More great mail this week. BEST SMALL FICTIONS 2018 arrived today. Honored to have two flash in the list of Finalists at the back. Looking forward to reading the 53 stories included in the anthology.

I always enjoy Tommy Dean's interviews with flash writers, and I was thrilled to see Emily Devane recommend THE MISSING GIRL in today's interview. When he asked what flash stories or writers she would recommend, she replied. "Jacqueline Doyle – The Missing Girl (Black Lawrence Press).I read this chapbook recently and I’m still reeling. I was struck by how these stories poke around fearlessly in the darkest of corners. Each flash explores the world of the missing from different perspectives, from victim to onlooker to perpetrator. Nola, originally published in Monkey Bicycle, was a stand-out story for me."

Great start to my week. A flash accepted at JUKED ONLINE, a magazine where I've always wanted to publish. I revised/developed/extended my flash "Framed" according to the detailed response that I got from Tara Laskowski at SMOKELONG QUARTERLY, felt a bit uneasy about it, since it was so much longer and less mysterious, but JUKED likes the new version. Hooray! It will be out in December and stay in their online archives "until the end of the world" (according to their acceptance letter). Now I have to withdraw it from a million other magazines where I have it under submission, one (Black Warrior Review) just yesterday. That happens frequently, that I get something accepted the day after I've submitted it elsewhere.  

I love online zines (and the buzz on twitter about my Bending Genres and SleazeMag pieces this week has been great), but it's also so much fun to get something in the mail. Especially when it's the gorgeous, 500-page anthology THEY SAID: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing. Steve and I will be in a reading at Green Apple Books by the Park in September, maybe in another in the South Bay. The book launched in Chicago, and there will be more readings in St. Louis, Portland, Santa Fe, Seattle, and more. There are so many amazingly great contributors. And the anthology is already on the Small Press Distribution bestseller list for poetry!

Here's "On Foot" in today's SLEAZEMAG. Sort of about Guanajuato, sort of about feet, mine in particular.

On my way to post on my blog I was interrupted by a rejection of a flash in my email inbox. Why do I find it so annoying when editors say, "Keep writing!" Because I will do that with or without them? Not sure why, but I always grit my teeth.

My micro-flash "What Remains" just came out in the new issue of BENDING GENRES, along with a number of writers whose writing I follow: Robert Scotellaro, Kathryn Kulpa, Peg Alford Pursell, Renee E. D'Aoust (a crossover from my other life as an essayist), others. A great issue all around.

The micro-flash about a missing girl whose remains are unearthed in Northern California is in fact based on a real case I was reading about. So the facts are nonfictional, but the details are culled to emphasize the universal. I don't mention that he was an actor, engaged to someone else, and that they were in acting classes together. Or a bizarre headline about the murderer's death that I ran across while I was researching:  "A former Fort Morgan man’s Hollywood dreams have allegedly ended with him killing and burying an aspiring actress before taking his own life as he fled from California troopers." "Allegedly" should be before "killing," but really, "his Hollywood dreams ended," not hers?