The Old Becomes New Again

I used to write short stories but for a couple of decades I only wrote novels when I was involved in fiction.  But PM Press is interested in publishing a volume of my short stories. I took out the old ones.  Some were good and some were not so good. Two are good but very dated, but I think almost rank as historical fiction by now.  I began to enjoy the form again. So I wrote my first new short story in twenty years and it was taken the first place I sent it, Blue Lyra review.  I just finished a second that my agent wants to see, so I’ll send it to her this week. I am also revising some of the older ones that still work well.  I revised three of them so far. There are at least four more that I really like and don’t need much work.  One other one needs to be updated, but I think will be a feasible story then.  It is great fun to get back to a genre I used to work in but hadn’t touched in years.  Ideas for short stories [instead of novels and in addition to poems] are beginning to come to me. There’s no hurry with this since my novel Braided Lives with my new introduction doesn’t even have a pub date yet, but it will be spring of next year.  So the earliest this would be out, the very earliest, would be fall of 2013. It was lovely here this week, dry, pleasant.  I walked down by the harbor and got a blister. I think those sneakers are for the trash. Right now Woody is planting our second wave of cucumbers I started weeks ago. I fed the fall cole crops that are sitting on the sun porch and also the second wave of basil and coriander.  Then I put the black currants that have been macerated and sitting in white rum for three and a half weeks through coffee filters and bottled it.  Tastes great.  I made a lot of black currant vinegar already, one of my favorite vinegars, along with chive blossom and cilantro-garlic-ginger.  I make a couple of others like tarragon but those are my favorites.  Tonight I will make a salad with the first four tomatoes of the year. Veggies are pouring out of the garden – yellow squash, pattypans, zukes, cukes, red cabbage, frying and stuffing peppers and lots of herbs.  My cilantro has turned into coriander, so today I finished drying the seeds and will smash them, grind them, whatever turns out to work.  What a marvelous plant that produce both an herb and a spice. Today it’s getting hot again.  I just turned on the airconditioning for the first time since last weekend.  I pick phlox and sunflowers for the table this morning.  The phlox is various shades of pink and fragrant. The sunflowers are rusty and red and huge.  I glare at the chipmunks.  Before the coywolves, when my cats could go out, the chipmunks did not dare nibble my tomatoes.  Now they take a bite out of each whenever they choose.