my flash is out in little fiction/big truths

When I logged on to twitter after breakfast today, three writers had already posted my new flash "Sooner or Later," out now in the special flash issue of LITTLE FICTION/BIG TRUTHS. Really excited to see it in such a great magazine with such an amazing roster of well-known flash writers. Can't wait to read the rest of the issue.

The Zoom open mic I did yesterday for my creative nonfiction workshop went without a hitch. I'm feeling sad already that it was basically the last class of my career. What a surreal end to 34 years of teaching this final semester has been.

I don't know whether it's the ten-week WIP facebook group I'm in, or rereading "The Lunatics' Ball" now that it's online and I have new readers reacting to it, but I sat down and did a revision of "I Could Have Danced All Night in My Maidenform Bra," which I think will be the closing flash in the collection, and I really love what I've done with it. One of my problems has been writing Lunatics' Ball essays and flash so they can stand alone (and I can send them out for submission at magazines) but also function in the book. I decided to forget about the stand-alone (really I've gotten enough Lunatics' Ball writing published, at very good places) and just work on the version for the book and it flowed beautifully, arriving at just the right last line. I'll do it with the Leps in a few weeks, which will probably temper my satisfaction, but right now I love what I wrote, and I love writing again. For the first month or so of the pandemic shelter-in-place I found it so hard to focus or even imagine reading or writing anything.

Pandemic news is not good. California is flattening the curve, but beginning to reopen too soon, I think, and many states are reopening even more businesses way too soon. Trump is a catastrophe, and seems much more interested in the economy than people dying (and in himself of course, always himself). I'm scared to go out, and Steve's anxiety keeps ramping up. 71,526 deaths in the U.S. so far. (More than a million cases diagnosed in the U.S. so far, but there's such limited access to testing that the figure doesn't mean much.)