Fish Farm online!

I haven't seen my mailwoman lately. She hasn't brought me anything new, so I don't know what's up with her. It's Saturday night - she could be anywhere. There are five millon people out there. Five million people drinking, eating, farting, laughing. It's enough to break your head in two. But Witness put a few selections from its new issue online and (yes!) my story Fish Farm is one of them. As happy as I am that Fish Farm is in Witness (yes!) I'm even happier it's in Witness and online. Now you can read it for free - and tell other people that they can read it for free - though I strongly recommend that you pick up a copy if you've got a few dollars to spare. It's good. Just looking at it on a shelf is good. It even smells good. It smells ... clean.

I hope Fish Farm is good. It wouldn't be in Witness if it were terrible - but I've written so much since then that it feels like somebody else's story. But I remember writing it. I was sitting on my bed in Madrid, and German Dave kept coming into my room. He said things like, "What are you doing?" and "I have two liters of beer in my backpack" and "Can you cut my hair?" I stopped writing (I needed a break) and cut his hair. I gave him a mohawk. We each drank a liter of beer. Then we went to the Casa de Campo and sat up in "the lookout," a little circle of trees you can see the city from, and drank another liter of beer. We passed it back and forth over the ants and the dead grass. It was summertime. Dave had his sunglasses on. His mohawk was fresh and new. I probably told him about my story, but I don't remember anything like that. He probably said, that sounds right. (He knew the territory.) Then I probably said, I'm going to write a story next week and put you in it. God only knows what happened after that.

In other news, Ethel Rohan has accepted a story of mine called Islands, which will appear at Necessary Fiction sometime in March, I think. And Lauren Becker has taken my story Children at Corium. Which is great news. Because that's one good magazine. Check it out if you haven't already. In the last issue they published a couple of stories by Glen Pourciau, whose writing is much admired here at down with the ship headquarters.