Sabbatical Interrupted

The interruption in this blog's sabbatical is brought to you by the fine folks over at Stymie Literary Journal. I'm fricken jazzed to be a part of Stymie's Autumn & Winter 2010 issue. 

I submitted "Eternal and Unnecessary" (page 83) way back in the spring, probably when Cliff Lee was still a Mariner. I've been patiently waiting ever since to see it in (online) print and it's been worth the wait. 

A big thank you to Erik Smetana and the folks at Stymie for accepting the story. Nothing cooler than writing a story on the world's awesomest thing (baseball) and having it accepted in a journal specifically dedicated to sports. 

Molotov Cocktail

New short at Molotov Cocktail.

Big thanks to Josh Goller at MC. 

Habits

They can be so annoying, can't they?

Check out my new short "Habits" at Staccato Fiction.

A big shout to Matt Boyd & Co. They're manning a kick-ass journal over at Staccato.

The Bullpen

As the group continued to implode, a season was sent swirling down the commode.

It appears we're headed for a series of gut punches in Milwaukee.

Let's Play 162

Found out a few weeks ago my baseball-themed story "Eternal and Unnecessary" will appear in the Autumn/Winter issue of Stymie Magazine. Exciting stuff. Since it's opening day I also have reason to run the following once written by Roger Angell. It is f'ing fantastic.

Baseball: learn it, live it, love it.

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift. Roger Angell, "Agincourt and After", 1975

A Limerick For Luck

The Madness of March has begun yet again,
the Irish are dancing, halleluiah, amen.
It was an up and down year filled with mistakes and oh no’s,
we groaned in frustration and thought “god this team blows.”
However late in the season came a glimmer, a spark,
on a magical run Tory and Ben did embark.
They stomped through the gauntlet knocking off GTown and Pitt,
suddenly, out of nowhere, this team was the shit!
They slowed down the tempo and started to pass,
and lo and behold we kicked everyone’s ass.
We got into the dance, boasting a six seed to boot,
that miserable winter was suddenly moot.
Now the tourney is here, the fun about to begin,
let’s kick this baby off by stomping Old Dominion.

GO IRISH!

It's A Celebration Bitches

The beer is green and the Irish are dancing in the tournament. Too bad St. Pat's didn't fall a day later. The Irish can't lose on St. Pat's. It's a mathematical impossibility.

Anyway, in other happy news my story "Loose Lips" is up as part of Crispin Best's very, very awesome Stories for Every Year Project.

Read it here.

Happy consumption.