This one probably won’t last long. Email me if you need to: bacteriaburger@gmail.com

As I’ve mentioned before, me and some friends have started a queer newsletter/zine for Pittsburgh called QueerBurgher. Here’s the most recent issue.

Hay. The Rainbow Book Fair was great – it’s an awesome event. I sold a bunch of books and some collages and met and talked to a bunch of people. All in all my weekend in NYC was exhausting but totally fulfilling in a mind-boggling sort of way – that’s New York City in a nutshell. On this trip I think I fell a bit more in love with the city than I ever have before. You can see it in the faces of the people on the street – there’s so much life there, so much happening, and people seem engaged, curious and alive to what’s going on around them.

I’ve been utilizing the capabilities of my new smart phone to make field recordings. It is so fun! I used to record things all the time when I was a kid – in fact I still have stacks of audio tapes that I made from when I was nine or ten all the way to when I was a senior in high school. So it’s sort of amazing that this new technology has taken me back to doing something I haven’t done since I was a teenager.

Here are the two best field recordings I made in NYC:
L Train Station 4/14/13
Hanging out in Greenpoint 4/12/13

So come out and see me if you’re around. This Saturday April 13, 2013. Noon-6pm at the Holiday Inn Midtown, 440 W 57th St. More info (but, alas, not a usable promotional image I coulda used to make this post more visually interesting, geesh) here: Rainbow Book Fair

This is an experiment. I was just thinking to myself, I wish some editor would give me an assignment to take one of my older stories and turn it into a novella. Why? It’s easier to justify spending time on something when somebody is expecting something from you, I suppose.

And so, this poll; the idea being that whatever story is chosen I will then expand to novella-length. I have to wonder if I’ll actually go through with it. I suspect that I might. Furthermore, I suspect that it’ll be rewarding.

I hope you will vote, and maybe even take some time to justify your choice in the comments. And, as always, thank you for reading.

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I guess masculinity bores me when it’s not giving me a boner. I hate action movies for the most part. I want to gouge my eyes out when I realize a movie is building toward an epic battle sequence (even worse, when the movie in question is a bastardized version of a classic girly story).

Maybe that’s why I get such a particular thrill when men write stories or make movies primarily about women. I feel like directors do some of their best work when they focus on femininity. Take David Lynch for instance. I am not a fan of Wild at Heart. The violence in it is dumb and obnoxious. The female characterizations are grotesque and uncomfortable. It’s a valid work and has lots to recommend, but it’s not brilliant.

I think it’s meaningful that Lynch’s arguably most groundbreaking work, Mulholland Dr, is the first movie he made that is focused on female protagonists. The whole movie is filled with femmy energy, chock full of vagina symbolism: apartments, purses, boxes, the hidden spaces behind and around and inside things.

And while this is an unpopular opinion, I think Death Proof is Tarantino’s best movie. The pacing is different from any of his other movies. It’s languid and dreamy (when it’s not featuring women getting run down on the highway, that is).

Both of those movies came to mind when I was watching Spring Breakers, particularly Mulholland Dr. “C’mon, it’ll be just like in the movies,” says one of our girls on Mulholland Dr. ”Just act like you’re in a movie,” says one of our spring breakers. Of course, in both instances, we are in the world of movies, but also of fantasies and dreams. Perhaps the best way I can recommend Spring Breakers is to say that I never knew what was coming next – sort of like a dream. That’s not something you can say about many movies: heroes generally prevail, villains are felled, romances consummated. Several times in Spring Breakers, characters pause to recount events that have just happened as if trying to make sense of it themselves. Seemingly important characters up and disappear when they aren’t needed anymore – a choice I found bold and thrilling.

The casting creates its own tension and plot. Everyone is acting and trying on personas, some with more success and authenticity than others. It’s easy to discount the zeitgeisty hot-button youth-culture elements of the movie, but I think they are part of its genius – it makes the movie as much about how it was made as what it’s about. For while movies might just be dreams to us, they are highly constructed things. The way that Spring Breakers is great, and the way it compares to some of the greatest movies, is that it is often about its existence as much as it’s about anything else.

Two words: Animan, incest. I recommend IMMEDIATE download (or check out the trailer here).

The entirety of Diary of a University Research Subject is now up on Nifty. I’ll be posting it to this website shortly.

What’s been going on with me? Well, ’691 Suburban Dr’ has been rejected by two different romance publishers, which has caused me to pause and reflect on what I actually want to do with it. It was really written for those who read and enjoyed ’428 College St’, and even though I was careful to make ’691′ a standalone work, I think without the full frame of reference people just aren’t getting it. So I may end up self publishing, or I’m considering consolidating the two volumes, or including it in a volume which would include a bunch of other stories and consolidate all the work I’ve done in the past few years.

Because I have a LOT of material stored up. A whole other book, in fact: ‘College Town USA,’ which is a college-themed (obv) story collection where all the stories are first-person or “found” pieces (Diary of a University Research Subject is part of it).

I’ve been really getting into journalism lately, which was my favorite class in high school, and which I’ve dabbled in from time to time over the years. But now, it’s almost become my main thing. I’m doing a bimonthly queer newsletter for Pittsburgh called QueerBurgher, and I’ve done a few on-site papers for the radical faerie events I’ve been attending. Here’s the first issue of QueerBurgher if you’d like to check it out. I’m going to be busting ass this weekend to finish up the next issue, which I have to get out before the end of the weekend cause I’m taking a trip.

I have a story in Best Gay Romance 2013, which just came out, and is the exact same story that was in Best Gay Romance 2011 (and in Backwoods). Don’t ask…only because I barely understand it myself.

Next month the Bruno Gmunder anthology Indecent Exposures is supposed to be released, and it contains what I think is a pretty damn good contribution from myself, a longer story called “Four Days in the Exurbs.” I’m doing another story for an upcoming Bruno Gmunder book; this one will be daddy/boy themed and I haven’t written it yet. I’m considering taking one of my older stories, writing a sequel to it and patching them together, which seems like a fun idea. At any rate I have to finish it by the end of the month.

AND beyond all of that, I have this lovely little story that I’m writing in a notebook. It isn’t erotica and it’s about teenagers, and it’s the one thing in my life right now that I’m not putting pressure on myself to finish. It’s pure enjoyment, and it’s important to me that it stays that way.

Part 2 is up on Nifty.