Tuesday, August 23, 2011

A Short Story

And by short story I mean a quick tale from my true life. I didn't start writing fiction. I have a husband for that.

This story ought to subtly tell you a lot of things about me, my past, and who I am. I just remembered it and chuckled to myself. Maybe not so much a chuckle as a titter.

When I was in junior high, I was in cheerleading. During things like halftime and part of third quarter, we got to take a short break. I of course went and bought a Mountain Dew and probably a Three Musketeers bar from the concession stand, inhaled them, and then went to the bathroom to take a leisurely pee.

As I entered the bathroom with one of my cheerleading buddies, I saw a man standing at the sink, washing his hands. Appalled, I yelled What are you doing in here!?

He turned around to reveal that he was, in fact, a woman. I'm... I'm washing my hands.

All I said back was Oh.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

News-A-Palooza

The summer is wrapping up and I have tons of news to report. The school year is beginning, which means I'm starting to work with kids again, teaching them how to be awesome, i.e. teaching them how to read. I've spent this week in a preparatory class for kindergarten, working with five-year-old spitfires who are gearing up for the ol' grindstone. A surprising true fact: two almost-kindergarteners agreed by head nod that a unicycle should actually be called "finger wheel."

There's big news at the end of this post, so if you haven't heard already, keep reading!

Other news: I got my contributor copies of Neon in the mail this week, which are excellent and full of awesome words. You can check it out online or buy a copy yourself! It should be noted that Neon is a British publication, and you can tell because in my poem "The House Does Not Look Burnt" the word "color" has a U in it! I don't know how the Euro/Dollar stuff gets handled, but I would suggest just getting published by Neon, and then you get the copies for free and don't have to do math.

During the last week of July, I had five poems up at fwriction : review. You should check out everything they published in July, because they did a whole poetry month, which is pretty sweet.

In September, I'll have some things coming out in an array of magazines, including Metazen, Bluestem, Writer's Digest, and Specter. The poem I'll have in Writer's Digest is included due to the awesome fact of me winning a contest.

If you haven't checked out Specter yet, go ahead and click on that link right now. It's a great newbie mag that is kicking some butt, and not just because I blog for them.

This post is so full of links!!

Another little piece of news is that September 1 marks the anniversary of One Year, One Hundred Rejections, which I've talked about here and elsewhere. After September 1, I'll make sure to give you a grand total of rejections, maybe along with a little list of the acceptances I've gotten.

And now for the big news. My first chapbook, Ether/Ore, is going to be published in 2012 by NAP! I'm excited, and I ate ice cream today to celebrate. It's book time!

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Overdue Blog Post

I am overdue for doing all sorts of things, the least of which is updating this blog, though by far the easiest to remedy, so I'm doing that now instead of an array of other things I ought to be doing.

It is always pleasing to me to go on the stats page for my blog and see the different Google searches that lead people here. It's also thrilling to see that one of my viewers is still using the Yahoo! search engine. I hope that he also still logs into ICQ to chat with his buds.

Some of my favorite search hits that lead people to my blog are "underwater basket weaving," and "angry Jenkins" or "Brett Jenkins angry" or any other combination of my name with the word "angry." Of course I get a lot of traffic from people looking up different kinds of rejections. But I think the most alarming of the hits so far has been "hired brett e. jenkins." Does somebody want to know who hired me? Or does somebody want to hire me? Is my employer looking up potential reasons to fire me? Who can say?

At any rate, keep putting strange things into Google. And also, if you want to hire me, I'm of course living in poverty while I work for AmeriCorps, so you are free to send me money for menial tasks, which can be writing related or otherwise. Nothing that the government is going to want records of, though.