David Macinnis Gill's Blog: Thunderchikin Reads, page 36

Shatner Does Palin

In his best performance since "Rocket Man,"  The Negotiator resprises Sarah Palin's resignation speech. Take that, Klingon.

Small Timid Comfort

The earliest draft of this story was started in the summer of 1993 while I was teaching summer school. It changed over the next couple of years as a tried to find a home for it. The germ for it came from a story my mother used to tell about traveling as young woman across country with an infant.

Calla heard the train before she saw its light cut through the fog. The air horn blasted as the engine wound over the ribbon of track, growing larger until it blew by the small people in the Nashville sta

Scent of Apples

This story dates from 1996, with revisions done in 1998. I wanted to write about grief and its lingering effects on the people left behind. The title comes from the myth of Tantalus, who could smell the fruit but never taste it.

My dad, Allison thought as she took the Corvette off of cruise control, is a philosopher. Not a Descartes or a Machiavelli. More like a Will Rodgers, a man who studies every day life and finds meaning in it. If she'd had a penny stock for all the times her dad had said, Y

Rubberband Man

This spec fic story was written in 2005. I wanted to tell the story of a man's life as seen by someone who doesn't know him at all.

The guy always wears a rubber band around his wrist—to remind him of what he is.  It's a thin brown band about the color of his skin, and like him, it's impossible to see unless you're looking for it.

That's what I do, look for it, when I show him to his favorite table in the back of the dining room, always away from the crowd.  It's a nice place, our restaurant, with

People's Song

This story first appeared in a slightly different version in as "People's Song" in Writers' Forum, v. 22, 1996, p. 66-73.  I wrote a few months after my dad died of lung cancer. He always wanted to be a musician, but as he often said,  a lack of rhtyhm and the inability to carry a tune stopped him. I made a few changes before posting it.

Woody Guthrie has shown up again in my hospital room, and he's swigging from a bottle of cheap whiskey, like the first time  he wandered in here two nights ago.

Going for Broke

This is another Coby Hawkersmith story, set when Coby is a young man. My family used to visit the Ebro dog track. When I was 14, they let me start picking races for the program, but I had to stand outside the fence to watch the races.

Thirty miles from the white sandy beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida panhandle became a dense forest of straggly pines. The two-lane highway that Coby had taken south from Dothan slithered through the rough underbrush, far away from the hotels and tourist tr

Eating Dirt

I wrote this curious little story for a short-short contest. One editor passed on it with a rejection letter that was twice as long as the story itself. When I sent him another piece, he passed on it because it just didn't stay with him the way this one had. Which begs the question…

The boy played in the dirt yard. His mottled back was bare. He sifted the loose dirt like flour through his fingers until it drifted and faded into the breeze. He chewed his thumbnail, ground tiny rocks between his te

Cut Bait

Although I grew up in an area world famous for its fishing, my father would wake us up every Sunday morning in the spring to drive 60 miles to a small lake with very few fish. My brother may not see himself as the narrator, but I bet he will recognize his thumb.

Do you remember the first time you caught a catfish? How about the first time a catfish caught you? I do. I have a inch-long scar underneath my thumbnail to remind me of how I once wrestled with both a mud cat and my faith in my daddy.

Broken Circles

This story appeared in The Crescent Review in 1993, my official debut. It was one of several pieces I wrote while teaching summer school that year. From first draft to acceptance with about three weeks. Like many of the stories written during this time, it feature legends form my mother's family mythology.

I have long legs and big feet, and I wear cowboy boots. So when my flight left LaGuardia, Delta terminal, at 6:45 am, I was in first class because I had to have some place to put my legs. The n

Take a Little Trip

Did you read this recent article in PW about the journey that the ARC of Mary Pearson's newest novel, The Miles Between, is taking? If you'd like the ARC tour to visit your home town, here's your chance. All you have to do is make a comment below by 6PM EST today, and your name will be in a drawing for the next gret adventure (drawing to be held by whichever Locust is in the house at the moment).

So that you know what you're getting yourself into, I've pasted the rules from Mary's LJ below:

1. REA