Hump Day News

 5:30 AM

Up and doing a bit of house cleaning of Clippings and email. Knocking at 6 pm so to get ready for work. Another damp day ahead, a trip to the courthouse, and then back here.

The cat showed up, still limping. Not sure what I can do about any of that.

 "Road Tripping" got another rejection in today's email:

Thank you for your submission to Night Picnic Press. Although we must decline your submission this time, we appreciated the chance to consider it.


Thanks again. Best of luck with this.


Sincerely,

Editorial Team

Night Picnic Press

Other notes, from other days:

• The Forgotten History of the Chapter 
• Submission Tips for Writers!
• Pond 78 - December 2023 
• The Clinical History of 'Moron,' 'Idiot,' and 'Imbecile' 
  

More signs romance is dead in Muncie: ‘Swear I could hear him crying and screaming’: Muncie man arrested for driving over estranged wife following argument, police say 

Checking in on Unlikely Stories' We Are The Lions by Danny Hankner, which is billed as a memoir but one that covers some of the territory I am trying for in my fiction, and is quite well-written (in my opinion):

Not long ago, there was a thin line of gravel that hooked Farmland Drive into greater Maquoketa, and when you rode down on your green Huffy the corn would creep in like an audience reaching towards the stage, slicing little lines into your arms.  The gravel path is gone now, blown out and paved and adorned with an overpass that keeps watch over your neighborhood like a sentry on a castle wall. The concrete is fresh, unblemished, perfect under your tires, and for some reason you kind of despise it.  You don’t yet understand what melancholy means, have never tasted the word nostalgia on your teeth, but you look upon this great patch of asphalt with your child’s eyes, see it as a harbinger of change, an unwelcome messenger, reminding you that spring never lingers, that the lions of life are ever prowling.  The corn is still here.  In a few years, when you ditch the tires and traverse the concrete in sneakers, a CD player clutched between teenage fingers, houses will bubble up between the rows of corn, and you’ll run past them, noticing how they come together, one stud, one brick, one sheet of drywall at a time.

6:51 PM

Where does the time go?

I got off work before 2 pm and got a ride out to the courthouse. From there I caught the 2:30 pm bus back to the station where the Mall bus was waiting. That got me close to home, also to McClure's. I made a stop there and was back here by 3:30. 

Since then, I have had dinner, watched a little of the news, and crashed Firefox while trying to submit "Road Tripping". That is now on its way to Unsolicited Press.

I wanted to do some work on "Love Stinks" and I wanted to do some work on the blog. Whatever I do get done is nowhere near what I wanted to do.

But I am sending this post onto published, but first some brief notes:

• Don’t Know Much About History from Sheila Kennedy - proof, I think, of how American schools dumb us down about the importance of history.
• LatAm in Focus: Beyond the Boom—Latin American Writing in Translation by Luisa Leme and Chase Harrison - discusses what is out there in Latin American fiction (and which we are missing because we are Americans and do not make time for foreign writers regardless of what they might teach us)

There’s a crisis in the Yukon River

There are two main species of salmon to fish in the Yukon. The first is chum or dog salmon, which is traditionally fed to canines here but still eaten by people. The other is Chinook or king salmon, the larger and fatter variety that people eat in Alaska and around the world.

“This is food that my family and our ancestors have used for millennia,” said Karma Ulvi, chief of the Eagle Tribal Council. “For thousands of years, we’ve fished on these rivers and our people lived here and we took only what we needed.”

Both varieties are vanishing. Compared to about the last three decades, the Yukon’s chum populations declined by around 80 percent in the period between 2020 and 2022, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Chinook salmon numbers, meanwhile, dropped by nearly two-thirds during the same time.

Hamas still has hostages; Israel continues its assault on Gaza; there was another mass shooting in Las Vegas. Is this the best we can do?

Advice frrom logn ago that I ought to have remembered:

sch