Well, today I’m ridiculously pleased to announce that my poem, “Hold This Camel” has been accepted for publication by The Germ. This is a new market for me and I’m very much looking forward to this poem’s publication in their autumn issue due out in September.
Beth Cato is an incredibly talented writer and poet who I’m proud to call my friend. Very recently she offered me the chance to be interviewed about Metastasis, my upcoming anthology from Wolfsinger Publications. I jumped at the chance.
Her interview went live on her blog today. You can check it out here — Five Questions for Rhonda Parrish, Editor of Metastasis. As you may have guessed from the title, the interview is short, only five questions, but it covers a lot of ground just the same. If you’ve submitted to Metastasis, are thinking of submitting or just want to know a little bit more about me or the anthology, check it out. It’ll be well worth your time.
I interrupt what has been mostly self-promotional posts of late, to bring you something completely unrelated to books or writing, but something I feel a desire to share… my Care Bear Crisis.
You see those pictures there? Those are some of the stuffed animals that make up my Care Bear collection (I also have an Eeyore collection. These are things that sometimes surprise people. They are like “So… you collect Care Bears and Eeyores and you write about acid-tongued rats, giant ants and zombies?”). Jo, Dani and I live in a relatively small house and a couple years ago, in order to make more room for books, I boxed up my Care Bears and put them in storage. I wasn’t ready to sell or give them away, but at the same time I needed shelf space, so it seemed like a good compromise. Last month I decide to unbox them and find new homes for them. Well, most of them. I pulled Bedtime Bear and Swift Heart Rabbit out of the collection and tucked them in between Eeyores on that shelf. I couldn’t part with them.
Bedtime Bear is special to me because I have a complicated relationship with sleep. I love it, but for various reasons I tend to do too little or too much of it, and often at the times I’m not supposed to. Some of my worst recurring nightmares have involved falling asleep at work or struggling to stay awake and alert while doing things. Those probably sound like stupid things to have nightmares about but trust me, they suck. So Bedtime Bear had to stay.
So did Swift Heart. When I was a kid in the 80s and Care Bears were all the rage I really, really wanted one. Really. For one birthday my cousin and best friend Clinton gave me a knock-off Swift Heart Rabbit. He was so pleased to be able to give me that bunny and I loved it fiercely. My younger siblings and I shared a toy box and they didn’t love it in the same way I did. Eventually my bunny lost his ears, but I still loved him. Clinton killed himself when we were both sixteen, and that was as crushing as you can imagine and made the bunny even more precious. Unfortunately when I was about nineteen my dog destroyed that poor stuffy. So when I got myself a real Swift Heart Rabbit… well, you can imagine why I can’t bring myself to part with it.
Still, that left a lot of other stuffed animals that I was looking to re-home. The emails poured in. Care Bears from the 80s are pretty highly collectable (not as much as they used to be before they were all re-released, but still). The first one said “I want Tenderheart and Grumpy” and I looked at Tenderheart and I looked at Grumpy and I thought, “I can’t get rid of Grumpy!” so I emailed that person back and said “Grumpy’s not available, but Tenderheart is.” and he was like “No, I need both.” So they stayed.
Then the next email came in, “I’ll take Birthday Bear and Grumpy.” and I was like “Um…”
Long story made short(er) I couldn’t do it. I think I could have sold my collection as a whole but I couldn’t cannibalize it like that. I did sell a couple bears to a girl who wanted to give them to her collector little sister because, well, she didn’t want Grumpy for one thing LOL And for another, she was giving them to someone who would love them, but mostly I ended up putting Grumpy, Bedtime Bear and Swift Heart Rabbit up on the shelf with my Eeyores and tucking the rest back into storage.
My name is Rhonda, and I’m not a hoarder I swear. I just have a bit of a Care Bear problem…
My poem, Alien Skin Creme, was published today at Every Day Poets. If you’re intrigued but the title (c’mon, you are, right?) then you ought to check it out. I wrote the first draft of this one as part of April poem a day last year and am especially pleased with how it turned out.
Remember when I announced the Bewitching Book Tour and I said it was the first tour I was doing? This is the second 🙂 Enchanted Book Promotions is also responsible for running a one week tour for Aphanasian Stories. The itinerary looks like this:
I’ll be sure and let you know how both tours go and do a comparison post of some sort when they are through. in the meantime, I hope you’ll pop by some of the places I’ll be hosted at in the coming week.
I wanted to do a virtual book tour for the release of Aphanasian Stories but April was so crazy I knew I wasn’t going to have time to set it up, so instead I booked a couple tours with websites who would do all that stuff for me 🙂 The first is the Bewitching Book tour. I’m going to be all over the interwebz on this one 🙂
But wait! There’s more! I’ve set up a giveaway that will run tour-wide over the next week. The winner will receive an autographed copy of Aphanasian Stories along with whatever Niteblade goodies I feel like tossing in. That’s likely to include postcards with free download links, magnets, pens–all sorts of things. You can earn entries for the giveaway by following me on Twitter (easy entry right there if you already do LoL), tweeting about the giveaway or leaving a comment on the blog which is hosting me. Perhaps best of all, you can get credit for leaving a comment everyday of the giveaway. Yay!
Please enter. I’ll feel unloved if no one enters and that wouldn’t be fun at all.
Aphanasian Stories Available at:
Amazon.com (Physical and ebook) Amazon.ca (ebook)
Also available on other Amazon sites, just search for ‘Aphanasian’.
Coming soon on Kobo and other formats.
I’ve bundled up three of the stories I’ve written which were set in Aphanasia into a collection I have cleverly titled Aphanasian Stories, and it’s now available for you 🙂 Including in this collection of re-released stories are Lost and Found, which was originally given away here on this blog, A Love Story, which was originally published by Sam’s Dot Publishing as Shades of Green and Sister Margaret which was originally published by Wild Child Publishing.
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A Love Story: Z’thandra, a swamp elf living with the Reptar, discovers a human near the village. When she falls in love with him, she faces the most difficult choice of her life, a decision that will affect the Reptar for generations.
Lost and Found: Xavier, the escaped subject of a madman’s experiments, and Colby, a young lady on a mission to save her brother, must combine their efforts to elude capture and recover the magical artifact that will save Colby’s brother before it’s too late.
Sister Margaret: A vampire hunter and a half-incubus swordsman are hired by a priestess to kill the undead pimp that is extorting, torturing and murdering vulnerable girls.
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The physical copies of these books are fan-freaking-tastic, no word of a lie. The original art is the illustration I commissioned from Darek Zabrocki long ago for Lost and Found and Jo (my husband) had turned it into the sort of wrap around cover that dreams are made of (mine anyway). However, if you like to read electronic books I’ve got good news for you. The Kindle version of Aphanasian Stories is available for free for May 15th and 16th.
Yay! My poem, My Whole World, has been accepted for publication by Every Day Poets. I’m not sure when it will be out, but I am really, really looking forward to sharing this one. It’s a completely non-speculative piece I wrote as a part of the 2011 November poem-a-day challenge but only got around to revising last year and I adore it 🙂
My poem, The Day After, has been accepted for inclusion at Napalm and Novocain — a webzine which features poetry with a theme of romance’s aftermath. I don’t often write things which would fall into that category but in going through some of my old poems on Monday I discovered one which did.
I’m pleased to know it has found a home outside of my computer. And so quickly too. Talk about a fantastic response time LOL
