Rarely Likable

The Northville Review is live!

Check it out here: http://www.northvillereview.com

I am really excited about everyone finally getting to see some of the great things that have arrived in TNR's mailbox over the last couple of months. Best of all, it's not over. There's much more to come, thanks to everyone who was willing to take a chance on us -- and, hopefully, will do so in the future.

The current plan is to publish one, two, or three new pieces each week. We'll be trying out different methods for this -- all at once, one every few days, and so on. The next installment will likely go up all together again, just before I head out to AWP.

Marginalia

Fictionaut just put together a feed that's all member blogs. It's like Christmas every time I check it.

I'm reading Demons in the Spring and enjoying the hell out of it so far. I need to write a blog post soon about books I've read lately. I also realized the other day that I've never written a post about pens or paper or notebooks. That's egregious.

Writing is going quite well lately. I like when I can say that.

I watched Battlestar Galactica last night, even though I'm just one of those "I watch it occasionally and vaguely know what's going on because everyone tells me I should be watching it" people. Holy crow, what an episode. What always gets me about BSG when I watch it is the cinematography.

Since I don't need to be anywhere in particular either before or after and it's been a while since I've been on a train and I like trains a lot even when they are obscenely late, I booked Amtrak for AWP. Their liberal baggage policies also solve the problem I had last year, where after a mere three hours at the Bookfair I had picked up 20 pounds of reading material. Anyway, if you're going and you want to have coffee or go to a reading not by yourself or tell me about some awesome event or check out the Art Institute or whatever, drop me a note.

The Northville Review is coming along very nicely. I am seriously excited, and grateful to people who sent their stuff without having a litmag to check out ahead of time. This week, we're going to start figuring out what work will appear when. The January 31 installment will have at least 6-8 pieces, followed by one or two each week after that. Stay tuned.

Clean House

I suck at trunking stories because I am a packrat, a procrastinator and a somewhat unorganized person. I further suck at trunking stories because I'm a sentimentalist. If that's not enough?  I write for mostly two reasons: to make sense of things, and to entertain myself...if I'm lucky, I entertain other people. End result: I trunk stories about, oh, once a decade.

However, I think I've found a solution.

Last Friday I was sitting at my computer going through my files (I save them in a chronological format no matter what they are (except for drafts), just to make things even more perplexing.). I opened something that has been shopped around a dozen times and I've alternately been told to expand, condense, expand, condense...you get the idea. I stared at it and sighed and a little voice in my head said "If you trunk this? You can put it in a chapbook." And somehow, that made it easier.

As I was going through my stuff, I started saying "Do you want to send this out again, or does it go in the chapbook?"  It was like when I sort through old toys with my daughter. It's a lot easier to make that first cut when you're saying "downstairs toy box" rather than "end of the driveway."

My tea went cold while I sorted and an hour later? Done. It feels GOOD to have all kinds of mental open space again. I'm really looking forward to filling it up again.

I've been thinking about the chapbook*. I wasn't going to actually MAKE one, it was a little trick I was playing on myself. But after a while, the idea grew on me. Wouldn't it be cool, especially for those of us who like reading and talking about process, if all writers put out chapbooks full of trunked  material? If you could, say, write to authors or visit their websites and get a copy of the stuff they've put to rest?  Read the flawed, the outdated, the awkward, the wrong place at the wrong time?  Who *doesn't* need to do that now and then?

So I might make one after all. If you do? Send me a copy.

*Since the document would serve a different purpose from a chapbook, it'd need another name. The obvious choice is, of course, crapbook. But maybe that's TOO obvious.

Last year's linkbucket

Just a reminder: If you enjoy Rarely Likable's linkbuckets, you should also watch the delicious page. I have strong suspicions that 2009 will bring more entries there than they will under this header.

A literary community that really looks like it's worth checking out. (via Perpetual Folly, which has also been selecting the best New Yorker stories of 2008. Start here, if you haven't read any of it yet.)

Another interesting new place to read about writing. (via lots!)

Blake Butler's year of submitting longer work to small presses, which links to Shane Jones' piece about same.

I've spent a hell of a lot of time in the last few months mulling over policies for you know what, and therefore Scott Garson's take on such matters was of particular interest.

Tayari Jones provides more helpful pointers before breakfast than most people will in a lifetime. This time around? Short fiction contests.

The Columbia MFA funding thing. I am really glad that discussion of issues like this has come so far in the last few years.

Matt lets it slip that Michael Kimball's life-on-a-postcard series will be used as contributor notes for the next issue of Keyhole. I was already set to stalk my mailbox...sheesh...

Are video games anything like novels? Looking at what I played in 2008 alone? Bioshock. Several Final Fantasy games. Fallout 3. The most recent WoW expansion. The World Ends With You. Guild Wars. Video games were instrumental in getting me back to writing fiction, when I'd quit a few years ago. Mini-resolution for this year: Writing something about that experience.

Snow day in Seattle!

Printing this out for the bulletin board...except that defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

I also like this book a lot.

And finally: Five worst Dalek cakes.