SOLICITS

Really pleased that THE OCEAN STATE REVIEW took my short story "The Snows of Yesteryear," a story that uses one of my obsessions (the afterlife of our possessions) to trace the rise and fall of a relationship, with interjected lists of "stuff" that the departed lover left behind. Very cool to be solicited on the basis of my chapbook.

When I went to withdraw the story from some other journals, I was reminded that one of them has a policy of not sending rejections and wondered why I even bother to send to them.

And I got another solicit today, this one from an editor that liked "Checkmate." I'm not sure I have what SleazeMag wants for the inaugural issue of their new zine, but I loved what the editor had to say about "Checkmate": "I'm just getting in touch today to say I had the pleasure  of stumbling upon a super clever piece you wrote in a recent issue of the Blue Fifth Review. It was an explosion of comedic feeling and truly a perfect, tight piece of flash fiction with no fat. It can be so much fun how we pick small moments like such, a game of chess labeled as a rhizome for a relationship, predicating its apexes and failures, setting the stage for a decade of reminiscence. The geographical sweep made it feel the speakers' (your?) relationship as big as the world itself and the ultimate collapse a heartbreak of corroborating size. Yet the utter nonchalance, sweeping it into oblivion. So yeah, wowza! I really, seriously enjoyed reading it."

A reminder that I should write more fan letters myself, since it's so cool to get one.