Is it just me, or is it really, really cold out?

I sort of feel like all I do here is complain about the weather, but seriously now. Seriously. Last year we were sweating and in the pool on my kid's birthday, and tomorrow it is supposed to be 64. 64! I love fall, but I prefer for it to not begin during summer.

My baby is going to be six tomorrow. I'm always sort of torn between feeling like she was born yesterday, and feeling like she's always been here and has always been old enough to roll her eyes and me and say "whatever." Though technically, I would like to protest that she is still not old enough to do those things.

I really love this week's Necessary Fiction by Ethel Rohan. Also, I really enjoyed this interview between Steven McDermott and Matt Bell over at the Storyglossia blog. Two great editors talk about editing. Good stuff.

Stephen Elliott will be coming to 826mi in October to teach a workshop and do a reading. I am very excited about that.

I wanted to do a whole lot of reading and writing in my time off school, and both have been kind of slow going. I think sometimes my brain needs a bit of time to recover after a brutal semester. I'm back in the writing groove now, though. I think I am working on something that I think will be a chapbook of some sort.

I am desperately hoping my Kant class is not going to be canceled due to low enrollment, because that would really make a mess of my schedule and everything else is full at this point and I am on a tight schedule here, people, and I need more upper-level philosophy classes and three out of four of said classes might be canceled because of enrollment, and I'm already taking the other one. I don't want to scramble to find another class to take a week before school starts. Stress.

I got a new haircut that was long overdue, and that makes me happy.

Look, I'm blogging two days in a row, this no school thing is really nice.

I am trying to spend these rare few weeks off reading and writing as much as possible. I've been picking away at a few stories I'm working on, but not really in the groove at the moment and will probably really get into something right when school starts back up and interrupts me. But that's okay, because I have a workshop in the fall, plus my senior thesis, so I will be back to having excuses to write instead of no time to write.

So reading. I am finishing up Monkeybicycle 6, and Jason Jordan's "Shuttle Cock" just made me laugh out loud a few minutes ago. I really love humor in writing and I try to almost always be at least a tiny bit funny somewhere in a story, but I don't think I ever do anything that funny. And on the really-good-in-a-not-funny-way side of the coin, I just read Sean Lovelace's recent story at Wigleaf earlier today (I know, I'm behind, I'm behind at everything right now) and was super, super impressed. I love flash, but it so often becomes more of a playing-with-language kind of thing, which is okay too. But my favorite flash is stuff like this that does the same work as longer pieces of fiction, that distills all of these huge things down into one tiny moment. Yeah. Wigleaf is good stuff. I am excited for them to open their submissions again soon.

Partially, I'm also spending my time off school worrying about grad school. I feel super lucky to have one of the top MFA programs in the country so close to home, but then it's also impossibly hard to get into and there are no easier to get into MFA programs close to home. I know I can always do low-res, but I'd rather not go so into debt. And then, there are the arguments about whether it's really best to do a program at all, but I really do like the idea, and I also really want to eventually be able to teach. Stress!

Sometimes I need to stop worrying and tell myself I have a lot to be excited about. Right now, I have a whole lot to be excited about.

Also, I think my new goal is to have a collection published (or at least placed with a publisher and all in the works of being published, not necessarily already in print) by the time I'm 30. That's just a few months shy of 2 years away. Totally doable, right? I think so. Maybe.

Vacation.

I don't know if it quite counts as "Summer Vacation" when it doesn't arrive until mid-late August, but whatever. I have 3 weeks off between semesters, during which I plan to do almost nothing except read and write. The Summer semester was possibly the roughest I've had. But then, I might think that at the end of every semester.

I'm not a very timely blogger. But for anyone living under a rock, The Collagist, DZANC's new online venture, launched a few days ago. I had pretty high expectations, but it really blew me away. I loved all of the fiction, Matthew Salesses was the only writer there who was new to me, and his piece was excellent. Also, I really want to know if Kevin Wilson has written more pieces "From the Big Book of Forgotten Lunatics," and if so, I want to read them. Anyway, anything I could possibly say has been said in probably dozens of places on the interwebs at this point, so I will just keep it short and say that The Collagist is really good stuff, and Matt Bell is an awesomely nice guy who is totally deserving of the success.

On a self-serving note: if anyone is actually out there reading this, who happens to have ever put together a full-length collection of stories, I have some questions. Such as: how do you decide when a collection is "done"? How do you determine the right length? For a novel or novella these seem like unnecessary questions, because the length is just however many words you needed to tell that particular story in the way you wanted to tell it. But with a collection, I write short stories and I'm going to keep writing short stories, it isn't a singular project with a beginning and an end. I'm starting to try to assemble something like a collection, and I have no idea at what point I say: this is a collection, it's finished. Some are so slim and others not so much. How do you decide?

I'm going to finish reading Monkeybicycle 6 now, delighting in my homeworkless state.

I am always half asleep.

I keep wanting to write a blog post and not feeling quite energetic enough, which is pretty pitiful.

I have a story up at Monkeybicycle.

It occurred to me today that the print submission I sent to Monkeybicycle is my only other story with lesbian content. It's a very different story, but it simply didn't cross my mind when I submitted it. Apparently on some subconscious level, I see Monkeybicycle as synonymous with girl-on-girl action. I can't explain it.

I had a brief reprieve from crazy mountains of homework, during which I read a lot. I finally finished Jackie Corley's Suburban Swindle, and read Matt Bell's wonderful The Collectors, Stephanie Johnson's One of These Things is Not Like the Others, and my custom-highlighted AM/PM by Amelia Gray. All fantastic. I also started Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas, but had to temporarily abandon it because I have to write a research paper now. Also, I should link to all of these fine books, but again, that whole lack of ambition. And I assume most people who might be reading this would know where to find them.

For those of you in Michigan, 826michigan will be hosting a special sneak preview of Where The Wild Things Are on October 6th at the Michigan Theater. Dave Eggers will be in attendance, and I'm guessing will probably do some kind of Q&A after the film, but no official word on that yet. I am super excited, and you should be too. The trailers are amazing. Dave is a lovely person. Tickets will be on sale on September 10th, and will probably go quick. All proceeds will benefit 826. Hooray.

I am going to watch the meteor shower tonight. I like strange lights in the sky.

No time to blog.

Summer semester is kicking my ass. I really like all three of my classes, but it's a lot of reading. And as much as I love reading Dracula and gender theory and Shakespeare, I prefer to also fit in some of my own reading. Stephanie Johnson's One of These Things Is Not Like The Others arrived in my mailbox today, but I am unfortunately unable to devour it at the moment, and have to temporarily satiate myself with watching the readings in the meantime. I'm still dying to finish Monkeybicycle 6, and read the new Hobart, and Scorch Atlas, and Amelia Gray's AM/PM... In other words, so many books, so little time. But I at least managed to actually get some submissions out tonight. If I don't start finding time to write soon, I am going to run out of things to submit.

Skipping School...

I love my lit class, but it was well worth skipping tonight so that I could go to The Dollar Store Show at its final stop in Ann Arbor. I feel bad for anyone arriving from out of town in the midst of art fair here and having no idea what to expect. But everyone was hilarious in spite of being in the middle of art fair hell. Really, the show was great. I kind of wish ours would have been in a bar like many others have been, but then I would still be out, and I will be at a party tomorrow night and I try not to miss being home for the kid's bedtime two nights in a row. So, you know. It's all good. The Dollar Store folk were plenty entertaining sober.

Also, I got to buy Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas, which won't be available for another couple months yet, the new issue of Hobart, and Amelia Gray's AM/PM (which she custom-highlighted for me... one of a kind!). And while of course everyone was very funny, and nice, and talented, I was particularly happy to have a chance to meet Matt Bell, because I have read a lot of his work and really admire him and he is a local writer and I don't know too many of those. We have a good literary scene around these parts, I think, I just never really knew where to find it before. I really like this small press world that exists.

So, it was a great reading, and I got to see writers I was already familiar with, and discover some that were new to me. I would attend something like that every week if I could. So worth using up one of my two allowed absences from class.

Also: I am editing this to add that the stories tonight were not only hilarious. Some of them were also quite heartfelt. I'm impressed by the whole range of what people were able to do with their dollar store objects, as I generally fail miserably at trying to write about something specific like that. Not that I write about vague things, I mean, but if you handed me, say, a clear plastic tube full of 5 radish-type-things with faces on them, I would not be able to do what Patrick Somerville did with it.

And also: Scorch Atlas is a freaking beautifully designed book.

Reading, Writing, Etc.

In between reading Shakespeare and critical theory about cannibals and whatnot, I am attempting to be better about reading entire print journals. I read online mags in their entirety all the time, and I buy print journals with the best of intentions, but I always have so many things on the reading plate, I often end up jumping around and reading stories that jump out at me and not reading them cover to cover. That's my confession. I am trying to remedy this. I'm reading Monkeybicycle 6 right now and thoroughly enjoying it. They're definitely a place I hope to end up in print one of these days. Good stuff. Next up on my lit mag reading list is Barrelhouse 7. And I am hoping there will be copies of the new Hobart for sale at the Dollar Store reading tomorrow in Ann Arbor.

A lot of these things should be links, but I am feeling lazy.

It occurred to me today that while probably only 1/10th of the stories I write have male narrators, almost everything I write with a male narrator is quickly accepted for publication. Perhaps I write in a more convincing male voice than a female one. I don't know what this says about me.