The Usual Stuff.

Obviously I haven't been blogging lately, so you might ask, what have I been doing? Oh, you know. The usual stuff.

Writing.

The writing's actually been going well. New, and some newly revised, stories are out on the rejection circuit, and there's a longer piece starting to bake, inspired by Mark Fogarty's one-day Grub Street seminar about using Joseph Campbell's "Monomyth" theory of the universal story for inspiration. And I'm proud and happy to say that Go Deeper Press will be including a little one-sentence (one loooong sentence) flash piece of mine, "Inappropriate Footwear," in their forthcoming flash erotica anthology, Dirty Little Numbers. You may have heard me read an earlier version of "Inappropriate Footwear" a couple of years ago during Grub Street's Muse and the Marketplace conference, at the Beyond the Margins cocktail party open mic.

Reading.

Penny's been traveling back and forth to Pennsylvania this year to help care for her mother (who's doing well now after a serious stroke), and while I'm home alone I tend to spend more time reading. Twenty-two books since March 1st, well above my usual average of three to four per month. Too many good ones to list them all here (and if you're a friend of mine on Goodreads you've already seen them), but Tim Powers continues to impress me with his alternate world historical urban fantasies (go read Expiration Date, if you're at all interested in the genre), I finally read Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (fascinating), and Steve Martin's memoir about his stand-up career, Born Standing Up, shows what it takes to succeed at not only stand-up, but pretty much anything (spoiler alert: it's practicing, learning from people who are better than you, and sticking with it). And I'm working through The Complete Idiot's Guide to Taoism (laugh while you can, monkey boy), at one chapter per night.

That's pretty much it.

Oh, and working, running, eating, drinking (have you tried Deep Eddy vodka yet?), playing games, walking the dog, and the other usual suspects, too. But I'm assuming that's not why you're reading this.

Hey, why are you reading this?

Well, whatever it is, thanks.

Stephen