On the good news front, my new collection of short stories, "If I Knew the Way, I Would Take You Home," will be coming out next year from Dark Sky Books. This is a book of rock and roll short stories, and I couldn't be happier to have placed it at Dark Sky, which is awesome and getting awesomer all the time.

Here's Dark Sky's press release thingy.

My story "Seven Clowns Before the Explosion" is up at the newly redesigned and really nice Dark Sky Magazine.

Here's the opening section:

He is driving, like always, curling the little car in ever-tightening spirals, pushing it, feeling the centrifugal force and allowing the audience to blur in his vision, a whirl of light and color, color and light, a beautiful hallucination, one of many that exist only within the small universe of the circus.

You read the whole thing over here at Dark Sky.

I have a short thing up at Wigleaf, called "Pop Star Dead at 22."

Here's the first paragraph:

Do you know what it's like when Myspace tells you they have to pull your profile because you're getting too much traffic? When Spencer Pratt friends you on Facebook? And then the next day, Brody Jenner? I mean they are friending you. You know what that's like? I do, bro. It's fucking awesome.

And here's the rest.

I have a short, odd little story called "How We Got from There to Here" up on Pindeldyboz right now.

Here's the first paragraph:

1.

At first, we didn't know what they were. Some people thought they were aliens, some thought god had dropped them out of the sky. They talked about them on the news, debated endlessly. There were articles in all the newspapers, the morning talk shows, even the celebrity gossip tabloids. We talked different then, talked a lot, used big words and sometimes talked just to hear ourselves talking. That was Before.

You can read the whole shebang here.

I have a short, odd story, called "Me and Drunk Me," up at Thieve's Jargon.

Here's the opening:

Drunk Me is completely misunderstood. He's killing Sober Me, people say, literally drowning me in Irish whiskey, German beer, and Italian wine. I hear the whispers: he's the reason things went bad with Stacey, why I can't finish the novel and haven't placed a story in a year and a half, why I'm on this bullshit "probation" thing at work.

But they don't understand. We have a symbiotic relationship. Yin and Yang. Chang and Eng. An action and an equal and opposite reaction. Me and Drunk Me are made for each other. We are soul mates.

Check it out here.

We've been telling everybody for awhile now that Barrelhouse 7 is here and it's awesome. Now we thought we'd do something to prove it: we made a little special section with stuff from the new issue. We have a free sampler thing, one of our favorite stories, "The Atheist Reconsiders," annotated with little thought-bubbles from author Michael Czyzniejewski, and a bunch of future related interviews.

I'm really happy with the annotated story -- or, as Mike C calls it, the "pop-up story" -- it's really interesting to get inside Mike's head and learn a little about what he was thinking, which parts of the story still make him laugh, and where the idea came from in general.

More interviews are coming down the pike, but the section's pretty much open for business. Click on the link below to check it out:
http://www.barrelhousemag.com/word/?p=706

Here's a new site. Um yea, that's about it. I realized that even though I do web stuff for a living, I hadn't updated my old site for a really long time, and there was some stuff going on, new things getting published, a class on the horizon, a conference in a few weeks, random things and whatnot, and I wanted to do a site in Drupal, so here you go. That is all.

I never thought I'd feel sorry for Bret Michaels. Last week, that all changed. My love for Rock of Love is, I believe, well known (if not well regarded). For those of you who are not familiar with the show, let me just tell you that it's a dating show where Bret Michaels of Poison fame (and maybe all you need to know about the show, about reality television, VH1, Bret Michaels, anybody trying to win the affection of Bret Michaels, and American Pop Culture Right Now, is encapsulated by that phrase: "of Poison fame") attempts to find "love" by the standard reality TV method of dating twenty skanks and strippers and television weather girls and wannabe reality stars, along with the occasional nice girl, all at once. Every week, one contestant's "tour ends here" and she is sent back to whatever shiny pole she's abandoned in Vegas or Memphis or Fargo. Sorry -- that doesn't sound very nice. It is, in most cases, however, quite true.

I love this show. Partially that's because I love reality television, and I love really bad reality television most of all. There's something recklessly stupid and kind of sadly earnest about the worst reality shows (Sunset Tan, Rock of Love, early Flavor of Love, Blow Out, the Real Housewives) -- everybody is so, so desperate to be famous that they just don't give a shit about how they come off on television. Scheming? Evil? Desperate? Awesome!

The worst show in the history of television wrapped it all up recently after an increasingly frustrating and nonsensical six year run. In this age of reality television (which I love, but also hate, but, you know, love to hate and hate to love), it's really fucking hard work being the Worst Show on Television. The Worst Show on Television is competing with Bret Michaels, Flavor Flav, random skanks who used to be on Rock of Love and Flavor of Love, shows about cougars and Real Housewives and exterminators and guys who eat strange food for a living, with Lipstick Jungle and Cashmere Mafia and Eyeliner Ninja Death Squad and Spray-on-tan Ballcutteroffers. But still, amid all this competition, the L Word has managed to distinguish itself as the Worst Show on Television.

Let me interject here to say that yes, I have seen every fucking episode of the Worst Show on Television, and that yes, this is my problem -- not yours, not even the idiot reponsible for the Worst Show on Television. For some reason, I have been unable to turn away. I am not proud of this. Were I a lesbian, then I might have a decent excuse. If the show still featured lots of naked hot chicks making out, then (as a heterosexual male) I would still have an excuse. But as of late (the past few seasons), the hot naked chick factor has been increasingly dialed down. And I'm not a lesbian. And there are plenty of crappy shows aimed directly at my demographic. What I'm trying to say is that I have seen every episode of this godforsaken show, and I know that's my problem, but I'm going to bitch about it anyway.