BIT O' BACKGROUND: I started this website as an experiment, and pasted the site info on my paperback when it came out this past Spring. The response has been amazing. Rather than just having tons of static info about Yours Truly on the site (though it's there too if you want it), I wanted to provide some services. One is the ever-morphing monthly calendar where I post events of talented friends, or people I dig -- from literary to art to fashion to erotic fiction workshops to music and stuff in between.
Then the fiction contest. After years of sending my shit out here, there, and everywhere, and accumulating a thousand rejections, I know there's room for more venues to showcase fiction. Why not on a website? Why not even outside of a straight-up online lit mag or 'zine?
I've been knocked out by the response, and the work. Not only that, but one of the first contest winners has already been contacted by an agent who's interested in more work! You never know.
The UCLA class this past semester was stunning -- and there final reading at Small World Books was a smash hit. I was blown away by the presence of the writers and power of their words. Big congrats to Yasmine Lever, Andy Heil, Sean Wolfson, Kristin Petersen, Wes Alderson, Jerry Brunkala, Marcy Rye and Si Matthies! Watch out for their names in the near future 'cuz if they keep on writing they will be coming right at you. Guaranteed.
Don't forget to pick up the paperback of GO WEST YOUNG F*CKED-UP CHICK if you haven't already gotten one -- that is, if you want to see me finish a second book! Also, support your local indie bookstores -- Skylight, Midnight Special, Dutton's, Small World Books, Vroman's, etc. Check out Skylights' new online presence @ www.skylightbooks.com . You can even order books through them! I'll be messing with and updating my website to incorporate that info -- balance out the amazon presence.
Dear readers, subscribers, browsers, friends, fans, foes!
DON'T FORGET TO ENTER FICTION CONTEST #2!!! See info above. Come on, if you don't got the holiday blues, you can at least stir up some black comedy right about now, just as the Fat Man in the sky is making tracks.
Merry Xmas baby, Chanukah, Ramadan, and of course my personal fave Kwanzaa.
I'm off to San Miguel de Allende in the morning, it's three am, that witching hour when the world collapses inward -- and I still have to pack. Wanted to say hi before I disappear -- escape the happy time, the swampish holiday cheer -- heading down to San Miguel to write for three weeks. Will visit with the luminous and talented Joy Nicholson, author of insta-classic Tribes of Palos Verdes -- her and her photo-journalist husband, three parrots, two parakeets, and three dogs -- or some combination thereof. Mex menagerie. So this hello won't be long -- but I want to wish everyone not just a Happy New Year but a Happy New Millennium -- this is really when the snake of time shifts on its scaly axis. How will you ring it in? Love to hear from people about the wacked ways they contemplate a thousand years past and usher in a new thousand years (depending on how long it all continues -- think green).
The reading at Beyond Baroque with Fran Gordon was fantastic -- thanks to all of you who showed. It was the first time I read from this new second book in public...which was terrifying and exhilarating (some of the stuff I'd written that morning, kinda like a high wire act but bound by print) -- the response was great, and inspiring. Many many thanks. More Bangkok to come. Meanwhile I pore through Slavov Zizek's The Plague of Fantasies, Divination in Thailand, and other books -- excavating the sinews of fantasy, mucking in the particular hells we make of our desires, and what our desires mold us into -- something like that.
I'm hoping to write my ass of down there in the sleepy little village of San Miguel -- where the ex-pats abound but the posadas still take place nightly, where the men and women of the village circle each other, men going one way, women another, check each other out, and the birds come in from the mountains and descend onto the square just as the sun sets, darkening the sky momentarily -- and years ago, maybe he's still there, a mad priest used to ride the bell that rang every evening at sundown --
Mid-January I'll be back, with a fresh update -- in the meantime, have bodacious holidaze -- and keep your eye out for info on the long-awaited special film-lit issue of Tin House magazine. It should hit newsstands mid- to late January, and Tin House will do both a New York and West Coast launch, including a panel discussion featuring Jonathan Lethem, Fred Leebron, David Trinidad, and David Gates moderated by the eminent Rob Spillman at the Barnes & Noble/Astor Place in NYC February 5th, and February 7th a panel discussion at Book Soup with Jerry Stahl and others (probably and possibly including: Ann Magnuson, Michael Tolkin, Larry Gross, Eddie Bunker) moderated by me -- both on that elusive intersection between film and literature -- does it exist?
Until the new millennium -- keep on trucking and tripping.
Yours,
Rachel
Click to get back issues of updates -- more gossip, ranting!
November 2000 Update: Seven Deadly Sins Contest! Plus Bonus Political Rant
June 2000 Update: Hell's Angels, Rocking the Tin House, and More!