​Waiting with some trepidation for the edited version of my manuscript (my editor-self excited to see what the experienced editor will do to make it shorter, my writer-self worried about her darlings). Four of my writing group members have published books in the past few years, so I knew to expect this to be late. I keep checking my email anyway. In the meantime I’m busying myself with other, surprisingly time-consuming tasks: chipping away at a bear of a marketing questionnaire, checking all previous pubs for how the magazines want reprints to be credited (a distressing number of really good magazines have gone under), and working on the illustrations, which won’t be color (again my writing group consoled me here; one writer with a six-figure advance from Houghton Mifflin couldn’t persuade them to do any color illustrations). I’d never heard of .tifs before, or thought about pixels, and the task looked gargantuan but I’ve happily discovered that some places, like the Metropolitan Museum in NYC and the Smithsonian in DC offer high resolution downloads for free. I just wrote to Jon Crispin, the photographer who did the photographs in the Willard Suitcases project, and will wait to hear what he charges for a photograph. I’d really like to include one. His stunning color photo installation memorializing the hundreds of abandoned suitcases and trunks discovered in the attic of the Willard State Lunatic Asylum were a real inspiration. I wanted to imagine their lives, try on their clothes. I published an essay in PASSAGES NORTH, “Madeline’s Trunk,” based partly on his 175 photographs of its contents. I’d include one of them here, but that’s the point, they’re copyrighted! I hope I can afford whatever he charges, and what the artist Ellen Gallagher might charge for her “Odalisque” depicting Freud and a Dora-like patient. If I can find her. Gallagher had a website when I wrote the essay; now she doesn’t. I fell into a rabbit hole today researching the 1928 Man Ray photograph of Matisse and one of his odalisque models that Gallagher riffs on in "Odalisque." That is, I think it’s Man Ray’s photograph, or is it by Brassai? Legitimate sources differ. I need to know that, if not for the caption (I’m not sure at all that I’ll include the predecessor photograph), for the essay about Gallagher’s “Odalisque” and its significance. At any rate, I’ve managed to assemble an astonishing number of high-resolution photographs for the book. Here’s just one that I’m disappointed won’t appear in color because I write about Mary Todd Lincoln and I was smitten by the dress as a child after I saw it at the Smithsonian on a family vacation. Not sure if this will be interesting enough in black and white.

​Planning to read an unpublished flash from the THE LUNATICS' BALL at Patricia Q. Bidar’s reading at Books on B on February 28. Hope I’m not a wreck afterward as I was after reading the title flash “The Lunatics’ Ball” at Sasha’s reading.

I've been in the UK magazine FICTIVE DREAM for their Flash Fiction February for over five years running. Laura Black has discontinued the series and substituted a weekly micro series. They also publish flash and longer fiction. I've been writing so little flash fiction, but I revived a number of flash when I was trying to find something for GHOST PARACHUTE, and I'm thrilled that Laura Black accepted "Fish Oil."

"Fish Oil" will appear on February 27. I'll be reading at Patricia Q. Bidar's book launch at Books on B (with Lynn Mundell and Dawn Tasaka Steffler, whose work I also love) on February. 28. Patricia made a great flier.

Steve finished a novella he's been working on for a long time, and the MS Word file disappeared from his desktop. He was distraught and after we tried everything, we took his laptop to the Geek Squad at Best Buy, which sent it to Louisville, Kentucky, hopefully to restore the file within 3-6 weeks. A day's adventure.
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By far the fastest that I finished a micro (at EIC Brett Pribble's request for a micro to replace "Ella's Going Places" in their upcoming anthology, since Ella would require five pages and their space is limited), sent it, had it accepted and then published in a new issue of the magazine. All within two days! 

Here's "I Can Tell You Now," with art from Brooksie C. Fontaine. It hadn't occurred to me until I saw her Cupid that this is an anti-Valentine's micro, but so it is. Lots of great writers in this issue, always the case with GHOST PARACHUTE.