Novels take time to write. What better way to catalog the essence of a story than by writing only the first and the last sentence? First and Last Sentence Magazine publishes just that: novels that don’t really exist by fictional authors offering up stories like mystery-meat sandwiches. Interesting premise. My offering, “The Gates of Leaven,” appeared today.

I’m really excited to see “Too Quiet on the Carpet” published as this week’s story at Brain Harvest: An Almanac of Bad Ass Speculative Fiction. Brain Harvest has been publishing one 750-word or shorter story each week since March, and each has been—in my reading—fully deserving of its “bad ass” designation.

As for my little story, it’s very odd but—I’m told—”really awesome” and “viciously sublime.” It’s a bit of a modern re-imagining of the basic premise from the story “Father’s Last Escape,” an amazingly weird magical realism tale by the early 20th-century Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz.

I have a letter (yes, an actual letter) published in this issue of The Dirty Napkin, which is an awesome publication with intimidating contributor bios. The wonderful editors have also decided to make my audio reading one of the handful available to non-subscribers—so anyone can listen to me read it (beware).

The epistle is an interesting form. The email missive, the AIM conversation, the cacophony of “tweets”—these successors do not quite make for a true spiritual supplantation. And, though the epistle has a practical purpose (to convey a message),  its literary merit (if it exists) can be unrelated altogether. It may even be a pleasant surprise.

An old-school New Yorker-esque self-consciously-super-pretentious non-fiction profile piece was published a few days ago in issue six of The Legendary.

On a related note, I actually thoroughly enjoyed that class. Granted, during senior spring, even reading a male classmate try to channel Jane Austen every week is better than biochemistry.

I have a piece in issue #15 of Six Little Things, themed “Captain McHurkeydurkey’s Utterly Masturbatory Prose Parade”—which is in fact the very best theme for any issue of any magazine, ever. When I saw it, I knew I had to submit (and that surely I had something really self-consciously masturbatory from my college writing courses that would make a good starting point).

SLT is a great little spot on the web that puts out exactly 6 very short stories/poems/things-made-up-of-words in each quaterly issue. Overjoyed to be a part of this issue.

“Memories of Life” appears in the Summer 2009 issue of Burst Magazine, a publication specifically designed for mobile phones (and including only pieces of 700 words or fewer). Even though iPhones and the like can handle normal web pages, there is something to be said for a magazine that knows what it does and who it’s for—subway commuters and the short-attention-spanned alike.

I wrote an even shorter first draft of this very short piece while listening to Nobuo Uematsu’s signature track “Melodies of Life” from the piano-arrangement of the soundtrack from Final Fantasy 9, of all things. Inspiration is everywhere.