October 19, 2017 at 4:28 pm (Artists and Writers, Lists, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Publishers, Recommended, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: dreams, flash fiction, Hotel Amerika, Literary Magazines, memories, nostalgia, poetry, prose poetry
Redwood City, California: Thursday, 19 October 2017
Vol. 8, No. 2 of Hotel Amerika was the trans-genre issue.
The opening piece was by Charlene Fix, “Less Than Zero”:
I know what Robert Downey, Jr. looks like and it’s not like you.
Yet he’s a ringer for you in this film, and we’re arrested,
handcuffed, booked, and sentenced to the couch for the duration.
Self’s piece in the same issue was “Ghosts”:
I dreamt about my sister, dead these many years. It seemed she was in a place of ghosts. In my dream I put my face up to hers and kissed her cheek and said, “I’ll always be your sister.”
Another piece in the same issue: “Alice Ages and Ages,” by Sarah White
ALICE IS OLD
She had the mirror removed years ago but has never stopped studying herself.
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October 18, 2017 at 9:37 pm (Artists and Writers, Links, Publishers, Recommended, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Literary Magazines, short story, Stanford
Thanks a bunch, Necessary Fiction, for all you do for the literary community. You’re a great web-zine! Self was first referred to you by Beth Coryell Alvarado, a fellow creative writing fellow in the Stanford University Creative Writing Program, and you published self’s short story, Witness, in February 2010.
An excerpt:
Witness (published in Necessary Fiction, 2/10/2010)
You were tired, that day. You were riding in a car with your daughter, Caroline, and Jay, her new husband, and they were arguing. They acted as though you weren’t there. Caroline swerved once, narrowly avoiding a collision. You bit your lip, you sighed, you rested your head back against the seat. The noises from the front continued, unabated.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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October 17, 2017 at 5:11 pm (Artists and Writers, Links, Publishers, Recommended, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: flash fiction, inspiration, Literary Magazines, speculative fiction, websites
With nods to Kafka. Kafka. Kafka.
Café Irreal is an online zine, edited by G. S. Evans and Alice Whittenburg, that has been in continuous publication since 1998 (Oh, kudos. Major kudos). Its focus is on writing about The Irreal.
They published self’s Appetites and The Secret Room.
The opening of Appetites:
- When she was a girl, she ate crab, bitter melon, rice soup. She loved milkfish, which at that time was still abundant. The cook, who was as dear to her as her own mother, served her glutinous rice cakes, salmon cured with tamarind salt, grilled squid stuffed with chorizo, the meat of young coconuts.
Food is life. Yes.
Stay tuned.
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September 21, 2017 at 3:50 am (Artists and Writers, destinations, Family, Food and Drink, Links, Lists, Personal Bookshelf, Places, postaday, Recommended, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: indulgences, Literary Magazines, memories, music, nostalgia, photography, postaday, postaweek, websites, Wordpress
This week, let’s explore the interplay of texture and depth.
— Ben Huberman, The Daily Post
Self’s home is in Redwood City, California. She’s been exploring its nooks and crannies this summer.
She got this nifty display stand about 20 years ago, and every time she needs some validation, she looks at the stand, where most (if not all) of the journals that have published her work over the years are displayed.
On the lowest shelf are two programmes from the New Hampshire Symphony. The opera she collaborated on with Drew Hemenger got its world premiere in New Hampshire, March 2015:
And here’s the interior of a peanut butter & chocolate do-nut from an iconic doughnut shop in Westwood, which she visited in July:
Finally, a keepsake box filled with samples of son’s childhood artwork:
Layers of memory, layers of goodness.
Other examples of LAYERED from around WordPress:
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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September 14, 2017 at 6:07 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Fan Fiction, Lists, Recommended, television, Wall Street Journal, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: adaptations, Everlark, fantasy, Game of Thrones, Gendrya, indulgences, reading lists
Self has moved on from Everlark.
She is still part of the fan fiction universe, only she’s switched allegiances to a new ship, Gendrya.
She is in complete awe of those fan fiction authors who drop Game of Thrones place names (Dragonstone, King’s Landing, Westeros, Highgarden, Casterly Rock, Stormsend, Braavos, The Red Keep, Winterfell, Volantis) as casually as bon bons.
She’s actually attempted doing a one-shot, but her lack of cred is immediately apparent because she’s only read one of GRRM’s books.
She doesn’t like AU Gendrya, it just doesn’t go well with the Bastard identity and Faceless Assassin plot lines. In the meantime, she lurks.
The number of Gendrya fics are about half the number of Everlark fics. But there are new ones appearing every day, because the ending of GoT Season 7 was so inconclusive.
Which brings us to:
The Books section of the Wall Street Journal, 12 – 13 August, 2017.
In Black Ships Before Troy, Rosemary Sutcliff (a rock star in her field) re-tells the Iliad. Now, the 1993 book has been re-issued and so it is with great pleasure that self adds the book to her reading list. It begins:
- In the high and far-off days when men were heroes and walked with the gods, Peleus, king of the Myrmidons, took for his wife a sea-nymph called Thetis.
What. A. Fabulous. Opening. Sentence.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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September 14, 2017 at 2:18 pm (Artists and Writers, Filipino Writers, plans, Publishers, short story collections, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: contests, dystopia, fiction, Literary Magazines, rejections, short story, speculative fiction
Got a rejection from Oxford American today. Nevertheless.
Self has decided to submit a short story collection to a contest.
Story # 1: The Departure
The Situation: A mom says good-bye to her son, who’s on his way to a college on the coast. Not five minutes after she waves good-bye and re-enters her house, the world ends. The woman wakes up to find that the roof of her house has cracked wide open, and nothing’s working. She decides to check in with a neighbor across the street, who invites her to share some cake (Did self say yet that she writes dark fiction?)
They each took a chair and faced each other across the kitchen table, the cake between them. The cat was still on Julietta’s lap but seemed to show no interest in food. She simply lay there, as if comatose. Through Mrs. Bautista’s kitchen window, Julietta thought she saw wisps of clouds moving backwards. Far off, somewhere, she imagined a whole bevy of airplanes were getting ready to scramble.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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August 19, 2017 at 5:52 pm (Artists and Writers, Family, Filipino Writers, Philippine History, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: American Imperialism, historical fiction, history, Jose Rizal, Literary Magazines, Manila, Saturday, short story, The Philippines
The story of the Americans, the Filipinos, the Spanish, a martyr, and a very famous oil lamp:
“She hands me a story and says, You must read it, it is something about our great-grandfather.”
Manila, 1898:
As Jose Rizal was lined up before the Spanish firing squad, labeled a renegade and underground solidarity worker, American Commodore George Dewey sailed into Manila Bay.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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August 5, 2017 at 3:16 pm (Places, Traveling, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: art, inspiration, London, museum, restaurants, short story, work-in-progress, writing process
Setting, The Wallace Collection, London:
Fragonard’s “The Swing” Originally, the lady was to have been pushed by a bishop. But this was evidently too much. So, instead, we have an elderly gent sitting on a stone balustrade, in the shadows behind.
- She walked past the Flemish Masters in the East Drawing Room, strode past Titian’s Madonna and David Teniers the Younger’s the Deliverance of Saint Peter.
Later, self took her notes and added this sentence (while having lunch at Chez Nous, 22 Hanway Street):
- She was more of a café person than her friend Maxine, who’d set the bar pretty high, whose idea of dinner was to go to the Ottolenghi in Islington, who had impressed her parents into gifting her a trip to London (she couldn’t be bothered to learn French, so London it was) by getting an A on a paper about the Thirty Years War (“1618 to 1648,” she told her mother, Cici, who blushed with maternal pride).
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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August 3, 2017 at 6:18 pm (Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: short story, writing process
Working Title: Magellan’s Mirror
Opening Sentence, Story # 1:
Her cousin believed that the sinking of the Titanic was part of a Russian plot to eliminate John Jacob Astor and other American imperialists.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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August 3, 2017 at 6:04 pm (Conversations, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: dystopia, fantasy, short story, work-in-progress
Tags: dystopia, fantasy, the future, the Philippines
Engage cornea slips. Again.
“Nature,” Fire Lizard begins, “will vindicate her laws.”
Laws.
New word. What does it mean?
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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