Look for me down there in purple and a couple of writing buds too.

I’m very lucky. I’m on my way to the Tin House Workshop tomorrow. I’m excited and more than a little ADD. Okay. It’s 11:51 at night. My plane leaves at six am tomorrow. I have to get up at 3:00 am. Clothes are neatly stacked on my bed. Just about everything is BLACK. I have no idea what to put into my suitcase. Will it be cold or hot? I pray for cold. I look so much better in a sweatshirt.

I’m going early so I can finish a couple stories and go to Powells. Maybe lose 5 pounds? Does my hotel have a gym? Then I could buy something that isn’t black and hot and oh, dear. I hope it’s raining.

I just printed up everyone’s piece 11 of them changing them all to garamond 11 pt. single spaced so I can manage to carry my brief case. And what am I doing? FACEBOOK! Well, I was doing FB until they told me this was too long so I moved it on over to my blog.

But what I should be doing is looking for flash drives, extention cords, power cords, cat cords (whatever that’s called), phone cord, my phone, my notebook I put together with my ticket information, and my camera, my camera charger, my ipod, my earphones, my neck pillow, my earplugs–the days of a writer traveling light are long gone–so what I really want to do is go look at the second half of So You Think You can Dance!

At Flash Fiction Chronicles, we’re planning to spend some time posting various articles about genres and sub genres. We have several writers committed to writing posts, but are on the look out for more. These can be opinion pieces (most discussion of genre falls under the classification since since few people agree), but they should all exhibit knowledge either from experience or research regarding the conventions they discuss.

Genre Safari!!! « Flash Fiction Chronicles

If you’re a writer and you know your use of language is strong but you are struggling with story structure (most of us do) watch this video of Alex Wong and Twitch on So You Think You Can Dance at UTube. Alex and Twitch

A new month of fiction at Every Day Fiction.

Jul 1/Alastair McIntyre/No Cause for Alarm
Jul 2/J.R. Hochman/Jabbers
Jul 3/S O Asante/All His Favourites
Jul 4/Erin M. Kinch/The Vote
Jul 5/Rickey Rivers Jr./The Result of the Argument
Jul 6/Tanya L. Schofield/Chance Encounter
Jul 7/Oonah V Joslin/Turn About
Jul 8/JR Hume/Self Promotion
Jul 9/Kathee Jantzi/Why Not Me?
Jul 10/Joshua Tate/The Animal
Jul 11/Kyle Hemmings/The Dance Floor
Jul 12/John Keel/Betting Kevin
Jul 13/Gay Degani/To Have and To Hold
Jul 14/Peter Tupper/Disappearing Girl
Jul 15/Amber Foster/Fallen
Jul 16/Daniel Austin Warren/Sleeping
Jul 17/Manuel Royal/Earth Air Fire
Jul 18/AJ Smith/Echo
Jul 19/Walter Giersbach/Day of Moving Hell
Jul 20/Jonathan Pinnock/The Colour of Criticism
Jul 21/Therese Arkenberg/Few Are Called…
Jul 22/Mickey Mills/One in Four Shot
Jul 23/Gaius Coffey/Alexei
Jul 24/Bret Bass/No Eternities, Only Moments
Jul 25/David Macpherson/Fright Wig
Jul 26/James Burt/A Bad Place to Stick Your Hand
Jul 27/Amanda Hayter/In the Key of Love
Jul 28/Deborah Winter-Blood/Birds of Prey
Jul 29/Ramon Rozas III/One Afternoon in Geneva
Jul 30/Steven Saus/Precipitation
Jul 31/Wayne Scheer/A Good Woman

I posted a review yesterday for Nik Perring’s debut collection, Not So Perfect. Nik is a fellow short story writer I “met” through a friend Sarah Hilary a couple years ago and have followed him online ever since. He’s an amazingly talented storyteller, able to give characters life with just a stroke or two. And characters you care about. If you get a chance to head over there, please do.

Not So Perfect but maybe YES « Flash Fiction Chronicles

Got an email today saying they are offering a 10% coupon for Pomegranate Stories as a special summer promotion. So if you ever had the inclination to get this collection of eight stories by me, now is a good time to do just that.

Here’s the Lulu link: Pomegranate Stories by Gay Degani, regularly $9.99, on sale now with coupon for $8.99. Enter coupon code: SUMMERREAD303

I wrote this post in 2006 after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Given the continued abuse by nature and man (most recently as we all know by BP and their inability to deal with disaster), Louisiana is even more in danger of disappearing than ever before. I thought I’d repost this review of the excellent book by Michael Tidwell, Bayou Farewell.

According to Michael Tidwell, in his book Bayou Farewell, twenty-five miles of Louisiana coastline disappear each year. That’s 25. 2-5. And this statistic may be more dramatic in the wake of Katrina and Rita, yet most of us are unaware of what is happening in the estuaries of Southern Louisiana.

The state’s rich supply of wildlife, animal, marine, and avian, is threatened by the advance of the Gulf of Mexico into the wetlands. It’s turning fresh water into salt, drowning native grasses, oak trees, cemeteries, and small towns. Changes in the fragile chemistry of the wetlands endangers oysters and crabs. Eventually the migration route for the white and brown shrimp will disappear. The people of this area are in retreat.

Louisiana fishermen supply “an astonishing 30 percent of American’s annual seafood harvest, measured by weight.” When the wildlife is gone and the people are relocated to higher ground, we all lose.In recent years, many of us have experienced the unique culture of “Sout’ Loosiane” by traveling to New Orleans and perhaps cruising down Bayou Black or Lafourche.

Many of us know Louisiana through movies like The Big Easy and books such as Heaven’s Prisoners by James Lee Burke. And most of us have fallen in love with the food, the shrimp okra gumbo, the blackened red-fish, the crawfish etoufee. Would there be the BAM of Emeril without Cajun food? What’s Cajun food without Louisiana shrimp, red-fish, oysters, and crabs?

The state’s plight is everyone’s problem and Tidwell’s book takes you deep into the heart of the swamp.Writing before Katrina and Rita, Tidwell relates his journey through the wetlands via shrimp trawlers, crab boats, and oil-company supply ship. He hitch-hikes down bayous and canals, meeting and talking with Cajuns, the Houma tribe, Vietnamese settlers, and the environmentalists who are trying to wake up America to this continuing tragedy.

Author and Louisianan Burke says Bayou Farewell is “The best book on Louisiana I have ever read…stunning, beautifully written,” and I have to add that it’s a jolting call to arms for the coastline along the Gulf of Mexico.

It reminds me of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a book length essay about man’s responsibility to the planet and to ourselves. Silent Spring changed the way we think about our custodial duty to the environment and Bayou Farewell admonishes us as to how we have forgotten that duty.

Over thousands of years, the Mississippi has built the delta that makes up Southern Louisiana. The estuary and its wildlife developed because of the river’s constant deposit of sediment at its mouth. This natural process has been interrupted by man and levee system which now takes that sediment and dumps it over the continental shelf and into the Gulf of Mexico. In other words, Louisiana wetlands are being starved of its nourishment of dirt, mud, silt, sand. As the sediment is denied into the area, the salty waters of the Gulf are filling the void, moving farther and farther inland. The end result is the disappearance of the land, the creatures that inhabit it, and a unique way of life.

There are solutions to help rebuild the coastline and estuaries, but Tidwell warns us to take action now. At the rate of twenty-five miles per year, that gives us maybe thirty years before it’s all gone.

I urge you to read Bayou Farewell and tell others to read it. Send it to your congressman. Your senator. President Obama. Thanks for your attention and time.