Testing, or "more news from nowhere"

99.999993% guaranteed to make you feel smarter*

1. Everything Ryder's published and written:

a. all of it is true
b. none of it is true
c. a & b & d
d. c
e. is under the influence


2. Ryder Collins wants you

a. period

b. to worship her
c. to publish her
d. to perform your civic duties

e. to pick her up in a 70s muscle car & take her to a dive bar



3. Security question she doesn't remember the answer to

a. favorite author
b. favorite cartoon character
c. favorite drunk author
d. favorite flower
e. name of grade school


4. Author she'd want with her in a barfight          

a. Palahniuk
b. Bukowski
c. Hemingway
d. Wilde
e. Cave


5. What Ryder does when her work's rejected:

a. picks up strange men in bars and gets them to steal for her
b. sits on her Alabamy porch with a shotgun and moonshine
c. sits at a bar and steals shotguns and strange men
d. sits on strange porches and picks up normal men
e. pisses on the editor's porch a la Berryman

6. What she does when her work's accepted

a. picks up strange men in bars and gets them to steal for her
b. sits on her Alabamy porch with a shotgun and moonshine
c. sits at a bar and steals shotguns and strange men
d. sits on strange porches and picks up normal men
e. pisses on the editor's porch a la Berryman


7. Favorite saying:

a. all my bitches live in Texas
b. go ahead, fireworks
c. she doesn't have one because
         1. sayings cheapen words and turns them into cliches
         2. she doesn't have just one; she scours Urban Dictionary daily
         3. she's not hip enough and lives in Alabamy
d. skeet
e.  she doesn't remember


8. Her novel's got

a. Julie Browns on meth
b. the corporate takeover of the U.S.
c. a mama looking for her baby daddy
d. a sinister gasman named Fitzie with eyes like T.J. Eckleburg

e. all of the above; none of the above




*side effects may include: excessive thirst, excessive hunger, ennui, boredom, apathy, dipsomania, weakened eyesight, loss of inhibition, loss of control, loss of your wallet, loss of self-respect (if you're a strange man), increased appetite, existential crises, whooping cough, dry mouth, hair loss, hair growth on palms.

On writing

I ripped the guts out of a poem and handed the bloody mess to flash fiction.

I kicked the baby out so I could remember my dreams.

I stabbed you in the neck so I could use your vest as parchment.

You'll show up in the bloody mess but won't recognize yourself for botox.

The baby'll come crawling back like those babies always do.

The vest'll remember nothing except the 70s and cocaine.

The vest'll save the last dance or something else cliche.
















http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZhFIfsR-V0

Oh! Intermittent baby...

Ought Ten and I haven't forgotten you! Although if you were really a baby, dear blog, you'd be dead and I'd be in jail right now. Or on the lam. That's how neglectful I've been.

This big ether sea of Internets and you are just a tiny drop. How could I leave you alone so long?

You were riding the waves, counting the phases of the moon, watching the other blogs connect and re-connect with reader and writer alike. You didn't feel sorry for yourself; you're stoic, for a blog. You let the sea-salt air whip your face; you spied Ahab out there and tried to lure him in with porn-like words and nubile phrases.

It didn't work, but that's probably for the best. Ahab's got Issues, man.

Now you know how I feel, trying to straddle that line between self-promotion and writerly prostitution. Trying to ride that bucking horse of the writer's MARKET.

I won't go on a tirade about talent being ignored or about the corroding effects of capitalism upon art...that will just conjure up the guilt I feel for ignoring you, blog baby.

Plus, I like stuff. I'm not about to go all minimalist yet. I just bought a new pair of boots. Boots and roads are my fascinations. AMC played all the "Road to" movies a few nights ago; I remember watching them as a child.

The above paragraph, if you've been paying attention, was a very subtle plug for my not-yet published novel, Little pink babies. It's a road novel that’s got danger, sex, high speed chases, drugs, both Julie Browns (wubba wubba wubba), political espionage, bar fights, black-outs, black top, rain, sun, lost highways, lots of pop culture, gas stations, men in overalls, stuffed armadillos, random conversations overheard, a philosophical treatise on Pez dispensers, booty calls, big booties, boots, Greco-Roman allusions, and, of course, a baby.

So blog, here's my news (i.e. this is where I continue my shameless self-promotion by masquerading publications etc. as things you need to know):

I've just had two poems accepted in the shady side review.

I've entered Little pink babies in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. If you're an emerging novelist, you can enter, too.
Here's the link:  http://www.amazon.com/Breakthrough-Novel-Award-Books/b?ie=UTF8&node=332264011

The good editors over at Juked have nominated "Name game" for storySouth Million Writers Award.
Here's info on the award: http://www.storysouth.com/millionwriters.html
Here's a link to Juked:  http://www.juked.com/

Thanks J.W. Wang et al!

And you, too, (well, not you, blog, as you're not quite sentient yet) can nominate stories for storySouth's award. See the rules on their website. This is not part of my shameless self-promotion. Nominate other writers; I mean it. Let other people know about those talented writers out there in the ether-sea.

Now here's a tune to walk you out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1D9hA1tWIw


Cause I sd so,
Ry

New Online Music Mix As Independent As You Streaming 24/7 - KCRW Eclectic24

Check this out cause I sd so:


New Online Music Mix As Independent As You Streaming 24/7 - KCRW Eclectic24

Nostalgia for childhood foosball and news

Yes, foosball. I kid you not...

We had a table, growing up. I don't really know where it came from. It was always in our basement; it may still be there. It's someone else's basement now, but who knows? Perhaps old foosball tables return home to die. Perhaps they never leave us.


News: New story published on Juked.com.
http://www.juked.com/2009/12/namegame.asp

I am very much digging the stories on Juked (and not just because they published me) and also very much digging electronic submissions. Juked accepted my story pretty quickly and it was up a couple days thereafter. I like instant gratification; I like things now and I don't care how. I blame Tim Burton for not making the new oompa-loompas scary enough.

I've finished a new story and am sending it out via Interwebs.

Other news: Jason Schwartzmann lies when he's says it's always summer in Alabama. Stop lying, Schwartzmann.

My sister may be on a famous talk show in Hollywood; it has nothing to do with Jason Schwartzmann or foosball. Stay tuned.

2Fer: Realism, schmealism

This post dedicated to my one true follower in Reykjavík ; sorry to hear about your economy, but not sorry about McDonald's...

Perhaps, attending school for creative writing has ruined me for traditional narrative?

I'm currently reading a small press novel that I find incredibly boring. I'm not going to name the press -  it's a good one, or the author - he's heralded as a "genius" in the book blurb, not because of what I'm afraid it'll do to my fledgling writing career (ah...but I have you, my Icelandic minions), but because it's a matter of personal taste. The book is unrelentingly realistic and I am so bored bored bored. If I wanted to suffer the excrutiating boredom of life in a corporate office, I would go live it. If I wanted to follow the minutest thoughts of someone who's plodding through life, overcome by ennui, someone who's on the verge of an existential crisis because their life is so very boring and unfulfilling but they don't know it (the rub, of course), I would just go to the post office of my small Southern town and imagine what everyone in line is thinking...or trying not to think.

I've managed to sound both haughty and pedantic in the above paragraph. Forgive me. Next I'll be sending hate mail to unsuspecting editors and McDonald's corporate office in Bethesda just for fun (and for the citizens of Iceland who will be deprived of their Big Macs and environmental/ethical onslaught).

Fiction, for me, should be surprising. It should show me something new. It should give me something I need that I wasn't quite conscious of needing, not like the next Iphone or Kindle or something you're made to think you need, but more like when you step into a warm shower and the water hits your calves and feet and all of a sudden you realize your feet were cold but you hadn't even noticed...you had acclimated yourself to cold feet. Fiction (and poetry, too) should make you realize you don't have to accept cold feet as a condition of living. These are my humble requirements, and the book I'm reading now just don't cut it.

I'm going to keep on reading, though, because I'm an idealist and an optimist way down deep - hell, I'll give the book a chance until the end. Plus, it's cheaper than boubon or Reyka in helping me fall asleep.




Yours in hoping the krona rebounds,
Ry

I'm not so good with titles...

& I wonder if the Postmodernists have ruined me for traditional narrative.

I've been working on a series of poems about this woman I call the PARIAH. Pariah's in all caps because she's appropriated the label but it still plays hell with her psyche. She wrestles with it daily. Anyway, I've got a PARIAH poem that I've entitled "The PARIAH fights the years, the suburbs, the nepotism, the networking and all the other crap of existence," which is a hell of a clunky mouthful and may be too telling to boot, but I just can't think of any other title...

(Today's word must be hell - in a Satrtrean sense, of course. Perhaps. How can I be so certain?)

I'm also working on my new novel; thanks to nanowrimo.

I've been carrying the idea for this novel around with me for months, but I haven't had the time to write it. That's what I've kept telling myself, although I think the bigger problem is this deeply ingrained fear of commitment I have. Plus, writing a novel is kind of like how I live my life sometimes, slogging through everyday minutiae and mundaneness to get to the sexy, exciting parts. I just want to write the sexy, exciting scenes; I hate backstory, I hate moving my character through time and space sometimes, I dislike linearity and having to be aware that everything has to make some kind of sense, which may be why I lean towards absurdism in my writing.

(I could illustrate this here by suddenly turning into a parrot, frothing and shouting Qui est la? But you'd have to have just read Wide Sargasso Sea & what does Rhys have to do with any of this, anyway?)

I may have set myself a difficult task as this new novel, because of its fantastical elements, does require some kind of linearity. Kind of like some of Murakami's novels (not Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World), set in "every day reality" but then there's a strange quirk, a slight tweaking of "reality," where what seemed to make sense is revealed as making no sense at all. My new novel's about the South and it's about what's going on in politics today (Glenn Beck and his rabid parrots, teabaggers (ha ha!), corporate takeover of the U.S. (see police response to G20 protestors vs. police response to teabaggers)), so maybe it's actually the opposite of Murakami - I begin with double strangeness and surreality to achieve some sense of reality. Maybe.

My tentative title for my novel in progress, though...it may be terrible and it may be too telling. It may be both.

(The other word of the day could be parrot. But there won't be any parrots in my new novel. Possibly. Maybe.)

Yours without any parrot pix Yours,

Ry

P.S. I know parrots don't froth...