Month: October 2006

The other day at work we had a staff appreciation luncheon. Besides the free food, everyone who attended received a $10 gift card (from Old Navy, Amazon, or Starbucks), and a little note of thanks for all our hard work over the past year. The note began with “Dear so-and-so…” and one of my co-workers pointed out that the company had used a semi-colon after this salutation, rather than a colon or the more friendly comma. You really know you work in publishing when you start proofreading even your thank-you notes.

I bring this up now because, on some of the posts below, there’s a “1 Comments” link at the end. There’s a tiny part of my brain going a little crazy over this. It really should be “1 Comment,” singular. I’ve yet to determine if this is fix-able in Blogger, but I suspect that most sane people wouldn’t even notice.

Of course, the easiest solution to this is for more people to respond more often to my posts, thereby eliminating all those “1 Comments” mistakes altogether. I’m just saying.

So I sent out the remaining issues of Kaleidotrope to contributors and a handful of reviewers this morning. All copies should arrive within the next week (or two, if you’re outside the continental United States), and again I want to extend my thanks and appreciation to those of you who helped make the first issue possible.

Now is as good a time as any to remind you that I’m still accepting submissions for the April 2007 issue. I’m especially in need of good fiction and nonfiction at the moment. I’ll accept flash pieces — and gladly if they’re good — but lengthier would be better at the moment, I think. I’m always happy to answer any questions you might have about my submission guidelines.

The Friday Random Guess 10:

  1. “All the Things She Said” by The BossHoss (or T.A.T.U.)
    And I’m all mixed up, feeling cornered and rushed
  2. “Girl” by Beck, guessed by Kim
    And I know I’m gonna steal her eye
  3. “Putting the Damage On” by Tori Amos
    There’s a light in your platoon
  4. “In the Deep” by Bird York
    Life keeps tumbling your heart in circles
  5. “She’ll Come Back to Me” by Cake
    Somehow I know it won’t last too long
  6. “This Side” by Nickel Creek, guessed by Glen
    And I’m nothing but scared
  7. “Invisible City” by the Wallflowers
    Now every heart has a blind side
  8. “We Both Go Down Together” by the Decemberists
    Meet me on my vast veranda
  9. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” by Bob Dylan
    Take what you have gathered from coincidence
  10. “Chimes of Freedom” by Bob Dylan
    Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed

Good luck!

And lest we forget, here’s last week’s answers.

You know, I liked Zadie Smith’s first novel, White Teeth; and while her two subsequent books have received some mixed reviews, I’m interested in reading those novels as well. But doesn’t it seem odd that Garrison Keillor could find practically nothing to say about Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, or Maxine Hong Kingston in today’s Writer’s Almanac, but he could find 6-7 paragraphs’ worth to say about Smith?

The comment links at the end of each post may or may not appear a little screwy. This is only temporary (I hope). I’m trying to migrate over to using Blogger’s own comment system, which is proving a bit more difficult than first anticipated.

Update: With some additional copying-and-pasting to the template, I think I have it up and running. For the moment, I have still have a link on each post to the older SnorComments-enabled comments, but I plan to phase this out soon, unless I run into any problems with the new Blogger-powered setup. Let me know if you run into any problems of your own.