Archive for February 2012

It’s a great day to be an indie

February 21, 2012 Uncategorized No comments

Maybe I didn't crush any AT-ATs with a log, but I'm still gonna party.

When I saw this tweet and Roxane’s similar news, I was sitting in a commuter student lounge and I squealed aloud, like a little kid. You should, too. And not just because we’re suckups.

Like many writers, I’ve bought BASS faithfully for oh god, this year will be 20 years, how’s THAT for apropos a long time. I read most or all of it, and I like maybe two or three stories. I really dislike no fewer than two or three. Usually, it’s for the same reasons as the year before. (Which, unfortunately, are tangentially linked to the reasons people still waste time trashing MFA programs.)

The last five or six years, though…they have been a little different. I read BASS and had the same reactions, but then I’ve thought I came up through the same system that venerates the periodicals these stories came from. I read stories this year in other periodicals that I know were better than some of the stories here. I don’t think I had a massive head injury. Please…I’m practically middle aged…can’t this world just catch up to that world before I die? 

Today gave me hope. Oh sure, it’s cool that I get to be smug and tell people I was already a fan of Roxane’s and Mike’s work, not to mention Hobart. It’s even cooler that I really mean it. I never turn down an opportunity to be smug. But this is really a victory for anyone who reads BASS and gets impatient. The world will move, and the wait just got a little shorter.

Ten fun facts about “Booking Number 2409756.”

February 11, 2012 Uncategorized No comments
1. “Booking Number 2409756″ is fifty postcards I wrote for Lindsay Lohan.
2. Three weeks after my mom died of brain cancer in 2010, Lindsay Lohan was sentenced to 90 days in jail for violating probation related to a DUI conviction. She reported to serve the sentence two weeks later, and served 13 days. While Lindsay was in jail, she received approximately 250 letters a day. She could have up to ten in her cell at any time. Anything Lindsay didn’t get around to reading in a day, her mother and her sister took back to her house in large mailbags.
3. I thought about Lindsay a lot when she was in jail. I started writing postcard messages for her. It was something I could do, it required a type of effort I could make. It was concentrated and finite. It was like making looped potholders, or knitting socks. Writing postcards for Lindsay Lohan was one of the things that kept me from losing my mind.
4. I wrote some of the postcards when Lindsay was in jail. I kept writing them after she was freed. For a short while I thought about writing 250 postcards — a full day’s worth of mail. I got to 50 and realized that those 50 said everything that I wanted to say, so I stopped there.
5. I did not write the postcards in order. The order came later. Putting the postcards in order was as satisfying as clearing a board in Tetris, although it took considerably longer.
6. After I finished the postcards and had them in the right order, I didn’t know what to do with them. I fretted. I tried different versions, different approaches. For a while I thought the end result was wrong, that it needed to have a different form, a different focus. A good friend convinced me to leave them alone.
7. The only movies of Lindsay’s that I have seen are Freaky Friday and Get A Clue. I would like to see Life Size, because Tyra Banks is also in that one. If Tyra Banks ever went to jail, I would want to write postcards for her, too.
8. My favorite Lindsay Lohan story is the one where she trotted into some nightclub bathroom or other and announced to no one in particular, “Tonight I’m going to fuck Jude Law.”
9. I didn’t send Lindsay the postcards. When she’s back in jail, which has happened a couple of times since then, I think about it. But I’m in a slightly different place now, and I suspect Lindsay is too.
10. I don’t get asked to read my work very often. If I ever got asked to read from this, I would probably write out the last ten postcards in advance, read them aloud, and give them away to audience members one by one.

O hai moar social medias

February 3, 2012 Uncategorized No comments

I’ve been using Tumblr in kind of a half-assed way for a while (I might have something to do with this one) but after today’s post at The Millions, I realized I should go full ass. Or three quarters ass, at least.

Anyway, my own Tumblr has been a collection of things I find useful for my project. Kinda like a digital notebook. Songs, pictures, videos, snippets. The early stuff is mostly Star Wars reblogs, but I expect that to fan out a bit now. If you want to play along, you can visit and shout from the sidelines here. Warning: I have Tumblr on my phone, too, so this could get a little mumble-at-the-pigeons-y.

On the Tumblr dashboard side, where I look at Tumblrs I follow, it’s all memes mixed with literary stuff, at near-random. I have to say…I am liking that a lot. But if you follow me, I will probably follow you. I’m friendly and fair like that sometimes.