My story “Making Plans” is featured in the new issue of M Review.

Why are people allowed to have GMail accounts, but not Google chat? You should have them both if you have either. Looking at you, Matthew Olzmann.

I’ve had two job offers in the last week, one for writing and one for teaching. I left the door open on the first, since I would love to do it if the right story comes along, but had to graciously turn down the latter, which broke my heart a little bit since I would have loved doing it.

After a brief visit to the library today, I have ended up with several new books, and none are non-fiction. Ladybug and I are driving to DC for a wedding next weekend, so I’ll be reading a fair bit on the road. I’m almost wishing that I were done with the book I’m reading, so I could dive headfirst into the Ander Monson book I picked up. Ander Monson is one of the best authors you’re not reading, so get on the stick, people.

The Regulator will soon be the latest bookstore to carry Bull City Press books. They should have them in stock next week. Stop by and support your independent bookstore. If you don’t use them, you lose them.

I need suggestions on great dance songs that people aged 16-66 would comfortable getting down with. Please please please, leave them in the comments.

Another way it could pay off and I’d be happy: I could be a little more like Carl Phillips. I spent a wee bit of time thumbing through The Rest of Love tonight, and I’m consistently awed by that man.

Yes, peoples, it’s a month of microfic!

And I have one partner in crime, with the possibility of a second!

My exuberant cries of BYAAAAAAH would put Howard Dean to shame!

Heavens, I left a book off of my ridiculous simultaneous reading list the other day: Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee by James Tate. Add the Schuyler to the list and I am in the middle of way too many books. Has anyone read The Route as Briefed? I’m enjoying Tate’s prose, which honestly is so much like his poetry that I don’t discern a heck of a lot of difference.

I failed to waste the day completely, but this is perhaps because Ladybug came home from camping earlier than expected and I was able to goof off with her for a while. I must say that I like being around her more than I like not being around her.

Thieves in Myanmar are stealing womens’ hair. The filchers target women in crowded areas, sneak up, and snip away. This is somewhat awesome. I mean, it isn’t, but it is.

The ginormous hard drive I use for music only is full. That’s 180 GB, or about 180 days of music without a repeat (unless I happen to have two copies of the song because of Greatest Hits collections or soundtracks). Seeing as how I would like to add some more songs to that drive, I suppose I will have to do some paring down. The completist in me, the obsessive collector, cringes at the notion of deleting the half-star (yes, I rate by half-stars) and one-star tracks that belong to full albums, even though I usually skip through them. Who owns the most stinkers in my iTunes library? Poi Dog Pondering has more half-star tracks than any other band, I think They Might Be Giants and Paul McCartney tie for one-star tracks. But I’ve probably only rated about 1/6 of the library. I have grand dreams of one day tagging/rating everything just so. But that is 36,000+ items… so it’s not a weekend project. I had a lot of it rated before I lost all that data in August because of iTunes 7.

Other random stats:

• Five-star tracks: 435
• Four-star tracks: 700
• Three-star tracks: 1646
• Most played: “We Used to Vacation” by the Cold War Kids and “Greeting Card Aisle” by Sarah Harmer, 21
• Last added: “One True Vine” by Wilso” and the new Polyphonic Spree album
• Now playing: “Heart of Gold” by Tori Amos (3 1/2 stars)

The center. The edge. Magnetic north. How we move in circles around it. These poles, this equator. Right. Longitude. Left. The Y axis. Vertical alignment. Movement across a plane. Concentric. Parallel. How we understand space, our placement in it, our relation to others. What responsibility we have when static, what inertia we have when moving. How we never stop. How we always stop. How we are stopped. The bend of the back when we stop.

I went outside to mow my lawn this morning and promptly got my lawnmower stuck in a thick patch of brush. Do not ask me why I was mowing the thick patch of brush. That is not important to my story. What is important is that I felt stuck, in fiftyleven other ways, too. I felt physically bound to things. Of course I could have walked away from that lawnmower, but I did not. I stayed there, stuck, for hours. The skies clouded over, and I thought, oh, well, now my luck has taken a turn for the worse. And I felt a drop or two of rain, and that was all. Slowly, my thinking became, hey, I dodged a bullet there, because as bad as it is to be stuck, it’d be worse to be stuck and wet. Then church let out– I live in the house next door to the church’s long driveway– and people from the church craned their necks to see me stuck in the brush. But none stopped, and none spoke to me. And soon I began thinking, perhaps I am not stuck. Perhaps it’s just the lawnmower. And I left the thick patch of brush. But the lawnmower is still there.

Just a moment. There’s someone at the door.

It’s a corpse.

Third time this week.

God damn it.

Dead people. Always interrupting dinner.

Dead people, you are so rude.

My name is Frank. I’m fifteen years old. I’m six-foot-six. I have been since I was nine. When I was seven, I was in a car accident. I had to have one hundred and seventy-four stitches in my forehead, cheek, and neck. Do you see where all of this is going? Yes, I am called “Frankenstein.” with great frequency. I have large hands. I have large feet and have worn large orthopedic shoes since kindergarten. The clunky black kind of orthopedic shoes. I used to want to be a country singer. Now I don’t know. I lost part of my tongue in the accident. I bit down on it. It came clean off. The police could not find it to reattach it. I sound a little funny now. I have accepted that I scare everyone else at school. I cried about it for a while and my parents made me see a therapist. The therapist had trouble understanding me. I would tell her, “Everyone thinks I should be a monster.” She would say, “It’s those other kids who are monsters.” I know she is right. I wouldn’t mind being their kind of monster: pretty, or suave, cunning. Even just able to stand up straight. I would be a vampire, a werewolf. I would be the creature from the black lagoon.

AWP has been oddity, curiosity, and overwhelming surge of bookness. It’s much larger than I expected and very difficult to process the sensory overload that accompanies such great numbers of people. I haven’t been to a long-ish conference in a couple months, and I remember every reason why I don’t like them. But I have learned a great deal: some about craft, some about publishing, some about the writing life. I thank my lucky stars for seeing friends and teachers; were I to have done this alone, I would have given up after the first session, retreated to my cave, and pledged to write another month of microfiction.

I’ve managed to limit my spending on books thusfar, as well, which is good. I’ll probably drop another $50 or so tomorrow afternoon as people are packing up.

My month of microfic is over, and I’m planning to sit down and evaluate the results when I get settled in at home. I feel excited about having accomplished it, and am pretty sure that a poem or two will spring forward as a result of these little stories. The most interesting part of the experiment was learning what my preoccupations are right now; I don’t think I’d realized.

I’m certain that eventually, someone will tell me that the creative well has run dry and will ask for some help. Last semester, I had two students commit to “the seven day challenge,” in which I had them write a poem each day based on a very specific– and sometimes very difficult– assignment. The point, of course, was not to create seven excellent poems. The point was to fail to write seven good poems, and fail spectacularly, because isn’t that creative block simply an unwillingness to be bad, really really bad? The month of microfic took that sentiment and drew it out into a month, and I had even more permission to suck because I’m not a fiction writer and no one expects me to be.

I read earlier in the year that New Year’s Resolutions (caps for emphasis) tend to fail because they’re unrealistic and they have no end date. The first time you waver, there’s nothing to strengthen your resolve, because no end is in sight. Making a pledge to change a behavior for 30 days is a much more reasonable way to effect change– you have a strong chance of being successful, and at the end of the 30 days, you can evaluate how the change affected you and whether or not you want to continue.

So, here’s my new prescription… let’s call it White’s Month of Microfic for Poets. (Fiction writers, feel free to complete the assignment by writing poetry.) The rules are as follows:

1. You must write an entry each day.
2. You must make the entry public to one reader or many. If you do not, you are not allowing yourself full permission to fail. Failure kept private is simply guilt. However, you should never apologize for the quality of the work when making it public; in fact, you probably need not even mention that you’re engaged in this microfic exercise.
3. Do not solicit comments. (You’ll get some unsolicited praise, in all likelihood, but if you know you plan to fail, why solicit criticism? You can do better by soliciting criticism on your later successes.)
4. You must write for a maximum of fifteen minutes.
5. You may only revise in the last three minutes of the exercise.
6. You may not have an idea when you sit down to write. If you have an idea already, make a note of it and develop it outside your month of microfic. If the idea was good enough to make you want to write, a) your month is already working, and b) you won’t want to fail. You’ll probably want more than fifteen minutes to develop your idea, anyhow.
7. Since you probably won’t know where to begin, try one of the following:
   • steal a line from a song and use it as a first line or a last line
   • use Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button to research a word you picked at random from the dictionary
   • listen to someone’s conversation and make something overheard into the last line of your story
   • write something boring or mundane that happened to you recently but imagine that you are somehow dramatically altered (in my case, I was usually dead… of course, to make sure my mother didn’t freak out, I used my three minutes revision time to take the story out of first person)

If you decide to go for it, drop me a comment. If you have a blog with RSS, I’ll happily be one of your readers.

If you stuck with Little Fury during February, I really appreciate you reading. Most entries will stay up, as is; those that are transformed into poems later will come down when that happens.

The story was short, and was this: he knew that midnight was the expiration date most anything he might try, so he raced through a whole life’s worth of mistakes in the few minutes he had left. And, feeling as though he’d made a lifetime of them, he thought he would not make any more. But the streets of his pre-midnight experiences were filled with open manholes, and after midnight, none were covered. Who would have come to do the covering?

There is an edge to the universe, and early man went there. We that remained on Earth, we were the idiot cousins. Though in time, we built buildings and split atoms, early man mastered immortality on garden-craft. They found themselves distended on the other side of the first black hole, and bodiless on the far side of the second. This was how they visited the edge of what can be known, and on the other side of that, they found themselves the idiot cousins of something far greater.

Listening to her old records, she was surprised at how supple her voice had once been. It was 1961 when she recorded “You Can’t Run Away from Your Heart,” which Judy Clay would later make famous for a few minutes. But most of the rest of 1961 was a life someone else had lived. The body was not her body now, the voice was something that had divorced her long ago. She understood, on some logical level, that there had been a hot New Orleans summer and a crisp fall, and that she had ridden in Lon Baxter’s convertible, and his hands had been on her back and thighs. But Lon Baxter was less memory now than fact, a fact which didn’t belong to her; he must have been someone else’s fact. And he had been, in the summers of ‘62, ‘64, and ‘65, before he headed to Mexico and got shot in the knee. And now he was on a patio in Chiapas, blind in one eye. He was listening to her old records too, and in a more sentimental galaxy, they might have read one anothers thoughts in a moment like this. But there he was, cripple, wondering if she still had that beautiful voice and did that thing with her buttocks, and he was thinking of a whole other woman, the one from 1964.

Your move, Eric said. But of course, it wasn’t. Dennis knew his hands would reach for one of the pieces, probably the rook, and move it a few squares on the board, but the move was not his, not really. The outcome was never in doubt. Eric would win this game, and would win the next, and they would stand and shake hands and Dennis would walk into drizzle of a New York March. He would ride the 7 train back to Woodside and stop at the Pizza Boy II at the bottom of the platform stairs. He would buy a hot dog wrapped in a pretzel for dinner, and would go home to Gaynell. They would sit in front of the television until she fell asleep, or he did, or they both did, and one or both would finally slog to bed in the hour of the infomercial. Then he would rise and work and live it out another day. And this would continue until one day he would choose to beat Eric in chess, and that would be the day Eric would tell him, and he would not go home.

Hello, sweet, and I was in your dreams last night. Walked there. Dressed in blue; it’s blue that allows access to the unconscious. Could not think of ways to delight you there, as I cannot here. Though I try. I often think of delighting you. Without knowing how. Delight is no fancy thing. Yet its motives and its charms are snakes and eels to me. So walked aimlessly in the dreamscape, sweet, beside you through the monstrous garden, coming towards you at each crosswalk in the intersection you don’t leave. Sat next to you in one of the Parisian cafes, behind you on the train to Leningrad, in the front seat of the runaway taxi. But hardly you notice because all your dreams are blue-tinted, and I can never, in a dream, speak unless first spoken to.

But the beauty of this plan is that when I have grown just another inch or two I will marry Sasha Monroe because she likes taller men, well taller men than me, and we’ll honeymoon in Cambodia where Sasha will eat her first cockroach and I will carve a thin tree-trunk into a boat to take her to the middle of a lake and serenade her under a moon that looks like sodium bicarbonate under blacklight and the whole of the Cambodian people will rise from the long grasses on the shore of the lake and harmonize with me near the end of the song, the net effect of my voice and the voice of the Cambodian people impregnating Sasha with a child who she’ll carry to term in eleven months instead of nine and who will be born in a deep green hospital in Greece and in the stupor of pain and deep green Sasha will ask to name her Jade. This plan assumes Sasha will not marry before I have grown this inch or two.

My curious talent is that I can make babies cry. My mere presence is incentive to wail. Mothers, so adept at dirty looks already, perfect their own abilities to transmit venom through the air when I am introduced. This is just the most recent talent I have discovered, but there have been others: I can stain a window by looking through it too long, I can wilt deli meats by lingering too long before biting into a sandwich, I can misconstrue anyone’s words into a personal attack. I’ve also displayed a natural knack for killing off hamsters and gerbils when they are in my care, though this can usually be explained by my reluctance to be asked to care for them again.

The ostriches carry pails around the zoo, speaking with the human patrons. This is all the animal union was able to accomplish. They’d had such lofty dreams: lions at the ice cream cart, shrews attending bathrooms, mongoose taking tickets at the reptile house. Only sloth and elephant declined assignment. The ostriches are dutiful. They do not rile at the litter the humans created, their feathers don’t ruffle when the renegade ducks fly overhead. No one else is so calm at the treachery of ducks. They sold us out for a piece of sky, say the marmosets. Though the ducks have been gone eight months, they are the subject of at least a half-hour’s griping at all union meetings. Unless one of the humans comes to the zoo with a guide dog and the guide dog is curt. They all agree that guide dogs have no more privilege for haughtiness; their own display is also a service.

I looked over the final print galley of The Smallest Talk this evening. That book is so close to heading to the printer that I can hardly stand it. Good heavens.

I traded e-mails today with a poet whose work I enjoy immensely. He has a new book coming later this year, and some poems that I have been dying to read will be in it. I’ve heard one of the set, at a reading, and we’ve chatted about the others. Put up a pre-order page, Amazon, and I’ll pre-order this book. (Wait a sec, it’s up… but the cover listed ain’t the one the author sent me to look at.)

For my next trick, ladies and gentlemen, the illusionist said to the eight people in the back room of the bar, I present to you… the dead. His eyes and hands tensed on the spot in front of him, the air became a shroud. Slowly appeared before them all Chester A. Arthur. The crowd grimaced, moaned that they’d expected something a bit more dramatic. One asked who it was and another expressed disappointment that the spirit was just some fop with a Garibaldi mustache. Then one said, I’m quite sure that’s Chester A. Arthur, I recognize him from my childhood book of the thirty-eight presidents. All agreed it was, but who was Chester A. Arthur, really, they grumbled. Then whispers. Couldn’t the illusionist have produced a president who might point a finger at his murderer, wag of some scandal? Arthur’s spirit– and it really was Arthur’s spirit, brought to focus nightly for reasons the illusionist could not understand– opened his mouth to speak, but was again mute, and would remain so until the illusionist could conjure a crowd ready to hear him. This was the third week the spirit had appeared, and still it hadn’t happened. We’re getting closer, the illusionist sighed to the spirit. At least this lot knew who you are.

Listening: lots of Sarah Harmer lately. Why isn’t Sarah Harmer famous like a mountain?