Welcome Year of the Snake!

Or more formally, the Year of the Water Snake. Celebrate by dropping in on The Mysterious China Blog to learn a little Chinese history, legend and lore.
Or pick up a copy of Kelli Stanley's first Miranda Corbie mystery, City of Dragons, which starts out with a murder on Chinese New Year.
Treat yourself to a Chinese movie marathon. (Get some inspiration here at Watch Culture.)
Don't forget to read the predictions for the year ahead. Tradition states that years designated by the Snake are marked by twists and turns.
Wuldn't it be cool to do an anthology with all the stories inspired by a zodiac animal? You could have more than twelve stories because each of the animals has variations on elements--water, fire, earth, etc. Hm.  That's going to have to go up on my possibility shelf, along with the Shakespeare Noir idea.

Book Review All Due Respect

ALL DUE RESPECT
Edited by Chris Rhatigan


I approach anthologies the way I approach the tables at a potluck dinner, wary but hopeful. I know that there will always be someone who brings a retro-ironic Jello salad made with lime gelatine and cottage cheese. (And I didn't like it when my grandmother made it.)
If I'm lucky, there will also be a bowl of my favorite white trash indulgence, Five-Cup Salad. (1 cup mandarin orange slices. 1 cut pineapple chunks. 1 cup minature marshmallows. 1 cup grated coconut. 1 cup sour cream. It's insanely good and full of vitamin C!)
And if I'm really lucky there will be a dish on the table that I've never tasted, a combination of flavors and textures hitherto unknown to me but delicious from the first bite.)
All Due Respect, the new anthology from Christopher Rhatigan's Full Dark City Press, is a groaning board of treats, from the wonderfully named "The Great Whydini" by David Cranmer to "A Drink Named Fred" by Tom Hoisington. (Seriously, who's not going to read those two stories first?) Everything is good here, not a green bean casserole in the lot.
This is an unthemed anthology but the common thread is crime--all kinds of crime and the criminals who commit them, some of them planners and some of them opportunists as in Patricia Abbott's 70s story "Wheels on the Bus."
Some of the stories are about the knife-edge between life and death, like Matthew C. Funk's "His Girl," and Erin Cole's visceral "7 Seconds," one of two stories that seem to have been written in the wake of Sandy Hook. (The other is "Ratchet" by Stephen D. Rogers, a story that just drips menace laced with surprise.)
There are first lines that grab you, like "By the time I got there, they'd already taken three of his fingers" ("Habeus Corpus" by Benedict J. Jones) and "Gilberto's mama was a whore--white chick with more tattoos than teeth, even before skin ink became fashionable." (Gary Clifton, "The Last Ambassador t6o Pushmata." The stories are stuffed full of lines you want to write down so you'll remember, or lines you wish you could forget because they're so good you wish you'd thought of them.
Some of the stories have twist endings, some are on a straight line to a bad place from the first paragraph. And the aforementioned stories by Cranmer and Hoisington? They do not disappoint. In fact, nothing here really disappoints except the lack of women writers. Out of 29 stories, only three were written by women. Ladies--I want to see a better showing next time!
At 175 pages, this anthology is just the right length to while away a Saturday morning if you have the time to gobble it up whole.

The Ugly One--the finished story

Have you ever done this? I managed to send out a working draft of a story to two different editors AND post it here before finding the final version deep in the wrong folder.  Ack.
Here's the real version:

THE UGLY ONE
by Katherine Tomlinson

Liia was very young when she first realized she was different.

Her mother had suckled her but not nurtured her in any other way and Liia knew that if it had not been for the intervention of her father, she would have been abandoned when her family and the school they swam with moved on to warmer waters.

Liia’s difference was not her fault. Her mother had swum through a current dense with toxic waste and when she gave birth to 23 fry, all of them but Liia were born dead. Liia’s mother tried to eat her dead offspring but their flesh was poisonous to her.

Her mother hated her, but her father had named her "Liia," which means "miracle” and had protected her from predators until she was old enough to fend for herself.

Just a suggestion....

Nathan Fillion

James REad

Every once in a while, the writers on Castle will tease viewers with the topic of Castle's unnamed/unknown father. The show's now in its fifth season and I think it's time they address it. (I mean, they ran that over-the-top conspiracy subplot involving Kate's mother through four seasons but it looks like it's finally been put to bed.) The actor I nominate to play Castle's dad:  James Read.  Doesn't he look like Nathan Fillion? They even have the same smirk/smile.

Looking for Jobs on CL

I saw this "Looking for a freelance writer" ad on CraigsList today. I don't know about you, but I think they're setting the bar too high:  Looking for a writer who can perform simple writing tasks. Must be able to read/write in English, have a keyboard and an internet connection.

Book Review Debt by Rachel Carey

Debt

by Rachel Carey

In Rachel Carey's debut novel, Debt, money (or lack thereof) and class hold roughly the same importance they do in a 19th century novel of manners. She has taken the conventions of chic lit (all the fancy restaurants and mindless consumption you see in books like Bergdorf Blondes) and mixed them with a subtly snarky style that evokes a 21st century Jane Austen.

She is keenly observant, pricking her characters' pretensions with subtle gibes that are so sharp you almost don't notice them until they draw blood.

The characters--and there are a lot of them--are all fully realized. There's the entitled Nadya--it's her world, you just live in it--and the totally adorable Clyde. Our narrator is would-be novelist Lillian whose work in progress is so downbeat it even depresses her and who is beginning to regret the way her student debt is piling up without her having much to show for it. That would depress anyone.

But this is a comedy, a multi-layered farce that treats money the way Sex and the City treated sex. Carey has a good time tweaking pop culture--there's a hilarious running gag involving a blog called "shopacovery"--and everything about Lillian's pretentious writing teachers will resonate with anyone who's ever taken a writing class.

This book is subversive and sly and extremely entertaining. If you liked books like Confessions of a Shopaholic and The Devil Wears Prada, you will love Debt.

Foodie Friday Blogs to Look Out For

I discovered Big Girls/Small Kitchen through a link on a newsletter I get every day. The article that caught my eye was "Homemade Fixes for French Fry Cravings."   As someone who has never met a French Fry (or even a potato dish) I didn't like (except for scalloped potatoes), I was all over that article.  The roasted chickpeas looked especially yummy.
You can never  have too many food blogs bookmarked.