Vacation, mini-interview, updates




I got back a bit more than a week ago from a family vacation in the San Francisco Bay area. Glorious sunshine, lemon and orange trees, green lawns and flowers in bloom.  Drought? There’s a drought going on? 

Oh, no, it’s going to RAIN! the locals freaked out while we were there. I’m so sorry, but there’s RAIN in the forecast, too bad about RAIN while you’re here on vacation. Rain? That five-minute sprinkle? Ha! My family and I are Midwesterners—you call that “rain?”

A hike by the sea, a stay at Half Moon Bay, and my husband and I were marveling at local flora like Dorothy dropped off by her tornado in the land of Oz. What are these trees? we wondered (wind-sheared cypresses on the coast). What are these orange wildflowers? (California poppies) And these flowering succulents on the beach?

The Internet identifies these as "iceplants." Not actually native to California, although they grow all over the coast.

Iceplants on the beach at Half Moon bay


Visits with family and friends. My youngest holding hands with her baby boy cousin. And snuggles with the newest cousin to join our family, an infant girl who is all fat rolls and edible cheeks and round softness and a heavy, sleepy weight in my arms.

Then back again, from technicolored California to gray skies here in Michigan. The trees are still bare. Spring flirts with us here, peeping out with sunlight and birdsong and then retreating again under veils of rain.

I’m still writing when I can. I’m playing with flash fiction. I finished a flash piece and sent it off to my critique group last night. It’s a dark sequel to Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” It’s basically Little Mermaid fan-fiction. LOL.

I’ve been reading heaps. Real, complete books, not short fiction on the Internet. Books on real paper, with real covers. I’ll be writing reviews.

I’m reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities now. It’s strange and beautiful and delightful and keeps making me smile.

                                                    ***
I’m also the subject of a mini-interview by the online journal, The Future Fire. I talk just a little more about my short story, "Disconnected," and current work.

I hesitate to ever call myself a fiction writer in the "real world." But I call myself one here. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On memoir and things I have no experience of—A review of "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life" by William Finnegan

I know nothing about surfing. I've never stood on a board. I've never even seen surfing done in real life (I've spent most of my life in the American Midwest. And even when I lived in Los Angeles for college, I somehow never met any surfers). Yet it came into my head to write a story that involved surfing. So I read a lot. I was interested in big-wave surfing, so I read Susan Casey's book, "The Wave." I read a lot of journalistic accounts. I watched videos online. And eventually, probably inevitably, I stumbled upon a two-part article in The New Yorker. The article is titled " Playing Doc's Games" by William Finnegan, and it was published in 1992. It is famous among surfers. The surf magazine The Inertia called it " possibly the greatest surf story ever" and a writer at The Surfer described it as "the best written piece (all 39,000 words of it) ever penned about surf culture."  I am not a surfer. Yet Wi
Read more

Short fiction recs! Oct-Nov 2023

Some stories that I read and loved, from October through November.    Fantasy “Four Words Written on My Skin” by Jenn Reese in Uncanny Magazine When the Fae stole my wife, I followed them into the dark woods to win her back.   A short but achingly sharp and lovely piece about finding what’s been lost. The Fae stole the narrator’s wife, but the narrator has been losing Jess for a long time, before the Fae ever appeared. What follows is a confrontation with the narrator’s own responsibility for that loss, for the distance that’s grown between them. And, at the end, a glimmer of hope—the decision to choose to love. Beautifully told.     “Six Versions of my Brother Found Under the Bridge,” by Eugenia Triantafyllou in Uncanny Magazine Technically it was built on top of a river that had been dredged and filled in some fifty years ago which made the ground under the bridge degraded and pretty dangerous. But rumor had it—and by rumor Olga meant Maria’s oldest cousin who had be
Read more

Short fiction recs! June-July 2024

So many beautiful, strange stories I’ve read this summer so far. Here are only a few. Strange Tales of Beauty and Horror “Markets of the Otherworld” by Rati Mehrotra in Uncanny Magazine In the Market of Illusions, I writhed on the cobblestoned street that wound between the gilded stalls, gasping for air, convinced I was a goldfish. Someone dragged me to a fountain and pushed me in, breaking the spell and—a minor point, except the water was ice cold—drenching me to the skin.   In the Cat Market, I was pursued by a large white Persian and coerced into signing away a month of my life in return for the privilege of petting her. In my dreams, I still run my fingers through her thick, beautiful fur while she leans against me and hums in pleasure. Worth it, I tell myself, even as I wonder which month of life has been taken from me.   An absolutely gorgeous, magical, and at times melancholy tale of a woman traveling through the enchanting markets of other worlds. A story that’s al
Read more