And I’m also plugging them because, LOOK!  Page 8! http://issuu.com/afterhappyhourreview/docs/ahhr_fall_issue_final

I’m giving the Clover Literary Rag a plug because they’re publishing my story, Bus and Truck in their next issue. Since it’s a biannual publication with a 9% acceptance rate, only slightly higher than The New Yorker, which has a 0% acceptance rate, I feel rather buoyed by the news. All you actors know that coming up with material for a story about a bus and truck is like shooting fish in a barrel. For all my many vegan friends I have never, nor will I ever shoot a fish.

No, I did not put that in the subject line just to attract Jewish scholars, though it might, and then they will be horrified. Anyway, I had to put in a plug for my son Michael, although it has nothing whatsoever to do with writing, unless you count the writers for Anger Management, a seriously non-Talmudic show.

Michael had a scene with Charlie Sheen in which he ‘discussed’ the Rambam. Fun fact: Michael’s dad went to Yeshiva Rambam where he didn’t have much fun at all.

Although it’s highly unlikely that anybody has reread Gone With the Wind looking for the lengthy trial scene I mentioned in an earlier post, I meant to write Inherit the Wind.” Sorry.

I would like my tombstone to read, STILL REVISING.

Hit with the terrifying realization that I will be out of town next week (you have to do a show now and then), followed by jury duty, which could be one day or one trial and that one trial could be straight out of Inherit the Wind, I spent the last 72 hours (more or less all of them), wildly revising the 100 pages the very nice agent requested from me. I am now hallucinating commas.

Anyway, I hit ‘send,’  and I actually feel much calmer. I’m on my way to another conference. With any luck I will get another excuse to stay up for 72 hours.

This will be my last blog post for awhile. I didn’t want my six regular readers to worry that I had been carried off by the herd of marauding deer that occupy our front lawn on a nightly basis, or, still worse that I’d run out of things to say*. It’s just that I have to finish editing 100 pages of the manuscript the very nice agent requested, in a very short time.

*I could do 10 pages on a hangnail.

Conferences are great! I love them! Worth every penny (she said as she looked at her pathetic bank balance). An agent requested 100 pages of a manuscript. Another agent asked me for three chapters of a different novel! The box lunch was like bad high school picnic. Hey, you can’t have everything!*

Raise your hand if you think you already do. Well, you’re wrong.

I have only been at the James River Writers Conference since last night and I have already learned two important things.

1. I should not even think about self publishing.

2. The Hilton Garden Inn makes a mean chicken pot pie.

Another short story published. Sorry Facebook friends who will me seeing this twice. And yet, it’s worth reading twice, don’t ya think?

http://www.quailbellmagazine.com/the-unreal/short-story-the-brittlestones