Got the good news today that my flash story "Grudge Match" will be appearing at BRAIN HARVEST! Details to follow, but this sale has me stoked!

I wrote "Grudge Match" as a two fisted fable during the SEVEN DAYS OF FLASH challenge that me and some colleagues did in April. So, I'm thrilled that something so fresh out of my ID, running faster than my internal editor could catch, has made the grade. Huzzah!

Thanks to Shane and the gang at BRAIN HARVEST and all my amigos during the seven days of flash for helping get this one out in the world.

Huzzah!

JSR

Mycena leaiana
On a rotten hemlock log across a brook, Mt. Toby Reservation.

The new camera, for those who care, is this, not a digital SLR but a budget 12 MP Kodak point and shoot the first thing I did on which was reset the resolution to 10 MP. It has a big long zoom that, without stabilization, shockingly works not all that well, and a wide angle that lets me be 3 inches from the mushroom, which is old hat to most people but is new and wonderful to me. I’m still learning the semi-klunky interface, but it takes a nice picture when I let it.

Time erodes all things, and new things, harder things, spring forth from their remains.

Old Maize God was made of orange-painted plaster. I bought him for a dollar from a wandering huckster kid at the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá and couldn’t work up the guts to toss him in the sacred cenoté. For three years, he guarded my garden from the likes of hungry wabbits, storm-felled trees and marauding bands of centaurs. But the winter of 2010 wormed its way through his plaster flesh, and he crumbled.

Young Maize God is carved from green-black jadeite, heavy and resilient as iron. I found him among the mazelike convolutions of market day in Chichicastenango, in the Guatemalan highlands. He’s done his best to take up the mantle of the old god—but come August, he and I must bid farewell to our much-loved little communal plot in the valley and travel east, back to the city, where fecundity will be restricted to a forest of pots on the back balcony.

Who knows what other change may come? Not I. Not he.

Happy solstice.

Just read an interesting comment from wrestling veteran Larry Matysik. He noted that the chances of success in the wrestling biz are bloody slim, even for the talented and the determined, but it can happen. But the goal is the performance. Losing sight of this fact is understandable, but bad news.

"With all this being said, once a wrestler finally gets a break, learns to center himself, realizes he has to watch his money, and accept that the mechanics and the politics of the business are seldom fair or democratic, he can concentrate on the FUN part - telling great stories and making the thrilling matches that excite the fans."

Sound like any other business you know, brudder? I've heard similar comments from musicians and writers. So here's to our cooky profession of passion and sometimes little payoff. Shakespeare had it right, the play is the thing. Time to crank out some great stories and thrilling tales to wrestle me up some fans!



Wooo!

JSR