Stories for every season....

and every kind of chaos...

Hello friends and readers, and happy holidaze!

This newsletter includes links for you to read my (new!) short fiction, hear me read an oldie but goodie (Husbands Helping at the Holidays - Party Personas), and watch me in an interview where I talk about my (as of yet unpublished but I’m still working on it) novel, Lilith Land! That’s a whole lot of me. Thanks for reading, listening, and watching!

I’m delighted to share with you that I have a new short story published in Apricity, the literary magazine from the University of Texas, Austin!

APRICITY, n. | From the Latin ‘apricitas’, the warmth of the sun in the midst of winter

I’m quite honored to be included in Apricity… their editorial team describes their award-winning publication as “a magazine, a team, and a mission to give today’s groundbreaking artists a place for their voices to be heard.”

Groundbreaking? Me? Cool!

I was sort of hoping that they’d publish my story in October, since it’s Halloween-themed, but I’m grateful it was accepted and I’m just going with the flow. I’m much too excited to wait until next October to share it with you, so I’m talking about it now anyway. Excitement wins over seasonality? I offer no pumpkin spice or minty lattes, just a story! If you’d like to know about the behind-the-scenes stuff, keep reading below!

Quick links…

• to my podcast reading of “The Holidaze Party Personas - Sagittarius Style" (14 minutes) - or you can read it again yourself if you don’t want me to read it to you and I won’t be at all offended. :-)

• and my interview, where I talk about my novel, Lilith Land! Talking about my book before it’s published? Yup. I’m having so much fun.

The backstory to the short story, “Carla and the Candy Conspiracy”

This was really fun to write. I’d been thinking about it for a year before I sat and put pen to paper. I love the way I’m working on process, which is super slow, and not at all the way the rest of the world works. But it works for me.

The idea came at my sister’s house one Easter when we were in her backyard for the kids’ easter egg hunt. My sister has also been known to hide airplane-sized bottles of alcohol in the yard, so we adults were all enjoying our afternoon in the sun while the kids popped open eggs for stickers and treats and candy. This prompted a nostalgic conversation about candy of years past…and that is where the seed for this story began.

I kept thinking about candy now versus when I was a kid, and then I started thinking about how kids today are missing out on all the best things from my childhood, many of which I’m sure are now known carcinogens.

Finding those juxtapositions is one of my favorite things when I’m writing.

Candy at Easter is cool, but candy at Halloween is loaded with much more emotion and excitement, and it’s also ghost season. All good elements to include to keep the story moving…

But what would hold the story together? That’s the part where things got fun. The writer’s life is not just about writing. It’s about observing. Noticing. Making connections from different ideas over the years. I have this cool box where I keep little index cards with ideas and thoughts and sometimes they come together and I start clipping them together with paper clips and tape and when a story gets bulky with connections, I know it’s time to look at them and see what story unfolds.

Carla, my story’s main character, lives in a small town with a big enthusiasm for Halloween. That is also a true fact about where I live. And like most small towns, there are always stories that are shared after town events. One place I love hearing those stories is at my book club. Over the twenty years I’ve lived in my little town in New Jersey, I’ve had the pleasure of being part of three different book clubs, and have collected a lot of story ideas. One of my neighbors really did have a special porch set up for Halloween trick-or-treaters, and one year they did get a complainer. That story, told in passing in less than a minute between a million other stories, became the foundation for Carla’s world.

When I finally sat to write, I found my old friends, resistance and self-doubt. They love to visit when I stare at my computer screen. So I abandoned my desk, grabbed a notebook, and called my sister - who I love and adore and have been telling my stories to since she was born. I told her my ideas. About Carla. And the candy. And the wheel of chance and the trick-or-treaters. And as I told her the story I wrote down notes and bullets and drew arrows and circles around the parts that made her laugh or furious. And then we hung up and I wrote down a first draft of the story. I let it sit a few days. Then I read it as if I were a reader, and I edited and revised, and then I sent it to my short fiction writing group. There I can count on honesty, kindness, and questions that help me revise the story to make it say on paper what I’m thinking in my head. After I tinkered with those revisions, I let it sit and marinate again, and then polished one more time before I sent it out to twenty publications. I prepared myself to wait six months, which is what often happens in the literary magazine world. Three days later I had my acceptance from Apricity, and I had the delightful experience of telling everyone else I’d sent it to - sorry - “I am withdrawing my submission, as this piece has been accepted elsewhere.” I remember a workshop instructor telling me that’s the best feeling - way back in 2019 I didn’t believe I’d ever get to that point. And here I am, and I’m celebrating my wins, and grateful for those who helped me cross this finish line.

Thank you for celebrating with me, and for cheering me on as I set my goals for what’s next…. more short stories heading out on submission, my novel heading out to agents who requested pages, and teaching my next humor writing class! I’ll be teaching virtually on Wednesday evenings starting in February. Can’t make my class? Please check out all the offerings at The Writers Circle - they are an unbelievably talented group. Every instructor is a published writer. And an amazing teacher. I’m so grateful to be among this crew.

Thanks for reading to the end - I love writing and talking about process, so it’s so much fun for me to share the behind the scenes. I’m grateful to have found teachers and instructors and writing partners along the way to help me find my own process. Writing life is hard, life without writing is harder.

Onward!