Gone Voting

Despite the Lincoln Journal-Star's claim that Nebraska's races are not "hotly contested," I was at the polling booths this morning all hot and contestatory, and I hope you had a good time wherever you voted, too.

Update on my literary noir novel:  Good news!  THE DESIRE PROJECTS is in play at several major presses, with editors loving it and getting back-up in-house reads.  Discretion forbids me to say more, but I'd love to. 

Lovely Agent Mitchell explains that "these days you need extensive support in-house before you [the editor] can buy something," so that's the process that's going on now.  My fingers are so crossed they're cramping, people.

I'm just about packed for NonfictioNow, and I look forward to seeing some of the readers of this blog there in Iowa City soon. 

Creative nonfiction writers might welcome this heads-up from writer Faye Rapoport DesPres:

Prime Number Magazine . . . is "actively seeking" nonfiction for their next issue, which will be online in January. . . .  They've published some impressive writers and are attached to a small press.

Info is at http://www.primenumbermagazine.com/

Writers of creative nonfiction, that pesky fourth genre, might also be interested in this cool blog, Essay Daily.  The post on Prairie Schooner's box-defying editorial preferences intrigued me, seeing as the liberally quoted managing editor James Engelhardt is a colleague and friend--and, from what I've read in the Schooner's pages, he's absolutely right. 

And speaking of Prairie Schooner, the search for a new editor goes on.  This is, of course, an impossible task, as the committee's trying to replace the irreplaceable (sob) Hilda Raz.

Cool things coming up on the blog here: 

You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know, a new memoir by Heather Sellers:  warm, funny, true, featured in the New York Times Book Review and O Magazine, and selling like proverbial hotcakes

Sisters, Strangers, and Starting Over, the second novel by Belinda Acosta, whose interview on this blog featured so largely when her first novel came out

"The Events of October": Murder-Suicide on a Small Campus, by Kalamazoo professor of literature and women's studies Gail Griffin, a thick description of a horrible crime and an all-too-common pattern of male-on-female dating violence, and how it affected a small liberal arts college in Michigan

No Word for Welcome:  The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy, by Wendy Call (whom you might know as the co-editor of the awesome and necessary Telling True Stories), forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press this spring and endorsed by lights no lesser than Philip Lopate and Sandra Cisneros

an interview with Kim Coleman, founder of independent bookstore Indigo Bridge Books

--and of course, the continuing saga of my publishing angst, the forbearance of the HH, and the general spiffiness of Spyder von Zeppelin, feline extraordinaire.  Let me just get back from soaking up the ambience of Iowa City, and I'll start knocking the stuff out of this pipeline.

Offline 'til next week--