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Month: September 2012

Six Sentence Sunday 9/30/2012

Welcome back to my 6-sentence snippet series from my book, Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook. Over the next 2 weeks, I will be sharing with you snippet from each chapter. (Click here to see last week’s snippet)

Today we meet Megan, who’s welcoming her brother home from the military for his first Thanksgiving in eight years, but when he comes home it’s not quite the homecoming she expects.

Her eyes widened a mile.  She’d never once considered getting a tattoo.  Even if she had considered it, she never would have done it.  Just like her smoking, her parents never would have approved.  Even now, at thirty-one, going and getting a tattoo was about as likely as asking her mother to watch her German shepherd, Daggit, so she could go off and spend the night with her new boyfriend.  But looking at Nathan, buzz cut and broad-shouldered, she knew she was going to do it.

That’s all for today! Be sure to check out some of the other talented people over at www.SixSunday.com, and come back to visit next week!

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Six Sentence Sunday 9/23/2012

Welcome back to my 6-sentence snippet series from my book, Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook. Over the next 3 weeks, I will be sharing with you snippet from each chapter. (Click here to see last week’s snippet)

Today we meet Anna, a grad student who’s struggled with her thesis year ever since her mother’s suicide, and when she finally graduates, she finds a reason to celebrate.

Just below the inside joint of her elbow, the ink still scaly and dry, was the word “Love” written in the unique script of her mother.  Anna wanted it on the inside of her arm because she knew someday it would be the very crook of her arm where she would carry her own children, the same way her mother had carried her. She was sad that they’d never be able to meet their grandmother, but in a small way, it would be like they knew the same kind of love that flowed through the veins beneath the inked skinShe’d scanned the letter that her mother had enclosed in her old birthday card and taken to the best tattoo shop in Blacksburg the day before graduation, the day her cooperating professor told her she’d aced her master’s thesis. Some of the essays were going to be published in the college’s literary journal, the Hokie Review.

Every essay had been based on something that Anna had found in the box of keepsakes her dad had set aside for her, the one she’d banged her knee on earlier that year.

That’s all for today! Be sure to check out some of the other talented people over at www.SixSunday.com, and come back to visit next week!

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Six Sentence Sunday 9/16/2012

Welcome back to my 6-sentence snippet series from my book, Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook. Over the next 4 weeks, I will be sharing with you snippet from each chapter. (Click here to see last week’s snippet)

Today we meet Kasey, a woman who’s getting ready to get a tattoo with her adoptive mother when she informs her that she has only a short time to live.

Their quest to create another child had gone into overdrive since her mother had broken the news about having cancer.  For once, it was Kasey and not her mother who was putting all the pressure.  In fact, Grace didn’t seem to care at all. She just wanted, she said, to enjoy the time she had left with those who loved her the most, like they had last night way past Jonas’s bedtime, joking about all the silly wigs and hats they would have picked out if she’d had the chemo, if the doctors had found the cancer early enough, sobering when they remembered that the doctors had not.

She looked over her shoulder in the bathroom mirror while she waited. The hummingbird tattoo had healed nicely, and Kasey found herself constantly staring at the delicate wings Curtis had managed to pull off while she sat there muttering obscenities under her breath.

That’s all for today! Be sure to check out some of the other talented people over at www.SixSunday.com, and come back to visit next week!

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Library Bookspotting for August 2012

I collected some great gems volunteering at my local branch library this month. Have a look for yourself!

This is an I-Can-Read book, so if you want to teach your kid to read and teach him a valuable lesson about the merits of public sewage servants, this is the book for you. What I really want to know, though, is how they convinced 1988 David Boreanaz to pose for this cover.

I just couldn’t resist snapping this cover. My life experience hasn’t involved many baboons, but I truly believe that this baboon is the most melancholy baboon in the animal kingdom. He looks like he hit the bong before his youth non-fiction book cover photo shoot.

We have an absolutely unreal amount of cookbooks, even for our small branch. You can get all kinds of holiday-themed cookbooks, your favorite celebrity’s cookbook (I’m looking at you, Alicia Silverstone), and cookbooks meant to transport you to a bygone era where men manned the grill and women had 18-inch waists with ridiculous titles like this one.

I don’t care how old I get; I will never not laugh at the title of this book. I’m guessing that when they started the series (A Look at Mars, A Look at Venus, etc.), they failed to take the full Milky Way galaxy into consideration. By the time you get to Uranus (snicker), you can’t very well deviate from the theme. Besides, it’s not like the intended audience of this book is a bunch of immature children or anything. Oh, wait…

That’s all for this month, but I’ve got some great ones already for September, so be sure to come back next month!

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Six Sentence Sunday 9/9/2012

Welcome back to my 6-sentence snippet series from my book, Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook. Over the next 5 weeks, I will be sharing with you snippet from each chapter. (Click here to see last week’s snippet)

Today we meet Jessica, a teacher who finds herself wishing for her first tattoo (and her first child) after getting skin cancer removed leaves her with an unsightly scar.

Jessica ran her hand over the growing scar.  It felt strange to the touch, thin and smooth like the skin on the tops of her feet.  She bent over to look at the scar, a grayish blue color, about the size of a cassette tape.  The doctor had had to take a larger section of tissue to get all the melanoma beneath the surface.  The spot looked and felt dead, like it just didn’t want to work like normal tissue anymore, like it had given up, like Jessica felt more days than she liked to admit.

“Well,” Dave said, kissing her scar and grabbing her free hand, “look at it this way; now you have an excuse to get that tattoo you’ve been talking about for years.”

That’s all for today! Be sure to check out some of the other talented people over at www.SixSunday.com, and come back to visit next week!

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Meanwhile, in the traditional publishing world…

Despite my literary fame and bestseller rankings exceeding 50 copies sold, I still make time to submit my shorter works to literary journals the old-fashioned way, including my poetry and short stories. Well, to a certain extent. There are still some journals that are SO old-fashioned with the way they do business I won’t even bother. This includes:

  • Ones that don’t accept simultaneous submissions. If you don’t want my work to ever be under consideration with another journal, but you won’t respond to me unless you accept my work, and it’ll be at least six months before that might happen, have fun.
  • Ones that don’t accept electronic submissions. You want me to print my work? On paper? Then send it… in the mailbox? Okay sure. But first, let me fly on back to 1989.

Last week I had a poem get accepted by a literary journal. I’m always excited and thankful when a journal accepts my work, despite the fact that none of them pay anymore, but I always lament having to withdraw my work from consideration from every other publication I sent it to. For this particular poem, I only had five other journals to inform, and this was how it all played out.

  • The publication that accepted my work received it back in May.
  • Two of the publications I submitted to required that withdrawing one of my poems meant withdrawing them all.
  • Three of the publications I submitted to just earlier this month.
  • One of the submissions I actually had to pay for, just like a contest with an entry fee.
  • The publication that accepted the poem has published my work before.

Compared to the last time I had to inform a bunch of journals that a work of mine was accepted elsewhere, this was much easier. Why? For one, I only submitted electronically, so there was a digital paper trail I could follow just by searching my email and logging in to my submission manager. For another, most of my submissions were done through an electronic submission manager (the costs of which some journals are defraying by passing the cost on to their submitters – see above) so withdrawing from submission was as easy as clicking a button.

Oh, and the number of times I submitted this poem to other journals before it was accepted? 19, as best as I can tell.

Keep your eyes peeled for my poem Culley’s Pub: An Elegy to appear in the next issue of Foliate Oak Literary Journal – whenever that may be.

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Six Sentence Sunday 9/2/2012

Welcome back to my 6-sentence snippet series from my book, Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook. Over the next 6 weeks, I will be sharing with you snippet from each chapter. (Click here to see last week’s snippet)

Today we meet Sarah, an almost-forty woman looking to get her first tattoo after recreating her life after her emotionally abusive ex-husband, in an attempt to get back to her roots.

It had taken a long time to get here, but she loved living simply, with a great new group of friends, a new career, everything he’d convinced her wasn’t worth her time.  Now, if she could just get back to her old friends.  Those friends in the middle – Jason’s friends – they’d just been filler, and they’d disappeared when her money had.

That was what the Celtic scroll meant to her.  She could trace the interlaced lines of the scroll, weave them through an intricate path of knots, and end up back at the beginning, where things were simple and clean.  It had been a long, jumbled series of paths that had led her here, but she was finally back; she was ready.

That’s all for today! Be sure to check out some of the other talented people over at www.SixSunday.com, and come back to visit next week!

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