Publishers, Schmublishers

Who needs a corporation to publish your stuff when you have one of these guys?



The type cabinet used to belong to JRL's mom, and the little press on top is my (40th) birthday present. For those who care about such things, it's a Kelsey Excelsior Mercury Model 5-8. Careful readers of this blog might remember when, several months ago, I read Rhonda Byrne's The Secret and decided to ask the universe for a letterpress. Well, it worked! However, if I'd thought to ask JR's friend Terry from Aurora -- a guy who does letterpress stuff for a living -- where to get one, it would have happened a lot sooner. Duh! Reading The Secret made me dumb. (Thank you, Terry.)

The press will only print 5 X 7 pages, so this is a good time to start writing short short stories. A few days ago I got Flash Fiction Forward, an anthology of 80 very short stories, and I'm really enjoying it. I think I have an idea how to write them: you need to know how you're going to end from the very first word. The story is about getting there as efficiently as possible. I wrote a bunch of short shorts a few years ago but they all felt kind of pointless -- probably they didn't have a point. This time I'll make sure I know the ending when I start and see if that makes a difference.

Does anyone else have any short-short writing secrets? Maybe I should just ask the universe for ideas.

Plugs For New Books

Back when I was complaining about book covers a couple weeks back, I said something in the comments about my friend Shauna Seliy's new novel. (I was snarking about the cover, in fact.) Well, let me give it a plug here, because I just got my copy in the mail, and it's a marvelous piece of work.

The book's called When We Get There, and is a family drama set in a coal-mining town near Pittsburgh in the seventies. Shauna was my best pal in college, and a fellow wannabe writer--there were lots of people I could discuss books and writing with at the time, and who would nod politely and smile and wish me luck. But Shauna was the only one who actually took the whole thing seriously, as though it were something we were actually gonna do. Well, she has really done it. This novel has been a long time coming, and it's just fantastic--I can't recommend it highly enough. It's beautifully written, and not in the way you think I mean. It is simultaneously exuberant and restrained, dark and wry, much like Shauna herself. Plus it's packed with crazy Eastern Europeans! What more could you want!

I also want to toss in a plug for a new anthology of short-short stories I'm in, called The Flash. We have an unofficial non-self-promotion policy on this blog, but the editor of this book, Peter Wild, is a cool guy, the book has a completely insane and hilarious cover, and proceeds from its sale go to Amnesty International. Peter is also editing the forthcoming Sonic Youth literary anthology I mentioned in a recent post.