Preview

My erotic romance "Drought" is scheduled to appear in Cowboy Lust, an anthology being released in August. Here, the editor shares a preview of my story: http://www.cowboylust.net/2012/07/31/snapshot-3-michael-brackens-drought/.

32

I received my 32nd acceptance of the year, this time for a 4,300-word confession.

Published 2x

My stories "The Little Black Dress" and "Forced to Choose: Work or Love" appear in the September True Story.

Published

My crime story about a kidnapping gone wrong, "Mac and Cheese Get Boxed," appears in Kept Against His Will II, edited by Christopher Pierce. The anthology was released in March but I just received my contributor copy.

I'm lean. Are you?

Is your writing flabby or fit? Don't know? Take The WritersDiet Test:

http://www.writersdiet.com/WT.php

I tested several of my stories (representing different genres) and all but one was rated "lean" overall. The only story that wasn't rated "lean" was an unedited partial first-draft typed directly into the text window, and it was rated "fit & trim" overall.

Weird video

I don't know why, but someone made a 12-second video of the cover of Bad Girls, one of my short story collections:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtiSExm2BGE

31

I received my 31st acceptance of the year a few minutes ago, this time for a Halloween-themed confession.

28, 29, 30

I just discovered that I had three stories reprinted last month, so they count as my 28th, 29th, and 30th acceptances of the year.

Siri knows me

Siri corrected me today when I was using the dictate function of my iPhone to send a text. (I know. It seems so convoluted to dictate a text to be sent via a phone. Why didn't I just call?)

I was telling someone I was a "horror writer." Siri changed it to "whore writer."

Sigh.

Siri knows me.

27

I received my 27th acceptance of the year this morning, this time for an erotic story about a middle-aged widow.

Published

My story "Chance Encounter" appears in the August issue of True Confessions, available on newsstands now.

Thirty-one

I finished and submitted my thirty-first short story of the year a few minutes ago. This one's a 4,000-word confession I started writing October 22, 2007.

Thirty

I finished and submitted my thirtieth short story of the year a few minutes ago. This one's a 3,300-word Halloween confession I started writing December 22, 2007.

ApolloCon and 26

I spent this weekend at ApolloCon in Houston, where I served time on two panels with moderator Bill Crider and had twice had breakfast discussions with Bill and his lovely wife Judy outside the Con Suite.

Late Saturday evening I received my 26th acceptance of the year--a 2,600-word confession--surprising me because who expects a magazine editor to be working late on a Saturday?

Reviewed

Tam recently reviewed the anthology Stand By Your Man at Tam Reads, Writes & Rambles and had this to say about my private eye story "Stand By Your Man":

"I don't want to ruin the ending but I was surprised to say the least. It's a bit about manipulation and using your body to get what you want, which is something graduate student Jeremy is quite adept at."

And he had this to say about all of the stories in the anthology:

"They were all well-written little shorts."

Read the entire review here.

Sinks and faucets

Writing bears an interesting similarity to sinks and faucets.

Ideas flow from writers like water from a tap. Every so often, when we want to capture an idea and turn it into a story, we put a stopper in the sink to collect the words, sentences, and scenes that will fill the sink and complete the story.

Sometimes the creative tap is wide open and the story sink fills quickly. Sometimes the faucet merely drips and the sink does not fill for a long, long time. Often we have several faucets filling several sinks concurrently.

What I've come to realize is that it doesn't matter how quickly or how slowly each story sink fills. Often no one, not even the writer, will recognize which story sinks filled quickly and which filled slowly because each writer's sinks are filled from the same creative source.

So, stop up a few of your story sinks and start capturing the flow of your creativity.

History sends me spiraling into depression

A few days ago I picked up a copy of Damon Runyon's short story collection Take It Easy. Though first published in 1938, my find is a 1945 PocketBOOK wartime edition.

Last night, I started reading Take It Easy and wasn't depressed until the second paragraph of Robert van Gelder's introduction, titled "A Few Words About Runyon," where he notes that Runyon "gives two days each to the actual writing of these stories that you are about to read [...], but although he is paid for them at the rate of three dollars or more a word, this work is for him a part-time activity."

Holy Mother of God. Three dollars--or more!--per word. In the early 1930s.

At a mere three dollars per word, last year I would have earned more than half a million dollars from my short fiction.

I didn't even come close.

Sigh.

25 and published

I just learned that one of my erotica stories was reprinted, making it my 25th acceptance of the year.

24

I received my 24th acceptance of the year this morning, and there's a story behind this story.

I originally wrote it for the confession magazines, from whence it was returned because it was too "hot." I revised it by amping up the heat a little and sent it to the editor of a series of confession anthologies, where "confession" has a different meaning than it does at the magazines.

Yesterday, the anthology editor asked for a slight revision--amping up the heat even more in the, um, climactic scene--but she wanted to finalize the contents of her anthology today, so could I turn it around quickly?

I said I could, I did, and this morning I awoke to an email telling the revision was "perfect."

I live for those emails.

Awards & accolades

Many Genres, One Craft: Lessons in Writing Popular Fiction, a writing textbook to which I contributed, has received many awards and accolades since publication last year, including

Winner, "Business: Writing and Publishing" category, 2012 International Book Awards.

Winner, "Education/Academic" category, 2012 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

Winner, General Non-Fiction Award. 2011 London Books Festival Award.

Listed 5th in "This Year's Ten Most Terrific Writing Books" by The Writer magazine (Dec 2011).

Finalist, "Business: Writing and Publishing" category. USA Best Books 2011 Award.

Finalist. 2012 Eric Hoffer Book Awards.

Finalist, "Writing" category. ForeWord Review's 2011 Book of the Year Awards.