Cruising the Green of Second Avenue

What’s a friend for if not to make you feel good, eh? A very early (1959 or so) friend just wrote, “Indeed, let me tell you how much I enjoyed reading your short stories” in Cruisng the Green of Second Avenue. (Okay, commercial break: take a moment and click on http://www.wildchildpublishing.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=74&zenid=ff94c21f95111b27e8b7210244ac97a3.)

Now, that is really nice, first, because many friends have promised to buy the book since it was published a year ago, but the royalties don’t even approach the number of commitments I’ve gotten. Second, he not only bought the book, he read it. “I really admire your talent,” he wrote, “to recreate and invent those most improbable situations and these wonderful characters who resurface รก la Faulkner from place to place, smoking (as I used to) Picayune cigarettes or needing to hide their tattoos. Your surprising codas or abrupt plots turning around as in the “Sound of Music” with la belle Ellen Schuster or the hermaphrodite-assumed son of the forger-embezzeler Carl [“The Man Who Put the Sin in Cynic”] give the reader a deserved kick in the pants. Notice I am practicing compound nouns preparing myself for Germany. It’s a delight to “se promener, oder spazieren” in the company of Anderson (a nasty but correct portrait of the Lit Prof in “Donna and the Love Contract”) with his verbal duels. (Once I bought the same sheets at Conran’s and for the same purpose), or Klein the biker and his practical jokes [in “Klein Comes Back Abashed”], the precocious Benny Three Sticks [“The Kid’s Got Smarts”] in remembrance of J.D. Salinger to whom you introduced me in 1959.

Ah, mon vieux ami, you made me go back and read “Astroturfing Benjamin’s Books” the eighth story in Vol. I. And here I am astroturfing my own book, reality imitating art. Thank you for bringing a ray of sunshine into this snowy, overcast January day!

Monday, June 22, 2009

New Distributor of Cruising

Cruising the Green of Second Avenue now has an additional distributor. The two volumes of my short stories are e-books available from BookStrand (http://www.bookstrand.com/product-cruisingthegreenofsecondavenue-15029-332.html). Thank you, Marci (my publisher)!
at 12:11 PM 0 comments

Friday, June 5, 2009

“Demon Switch”

Odd where ideas come from. I was lying in bed reading the Sunday comics and laughed out loud at the cartoon “Baby Blues.” The thought of a “ghost switch” that brings the ghosts out—scaring the shit out of baby brother—stayed with me through church service as I blocked out the short story. “Demon Switch” is now up at Everyday Weirdness. (Sorry, Pastor.) Catch it at http://everydayweirdness.com, at today’s date, June 5.

By the way, the good people at this e-zine are fast! One month elapsed between my writing the and their publishing it. As my college English professor ruefully noted, I may not be an A student but I'm facile.
at 7:45 AM 0 comments
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