Friday, April 27, 2007

Sleepingfish 0.9375

i have a short piece of something quasi-fiction quasi-handbook in the latest issue of sleepingfish magazine #0.9375, the line up of which is absolutely sick, including some of my favorite working writers and others i greatly admire: gary lutz, terese svoboda, peter markus, deb olin unferth, laird hunt and tons more. to see my name among such a group is inspiring, really. it is the first piece in the issue, which seems nice.



here's an excerpt:

THRUST MANUAL: Young Recruit Edition
By Blake Butler

I. GENERAL PROCEDURE

Be washed. From a distance resemble a thing someone might desire. Say hello, yes sir, or good evening but not more. Do not look them in the face.

The Client will have been informed enough to possess an idea of you. He'll want to learn your smell. Allow his fingers where they will. Do not cringe. Do not smile unless requested. Sit up straight. Allow enough detachment in the preliminary minutes to allow a rejection without shame. If one does walk out, don’t worry! The queue is never-ending.

Sweat only in the moment. Make hot sound if prodded, enough to acknowledge but not disgrace. Lubricate if dry to ripping.

In event of pleasure, time will be deducted from your payclock.



- - - -

to read the rest you can buy a copy of the magazine here and it is worth every cent, as is everything i've read that calamari press releases.

the cover alone makes it worth buying, in my opinion:

Monday, April 23, 2007

new reading

two excellent new stories by Ron Burch and Michael Jauchen are now live at the web journal i do,
Lamination Colony.

read and enjoy.

interview & stuff

last week i was the featured writer at a nice blog called
What To Wear During an Orange Alert?
here is a link to the interview


this week i received acceptances from several print publications, i think 4 in 4 days, which was nice and unusual.

i am addicted to ebay (selling for once, instead of buying) and online poker.

it distracts me from writing.

one good thing to do is eat ice cream until you feel ill and then sit down and start babbling.

i have nothing of interest to say because my brain is fried from sitting at the computer typing for 8 hours a day minimum.

goodnight.

Friday, April 13, 2007

Paula

i have a new short piece called 'Paula' up at Thieves Jargon.

it is a short vignette from a novel called 'YES I AM AWARE THAT I'M IN HELL' that i abandoned because it was fucked and bizarre.

the majority of what i've written to date i don't to intend to ever show anyone.

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Kelly Link and simul-publishing

I just finished, perhaps way behind everyone else, Kelly Link's latest collection 'Magic for Beginners.' I think I started reading this book several times and each times didn't make it very for reasons I didn't realize until after I'd read them all. Some of the stories, and I think the first one in the book, just didn't hit me and I kind of started thinking of the book in the wrong light. The stories that did work here for me completely shredded my head. I think one called 'Stone Animals' I think is a perfect story and is a story I've tried to write many times. I think it's one of my favorite stories. I like the way she can throw things in and go way out with bizarre details but still end up feeling like she's not just jazzing around to be weird or funny, but she also doesn't try to tie everything up, either. She leaves a lot to rumble around and a lot is playful and smart and sloppy in a smart way and still manages to cause an effect, however indefinable. I like things that meld fantasy with reality, in a Barthelme way, or Marquez. I like to laugh or say 'fuck that's good'. I also know I liked the last story 'Lull' a lot, though I can't remember what it was about or why I liked it because I don't have the book in front of me. I could go get it because it's just in the other room but I don't think I'm going to because I'm lazy. I didn't much care for the title story, though I didn't not like it. I think I really liked this book a lot and I'd recommend it to people, though I think a lot of people already read it.



Miranda July's promo site for her forthcoming book is really good. Tao linked it and I went through it twice. It's smart. Click on Tao's link here and there's a post there with a link to her site. I've never read any of her stories. I want to read her stories now. I liked certain things about her movie 'Me and You and Everyone We Know' but I didn't like it completely. I liked it more several days after I watched it than I did immediately after watching it. The little black boys typing on IM is very good. I imagine her story collection will be very good and I plan to read it.

I have a bunch of other little things here and there I think are coming out soon. A lot of short pieces pending that I feel good about. S0me print and some online. Outside fiction and poetry, I have an interview with Dennis Loy Johnson, in which he talks about the threat looming over small presses right now and it kind of socked my gut, some of his answers. It's going to be a good interview. I never heard back from Sonora Review when I told them the story that they wanted to run had been online, which makes me think I made them mad for not telling them already, which I feel bad about. I feel conflicted about the whole thing. If anyone else reads this, what do you think about simultaneous submissions and maybe allowing things to get published in more than one place? I can't figure out how I feel about it. I do a small online lit journal sporadically Lamination Colony and I wouldn't care if someone sent me something that'd been published before. If it was good, I'd want to publish it. But that's just a tiny web-based site, so it's probably different. I understand somewhat and I don't. If it's been in the New Yorker or VQR or something huge that a ton of people read, then I'd understand why they wouldn't want to republish. There's so much out there and people want new things in their magazines. I get that. If it's new to them though, it must be new to most people. I don't know. Tao talked about first serial rights a lot on his blog for a while when he had some rigamarole over a previously published piece at Pindeldyboz. That was a good post. I need to read that again.

I need to go to bed.

I need to get my wisdom teeth pulled.

I need to not be dumb more often.