The poetry is back! And I have a new one for your verse-loving pleasure. I’ve been pretty well entrenched in wedding planning stuff for the past month or so, so naturally it was on my brain when I was thinking of writing a new poem.
And this is what came out of it! Check out Shotgun and let me know what you think 🙂
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I’ve been thinking a lot about names lately. For one thing, I recently got engaged, and my fiance isn’t super keen on the idea of me keeping my maiden name. As Kelly Hitchcock, I’ve published one novel (and hopefully one more), a few short stories, and several poems. Still, he maintains that he wants me to take his last name, which is four syllables… not exactly hyphen-friendly. And anyone who has read my work knows I am a big fan of the hyphen; almost as much as I would be a semicolon superfan if it didn’t make me look like a pretentious a-hole.
It also came up in my writer’s group the other day – when is it appropriate to use a pen name? I imagine that if your given name at birth is Brad Pitt or James Cameron and you plan on making a serious living as an author, you might want to use a pen name to distance yourself from the celebrity namesakes (then again, you might want to invite the connection). Then there’s the case of writers who cross over into writing in another genre – like erotica – and use a pen name to maintain the separation between the two genre’s writings. Or maybe your name just sucks, like Dentenia Zickafoose.
What I wonder is:
What do you think?
1 CommentSeptember was a great month for me, both personally and professionally, both of which I will elaborate on in a future post. For now, savor these tasty gems I found while volunteering at the library last month.
It’s a good this fiction (?) novel is geared toward junior high boys, because otherwise men of all ages might track it down and enjoy it. How do I know? My fiance laughed hysterically and said he would read it, and all he reads is programming books. I think we can all recall a day this very thing has happened – I once ate street tacos for every meal and yes, it ended badly. And The Day My Butt Went Psycho is supposedly based on a true story…
This one’s a little hard to read since the cover’s so busy, but it’s a children’s cookbook called The Star Wars Cookbook: Wookiee Cookies and Other Galactic Recipes. I’ve been trying to get a good shot of this one for awhile, but it never stays on the shelf for long. I want to believe that the publishers of this fine specimen had no idea that Wookiee Cookie had another, more grownup, meaning, so I will give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, they knew the correct spelling of Wookiee – which blew my mind when I discovered it. I’ll have to check it out and try the Boba Fettucine for myself sometime.
Remember how I told you that mystery novels, particularly those in series, have ridiculous titles based on bad puns? Well, here’s another case in point. Roast Mortem (part of the Coffeehouse Mystery series) is about as stretchy of a pun as you can get. Despite its terribly punny title, this book actually doesn’t look half bad.
The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln is an I-Can-Read book. I can’t think of more appropriate subject matter to use to teach my child to read with than the in-cold-blood killing of our 16th president. I’ll avoid this one like the plague – I’d rather wait until the dog passes away to explain the concept of death instead of using poorly illustrated photos of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
Stay tuned for October’s finds!
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Welcome back to my 6-sentence snippet series from my book, Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook. This is the final week I will be sharing with you snippet from each chapter. (Click here to see last week’s snippet)
Today we meet Erika, a new mother who uses her tattoo as a way to heal from her debilitating fear of phone calls and her father’s death.
As she exited the shower, she caught her reflection in the full-length mirror, reminding herself for the hundredth time not to get in too big a hurry to get back in the gym. There would be plenty of time for that when her maternity leave was over, which would be here before she knew it. Maybe tomorrow, she thought to herself, she’d take Josie for a few laps in the park in the expensive jogging stroller that was currently being used as a clothing rack. As she toweled off her back, her eyes were drawn, as they always were, to the tattoo over her left shoulder, just behind her heart. Erika stepped backwards, closer to the mirror, tracing the part of the tattoo’s outline she could reach. Almost four years, and it was still as vibrant as the day she’d gotten it.
That’s all for today! Be sure to check out some of the other talented people over at www.SixSunday.com.
1 CommentWelcome 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!
2 CommentsWelcome 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 skin. She’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!
Leave a CommentWelcome 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!
Leave a CommentI 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!
Leave a CommentWelcome 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!
5 CommentsOne of my poems was recently accepted by a great semi-annual literary journal – Foliate Oak Literary Magazine. Their September issue is now online and you can check it out.
My poem, Culley’s Pub: An Elegy, is about a bar I went to all the time in college. It closed down shortly after I graduated.
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