Saturday, September 25, 2010

Publication: The Last Ant

My short humour piece "The Last Ant" is up at Wild Violet, the literary magazine that also published the even more esoteric piece "Corrections to the Rules of Fimble Fowl (for 3 players or 4)," the semi-true/semi-autobiographical piece "Me and Margery Kempe" and the MLA-inspired flash fiction story "Wixey" (bonus points for identifying the words swiped from Nabokov). Alert readers who are also Peter Cook fans may notice a theme throughout my pseudo-journalistic essay on the now extinct sub-species of ant.

I had a fabulous time yesterday in Northampton with my wonderful collaborator, the Queen of Everything. We had a delicious lunch at the Lhasa Café with my colleague May and wandered around the main drag, stopping in at galleries and for food and bevvie refueling, including at a coffee shop, The Yellow Sofa, that neither of us had stopped in before and which we found quite lovely. We had an editorial meeting for the journal of The Women's League of Ale Drinkers with the glamourous Vicky Squid in Union Station, laying out our plans not only for this issue, but for the future -- many dreams lie ahead for us to make manifest!

And yes, I did get the story on the wombat fortune (thank you all) -- but where's mine?!

2 comments:

pattinase (abbott) said...

I have no email addresses for K.A. Laity or Kassandra so I will post this on their blogs.

Just so we're all on the same page, the only thing you are obliged to take from the story before yours is the character the previous story's protagonist was jealous of. So if Fred Astaire is jealous of Gene Kelly in the story before yours, your story about Gene need not mention Fred at all. And Gene can be jealous of his plumber for his ability to fix things or anyone you like. It would actually be better if we veer away from the initial source of jealousy.

My story concerns a high school teacher who is jealous of another teacher's charisma and talents. So Dana has a charismatic and talented guy to work with.

You will only have a week to write your story and I hope that is not a problem. If you find it is going to be, let me know and I will delay posting your link until it's done. But if we want to finish this by Christmas, it would be good to keep to every Tuesday. Let's give each segment its own title.

Schedule (And let me know if your week is a problem).

10/5 Patti
10/12 Dana
10/19 K.A. Laity
10/26 David Barber
11/2 Rob Kitchin
11/9 Sandra Seamans
11/16 Evan Lewis
11/23 Eric Beetner
11/30 Nigel Bird
12/7 Kassandra Kelly
12/14 Graham Powell
12/21 Patti Abbott

I will try to bring it back to Graham's person being jealous of my original character. I hope this is doable. Sometimes I wonder why I have a brain that thinks up stuff to make us all busy. But there you are. Let me know if you've had second doubt. Patti

C. Margery Kempe said...

I can't wait! This ought to be a lot of fun: people be sure to stop by Patti's blog -- there's always some interesting conversation going on.