…I have new things up:
"Bullet Proof" @ Bartleby Snopes
"I'll Never Tell" @ Left Hand Waving
"My Mother, Marilyn Monroe" @ Blue Print Review
"Repo," "Rendezvous," and "Bath Time" @ Orion Headless
"Thrum" @ 52/250 A Year of Flash
"Sea Creatures" @ Indigo Rising
All of these are also up here under "Words In Print"

…I am back from having run the Tucson Marathon yesterday. Tucson, as a city, is not my cup of tea. Everything there is mountains and rubble and dirt. It is all beige. The landscape is beige, the homes, the malls. People have dirt lawns. Really. Well, they're beige, pebbled yards. Oh, but there are also cacti to bring some added hue.
I'm not slamming Tucson, just saying it's not my type of place.
If you saw where I live, you'd probably--other than the lake--have a similar distate, but for other reasons. Where I live is very rural and red neck. People post handwritten signs on trees advertising their day care or auto removal businesses. There are delapidated barns. There are cows and sheep and ostriches, lamas, goats and lots of horses. Some yards have rusted vehicles sulking in them. Sometimes it bothers me quite a lot if people are not keeping up their property, but overall, the advantages of living here, to me, outweigh being somewhere else. I've lived in nice, upperscale suburbs. They have some wonderful attributes. But at this point in my life, I prefer the raw, truth of the country.
So, what I'm saying is: we all have different tastes, and thank goodness for that.
I just wrote a very short piece about a man who lives in a tin shanty next to a garbage dump while a rich tourist town flourishes miles below. This man, you think he is jaded until the end when you learn he believes himself--because of the family he has--to be, in fact, rich. (Can you tell that my trip to the garbage dumps in Puerto Vallarta still sort of haunts me?)

…About the marathon--I did horribly. Really. It was my worst performance out of all eight. I'm giving up the marathon. I may do halves, but the marathon has become more than my nemesis. It has become my master. It has owned me and broken me and I am escaping from its bondage.
How do I feel today? Thin. Sore. My bloody toes from yesterday have gone pusy--yoke yellow rimmed with green (don't worry, I'm draining and soaking.) Walking down or up stairs is painful. It feels as if furnace-heated rods have been implanted in each thigh and, with every step, they melt my muscles from the inside out.
But that will all subside in a day or so. I've been there before.

…I finished five books while I was gone. "Bad Marie" by Marcy Dermansky is wonderful--a little naughty and a lot mischevious, but it's an addictive novel. Marcy is some skilled writer.

…I like this: "It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them." -- Julian Barnes, "Flaubert's Parrot"