bits and pieces

A photo from the archives. This golf ball had been pressed into the fresh concrete of a sidewalk near my home, and weather and usage had cracked away the thin layer above it, revealing the incongruous ball below. Since there are no courses nearby, the ball was evidently placed here deliberately. This patch of sidewalk has since been replaced, so this little mystery is no longer there.

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Have you ever seen or heard of a menace being dismissed as “moonlight”? That the menace is more imagined than substantive? I mean beyond the literal sense of a shadowy something cast by weak light from the moon. More in the way of a noun. “You’re nothing more than moonlight!”

I’m using it much this way in Ouroboros when a character has very little to work with (moonlight) but needs to make some big conclusions.

It seems like I’ve seen this usage, but I can’t find it as a legit definition anywhere. (If not, then I’m going to use my writerly privilege to evolve the meaning of the word!)

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We’ve named our kitchen table Autumn because it is always dropping its leaves.

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I had worried that One-Match Fire was not going to be publishable as a novel because ten of its twenty-four chapters have already been published as stand-alone stories. I even asked about this on various publishing-related blogs and message boards, but I got contradictory responses. Some insisted that I had forfeited first rights to the whole by publishing some of the parts so no publisher would touch the novel. Others had never heard of such a thing and thought that this history showed the whole had a market. One publisher I was interested in (whose submission window finally opened this month) was unclear about it in the guidelines, so I wrote to the email address they listed for questions. I got a response within a few hours from the editor herself saying that she’d heard of this “stigma” but that she didn’t think it was valid, certainly not with the indie presses. (She also said that getting ten of the stories in print already was impressive, which was a nice word to carry me into the weekend.) So I submitted the novel to this press. Whether they bite on the whole or not is dependent on their stylistic judgment, but at least I know that it has a chance.

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My friend Peter Anderson had one of the short stories in his collection, Where the Marshland Came to Flower, reviewed last week on the Story366 blog. The editor there is reviewing a short story every day of this leap year, and last week he reviewed one of Anderson’s from his collection. The title of the collection is from a poem by Nelson Algren. (And one of the stories had been previously published prior to the whole.)

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In Ouroboros, I have a semi-literate character use the word “accept” in place of “except” in an email. Funny, then, that in my re-read this weekend I found myself using “except” when I meant to say “expect.”

Explore posts in the same categories: Fathers and Sons, Ramblings Off Topic

Tags: Ouroboros

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