Trans/plant/portation

Photo courtesy of See-ming Lee

I wrote last week about the sudden newsworthiness of LGBT youth suicide. Certainly it’s been around for decades, and there have been and are people who study these people and these moments, but collectively, their work, analysis, and recommendations haven’t made it to center stage. So it frustrates me to see personalities emerge from the woodwork to tout their initiatives, as if we’re seeing a meteoric rise in suicide, or as if the world merely needed their guidance to avert the tide of anguish. Read More…

Everyone loves a good character. The converse is also true. Weak, two-dimensional characters kill a story because what hooks most of us is our interest in the personalities depicted by the writer. After all, we’re writing, usually, about conflict between people, and most stories end by showing how someone changed from the start of the tale. Thus readers are looking for people who feel real, with whom we can identify or about whom we can feel superior, especially in the case of comedy. Read More…

My newest guest blogging stint with Bitch Magazine resumes this week. I’ll be looking at the 2010 midterm elections: the good, the bad, and the loopy.

Snarky’s Machine posted a fun and wildly addictive game called Movie Equations, over on I Fry Mine in Butter. Take a stab at your own cinematic arithmetic.

This afternoon I’ll post a recap of last week’s Dexter season premiere. Spoilers from that episode will be all over the place.

Midweek, expect a new short story, and this time, it sticks like a glob of maple syrup to reality. I hope everyone enjoys it.

Supreme Court Justice Elana Kagan begins presiding with the other 8 justices tomorrow. She took her seat for the first time Friday in a formal ceremony during which no court cases transpired. But let’s get real, she’s going to have to recuse herself for a few of these cases.

Tomorrow I’ll post my review of the Mobile Chowdown V that Susanne and I attended last Friday night! In short, it was great!

There’s an entertaining show about cancer on Showtime, The Big C. This is out of alphabetical order with The L Word, an entirely different, and now completed, series about lesbian life in LA—and which shock of shocks, looks nothing like any actual lesbian’s life I’ve ever known. HBO has its pluralist wives show, Big Love, which hasn’t worked so well for a reality series, Sister Wives, over on TLC. Apparently The Learning Channel wants to learn us some polygamy? I’m not sure. But in this television is a window into our culture thang, there are some obvious disconnects, and not just having to do with the preponderance of overly made up, coiffed women near Rodeo Drive.

Four boys made headlines in the news in these last three weeks, four boys—one of whom was 18 but for all intents and purposes still had the thinking processes and responses of an adolescent—who took their own lives because of bullying, more specifically, anti-gay bullying. You’d think this sort of situation had never happened before. But that’s just because we’ve turned away from admitting we have a long-standing problem with youth suicide. Read More…

It’s not as short as Hemingway’s shortest story (For sale: baby shoes, never worn.) but seeing as I don’t compare myself to him, it doesn’t matter. It is, however, my shortest story, barely scratching 450 words.

She feels the pressure at her knees, because this roof is on more of a slant than the hill behind her house, and she’s only used to running down dirt and grass. Something about this hard tile surface hurts.

Looking toward the sunset she’s excited by how far her vision extends. She’s only ever seen the curve of the earth when she visits the coast with her parents, and somehow, it never seemed as powerful a view as this does now. She wishes, for a snatch of time, that she could just extend this sunset into tomorrow. Read More…

Well, this is my 250th post!

I’m a regular reader of the various “How I found my agent” stories that pop up all over the Web at a slow simmering rate. Part of it is because I enjoy a good pick me up tale in the midst of all the mass-murder, spree-killing, pandemic-virus, certain-doom narratives that flood the information superhighway every day. But I’ll come to Jesus and add that I’m also looking for patterns, as anecdotal as the occasional agent article is. Is there something successful authors are doing that I should adopt as a practice? Is there any kind of aspect to their attitudes, their community base, their writing environment that I can leverage? Read More…

In college, a battle took place every Friday and Saturday night, at the edge of the campus. Two white trucks served hamburgers to students, competitors looking to be top dog in some kind of feud. There was the Wimpy Wagon, and then there was the other one. I guess Wimpy’s won out, since nobody I know remembers the name of the other one, but there was a war, all right. Because this was Syracuse, New York, getting a late night burger anytime after October 15 meant trudging through at best, several inches of snow. That’s a kind of commitment to something that university students rarely muster.

Food trucks weren’t exactly bastions of quality cuisine in this environment. They were just cheap and available, and if a wagon were sixteen steps closer than the dining hall, a good percentage of students would make that their preference, easy. I have no trouble attesting that as a Syracuse University alum, if presented with a no-brainer, I will option that every time. This is why the wine tasting class was booked solid every year, as was Theater for Non-Majors. Read More…

I put all of my Friday Flash stories and a bonus short story in one collection, titled Spinning Around a Sun: Stories by Everett Maroon, and slapped it up on Amazon for their Kindle reader, at the bargain basement price of $2.99. Hey, as an author, I’ll take what I can get in terms of income, so hopefully $3 isn’t too much to ask for months of my work. Anyway, feel free to purchase one!

When we moved to Seattle, we calculated that we did not need a land line for telephone service. After all, we’re only here for 6.5 months. That’s just enough time to get around to giving out a new number and then telling people it’s not our number anymore. When I’d done the initial walkthrough I’d called Susanne, so I knew our phones—which are the same model, only in different colors, and no, I don’t need any jokes about having the same phone, thanks—would work in this space. Hence no need for a land line.

But the super gave me a warning: DSL is terrible in this part of the city. If you want actual bandwidth, get the cable modem. This made me flash back to the last time I had a cable modem, four years ago in DC. I almost threw the thing out my third-story window, because the provider sent each line out to too many customers, and when 8p.m. rolled around—otherwise known as The DC Porn Watching Hour—bandwidth thinned to a few blips an hour. It was mind-numbing. I went directly to DSL without passing GO and was rewarded with a cheaper monthly rate. Read More…