilliant enough to justify the read!

Here’s a nice little excerpt, in which César goes to school for the first time:

     The first weeks were a stream of pure images. Human beings tend to make sense of experience by imbuing it with continuity: what is happening now can be explained by what happened before. So it’s not surprising that I persisted in the perceptual habits I had recently acquired with Ana Modena and went on seeing gestures, mimicry, stories without sound, in which I had no part. No one had explained the purpose of school to me, and I wasn’t about to work it out for myself. Initially, however, the problem didn’t seem serious. I regarded it all, rather stubbornly, as a spectacle, an acrobatic show…

Bacacay (My Amazon Review)


I would make a terrible reviewer of … anything. I lack a critical faculty. Which is fine with me, of course: I don’t need one; I only want to write fiction.

But over the years, struck by a certain mood—the same one perhaps that drove Ishmael to knock hats from heads—I have posted a few reviews at Amazon. (I mean that: three or four tops!) And at times that makes me a little nervous because I don’t entirely trust Amazon. It seems to me that one might wake up one day to discover that Amazon has revamped its customer review policy to exclude all reviews by those whose first name begins with the letter “Y.” It could happen.

So I am going to post those reviews here, what with this nifty blogging software I’m now using. Call it a test drive. I want to hear just how sweetly this Ferrari purrs. Bear in mind that these are not meant to be rigorous; they’re just little bundles of thoughts and feelings about a particular book.

So maybe I’ll post one a day? Every other day? Not sure yet, but here’s the first one:

 

Bacacay

by Witold Gombrowicz
tr. Bill Johnston
pub. Archipelago Books
Review posted May 23, 2011, 5 stars
Review title: A true pleasure

This book is a delight, both in the writing and the construction.

The materials are of a high quality, the text is crisp and pleasingly set with enough white space that your thumb won’t interfere with your reading (even if you’re the kind of reader who holds the book with one hand, a procedure I’d recommend in this case only to large-handed readers, as the dimensions might prove unwieldy to those with short fingers). There are even French flaps, if that is something that excites you.

Gombrowicz is never profound in these stories, indeed turns the idea of insight on its head, and that is precisely what makes this collection so adorable! The situations are absurd, the silliness protracted. Just when you think a story has gone off the rails, you discover that really the author has created a whole new set of rails and you simply didn’t notice. If you enjoy Rimbaud or Douglas Adams, I think you’ll find yourself right at home in these pages.

Bill Johnston’s work of translation is glorious. I don’t know Polish, so I can’t judge the accuracy of the English version, but the style is superb and audacious and fits the content impeccably, which to me indicates a genuine synergy with the original author.

I’ll close this review with a quotation typical of the style (from “A Premeditated Crime”):

     The deceased lay on the bed—just as he had died—the only thing they had done was to turn him on his back. His livid, swollen face betokened death by asphyxiation, as was usual in the case of heart attacks.

     “Asphyxiated,” I murmured, though I could clearly see it was a heart attack.

     “It was his heart, his heart, sir … He died because of his heart.”

     “Oh, the heart can sometimes asphyxiate … It can,” I said lugubriously. She was still standing and waiting—and so I crossed myself, said a prayer, and then (she was still standing there) I said quietly:

     “Such noble features!”

     Her hands were shaking so much that I decided I ought to kiss them again …

Inaugural Post


Prior to this post, I had been hard-coding my announcements into a “Weblog” page … but as of today, I have implemented some blogging software to ease the burden of that task. Maybe now I won’t put it off, as I so often did in the past!

I plan to add a few touches to the site, as well, over time. For example, I’d like to include a page of links to relevant sites: friends, interesting writers, various lit mags and writing resources … who knows?

Weblog Archive (2011-2013)


This page consists of all the announcements that preceded my implementation of blogging software. There may be a coding error here and there, since I had to put this code through a rather extensive manual conversion process! The original “Weblog” page may be seen here, for historical purposes.

December 5, 2013

  • Shimmer Magazine conducted a poll of their readers recently to determine their favorite story in Issue # 17; my story “The Metaphor of the Lakes” came in second! The story also recently received a very favorable review from a blog called Casual Debris, which I shall shamelessly (but, uh, modestly, yeah, that’s it, with humility and the perspective of wisdom!) quote: “The ghost of a girl and her brother, now a cat, live in the house of Mr. Menders and Mr. Scatt. A highly enjoyable tale (tail) with refreshingly no straightforward explanations. Certainly the most entertaining story in Shimmer 17.”
  • I am also delighted to announce that The Atticus Review has accepted one of my stories for publication, and it should be appearing at their website within a few months!

November 8, 2013

September 17, 2013

  • Today marks the release of Shimmer Magazine # 17, in which my story “The Metaphor of the Lakes” appears. This issue, apparently, is the first for which Shimmer is compensating its contributors at the SFWA-qualified “professional rate” … and in a happy convergence of fates, this publication also marks the first time that I have been compensated at that rate! I am rather proud of this story, in any case (and at any rate), and I think anyone who seeks it out will not be disappointed.

August 1, 2013

  • More poetry news from me! Highly unusual … I wonder what’s going on here … I have had a poem called “blood for the blanket” published in the third issue (# 2.1) of Bellow Literary Journal. (You may recall that my novella Diplomat in Ebony was published in that journal’s very first issue.) My thanks to Patrick Sugrue, Bellow’s passionate editor.

July 27, 2013

  • Back in 2011, I was invited by the estimable editor Brian Clements of Firewheel Editions to participate in a collaborative poetry project. I was associated randomly with several poets, and together, we were tasked to compose a poem! And compose we did. After months of struggle, we emerged with a rather intriguing little poem called “With.” We were only one of many groups that Brian gathered, but we were the only group that actually managed to produce a poem! That poem has now been published as a broadsheet, and I am delighted! It was a fun experience, altogether, and my memories in its regard are all fond and nostalgic.

July 17, 2013

  • Might as well use my birthday as the dateline here! Bibliotheca Fantastica has finally arrived! An anthology from Dagan Books devoted to the idea of the book as a locus of wonder and imagination.

July 6, 2013

June 1, 2013

  • Gone Lawn # 11, which I Guest Edited, has arrived unto the Cyberverse! Thank you, all you Writers who consented to Agitate my Ether with your Literary Excitations and Esthetic Lapidations!

Our Featured Excerpt comprises the first ten pages of Evan Dara’s brilliant beast of a novel The Easy Chain (2008).

Our Featured Artist is Pd Lietz, who has provided a deliriously evocative and beautiful work of art to adorn this issue.

Our truly estimable Writers, in randomized order: Eric Schaller, Carol Guess, Zack Wentz, John McKernan, Berit Ellingsen, Robert Vaughan, Stephen V Ramey, Rachel A Dowling, Ken Poyner, Neila Mezynski, Alexander V Bach, Rosabelle Illes, Leonard Kress, Nicolette Wong, Jason Kane, L S Bassen, Graham Tugwell, Sarah Tourjee, Alex S Johnson, John Cairns, E Catherine Tobler, Mike Gallagher, Maggie Bára, and J B Mulligan.

I hope readers of my Electric Library of Literary Explosions will appreciate the colossal talent of all these contributors enough to become lifelong fanatics of their work!

And last but not least: Thank you, Owen Kaelin, Founding Editor of Gone Lawn, for this opportunity … my first Guest Editorship. And thank you, also, for inviting me to stay on as your continuing Co-Editor for future issues!

Anybody wishing to submit work to Gone Lawn # 12, commence your cheers, for the gates are open … we await your flood! You may address your submissions to Owen or Yarrow … or (if you lack a preference) Providence. Consult the guidelines for all the details.

  • I am delighted to report, as well, that I have had a piece accepted for publication in an upcoming e-chapbook from LucidPlay Publishing … what a day!
    h4<. May 15, 2013
  • I have had a short story accepted for publication in the summer issue (# 17) of Shimmer Magazine. I can’t wait!

May 1, 2013

  • A beautiful magazine called L’allure de Mots has appeared today, containing my short, cruel story “A Universal Sensation.” The magazine also contains naked women, so cover your eyes! A print edition will be forthcoming, and I very much look forward to seeing it.

April 29, 2013

  • I’ve learned today that a treasured little jewel of mine will be making its foray into the limelight (how many metaphors-in-one is that, I wonder?) in the premiere issue of a print magazine called The Shwibly Magazine, which is just a crackerjack name for a literary endeavor, isn’t it?

April 24, 2013

  • My story, “Rumour’s Run”, appears today at The Original Van Gogh’s Ear Anthology. The story was originally published back in 2003 in the innovative print journal 3rd Bed. I am very pleased that “Rumour’s Run” can see the light of day again … dont’t worry, it’s not too moldy after its decade on paper!
  • Also, today, at Sein und Werden, the Exquisite Corpses have arrived! An Exquisite Corpse is a story created by collaboration among many writers. Each contributor writes a paragraph continuing from the previous contributor’s paragraph; and that paragraph is all you have to go on! You don’t see the whole story until it’s completed. Rachel Kendall, the editor of Sein und Werden, organized a massive project (as this issue’s theme was “Exquisite Corpse”—see my story “The Great Event” elsewhere in the issue), which resulted in three Exquisite Corpse stories. I contributed a paragraph to one entitled “Beetle”. There were 24 other contributors to this story!

April 1, 2013

  • I’ve had a flash piece accepted for publication in the May issue of L’Allure des Mots. It is a slick-looking magazine that is available online in some sort of PDF/Issuu format, as well as in a limited print run—a nicely designed publication featuring beautiful photography and clean aesthetics. Which is to say, I’m looking forward to seeing my story there!

March 26, 2013

  • My story “The Great Event” is included in the new Sein und Werden. The theme of this issue is Exquisite Corpse, and I had quite a bit of fun with it!

March 19, 2013

  • I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be seeing a poem into print at Bellow Literary Journal. I have rarely attempted poetry, and the forays I’ve made have been … idiosyncratic, to say the least! This one’s no exception, and I’m quite fond of it. This poem will mark my second publication by Bellow. My epic story “Diplomat In Ebony” appeared in the very first issue, and I’m happy for the opportunity to continue a relationship with this big-hearted lit mag.

February 24, 2013

  • One of my favorite online literary endeavors is Sein und Werden, a U.K.-based site, which is curated by the seemingly indefatigable Rachel Kendall (author of a delicious little collection called The Bride Stripped Bare from Dog Horn Books). I have had two pieces published there in the past, and it is with pleasure that I can say that Rachel has accepted another story of mine for her forthcoming Exquisite Corpse themed issue.
  • I’d also like to note that I’ve recently had a story accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of New Dead Families. I only recently came across this site and wish I had discovered it sooner! Smart people there and a sense of fun.

February 13, 2013

  • I am very pleased to reveal that I’ve been invited to “guest edit” for Gone Lawn # 11. Gone Lawn is a very handsomely designed web journal edited by Owen Kaelin, and a story of mine appeared there a couple of years ago. Now, it seems—as of tomorrow—I’ll be making the selections for the upcoming summer issue!
  • Thus, if you are a writer of poetic prose or literary fabulist stories that emphasize the beauty of our language, then I urge you to peek around the site, have yourself a gander at the guidelines and, if it suits you, submit! I will be delighted to learn, finally, what it’s like on the other side of the Great Author / Editor Divide.

January 3, 2013

  • “The Revised Minutes,” a story that I consider a personal “classic,” appears in Gargoyle # 59, which has been made available for purchase today. I have been waiting for this one!

December 3, 2012

  • “Epistle of Icarus” (alongside a Portuguese translation, “Epístola de Ícaro”) appears at Hyperpulp today. I am very excited, as this is the first time my work has been translated into a foreign language!

December 1, 2012

  • An excerpt from Sholder Greye’s Confessions of an Eccentric Old Man has been featured in the current issue of Gone Lawn. You may find out more about Sholder Greye by clicking the link in the side panel over there ← … and if you are interested, his book may be purchased at various ebookstores—or you may even order a print edition to set upon your shelf!

November 7, 2012

  • I’m delighted to announce that the anthology For When the Veil Drops, from West Pigeon Press, has landed! I am honored to have provided a short story for this volume, along with many other worthy contributors, and of course, I encourage you to obtain a copy for yourself. It’s currently available in paperback and for the Kindle ebook platform. It appears the publisher has opted to enroll it in the Kindle Select program, which means that if you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can borrow it for free from the Kindle Lending Library; it also means that the ebook is currently not available for other ereaders … Hopefully, after the three month minimum Kindle Select period has expired, the ebook will be released on alternative platforms—if so, I will certainly mention that here!

September 12, 2012

  • Wow, it has been a while since I’ve updated this website. But I have a good reason today—I finally received my copies of Kerouac’s Dog Magazine! Issue 3: Truth A beautiful book! The cover is gorgeous, and there are even some naked ladies among these pages to, um, engorge your less “literary” appetites while you peruse the stories. ;) (I believe the issue was sold by preorder only, so it may not be possible to obtain a copy, but it doesn’t hurt to try …)

May 23, 2012

  • Dadaoism has been reviewed in a very unique way by one of its contributors, D. F. Lewis. He apparently specializes in “real-time reviews,” in which he reviews the text as he reads. In this case, he reviewed each individual entry in the anthology, one by one! His insights are extraordinary—he’s obviously a meticulous reader, one whose eyeballs any writer would be ecstatic to have perusing his or her bespoke fictions … Here’s the link to the portion of his review that addresses “Spirit and Corpus,” my own contribution to Dadaoism.

May 16, 2012

  • The Dadaoism Anthology from Chômu Press has been released today! Having received my contributor copies, I can tell you it’s a very special book, and any collector would be pleased to count it in his or her library.

May 2, 2012

  • I have had a story accepted by Hyperpulp, a bilingual English / Portuguese speculative magazine headquartered in Brazil. The magazine is released, I believe, in PDF and ebook formats. My story will be translated into Portuguese! I can’t wait to see it! It should be out at the end of May or beginning of June …

April 2, 2012

March 12, 2012

  • Wow, a month for sentimental favorites! Another one has been accepted, this time for the Bibliotheca Fantastica Anthology from Dagan Books.

March 4, 2012

  • I am happy to announce that a sentimental favorite of mine has been accepted for the West Pigeon Press Anthology, due out in May or June in both paper and Kindle versions!

February 17, 2012

  • Bellow Literary Journal, featuring my somewhat long and, um, exuberant story, “Diplomat In Ebony,” has been released for sale at Createspace. I haven’t seen it yet, but the cover photo online is promising …

February 15, 2012

  • A tiny piece of my writing indeed has found its way onto the Opium Magazine website.

January 20, 2012

  • My issues of Pear Noir! were in my mailbox, and I am happy to see them! Very simple and “tasteful” in design and aesthetic … High class … Lovely! Also, Robert Olen Butler is in there—I’ve hit the big time! I’m also pleased to see that one of my editors from Twelve Stories, Molly Gaudry, has a piece in there.

December 1, 2011

  • I’m taking down the Hullabaloo link to Quite Curious Literature today because I don’t believe they exist anymore! I’ve heard nothing from them despite inquiries, their website has not been updated since June, and indeed their website seems to have been commandeered by spambots … If I hear otherwise, I’ll repost the link, but at this time, I think the story they accepted for publication is now free to seek another home!

November 11, 2011

  • My bio page at Kerouac’s Dog Magazine has been posted—lovely! And the revamped site is quite attractive. It looks like the magazine is going to be a thing of beauty. I can’t wait to receive my copies!

November 3, 2011

  • Cavalier Literary Couture has accepted a story of mine for publication on their website. It’s a beautiful site … take a look!

October 16, 2011

  • Anemone Sidecar, an ebook literary magazine (pdf), has released Chapter 16, in which my piece, “Heat Life,” appears. Beautiful cover image!

October 4, 2011

  • Barge Journal has finally arrived in my mailbox, and it’s beautiful! To sweeten the triumph, the journal has nominated me for a Pushcart Prize! Quite an honor …

September 27, 2011

  • The inaugural issue of Pulp Modern has been released. My story, “Omelette du Jour”, sits between the same set of covers as a “classic story” by Lawrence Block! I don’t know whether the story was acquired with permission or it simply fell out of copyright, but either way, I’m pleased! Buy the issue here, it’s only ten bucks … (Or, in a few days, it will be available at Amazon. You can combine it with other purchases to get free shipping!)

September 2, 2011

  • I have had a story accepted into the next issue of Pear Noir!

September 1, 2011

August 22, 2011

August 5, 2011

  • I’m sorry to report that Abjective has folded its web awning. The site is still there, but closed for business — it seems, however, that the archives will be maintained. My story was the last one to appear, as a matter of fact, hopefully a coincidence! I wish the editor, Darby Larson, the best in whatever he’s moving on to.

July 23, 2011

  • Some very exciting news today: I have had a story accepted by the U.K.-based Chômu Press for inclusion in its upcoming Dadaoism Anthology. Don’t ask me what “Dadaoism” is! But you will find some elucidatory clues at the linked site … I have no idea when this book will be released, but of course I will share any news here as emerges.

July 14, 2011

  • Gargoyle has accepted one of my favorite stories! I’d say I can’t wait, but we’re talking 2012 or 2013, so … I can wait … ;)

July 7, 2011

  • Pulp Modern has accepted a story of mine and will publish it in their first issue, September 1!

June 25, 2011

June 17, 2011

  • I have had a story accepted for publication at Metazen! Should happen September 1 …

June 15, 2011

June 1, 2011

May 25, 2011

  • My story, “Confiteor,” appears in the newly released issue of Collective Fallout. It may be purchased at Lulu in either print or digital editions.

May 16, 2011

  • I have had a prose poem accepted for publication by Anemone Sidecar! Should appear in Chapter 16. I will of course update when appropriate!

May 7, 2011

May 3, 2011

  • The Step Chamber has gone live. It includes two works of mine (“Love is the Cure for Love” and “A Hundred Thousand Men Plus One”), plus a collaboration (“zaphod” in Step Chamber Speak) with Owen Kaelin, called “The Lay of Hen and Fen.” This story (in verse (mine) and prose(Owen’s)) will be serialized over subsequent “Creatures.”
  • These Creatures shall be released bimonthly by the lunar calendar. The second one will appear on July 1.

April 30, 2011

April 25, 2011

April 23, 2011

  • This will be my blog. Shouts & Murmurs, don’t you know. If it becomes more than that, I may implement a content management platform. Here’s hoping it doesn’t come to that …
  • I will move appropriate items from the Changelog to this page … retroactive blogging, the wave of the future …

April 21, 2011

April 15, 2011

  • Red Lightbulbs will be “publishing” one of my videos! Or maybe that’s called “curation” …

April 8, 2011

April 7, 2011