Sunday, November 27, 2011

Hodge Podge, plus Divinity Gene review

S'looking like I'll have an essay in an upcoming anthology of writers writing about their mentors called A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors. Unsure if it's official or not, but I'm excited and wanted to share my excitement on my blog, which is this place. My essay is about how mentoring someone is like figuring out the best way to get someone off. I think it makes sense, and sounds less pervy, in context.

Anyway.

On a completely unrelated note, Diane Arbus is creepy. I'm reading about her in this book:



She's weird and her pictures make me feel bad about myself and the world, kind of like Radiohead. In any case, I have her pictures taped to the wall above my writing desk.






This thing below is one half of a review I wrote for MTLS, where I look at two short story collections. You can find the entire review here.



The Divinity Gene

by Matthew J. Trafford

Vancouver, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011

192 pp. $22.95



Distillery Songs

by Mike Spry

London, ON: Insomniac Press, 2011

160 pp. $19.95



In her stint as guest-judge for The Giller Prize, British writer Victoria Glendinning railed against Canadian literature for being too boring, too regional, too . . . Canadian. In her eyes, we Canucks lack imagination, a willingness to take risks. See, for example, this excerpt from a piece in The Globe:

It seems in Canada that you only have to write a novel to get grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and from your provincial Arts Council, who are also thanked. Complaints were once voiced that most shortlisted Giller novels emanated from just three big-name publishers, all owned by Bertelsmann, and that virtually every winner lived in the Toronto area. Now, many of the submitted authors, and their rugged subject matter, hail from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland. That’s maybe because small publishers too are now subsidised, and they proliferate. If you want to get your novel published, be Canadian.

Though one can concede that maybe, just maybe, Ms. Glendinning has a point, it’s also clear she hasn’t read Matthew J. Trafford or Mike Spry. The Divinity Gene, Trafford’s debut collection, is a wicked fusion of Italo Calvino and the kind of funky grist you’d find in McSweeney’s, while Spry’s own debut collection, Distillery Songs, is a welcome knee to the groin of anyone who says that Canadian’s can’t be funny, subversive, or over-the-top.

The stories in The Divinity Gene tend to go one of two ways. Either they’re intensely creative pieces – a dance club run by angels demands of its patrons an odd sort of bartering, the son of a fisherman watches as dad slices open a mermaid – that challenge perception, or more conventionally realist stories where character trumps concept.

While the cover blurbs praise The Divinity Gene’s imagination, this reader found the glitzier pieces at times lacking. Take iFaust, for example. Here a new app for iPhones lets its users sell their souls for material ends. Once our justly-warped minds regain their natural shape, we start to consider the lives in the story. The problem, I suspect, has to do with length, lay-out, and what Trafford chooses to dwell on; (too) much of the story deals with the glamour of the Faustian narrative trajectory, at the cost of actually getting to know the characters.

Another story, “The Grimpils,” offers a plot almost as absurd as the story’s title: the call of a mysterious writer draws friends and family of our main characters to Paris, where, it turns out, they’ve somehow been assimilated into an odd kind of cult. They become, to use Trafford’s term, ‘grimpils,’ a play on the word ‘pilgrim.’

The story never quite transcends its conceit. When Canadian Richard visits the American embassy for answers, his plea for help sounds almost comical. “We’re here to talk to you about a very serious situation,” he explains, and he’s right: if someone close to me flew to Paris, heeding the siren-song of some writer, and became a weird nihilistic fanatic, I’d be concerned, too. But the sense of loss swirling at the story’s core gets lost in what feels like a running joke, while the seemingly superfluous inclusion of footnotes gives the impression that what we’re reading is actually some kind of science experiment.

Again, the story is strongest when Trafford focuses on the emotional cores of his characters and limits the time we spend vacationing in Absurd-istan. The shared grief of Richard and co. is heartbreaking enough to almost transcend the story’s silly conceit, and the ending, I have to admit, arrives with surprising power.

Stronger are more subtle stories like “Thoracic Exam,” which brilliantly uses a medical exam as a narrative frame, and “Forgetting Helen,” where our narrator, who has literally spent his entire life in a library, might have found his Helen of Troy roaming the stacks. In both cases, Trafford never loses sight of what this reader considers the most important part of story-telling: making me care, truly, about the people he’s created.

To my eye, two stories stand out from the others as evidence that Trafford can tell one hell of a story.

“Past Perfect” follows its queer lead as he struggles to comprehend his partner’s descent into dementia. There are no otherworldly creatures, no supernatural occurrences, no blinding pyrotechnics, just a man who loves another man who is dying, their relationship masterfully captured with a subtlety often at odds with the rest of the collection.

Impressively, Trafford manages to do something similar with “The Divinity Gene,” the story that probably first got the author noticed when it appeared in the brilliant Darwin’s Bastards, a collection of Canadian speculative fiction published by the same folks who put out Trafford’s debut.

The conceit isn’t entirely unfamiliar: some intrepid scientist breaks down Jesus’ DNA, spawning an entire race of Christs who behave in weirdly opaque ways. The story takes its time, developing into a surprising meditation on grief, spirituality, and humanity. Surprising, I say, because a lesser writer might milk the Christ-resurrection angle to gimmick proportions. Not Trafford. Once he’s got logistics out of the way, his attention shifts from Godliness to base humanity, where the inner struggles of Maciej, the man who cracks the ‘Divinity Gene,’ force the reader to ask big questions about faith and the capacity to hurt and hurt others.

The story anchors the collection and proves that, when he isn’t playing mad scientist, Trafford can work wondrous, heartfelt alchemy, a skill he shares with Chris Adrian, an American writer known for playfully bending reality. Like Adrian, recently named one of the New Yorker’s best writers under 40, Trafford juggles humour, sadness, and an often delicious sense of the surreal. The result, fictions that play to either mind or heart but rarely both, suggest that Trafford has the potential to become a force in Canada’s literary world. He just needs to slow down and listen to his characters, first and foremost.

[First published in MTLS]

Monday, October 31, 2011

PRISM-matic (Now in technicolor!)


Fresh from the seedy underbelly of Canadian literature comes "Krupkee, on a Molecular Level," a short story of mine published in the recently-released new issue of PRISM International. Gazooks!

I've already mentioned this, but the story is about a Ukrainian punk band on the run from the law. It also features alcholic toilet water.

Much as I'd like to explain what that means, you should probably just head to your local magazine, book, and journal distributor and pick up a copy of the magazine to read for yourself. As a bonus, you'll be supporting two industries that badly needs you support: literary journals in Canada (yay!) and me ( *crickets* ).

xo!

- Andrew

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

MTLS


Another bout of blog left untended. Shame on me. Shame shame. Especially when I have a review of Mike Spry's Distillery Songs and Matt Trafford's The Divinity Gene online in the latest edition of MTLS.

Interested in what I have to say? That's sweet of you to say. You can sate your review-lust here!

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Review: The Reinvention of the Human Hand by Paul Vermeersch

Poetry Review
Andrew MacDonald

The Reinvention of the Human Hand
by Paul Vermeersch
Tonronto, ON: McClleland & Stewart, 2010
88 pp. $ 18.99

Toronto-based poet and former Lampert Award nominee Paul Vermeersch returns with The Reinvention of the Human Hand, a book of 38 pitch-perfect poems that test the boundaries between man and beast. The collection follows The Fad Kid, Burn, and Between the Walls, showcasing Vermeersch’s trademark wit and an artisan’s talent for crafting thought-provoking poems from the most unexpected of materials.

In “The Painted Beasts of Lascaux,” the “Yellow ochre horses” painted on cave walls may predate starships and the centaurs of our imagination, but they sing the primordial song “that’s been snarled in your heart – breaking it, / trying to pound its way free – for your entire life.” Meanwhile, an ostensibly benign encounter with the natural world in “A Scorpion in Alcohol” introduces “a venom so subtle, it lingers / and threatens to ruin you still,” the realization that the realm of the bestial might just be closer than we think.

Time and again, Vermeersch asks us to re-examine where we place ourselves in relation to the natural world. Not surprisingly, a number of poems hinge on our relationship to primates. In “Twenty-one Days with a Baboon Heart,” for example, an ape – the most striking of “our primordial reflections” – gives up its heart to fix an ailing human infant. More Orwell than medical miracle, the transplant brings with it the spectral presence of an animalistic “fear what we cannot know.” Though the poem appears to end rhetorically – “how long / do you suppose she survived with their terror?” – Vermeersch cleverly embeds the answer in the poem’s title. A longer piece, “Ape,” suggests that the aforementioned terror might be of our own making. Broken into three sections, the poem addresses mankind’s exploitation of its nearest link, concluding with actual dialogue between Michael, an ape capable of speaking sign language, and researchers eager to learn the fate of Michael’s mother. From Michael’s harrowing account, you almost wish they hadn’t asked.

Like much of the collection, “Ape” confronts its reader with some heady, deeply troubling philosophical questions about what it means to be human. Which is not to suggest that Vermeersch can’t make us laugh; comedy has its place in the collection, but only at the service of provoking more self-analysis. “Last of the Blondes,” a clever riff on recessive genetics, asks Ingrid, the world’s sole natural blonde, if her birth will be “co-opted / by governments and syndicates?” Will she become “their Golden Child, their Chosen One, their Brand?” We laugh at the absurdity of Ingrid’s celebrity status. Laugh, that is, until our flaxen-haired Everywoman’s dissolution into legend leaves us wondering what—existentially, biologically, and culturally—a world without blondes would mean. Another poem, “Three Anthropomorphic Studies,” features a familiar trio of Warner Bros. cartoon characters consumed by an almost existential despair. Here again, the gap between man and beast dissolves.

At times Vermeersch seems to laud the natural world, envying the way it has “mastered the arts of giving and taking,” (a doozy of a line from “Ode to Amoebus Proteus”), while poems like “In the Glorious Absence of Gods” and “Boys Who Envy Werewolves” point to the disastrous consequences in store for those who ignore their primeval selves.

If the collection has a weakness, it’s that the poems may cohere a bit too much, offering slightly different takes on a thesis that Vermeersch has no trouble proving in a single go. But that is a minor quibble. Both a swan song to our shared primordial past and an examination of how the animal within thrives in spite of, or perhaps in retaliation to, our best efforts to subdue it, The Reinvention of the Human Hand might very well be the year’s most astute meditation on human nature and its lingering past.

(Originally published in MTLS)

Friday, July 15, 2011

Review: I'm a Registered Nurse Not a Whore by Anne Perdue

Fiction Review
Andrew MacDonald

I'm a Registered Nurse Not a Whore
by Anne Perdue
London, ON: Insomniac Press, 2010
258 pp. $19.95

I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore, Anne Perdue’s provocatively titled debut, is a collection of eight funny-sad short stories about the lengths we go to find love in a world of pawned dreams and everyday catastrophe. Perdue’s characters are jerks, spazzes and obnoxious boozehounds. They cuss, kvetch and refuse to play nice. But they are also expectably human and just as susceptible to the wiles of hope and love as the rest of us.

In the “Escapist,” for example, expert tourists Doug and Shar wreak havoc in the Caribbean. Here, as elsewhere in the collection, the narrator is a roving shifty-eyed third person, binding itself to the story’s dynamic duo while doling ample helpings of snark and discontent. Not only do we dislike Doug and Shar, we have all met them in some incarnation or another. They are the goons who butt in front of us at the supermarket, the lushes who come to parties empty-handed and drink all the good stuff. While Doug heaves himself dramatically on an ice sculpture in an effort to drunkenly protest paying for a bottle of expensive wine, the perspective shifts to his wife Shar. Watching on, she weighs the pros and cons of getting yet another divorce before deciding to stand by her red-faced, steak-craving man. Somehow Perdue convinces us to suspend judgment of her creations, if only for a second. There is nothing left to do but gape at these marvelously complementary specimens in wonder.

Then, there are the protagonists of “Dry Well,” Keith and Heather, hapless first time home-owners desperately trying to stay financially and emotionally afloat. Between the mice, the busted furnace, and Keith’s career-woes, there is not much the pair can do but scratch their heads and hold each other tight. In one memorable scene, they frolic in an inflatable backyard pool until an errant nail deflates their fun. And then the rain comes. Even here, in a ramshackle house that refuses to be fixed, the human spirit endures. The ending, a brilliant recounting of the flawless trajectory of a gummy bear, is well worth the wait and proves that, even at its bleakest, the universe can still serve up grace.

Sally Snow, the main character in CA-NA-DA, is perhaps Purdue’s most striking creation – a whirling dervish of quirk and emotional spasticity. Middle-aged and awash in her own life mistakes, she urges her slacker of a son, Lyle, to get a life. She even offers him a cool grand to take the MENSA membership test with her. But Lyle is content working at the local shooting range, chumming up with illiterate rednecks, and Sally’s attempts to buy him over only widen the gulf between them. The story really comes alive when Sally welcomes Ruth, a Haitian billeting in Canada with her baby, Joe, into her house. It is not giving too much away to say that Ruth becomes vinegar to Sally’s baking soda, her presence being just what the proverbial doctor ordered to bring the story to a climax.

On a technical level, Perdue has commendable writing chops. It takes a special kind of artist to cuss like nobody’s business and still sound smart. Junot Diaz manages it, Mordecai Richler, too. Add Perdue to that list. When she is not crafting sensual metaphors and provocative imagery, Perdue drops F-bombs with aplomb. Moreover, each story is meticulously crafted and well structured. Any one of these tales could light up the big screen with their evocativeness.

If I'm a Registered Nurse Not a Whore has a flaw, it is Perdue’s occasional lack of sympathy for her characters. They are not the most likable people in the world, and I cannot help but wonder whether a bit more narratorial compassion might go a long way in endearing them to us. But that is a minor irritant in an otherwise splendid work. Manic but never gratuitous, I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore is a brave, sly and touching meditation on sharing an imperfect world. Perdue’s characters learn, like the rest of us inevitably do, that no matter how far we fall, as long as there is company we can at least enjoy the ride.

(Originally published in MTLS)

Friday, July 8, 2011


Two items of note. First and fore, my review of a pair of novels, Combat Camera and the Evolution of Inanimate Objects, can be found in the current ish of Event. Deets here.

Also, PRISM International has picked up my story, "Krupkee, on a Molecular Level," for a future issue. It's about a Ukrainian punk band on the run from the authorities after the lead singer puts the son of a political high-up into a coma. Other features include mysterious toilet alcohol, a plane crashing into the steeple of a church, and several reference to genitals. At its heart, though, it's about fatherhood and redemption. Seriously.

Will keep you updated, you interwebs you.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Katrina Barton Best: Bird by Bird interview


My interview with Commonwealth First Book - Canada and the Caribbean Region - Award winner, Katrina Barton Best, is up and atom in the latest issue of The Puritan. Read! Wonder! Enjoy!

Link to the pdf can be found here.

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Review: Sarah Court by Craig Davidson

Originally this was going to be in Broken Pencil. Now I'm not so sure. Anyway, it's a book that deserves to be read, so I'm just posting the review here. Salut.

* * *

Sarah Court
By Craig Davidson
ChiZine Publications
308 pages
$15.95

Reviewed by Andrew MacDonald

Populated by a surprisingly endearing rogues gallery of boxers, drifters, sex addicts, basketball dads, dog fighters, and repo men, Craig Davidson's debut collection, Rust and Bone, was a stiff knee to the groin. Painful to read but, in some bizarre way, utterly mind-bending. When I heard Davidson's new collection, Sarah Court, had just been released from estimable publisher ChiZine, I stocked up on some frozen peas, bought a bottle of cheap rye, and sat down for what I hoped would be a visceral, testicle-swelling experience.

Sarah Court follows five families living on a single squirrel-saturated block a stone's throw from Niagara. You have daredevil Colin, dead set on going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. A few doors down neighbours Saberhagen and Fletch Burger throw their children into a boxing ring and call for blood. Meanwhile shoplifting Patience, her basement famously destroyed by a local pyromaniac, discovers a toilet-bobbing infant in the local department store's loo. And there's a box that might contain a demon, too.

Heady stuff? Yes ma'am. Good writing? You bet your ass.

Present are all of Davidson's pet themes: failing fathers and flailing sons, the relentless clawing to absolution, an utter disregard for the frailties of the human body. Short of Barbara Gowdy, nobody else in Canada writes about the down and out with Davidson's signature blend of tenderness and tough love.

If I could venture a single whisper of criticism, it would be that too often characters blur together. Maybe it's because they all speak a uniquely Davidson dialect: terse half-sentences followed by insanely rich, almost imagistic figurative observations. It's no knock on the stories themselves, each of which stands tall in its own right. As an interwebbed collection, though, they gel a bit too much, if you get my drift.

I refuse to end with criticism of any flavor, though. Sarah Court is just that good. Canada needs more Davidson. Help facilitate more Davidson by buying this book, reading it on the subway, and showing it to people who like to read. Or people who don't like to read. Like Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh, and Charles Bukowski, writers to whom Davidson is often compared, he possesses the unique ability to make readers out of high school drop outs and grease-spattered fry cookers. And while Sarah Court will inevitably deliver a few dodgy uppercuts to your kidneys and gut, the organ it will expertly, lovingly abuse is your my heart.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Reportage

Not much to report these days, re: the writing. Have stories in submission land, am working on an interview with Katrina Best, in the middle of reviewing Matthew Trafford's short story collection "The Divinity Gene," and I'm going to an 80s theme party tomorrow night. Then there's that whole novel thing. That too.

Hope you're swell. Go to your local bookstore and pick up a copy of The Pinch while you're there. Something I wrote is in there.

Monday, March 21, 2011

FCOL2

FOR CRYING OUT LOUD II and DEMONS Launch Party and Readings

The Supermarket
268 Augusta Ave, Kensington Market

Thursday March 24th, 2011 @ 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM

FOR CRYING OUT LOUD II will be on sale for $12. DEMONS will be on sale for $7. Other back-list titles will be available as well.

There is no cover. This is a fully licensed event. Contributors to each publication will be reading to celebrate this unique release. It will be hosted by Ferno House staff.

Eh. I'll probably be reading.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

First lines are sexy.

Find the first line of a story I wrote at the sexy first line (and short-short story) website, 50 to 1. The story's actually about a girl who falls for a boy who falls for her best friend, who's a guy, and how they make it work. I don't think it'll ever be published. But you can read the opener!

Here are some other first lines that are cool and so on . . .

Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

"To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die." —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. —David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)

and from my mentor, the estimable Larry Garber, from his first novel Tales from the Quarter:

There are some women who are terribly narcissistic; they keep kissing their own shadows and getting their lips dirty.

You should really track this book down and read it. Probably at the biblio, since it's out of print.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Shhh. Quiet.

I don't really enter contests, or haven't in the past. Mostly because I'm miserly and don't like paying for anything. But I'm starting to enter more contests, including the Dzanc Book International Literary Award. You should know right out that I didn't win. But I was named a finalist, which I think is worth celebrating. Deets below . . .

Dzanc Books and Guernica are pleased to announce the winner of the International Literature Award—affiliated with the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal (June 19-July 2, 2011)—who receives airfare, accommodations, and tuition to this summer’s program and publication in Guernica.

Out of just under 200 entries, Final Judge Chris Abani selected a group of poems by Jacob Shores-Arguello as the winner:

Jacob Shores-Arguello grew up in Costa Rica and the United States. He studied poetry and translation at the MFA program at the University of Arkansas where he was the Walton Fellow. He is also the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Ukraine and the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship in Provincetown.

Finalists include:

Kevin Kaiser’s “Little Parrots” (fiction)
Angie Lee’s “Shuffle Master of the Universe” (nonfiction)
Andrew MacDonald’s “Krupkee” (fiction) - this is me!
Shivani Manghnani’s “Tsunami” (nonfiction)
Ottessa Moshfegh’s “The Chaperone” (fiction)
Brian Sousa’s “Away from the Mountains and Towards the Sea” (fiction)
Eleanor Stanford’s “A Story of Brazil in Three Fruits” (nonfiction)


With 200 submissions, making the final eight is pretty happy-making. Methinks it's time to start shopping the piece!

xo -a

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Silk Road / Katrina Best's Bird Eat Bird



The latest ish of Oregon-based literary journal Silk Road is out, and included between its pages is a short story I wrote about a kid who's dad went mental in a supermarket and said kid's relationship with the Ukrainian exchange student he bullies. Doubt this one will ooze over the Canadian border, so if you really, reeeeally need to read, you'll have to either go to the states or order via their website.

Also, I want everyone to go out and buy Katrina Best's debut collection, Bird Eat Bird, which recently won the Commonwealth First Book Award for the Canada / Caribbean Region. Before Katrina hit it big time, I reviewed her book here. But as much as I'd like to take credit for 100% of the book's success, I'm willing to concede that Katrina might have played a role in it, too.

(winky emoticon face)

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

New Puritan

Dear Puritan Friends,

Out twelfth issue -- Winter 2011 -- is up and running. Head on over to our site (www.puritan-magazine.com) and ogle the new writing!

There you will find:

Fiction by Daniel Scott Tysdal, Christine Fadden, Sharon Erby, and Joel McConvey.

Poetry by Mat Laporte, E Martin Nolan, George Moore, Kristine Ong Muslim, Martin Balgach, Bardia Sinaee, Mark DeCarteret, William Doreski, and Richard Kostelanetz.

An interview with John Lavery by rob mclennan!
An interview with Catherine Owen by Darryl Salach!
An interview with Daniel Scott Tysdal by E Martin Nolan!

And a review of Margaret Christakos`Welling by E Martin Nolan.

We are currently accepting submissions for our 13th issue, Spring 2011 up until March 31st. Head over to our site and use our BRAND NEW submissions manager to send us your work.

We still pay respectable bounties for new fiction, poetry, non-fiction, interviews, and reviews! Hope to see your stuff come tumbling in.

Thanks!

Spencer Gordon
Andrew MacDonald
Tyler Willis

The Puritan : Frontiers of New English
puritan-magazine.com
puritanmagazine@gmail.com
http://twitter.com/#!/thepuritan

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Pinching.



Next week or so, swanky Memphis lit journal The Pinch will be releasing their latest issue, which includes a personal essay I wrote about possessing male genitals. This may or may not be something you want to read. I hope it's the former, but I'll understand if it's the latter.

I reference foreskin rejuvenation treatments, though! And marijuana![!!]

The cover will look like this and the entire issue will be available in places like Chapters on either the 15th or 16th. Can't remember. Golly!

The picture to the left is the first google image that comes up when you search 'the pinch.' I like it.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Reviews

Heads up - two reviews are out and about. First, in Matrix, my review of Giller/GG/Writer's Trust Award-shortlister Kathleen Winter's novel Annabel. I may or may not reference trousers.

Also presented for you perusal: a review of Anne Perdue's charmingly-titled collection, I'm a Registered Nurse Not a Whore. Read it here at MTLS.

Finally, you should read Matthew R Loney's story, "That Savage Water," in the same issue. Not only is the story really swell, but Matt is a handsome gentleman who looks like this:

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

David Mitchell: On Writing

You've probably heard of David Mitchell. He wrote, among other things, Cloud Atlas and, most recently, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Brilliant writer and, it turns out, smashing fella. Take, zum beispiel, the following interview:

http://www.youtube.com/v/kdKk29Sv4Uk?fs=1&hl=en_US

I especially like the part where he talks about seeing yourself as a writer, how it's gradual. Also how you have to leave the sociopathic bitch that is your next project alone until you finish your current.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Daniel Scott Tysdal Mourner's Book of Albums / Indie Writers Death Match

Apparently a lot of people came here off searches for Dan's amazing new book. So in the spirit of parasitism . . .

Daniel Scott Tysdal Mourner's Book of Albums
Daniel Scott Tysdal Mourner's Book of Albums
Daniel Scott Tysdal Mourner's Book of Albums
Daniel Scott Tysdal Mourner's Book of Albums
Daniel Scott Tysdal Mourner's Book of Albums
Daniel Scott Tysdal Mourner's Book of Albums
Daniel Scott Tysdal Mourner's Book of Albums
Daniel Scott Tysdal Mourner's Book of Albums




Solid. Which reminds me: I'm supposed to tell you that the Indie Writers Death Match deadline has been extended. Which means you should write a story and submit it for bloodbathing.

Waterhouse Review

Happy New Year one and all. If you're in the mood for reading words on the internets to celebrate surviving another year, consider the current issue of Scotland's The Waterhouse Review. And because this blog is generally, mostly, lovingly self-serving, you could even read my story, "Vanishing Point," in said issue. Golly!

Because the story is about a really, really skinny person, I've included a picture of a sumo wrestler. Tricky, no?