dogzplot short

One of my short-shorts,"Hearing," is up on dogzplot--the flash fiction site today. The piece came from the beginning and end of a much longer story that I am continuing to fiddle with in it's entirety, but it's interesting sometimes to pick parts away and make them new in isolation. It makes me look at the whole story a little differently, seeing these bits mashed in a new form.

Read the short HERE.

andernovel

I work as a reader/editor for the online literary journal Anderbo.com and it seems we are looking to publish a novel in its entirety.

Guidelines here

You know, just in case you happen to have a novel stuck in a closet somewhere getting dusty, or if you feel to urge to whip one up by September 1st.

hey cool

There are photos from the elimae reading 5/26/09 at the KGB bar.

I found me. There's an "s" missing (it's okay--the "bosch" part is the least interesting anyway) and I kind of look like I'm just standing, saying maybe the word "deer," but the moment was an exciting one, lots of heat and wiggling on the inside. It was fun. Affirmation of something for me in the scope of the recent past, I think.

be serious sasha, idea

Someone suggested recently that I read my weight in books. I was like, I'm sure I've done that, a few times. I like books and I'm a little person. But he was like, No, do it starting now and as an event on your blog--Sasha will read her weight by a certain date! Catchy. He envisioned a photograph involving 1) me on a scale, smiling or something, waving, and 2) another scale with books stacked, and 3) weight equality between 1 and 2. Close up of digits. Maybe a calendar in the background with a date ominously circled in red. I was like, Hm.

I think we also discussed asking for pledges on my blog to raise money in this endeavor...to fund my book purchases? I'm fairly sure the only person who would pledge money to encourage my reading would be my father, but he would want to select the books. I'd end up reading only Thomas Hardy and George Eliot and Tolstoy for years.

Writing about this is actually making me interested in the reading part though. How much do books weigh? No more than a pound each, right? Probably most I read are 1/2 pound. So if I read 100 1/2 pound books and 60 1 lb. books, I'd be there: 110. How long would that take me, to read 160 books? Maybe five years?

cheap mcsweeny's books

click this link and i will show you the way

i love deb olin unferth's Vacation! it's only 5 bucks good god we should all buy it like twice.

i'm getting Mcsweeny's 24 (the donald barthelme one) and i think Arkansas by john brandon. deb told me she liked it and she knows things.

fat

I'm reading Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno and the feelings I have are kind of sweet, like I want to eat ice cream and paint my toe nails. I even took a pink flyer from the elderly Asian man who always stands outside FIT with pink flyers, ignored. It was for Jess's Nails. I wondered if he has to get rid of the whole stack before he can go home. I wondered if he gets paid per flyer. I wonder what he's thinking and if he has children and what they are doing and if one of them goes to FIT, supported by pink flyers, and probably not but why not and what that would feel like, to be the man, or the people who run across the street to avoid flyers. Surely it is out of the way to do that. They are so repulsed. Are the papers diseased? They hate baggage. They hate inconvenience. I'm going to take flyers from everyone, always, and not throw them away until I am a little dot, blinked out.

It is raining but the sky doesn't seem to be agreeing. If I went outside--which I should because the clock says I am no longer being paid to sit here--then the ground would be bright and wet and I would feel like a mermaid reflecting on rocks. Pleasant and runny.

I am the only one not working because the other two consultants are tutoring students and my student left, because we had finished our session and were just talking about Woody Allen, and no one else is here.
Yecca just said, "Why would you want to start a sentence with 'But'?"
Student mumbles something. Sort of scribbles.
Yecca says, "But do what you want, if you're thinking about it. I mean, rules are just rules."

Patrick is saying, "Journal entries aren't always a story. A story someone else would read."
Student says, "I want to make it a story."
It sounds like they are making stories.

I don't remember why I felt motivated to write this. Did it have something to do with Joe Meno? Was it the coffee? I underlined these things in Meno's story "An Apple Could Make You Laugh": "the desperate waistbands of our unhappy clothes," "your shoulders would be as white and stunning as antelopes made of snow," "a phone from a dream I once had about you where we were both made of soap," "you borrow a pen because your pen is haunted," "I ride my bicycle into a tree."

Today Patrick brought me Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I'm getting fat on reading and need to do more writing. I've been working out this thing in my head that will probably be longer, like a novella or something, but considering my longest stories are like 8 pages, then I'm guessing this would be about 50.