I began reading Jim Carroll as a teenager in the late eighties. My father saved me a newspaper clipping about Carroll’s life and poetry. I don’t know how my father knew that I, good daughter, would adore Carroll, bad son; but he did, and I did. I read Jim Carroll all the way through the long year of my growing up: from boot camp to my dorm room to my boyfriend’s squalid flat to the wakeful hours of my nightshift summer. I saw him read, once, in Toronto. I remember, for some reason, these lines in particular: “The positions we use when making loveDetermine the next day’s weather” That’s from “Sick Bird” in Void of Course. And this, at the end of Forced Entries: “…red to green…stop to go. Walk. Wait.” As I write this I’m aware these lines, stripped of context, might not sound to you the way they do to me. I can’t unread them. They changed me. He changed me. […]
Sale!
Yes, my temperamental heroine Gus Hillyard of “Who in Mortal Chains” will make her debut in Strange Horizons in the new year. (Since very few people read this journal, I shall confess here that when I read the acceptance letter, I cried out loud like a little child. No one was home but the cats. I got cat fur stuck to my face. It had been an amazingly awful day up to that point; and then it was something else.) This story, which I thought weaker than its predecessors, made the cut; goes to show that I’m not the best judge of my own work, I suppose. For the first time since I began this project, I have more than one completed story in the kitty, as well: I’m going to be in SFWA by Christmas, at this rate. And I’ve given myself a deadline to finish the somewhat related Not-a-Werewolf book, so that I’ll have something to show the agents who will doubtless come calling 😉 Good Lord, but I must work faster! Accepted for publication:“The Tongue of Bees”“Who in Mortal Chains” To submit:“The Duellist, After Her Prime”“The Oracle of the Dashboard” First drafts complete but in need of […]