yeah, I'm alive

So I figured I'd do a quick pop in to the old bloggy blog. I haven't been intentionally ignoring my neglected child, it's just I happen to like my short fiction kids a little more. But here I am, giving it a little love, I might even take old bloody knuckles out to McDonald's for a happy meal before I head back to short story land and attempt to talk my thugs and thugets out of going to college and settling down in the suburbs.

But anyway, I've been busy the last few weeks. The last of the 2008 stories have been kicked out into the world. Fifteen have found homes, three are floating around begging for change and a place to stay, and the final two are stuck in the limbo of print publications. One's only been gone a couple of months, the other it's been nearly five. What a difference between online publications and the print journals. Most online zines I send to provide you with some kind of response in less than a month, but print keeps you on a long leash, and keeps you heading to the mailbox for a response of some sort. I'm strongly considering sending the one that's been gone for five months just so I can get some kind of feed back on it. (Yes, I have become a By-line junkie, and by the way, I'm starting to think publishing online is a far more viable means for a youngish writer such as myself to gain attention for their writing,) But, I might still give it a couple of more weeks before I do it.

I have to say that 2008 was a great year for my writing. Along with the 20 shorts I finished off, I somehow managed to complete the first draft of of 90,000 word hard-boilded novel(which I'm attempting to cut down by 20,000 words) and wrote over 40 blog post on Myspace. It was a good year, and this year seems to be shaping up pretty strong. 

So far, I've put out three new stories, and I'm managing to edit down the book and have set a deadline for myself to have a new draft completed by the end of April, but honestly, I'm not putting any pressure on myself to get it done, it just feels like I've been living with the ghost of it so long now that I just want have it out of my hands so I can move onto another long project.

So, anyway, I better wrap things up. I took a decongestant earlier (Yeah, guess what, sick again. So far this winter, I'm pretty sure  I've been continuously sick for the last month-and-a-half. It sucks, and I'm very ready for the warm weather to make back into the Valley of the sun just so my sinuses can have a chance to dry out.) and it's starting to make me a little sleepy.

But before I go, I mentioned in my last post that I was going to announce something pretty cool. Now it hasn't happened yet, but I'm busting a nut wanting to talk about it. . .but I'm going to save it until it happens, sorry.

But in other good news, I did manage to place a story with Pulp Pusher, Tony Black's excellent all things Hard-Boiled/Noir zine. The story needed to go through a rewrite before Tony picked it up, but the changes were minor overall. Also, chances are I'll be appearing along side my favorite country fried noir writer, Frank Bill.  If you haven't read Frank's stuff yet, I encourage you to sit down at your computer and head over to Plots with Guns and Thuglit and take a gander at the man's fiction. It's great stuff, and I'll be the first to say it, chances are Frank is going to be one of those guys like Daniel Woodrell and Cormac McCarthy-- a real writer's writer--who's going to make some serious noise in the next couple of years. 

And, yes, I'm being dead serious when I say this, the guy's got some crazy skills

And in more Me, me, me (what else are blogs for?) news, I've also got another one up over at A Twist of Noir. Make sure to check it out if you haven't already.

So that's it, I'm going to go and blow my nose until what's left of my brain tumbles out into the Kleenex along with all the snot crammed up in my sinuses