On Acceptance to Lamplit Underground

Lamplit Underground

I am grateful “The Perils of Reading the Classics When You're No Holden Caulfield" was accepted into issue ten of Lamplit Underground which launched today.

It was probably sometime in the middle months of our stay in Portland, Oregon when I first wrote “The Perils of Reading the Classics When You're No Holden Caulfield.” Admittedly, I don't remember writing it. What I suspect, though, it must have been during those months when we lived in SW Portland, and I worked at the kitchen table in the mornings and worked in the restaurant in the evenings.

On an Acceptance to Short Breasts

Short Beasts

 My short story “Poop Sprinkler” appears in Short Beasts today. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to be featured in Short Beasts, and I wonder if grateful is too light a word for it. I am delighted, elated, beyond description of my emotions. If you have a few minutes, please read it, and when you discover you have a few minutes more, please take a closer look at Short Beasts and the other writers they have featured.

The truth is, I have more questions about this than anything else. Some of you know me as a graphic designer, some of you know me as a waiter, others know me as the editor of Umbrella Factory Magazine and I hope more than a few of you know me as a writer, a writer of fiction namely. I have spent much of my life fiercely protecting my time so that I would have time to write. I cannot add up the years I have spent with my trusty composition notebook and my pen. They have been the only constant I've known. For many years I wrote full time. I got to spend 8 to 10 hours a day, every day, writing. I was living the dream, and to pay the rent, I was a waiter, every night. The only real difference between “writer” and “waiter” is one letter.

Of Masks and Dolls

It may be too late for a serious reflection on this, but here it goes anyway.

I bring it up now, mid-June only because I've had it in me to start cleaning up files on my desktop. There are a great many digital files that I do not need, many I don't even know what they are, and some I haven't opened up and seen since the day I got them. The real trouble with digital files is that they are much more easily out of sight out of mind. With paper, well, if it's in you hand, you have to deal with it.
So, I did Camp NaNoWriMo in April. I did a complete rewrite of a “novel” I wrote in the fall of 2000. The old version was call Mascaras Y Muñecas, and as I reread it, it was one messy thing. It was messy because that was who I was at the time I wrote it.
Just to be sure, I spent 13 months, starting in April of 2023 (also a Camp NaNoWriMo thing) reworking old novels. These old novels were written in 1993, 1999, 2000 and 2001 respectively. And the Mascaras Y Muñecas was the last one of the four. The title changed to Of Masks and Dolls and that is important only because this novel was a continuation of In Tint or Texture which I wrote a couple of years back.

The rewrite had nothing much to do with the plot or characters from the original.

And admittedly, the whole thing was very cathartic to write. All four of these were. And the beautiful thing about NaNoWriMo, at least for me, it gives my schedule some structure and a sense of urgency. It took all 30 days of April to complete it. At the end, I got a certificate.

A Year of Creative Challenges

Refer to the first post of the year "A Year of Creative Challenges."

As 2023 comes to an end next week, I see it go with a small level of sadness mixed with a pinch of pride. I started this year with notion that I would do a creative challenge a month every month. Many of the challenges I took required me to work on them daily. That was a lot of commitment. Some of them I finished quickly, and some took longer than the month they were intended to take. Some of these I did with friends. Some I did with strangers. Some I did alone.
Here's the rehash:

January—Daily drawing challenge with Kimberly. I did 31 pen and ink drawings.

February—Daily watercolor painting with Kimberly. I did 28 watercolor paintings.

March—A mini comic. I made a four part mini comic in a zine format. I made hand drawings that I put into vectors with illustrator and did the layout in InDesign.

April—Camp NaNoWriMo. I wrote a 50,000 word novel called The Cataract.

May—Daily photos with Kimberly. I made a photobook from Smartphone photos. I also made a second photobook with some film I had developed during the month. So, two for one this month.

June—Painting project. I painted 20 faces. This was a weird one.

July—Camp NaNoWriMo. I wrote a second 50,000 (closer to 60) word novel called Exile.

August—Click it up a notch photo challenge. This was the dog of the year. I used my DSLR and I hated every day of this. The resulting book was not all that bad.

September—Poetry. I did this one lofi. I typed the poems with a manual typewriter and then bound the poems together into a book with some pastel paintings. A true one of a kind.

October—Inktober with Kimberly. I did 31 pen and ink drawings.

November—NaNoWriMo. I wrote the third novel of the year. This one is called: Twenty-four Hours in Vancouver.

December—A submission a day. I submitted 31 short stories to 31 different magazines.

Additionally: I read 52 books, wrote 52 blogposts, drained countless pens and filled a dozen notebooks. It's been a very prolific year.