Ten-ish Things This Time, Okay?
Preorders for physical copies Family Night are live!
Ur boi is a Lordship House Fellow! Grrls (gender neutral), I am VERY excited for this opportunity to take a beat in a place I’ve never been, and to be in community with folks in person. Y’all, understand that I am from Michigan, and imagine that in my voice when I say THERE’S A SEAWALL! A FOX FAMILY LIVES IN IT!
New Horsegirl story! It’s Not Called a Miscarriage if You’re a Horse is up at Literary Mama. CW: Miscarriage, blood, fertility trouble, grief.
I did a Mondettes! I might hate Subst*ack, but I think Matt Kendrick is delightful* and I love an opportunity to highlight amazing work in the flash community, especially alongside someone who is so supportive. My theme was “embracing the animal as a way to bring out the human.”
My friend Mike writes a great weekly newsletter, and man, he’s a great story teller. I wrote in a couple of weeks ago to ask him about promoting my own work, a thing I struggle with that Mike is also great at, and you can read what he had to say here. I share this because I know a lot of y’all are also writers, or may simply need the encouragement to put your work out there—I know I did.
My friend Travis Flatt has a new chapbook, Such Late Night Radio, available for pre-order from Bottlecap Press! Travis writes wonderfully odd and surreal stories, and I can’t wait for this to arrive in my mailbox!
Lindz McCleod, author of The Miseducation of Caroline Bingley, and An Honour and a Privilege: A Craft of Writing Collaboration, wrote up a tremendously helpful Bsky thread on querying, highly recommend checking it out, as well as their literary work!
I got to attend a Werd Nerdz session with Diane Hardy from Claudine, and it was awesome, and it should be on your radar! We did a deep dive into a story and then some prompted writing, which I found super generative, and that’s saying something with how fussy my brain has been.
Liz DeBeer has a new chapbook available for preorder with Thirty West Publishing House, and was gracious enough to include me as a reader for her remote launch party on July 2, which will open to all! Farewell to Emptiness is novelette-in-flash about a frustrated young waitress from upstate New York, whose unhappy, unemployed, alcoholic father recently died.
A quick raccoon story: one time my partner was smoking a big ass pork butt in his Weber grill on the back deck and a raccoon climbed up the stairs and tried to steal the pork butt, and for a minute it seemed like my partner was going to have to fight an adorable but seriously intent raccoon. And the raccoon decided the grill was too hot, my partner was yelling too loud, and goddamnit, it didn’t need this shit at two in the morning. Prompt: draft a story where a raccoon tries to steal something, bonus points if you can make it something you cannot imagine a raccoon even wanting. Double bonus points version: write a story where your character tries to steal from a raccoon.
Fuck AI.
*Matt is a terrific educator, champion of fellow writers, and runs two contests a year, the Welkin Writing Prize, and the Welkin Genre Prize, the latter of which is open now.
