I can't seem to get the hyperlink feature on the website to work today, but I have some screenshots of my flash monologue "Your Perfect Day," just out in the innovative Canadian journal NUNUM, which combines art and text.  The artwork with mine is by Angel Dionne. 

NUNUM just wrote to me that they're nominating "Your Perfect Day" for BEST MICROFICTION! I'm not sure whether that's for this year or next year. It's not out yet, but it will be included in their Winter 2025 issue, so maybe it's coming out sooner than I thought. Right now I'm struggling with their difficult interview questions (at least difficult to me). They want contributors to make up some of their own interview questions as well, which should make the interview easier, but I don't have any great ideas today.  NUNUM is a very cool, small, Canadian, online zine that pairs graphics and art with text. 

I'm bursting with news I can't disclose yet because it hasn't been announced. So I'll wait for that.

This morning I woke up thinking about tonight's reading in the Mission and wondering how hard it's going to be to park. I'm looking forward to reading the title flash from THE LUNATICS' BALL. I got up and opened my email to a rejection of a piece that was accepted in the next email.

CLEAVER accepted my nonfiction micro "Faceplant"! It's about the pretty catastrophic fall I suffered a few years ago (when I had to give my talk for SUPERSTITION REVIEW with the camera off because I still had two black eyes). It's the only time I ever had involuntary flashbacks about an accident and I really wanted to describe that. 

I know Kathryn Kulpa, the flash editor at CLEAVER, so I wasn't sure it was okay to send it there. When I queried in advance, she said that she'd assign it to two other readers. She named the other readers in her acceptance. I really like CLEAVER and published two of my favorite nonfiction flash there a long time ago.

And my strange hybrid medley "Some Come Back" came out in BENDING GENRES today. I never showed this one to my writing group, since it seemed too odd, too much a product of my obsession with Poe (dating back at least to my PhD, when I wrote a 600-page dissertation on Poe and the American modernists, but probably back to childhood). I published an article on "Berenice," the least well-known of Poe's women, in Poe Studies.  I conclude my Bending Genres hybrid with her: "l admit it. I was obsessed with Berenice’s teeth. Obsessed. I abstracted them. Okay, I extracted them. I inadvertently buried her alive, but the toothless hag clawed her way out of her grave. Who knew she’d be back?"

(1919 illustration of "Berenice" by Harry Clarke)

I love Claire Polders' Substack "Wander, Wonder, Write," really a series of essays (not just blog entries or travel pieces) written during her nomadic travels. She's a prolific writer (memoir, novels, essays, flash) and also a prolific reader who recently recommended her favorite fiction from this year's reading, and today her favorite nonfiction.  THE LUNATICS' BALL heads her list of twelve books (eleven of them published) in "2025 Best Books Part Two: Nonfiction and Hybrids"!

The Lunatics’ Ball by Jacqueline Doyle
"Let’s begin with a book that’s… not yet published. If you’re lucky enough to have talented author friends who trust you with their work in progress, you may get to read amazing books long before they’re available to the public. This was the case for me when I was given Doyle’s masterful book The Lunatics’ Ball. It’s a riveting memoir on her bipolar disorder—the discovery, the struggle, the acceptance—and a lyrical, sometimes speculative exploration of how women throughout history have dealt with their mental illness and how men and the medical establishment have mistreated them horribly. The book is also much more than that. I have every reason to believe that The Lunatics’ Ball will be published in 2026 or 2027, and when it does, you’ll hear about it from me again!"

My San Francisco writing group read most of the flash and essays in THE LUNATICS' BALL,, some more than once as I revised them, but my husband Steve and Claire are the only writers who read the book from beginning to end after I completed the manuscript. Claire's critiques were so helpful! (Steve's too, always.) I am so grateful to her. And I'm grateful that she included me in today's Substack.

I also read her memoir about an eldercare crisis with her father-in-law during the pandemic, which is beautifully written and I'm sure will find a publisher. Her flash collection WOMAN OF THE HOUR, recently published by Vine Leaves Press, is wonderful. (It's on sale at the moment, and would be a great holiday gift.)
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I have a Substack that I started so that I could read other people's Substacks and have never used. (That is, I see a few posts there that I must have "re-stacked" by mistake as I was learning how to use it.) I just followed more people to get more followers as I'm about to make a big announcement that I've been sitting on since just before Thanksgiving. Bursting with the news, but I don't think I should say anything until it's been announced. I'm ecstatically happy.