Most Likely to Take Over the World

Am only a finalist, not a winner, in the Culture Now essay contest. Supposedly, with things like this, it’s an honor just to be nominated. I don’t feel particularly honored.

Second attempt at Tweet the Meat was also a failure. Supposedly, rejection gets easier the more often you experience it. Don’t believe the lie.

Sent out an entry for the Mid-American Review’s short fiction contest today, entitled “For a Good Time”. It’s basically a twist on the typical Hemingway story: short, terse prose that starts with a man in a dingy bar. Except the man is a hipster and out of place. Also, there’s reference to Circe and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (again re: Circe) which is key to the ending of the story. If I’m at least a finalist in this, I will feel honored.

A friend of mine is submitting stories to literary magazines as well now. While I’m very proud of her, I also can’t help feeling a twinge jealous — especially if she’s selected instead of me. I am absolutely terrible and afflicted with a crab mentality that, unfortunately, I do not wish to shake.

The Husband is calling. It’s time for dinner. Ciao!

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First things first, I am a finalist in Culture Now’s Zeitgeist writing competition. That’s kind of nice, since I spent two hours on that essay about two hours and forty minute from the deadline. A bit like being back in high school, I suppose.

Second, I’ve made another submission to Tweet the Meet. Hopefully, this one will not be rejected like my first submission; the submission this week was substantially darker.

Finally, in April I was notified that two of my LiveJournal entries were selected as finalists for publication in the LiveJournal anniversary book. I haven’t heard anything since I returned my author release forms, so I went to the site specifically set up for information and posts about the book. It hasn’t been updated since May 6th, which is more than a month ago.

Hopefully there will be more news on the anthology soon, as it’d be fun to throw an ickle release party for that.

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Rejected for Tweet the Meat — not sure why, as the one they chose that went up a few hours ago makes no fucking sense what so ever.

Anyway, new submission to Culture Now went out a few hours ago, on the topic of singularity. It started out humorous, but I think I lost the tone somewhere around the talk of humanity driving itself to extinction, and machines basically stepping in only to stop us from taking the rest of the planet (and the machine’s resources) with us. It probably won’t be selected; I’ll post here if it is.

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It’s unseasonably warm today, the sort of sick, sticky humidity that rots your lungs with every breath, weighing down your chest like lead. Nuala, our Birman cat, lays under a chair as the sun slowly moves across the floor; she scowls at the coming sun, then pulls herself from the floor and skulks to another, shadier space. By the end of the day, she’ll be under the sofa.

I’ve been doing some research on zombies, viral and bacterial infections (I think viral is more interesting, and works best with zombies, as rabies — the disease zombism is based upon — is viral) and human reactions to zombie situations. The poll is still open if you want to participate and weigh in on what you’d do in the moral quandary presented.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on some flash fiction, to get back in the habit of writing in general and horror writing in particular. There’s a 50-word story up at Hyper Short Stories and I just sent off a 140 character Twitter story to Tweet the Meat. I like writing flash fiction when I’m getting back into fiction/creative non-fiction because I find having to express so much in so few words is really helpful for self-editing, to get sentences tight and concise (as I’m given to verbosity) without going into terse, Hemingway-style prose.

And now, with my research and brief writing done, it’s time to unplug for a while, kick back with the <i>Secrets of the Dead</i> episode I Netflixed, and then read some Fitzgerald. Oh, and later, to find a gift for my mom. I was thinking of just making a children’s book for her entitled “I Can’t Do Anything Right!” in which little Trisha learns that she, in fact, CAN do things well if she just tries and applies herself rather than just throwing up her hands and screaming “I can’t do anything right!” when something goes wrong, which my mom, Patricia, is given to do.

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