Jeffrey Ricker's Blog, page 44

Help! I’ve been vlogged!

While I was in New Orleans for the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by author and vlogger Carsen Taite. We talked about my first novel, Detours, my upcoming novel The Unwanted, as well as a number of places where you can find my short stories.

There’s also what sounds like some random gunplay in the background along with a rather amusing moment where—well, as River Song would say, spoilers! You’ll just have to watch.

Upcoming chat on June 11

They say you should always try new things, so next week, I’m trying something new: a chat!

I’ll be taking part with a number of authors from Bold Strokes Books on Tuesday, June 11, at Beth Wylde’s Yahoo group. I’ll post an excerpt or two and answer questions (and probably ask a few of my own, too). Go check out the Yahoo group and see all of the other events she has lined up for the month of June, which is devoted to all sorts of LGBT literature in honor of Pride.

Come on by! Hope to talk to all ten of you who come here regularly….

Taking a page from ‘Nathan’s playbook, or 99-cent sale!

So, if you follow me on Twitter or like my page on Facebook (hey, this might be a good time to do one or the other—or both!), you’ll have noticed this week that there appears to be a huge (no, really, it’s HUGE!) e-book sale going on at the moment. For starters, my debut novel Detours can be had at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo for 99 cents.

Yes, I’m that cheap and easy, apparently.

But more than that, just about every anthology in which I have a story can be bought for the same price. I’m not sure how long this sale will last, but short story anthologies are a great way to introduce yourself to a number of new authors.

Over at his Red Room blog, my friend ‘Nathan has put together a handy dandy list of all the e-books in which his work has appeared that are on sale right now. There’s a fair bit of overlap between his bibliography and mine, so I figured I’d put together a list as well.

Now, you can find these all at Barnes & Noble and Amazon, like I said, but I’m going to list the titles for sale via Kobo as partner to my favorite local independent, Left Bank Books. (If you live in St. Louis, you surely know them by now. If you don’t, where have you been? Go to their store. Say hi to Spike the cat while you’re at it.)

I’ve put an asterisk next to the stories/anthologies that are on the… naughty side.

Detours (this is the novel, and a good place to start, I’d say)
“Lifeblood,” in Blood Sacraments *
“Murder on the Midway” in Men of the Mean Streets
“Landfall” in Wings *
“Satan Takes a Holiday” in Raising Hell *
“Blackout” in Night Shadows: Queer Horror
“Mount Olympus” in Riding the Rails*
“Finish Line” in Sweat*
“The Key Ingredient” in The Dirty Diner*

Oh my, that’s a lot of asterisks, isn’t it?

Saints & Sinners in pictures

It always takes me a while to edit photos once I come back from a trip. This is not necessarily because I’m a perfectionist, but more typically because I’m not the world’s best picture-taker, so I rely on Photoshop and Camera Raw to salvage what I can.

Without further ado, here are the shots I took last month in New Orleans at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival. I always look forward to this event. One of the best things about writing (besides having written, as Dorothy Parker famously said) is the group of friends and compatriots and, occasionally, partners in crime that I’ve met as a result. Those two guys pictured to the right, for example. That’s ‘Nathan (Burgoine) Smith and (Famous Author) Rob Byrnes (who needs to have his people update his website—ahem). Rob was the guy who passed along the call for submissions that resulted in my first published piece of creative writing (an essay about my dog, Dakota), and both ‘Nathan and Rob were included in the anthology that contained my first published piece of fiction. I often feel like ‘Nathan and I are in the same class at How to Be A Writer School, and I can’t wait to read his novel Light, which comes out this October.

There are lots more people like ‘Nathan and Rob whom I love catching up with at Saints & Sinners, not least of whom is my editor Greg Herren. He never fails to make me laugh and give me things to think about. Likewise, my friends Tim and Becky, editors of my aforementioned first fiction, are always a pleasure to see, and so many others to boot.

And I even got to record a vlog with author Carsen Taite, talking about my upcoming novel and all sorts of other writerly things. Of course, there was a rather… odd moment in the middle of it where I might have lost my composure, but I won’t spoil the surprise.

Apostrophe Man! or ‘Nathan gets vlogged

’Nathan Burgoine gets the vlog treatment from Carsen Taite! And that little voice at the beginning that says “we’re recording”? That’s me!

(Now that I think of it, “’Nathan gets vlogged” sounds naughty, but I assure you this video is completely safe for family viewing. No, really.)

A review of “The Other Man” and a giveaway

Over at The Novel Approach blog there’s a review of The Other Man, which contains my essay “What If?” along with essays by 20 other writers on the topic of infidelity. In addition, the poster asked each of the writers included in the anthology to answer the question: “How difficult was it to write your essay, considering the thoughts and feelings involved and the fact you were sharing them with strangers?” Check out the answers; they vary widely.

And there’s also an opportunity to win an e-copy of the book courtesy of editor Paul Fahey. Deadline’s midnight June 6 though, so don’t dawdle!

Congratulations to the Lambda Literary Award winners!

Last night was a really good night for writers I know. It was the 25th annual Lambda Literary Awards, and a number of friends, peers, and new acquaintances came out winners:

J.M. Redmann, Lesbian Mystery, for Ill Will (and—AND!—she got married yesterday!)
D.L. King, Lesbian Erotica, for The Harder She Comes: Butch/Femme Erotica
Tom Cardamone, LGBT Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror, for Green Thumb

At the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival last month, I also had the pleasure of meeting Sassafras Lowrey, who received the Dr. Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award last night; and Trebor Healey, who picked up the Dr. James Duggins Mid-career Novelist Prize.

For the complete list of nominees and winners, click here.

Pride and Father’s Day Sales at Untreed Reads

Who’s your daddy?

I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist. Over at Untreed Reads, they’re having a pair of sales, one for Father’s Day which includes 40% off selected paternal-related stories in their library (which includes “D.C. al Fine” by my friend and colleague Jeff Howe), and 30% off LGBT titles for their Pride Month sale. The latter sale includes two stories by me, “New Normal” and “Straightening Up.”

Who doesn’t love a sale? Go check it out.

The cruelest cut, or “How many fingers am I holding up?”

Today I was going to blog about my recent weekend in New Orleans at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival, where I spent time with writers and editors and publishers and as always came away re-energized and inspired to pursue my own writing with renewed vigor.

Instead, let me tell you a far more exciting story about how I nearly cut off my finger!

Emphasis on “nearly.” My ring finger on my left hand may be slightly mangled but it’s still hanging on.

Let me back up. Folks may recall how I swore off yardwork in 2003 after I threw out my back for the first time. (When I did it again in 2011, I swore off spinning classes. Seriously, seems like just moving is a hazard.) However, now that I’m home for the summer and am essentially a stay-at-home writer/dogsitter/chef, it seems only fair that I make some time to do things around the house that need doing, especially since Mike’s been handling everything solo while I’ve been in grad school. (He’s a mensch, he is.) So, the last couple times the grass has needed mowing, I’ve pitched in and done it.

Now, let me tell you about our lawn mower, which I think I’m going to rename spawn of Satan or Damien or something similarly appropriate. It’s a rechargeable electric model that Mike bought shortly after we moved into this house. At my old place, which had a much smaller yard, I had a reel mower. You know the kind—with the canister of blades that spins around and runs on a one-horsepower motor. In this case, I was the horse. It was a gift from a friend and it was a great little mower for my little yard. Mike’s gas mower gave up the ghost about a year after we moved in (note to self: where did that cliché phrase originate? Not that I’m going to interrupt my flow right now to look it up). When he replaced it, he decided to go with the rechargeable electric one—turn a key and hold down a lever and it starts right up, with no gas fumes, so it’s a little friendlier for the environment.

It’s also a temperamental, fragile cantankerous beast that barely had enough battery life when it was new to get through both the front and back yards. Did I mention that it also weighs a ton? Anyway, now that it’s over five years old, that battery life doesn’t even get through the entire back yard on a single charge. Naturally, the cost to replace the battery is higher than the blasted thing cost in the first place.

But let’s get to the heart of the problem with it, which is that the switch gave out over a year ago, so the beast didn’t even run until his dad rewired it and bypassed the safety lever. Unfortunately, now the only way to shut it off is to turn off the key and pull it out, and when you do, the blade doesn’t stop; it just spins down until it finally loses momentum and stops.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?

I started mowing yesterday and only got through half the back yard before the battery gave out. I finished the rest of the back roughly with the weed trimmer (which is also rechargeable, but at least in this case the batteries are replaceable). However, cutting a lawn with a weed trimmer? Not a lot of fun. So yesterday afternoon it looked like it was about to start pouring and I hadn’t gotten around to mowing, so I hurried out and finished it up before the skies burst open like they were threatening to do. For the record, the rain held off until the evening, so there was really no need for me to rush.

But rushing I was, and when I finished the mowing and took the bag off the mower, I reached into the little ejector chute to clear out the last of the grass clippings.

For the record, I’d like to point out that I’d switched off the mower and removed the key at least a minute beforehand, so the blade wasn’t spinning that fast, but it was still going fast enough when it made contact with my ring finger.

Yes, I should have been wearing gardening gloves and yes I should have checked to make sure the blade had stopped and yes, I’ll skip the shock and the flailing and the surprising lack of curse words (much to my amazement, the strongest thing I said for the first few minutes was “Dang it all!”). I ran inside and grabbed a tea towel (which started out tan but is decidedly less so now) and held it for what felt like eleventy million hours before it finally stopped bleeding. It looks nasty but it doesn’t feel so bad now, though I’m not looking forward to unwrapping it later. Anyway, I could go on about how it probably needs a stitch but I’m on Canadian health care and this being the U.S. I’ve had enough of jumping through those particular hoops, and if I get a scar then at least I’ll have something interesting to talk about.

I am not, however, ever using that lawn mower again.

What’s with “Billy”?

Getting into Jamie’s head was far too easy. I’ve been him. I’ve lived through those days. And there are some phenomenal lines from Ricker here that perfectly capture the mindset of Jamie (and the everykid he represents). This story, part of Speaking Out!, is a perfect example of the anthology as a whole – LGBTQ youth tales from youth voices dealing with life the way it is for LGBTQ.

My friend and colleague ‘Nathan Burgoine gives a shoutout to my story “The Trouble with Billy” on his Red Room blog. I wrote the story while I was in the beginning stages of working on my next novel, The Unwanted, and started getting into the heads of not just Jamie, but also Sarah and Billy. As you might guess, since it’s a fantasy novel, things take a definite turn from this very much real-world story.

There are a lot of other good real-world stories in this anthology by writers like Sandra McDonald and Alex Jeffers. Check it out. Also, ‘Nathan is reading a short story a day this year, so take a look through his previous blog entries to get some of his recommendations. I’ve got a couple recommendations myself, which I’ll share later.