Steven Woods, for “Billy.”

Nik Korpon for “Gold Teeth.”

Alex Mattingly for “Marbles.”

Mimi Brooks for “Out Like A Lion.”

Richard Thomas for “Jimmy Five Ways.”

My story “Jimmy Five Ways” was one of the winners at Punchnel’s fiction contest. My good friend Nik Korpon was also a winner! All five of the stories and winners will have their work up live next week. So keep an eye out.

]]> http://whatdoesnotkillme.com/2012/02/04/punchnels/feed/ 0 wickerkat http://whatdoesnotkillme.com/2012/02/01/nowtrends_ktg_tnb/ http://whatdoesnotkillme.com/2012/02/01/nowtrends_ktg_tnb/#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:11:40 +0000 Richard Thomas http://whatdoesnotkillme.com/?p=1411 ]]>
My review of Karl Taro Greenfeld’s NowTrends is now up at The Nervous Breakdown. Great stuff. He’s known as a non-fiction author, but he writes fiction too, very well published—The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, BASS, O. Henry, etc. And KTG is one hell of a nice guy, too. I ran across his work in a few copies of TMR and TPR and posted up something at HTMLGiant one day about something, can’t remember what, but he dropped me an email to say that he agreed with my POV and we started chatting. Loved these stories.

Also, I’m a big fan of Hobart‘s Short Flight / Long Drive books. I’ve read many of them, and they’ve all been great.

And, now my fourth column is live up at Lit Reactor. It’s all about how to navigate Duotrope.com, one of the best sites going for doing research on magazines, journals, websites and publishers, for tracking your submissions, and for staying on top of all of your literary pursuits. I could not do what I do without these guys. And if you can, when you get a few extra bucks in your Paypal account, send it on over to these guys to help them out. If you write short stories, especially, and don’t use these guys, you could really get a lot out of this column. And, heck, even if you already use Duotrope, maybe I’ll point out something new.

My third column went up at Lit Reactor last month (December 2011) and I totally forgot to come back here and post up about it. This column talks about the journey of one of my problem children, “Rudy Jenkins Buries His Fears” and shows you what you have to go through sometimes in order to get published. Don’t worry, the story ends well.

So excited to be in here with my story “The Jenny Store.” This is a beautiful book. Inspired by photographs taken around the Los Angeles area, the book features short stories from 26 authors. Each author was asked to select a photograph from a collection taken by the editor and write a story of precisely 1,000 words inspired by what they saw – no more, no less. The result is quintessential Los Angeles: Dreams, Drugs, Hallucinations, Romance, Life and Death, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Redemption. Like the city itself, the book is multifaceted, hard to label and even harder to put down.

CONTENTS

Ryan Wilson – “American Trash”
Stuart Gibbel – “Break on Through”
Craig Clevenger – “Obsolescence”
Nik Korpon – “South of Thirteen”
Dennis Cruz – “Smile Now, Cry Later”
Pela Via – “Bathhouse”
Stephen Conley – “Don’t Feed the Animals”
Grigori Black – “This Was Heaven”
Doc O’Donnell – “Your Personal Apocalypse”
Nikki Guerlain – “Sick Ticket”
Patrick Verhagen – “Swim”
Craig Wallwork – “El Bordello Alexandra”
Nicholas Merlin Karpuk – “Ahm’s Bay”
Nik Houser – “Subtitles for a Silent Film”
H.R. Tardiff – “Walls in the Sand”
Richard Thomas – “The Jenny Store”
Bob Pastorella – “Alexandra”
Simon West-Bulford – “Project Asmodeus”
Jay Slayton-Joslin – “The Fantasy of California vs. The Reality of London”
Amanda Gowin – “Gilded Bones”
Chris Deal – “Padre Nuestro”
Boden Steiner – “Here”
Gordon Highland – “Fry Girl”
edward j rathke – “All the Dreams You Dreamt Retold”
Michael Paul Gonzalez – “Tidal”
Victor Bengtsson – “Venice, Forever”

I’m thrilled to announce that my twist on the classic vampire tale, “Transmogrify” is now available in a new anthology from Dark Moon Books. They’ve done a few themed issues, such as ghosts and zombies, so of course, vampires is up next. They’re doing great things over at DMB, and I’ll have another story coming out with them in a really cool flash fiction collection called Slices of Flesh, which will have some big names in it, like Jack Ketchum, Ramsay Campbell, and many more.

Here’s more about this book, as well as a tables of contents. I’m familiar with C.W. LaSart and Kenneth W. Cain, who are really excellent dark fiction authors.

SYNOPSIS: It’s true that few of us would choose the life of a zombie, mindlessly consuming every moving thing in sight as we rot and shrivel with decay. It’s also true that few of us would choose to become a ghost, dolefully watching the comings and goings of the living, unable to touch, to breathe, to feel them in a physical way. But, if given the chance to become a vampire, I think most of us would bite. Vampires make our pulses quicken: whether they are the velveteen figures of Anne Rice or Bram Stoker, or the violent monsters of Stephen King, we don’t care. Not the hunters. Not the hopefuls. The real, blood-drinking, neck-biting fiends. Vampires are timeless because they are immortal. And the vampires in these pages may just come back to bite you in the end. These are stories you can really sink your teeth into. Promise.

TOC:

Voices Carry (TOM WORTMAN)
Fountain of Flesh (NICKY PEACOCK)
Dawn Hunter (EARL PARRISH)
Green Eyes and Chili Dogs (KEVIN DAVID ANDERSON)
Cosmina (CHRISTOPHER LEPPEK & EMANUEL ISLER)
Rite of Passage (LORI MICHELLE)
7 Hours (MAX BOOTH III)
Liquid Blue (DREW WILCOX)
Ordering Out (KENNETH W. CAIN)
To The Last Drop (ERIC GRAWE)
Sekhmet’s Daughters (C. W. LaSART)
Entangled (JENNIFER LEFSYK)
The Spy Who Bit Me (LORELEI BELL)
An Unusual Occurrence at Pointe Laurent (MARYKATHRYN GELISSE)
Tough Love (DAVID THOMAS)
The Taste of Love (RENEE PAWLISH)
State of Grace (TARA FOX HALL)
Transmogrify (RICHARD THOMAS)
The Key to Happiness (PENELOPE CROWE)

This is a list of all of my current, live book reviews. It is in reverse
chronological order by web site. Last updated 2/06/12.

The Nervous Breakdown

Damascus by Joshua Mohr
NowTrends by Karl Taro Greenfeld
The Necessity of Certain Behaviors by Shannon Cain
Crimes in Southern Indiana by Frank Bill
Short Bus by Brian Allen Carr
The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
Follow Me Down by Kio Stark
Zazen by Vanessa Veselka
Drinking Closer to Home by Jessica Anya Blau
Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City by Michael Bible
The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch
Volt by Alan Heathcock
Normally Special by xTx
You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know by Heather Sellers
Sarah Court by Craig Davidson
The Ones That Got Away by Stephen Graham Jones
In The Mean Time by Paul Tremblay
Cut Through The Bone by Ethel Rohan
The Wilding by Benjamin Percy
Daddy’s by Lindsay Hunter
The Avian Gospels by Adam Novy
It Came From Del Rio by Stephen Graham Jones
The Physics of Imaginary Objects by Tina May Hall

Lit Reactor

11/22/63 by Stephen King

Outsider Writers Collective

Wild Life by Kathy Fish
Hiram Grange and the Chosen One by Kevin Lucia

Emerging Writers Network

Black Tickets by Jane Anne Phillips

Bookslut

Men Undressed: Women Writers and the Male Sexual Experience
ed. by Stacy Bierlein, Gina Frangello, Cris Mazza and Kat Meads

The Cult

Cape Cod Noir edited by David L. Ulin
Forecast by Shya Scanlon
Slut Lullabies by Gina Frangello

Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl (Emergency Press) is a wild ride though London. Her protagonist, Ruth, is detached and a bit of a sadist, and yet, at the same time, lost, vulnerable and endearing. Head over to The Nervous Breakdown for the full review. Loved it.

My review of 11/22/63 is now live at LitReactor and I think it’s Stephen King’s best book in awhile. You don’t have to be a fan of JFK and/or conspiracy theories in order to dig this book. And the time travel aspects are certainly a part of this story, but really, it’s the way that King creates the communities that he builds, develops his characters, and shows us how our decisions effect our futures (and the futures of those around us) that make this his best book in a long time. Read the full review for more information.

My second column is now up at Litreactor.com, and it talks about how to write a cover letter, your bio, and the ways that you can stand out when you submit your stories to editors at magazines and journals around the world. Hope it helps you out a little bit. More columns and review to come.