The standoff in Wisconsin reminds me of Woody Allen’s great quote that “ninety percent of life is just showing up.”
It reminds me, too, of Alexander Hamilton who signed on to the Constitution when the other two members from New York marched away from the convention in an angry funk after disagreeing with the resultant document. If he hadn’t signed for New York, one might speculate that the Constitution could have been delayed, significantly changed or scrapped. Who knows?
Read more: Showing Up
If you are a reader of print books, the bankruptcy of Borders will have the impact of inconvenience, since the big box bookstores like Barnes and Noble largely carry the same books, you will simply toddle over to the Barnes and Noble store, which might or might not require a short ride or walk.
If you are addicted to best sellers, you will be able to pick up your favorite read at a Walmart or if a mass market paper book is your choice you’ll still be able to purchase it at your favorite drug store or supermarket.
Read more: What Happens Next for Authors and Publishers
People’s Choice Award Finalist Story in the 6th Annual Warren Adler Short Story Contest.
The sun was out and the few remaining clouds were scudding away, but the barnyard was still too wet for playing. The grandkids joined Bob and Berta on the porch. Bob had seen them looking curiously at the dust covered little car in the barn yesterday. He’d begun wondering about the car’s mysterious equipment failure that had brought him here so many years ago, and his suspicions were on his mind when the kids clustered around him, begging for a story about the old days.
“Did I ever tell you kids about the time I was kidnapped?”
Berta’s oscillating chair jolted to a stop.
“No!” she and the grandkids said.
“Oh, Grandpa Bob,” the kids continued. “Were you really? Did you get hurt? Were you scared?” The kids, ages five, six and seven, pressed closer, touching him gently.…
Read more: Arti by Neil McCabe
People’s Choice Award Finalist Story in the 6th Annual Warren Adler Short Story Contest.
I AM: unemployed once more, 4th time in past year, which is 100% tell-me-somethin’-I-don’t know info as
I AM: an L.A.-cliché, AKA failed TV writer, with lone 6-years-in-past credit, but 2-day is 2-day and
I AM: on Zuma sands, sweating ass in yellow plastic chair.
I AM: sans sunblock yet again,
I’M: still on Prozac, AND
I’M: reading something calculated to make me more attractive to some Baywatch beauty-type, though she’d need a degree in contemporary Lit or else won’t recognize name of author of same Grove Press tome which I hold, but don’t read really- a ploy, as I say, to gain the interest of some boobs and brain dream-combo and NOT the fully-dressed man with the John Brown-wild, granite-colored hair and beard who, as he stands like darkened dew-fat cloud between yours truly and the warm-as-raisin toast sun, is fucking with my George Hamilton, and who claims
I am your biological father
and who has tracked me here to this spot, he further elaborates, after having received tip from faux-Jamaican accented mama answering the telephone at 1-900 psychic thinggy – but he could just as easily have found my # & my address after B.S.-ing some nosey neighbor, Crazy Kelly no doubt, she with aged tattoo of weeping Jesus on Pillsbury-Doughboy white left ass cheek, latter and its twin in serious need of Thigh-Master action to point that Jesus, when Kelly sashays in satiny G-string bikini bottom after leaving my apartment door disappointed yet again, shimmer-moves and appears to be face from LSD flashback (Vermont, 1979, Neil Young plucking acoustic guitar in converted cow pasture, and me speaking aloud to any funhouse-mirror faced fellow concert-goer nearby fluent German, I think, having never studied same) all wavy’n shit and Kelly always slapping at same ass cheek with turquoise ring-weighted hand, reminding me that “he’s” (weeping tattoo Saviour) “got my ass covered!” then haw-hawing at own quasi double-entendre & extending invitation # 332 to me to drink Mickey’s tallboys by our apartment building’s kidney-shaped pool, said pool overflowing with water the color of that which passes thru same organ, but I digress; daddy, or so he claims, could’ve gotten info on my whereabouts any number of places/sources, though when he mentions
You were born in Washington D.C.…
Read more: Historical Insignificance by Garrett Clancy
People’s Choice Award Finalist Story in the 6th Annual Warren Adler Short Story Contest.
Seven squid jiggers line the weathered dock like seagulls. They stand shoulder-to-shoulder, hair amiss from a significant east wind, waiting for their prey. Their hands are covered with ocean slime, dirty water sloshes over onto their shoes and the sound of a distant foghorn goes unnoticed in an otherwise silent night.
I live on a rock where jiggers welcome the black of night like hungry bats. They use the dock nearest my house. On the east side of the island, the dock juts some 300 feet into the deep waters of Puget Sound. The dock, they say, has been here almost as long as there have been people living on the island.
Sometimes I walk by the fishermen at night filling my lungs with fog and mist and occasionally rain, on my way to the Toolies to dance and drink with others who gather to avoid lonely nights in dark houses, alone with last year’s thoughts. …
Read more: Squid Jiggers by Judi Blaze
First Place Award Winning Story in the 6th Annual Warren Adler Short Story Contest.
After my father left us, my mother began speaking to people I couldn’t see and never answered the door. When she was institutionalized, I became a ward of the State, but only for a week. The court awarded custody to my uncle, who took me to live with him and Aunt Rose on their farm in McMinn County.
“She’s your ma, Melissa,” Uncle Luther said of his sister. “She’s afflicted with real bad nervous spells; always has been.”
I was seven-years-old and had never been outside Knoxville. I remembered little of my father, and my mother’s intractable moods rendered her incapable of bestowing affection, so, emotionally, I had left nothing behind.
The sun had not shown its face since morning, the sky rippled and twisted into gray whorls, but then, just before dusk, as we turned off the main dirt road to an even narrower one leading to their house, the same house where my mother had grown up, it streaked low, lingering clouds in scarlet and purple. …
People’s Choice Award Finalist Story in the 6th Annual Warren Adler Short Story Contest.
After the passing of Camilla, it was as if everything living had ceased to fly over the village of Grande Fleuve.
Once an important trading town buoyed by the reign of King Sugar, many moons of silt and remembrance had rendered its once thriving channels unnavigable, causing nature and its people to turn their back on the rest of the country; they became the people of a dreamtime, with sandbanks and wiry mangrove closing the door to the world outside them.
The town had been founded and designed by Mr. Oxley Keats, the unclaimed bastard child of the once flourishing Keats sugar plantation. In the hope that God would absolve him of his illegitimacy, he had originally designed the village to look like a giant crucifix from above, with King’s Lane forming the main business base and Queen’s Trace completing the apex.…
Read more: Madame du Jour (Lady of the Day) by Solange Anduze James
If Egypt and, indeed, the whole Arab world need a role model for how to conduct their governments in the ways of democracy, they should look no further than to one of their closest neighbors.
Israel.
Sounds crazy. It’s not.
Read more: Israel: The Role Model in the Neighborhood
Now that the skeptics in the publishing industry, the media, assorted prognosticators and self-proclaimed experts have finally realized that they had it all wrong about e-books, it is time to move to the next big idea affecting readers and authors.
Matching up the serious reader with his or her natural author mate?
How does one find their reading material of choice when the filters, meaning the old army of “experts” who once dominated the book pickers round table have been lost in the fog of the Internet. Let us confine this discussion to the realm of fiction, which, for obvious reasons is my abiding concern.
Read more: The Enigma of Matchmaking Between Author and Reader
When you have lived a long time through what is termed historical moments, you begin to see patterns at work that repeat themselves ad nauseam. Been there. Saw that.
The scenario is normally played outdoors in a symbolic square or sacred area in some foreign country. It follows the same narrative line. Angry people, mostly young, erupt in a hysterical display of passionate frustration that often leads to violence.
Read more: Been There. Saw That.
