With the football pool emails a-flying, it's time once again to bring up the idea of a Man Booker Prize Pool. Works for balls, why not books? You chip in five bucks for their favorite long-lister. If your guy/gal makes the short list you're in the playoffs. That sort of thing.

The judges for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction have already announced their long list of contenders, chosen from 110 entries:

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
• Self Help by Edward Docx (Picador)
• The Gift Of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon)
• The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
• The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies (Sceptre)
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
• Gifted by Nikita Lalwani (Viking)
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
• What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn (Tindal Street)
• Consolation by Michael Redhill (William Heinemann)
• Animal's People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)
• Winnie & Wolf by A.N. Wilson (Hutchinson)

And if you think running a vicious dog-fighting ring is controversy, check out THIS brutality.

Yeah. "Waterstoned throng." Your breakfast just came halfway up, didn't it? Booker's for real, baby. And here's another shocker, straight from the Booker Prize Forum:

"having great difficulty taking any prize seriously that would not even shortlist the beautiful and haunting DIVISADERO over the slight and 'so what' Chesil Beach."

Hope you're wearing your cup, Ian McEwin. Cuz you just got "so-whatted" in the crotch!

How can you get in on this cerebral annihilation rocket of madness? The truth is, I'm too dim and lazy to actually organize a Booker pool. So why not just do it the old-fashioned way? Place your bets!

File Under "Yes, I'm Out Of Date, But..."

It's a rapidly expanding file, that one.

But last night on NPR was the first I'd heard of the First Chapters competition at Gather.com. The goofily self-dubbed "American Idol for Books" was featured on All Things Considered, which gave a nice summation of the now even-more-impenetrable publishing industry.

I understand the modern necessity of marketing hooks, but "American Idol for Books?" Doesn't really bode well in my mind for the quality of the final winners, does it? Would YOU want to be the Taylor Hicks of authors? The Kelly Clarkson? Congratulations! Your novel is the cultural equivalent of a regurgitated, two-minute pop song!

Really, the big thing that struck me about the story was this number: 2,600. That's the number of authors who submitted manuscripts. Two thousand. Six hundred. Am I alone in thinking that doesn't sound like a whole hell of a lot? Short fiction journals churn through hundreds if not thousands of submissions every issue, don't they? Granted, novels are slightly larger endeavors, but if you're looking at it from a statistical point of view (the slushpile mindset), 2,600 to 1 sounds like decent odds.

Now there's a First Chapters Competition for Romance Novels. Though I think they should have a First Chapters Bodice Rippers competition. Or a First Chapters Invent Your Own Sci Fi Religion competition.

Yes, suffering through the wrenching, uncontrollable tunnel of food poisoning is no fun, as this last weekend proved to me yet again. (The last time I had food poisoning was a decade ago, in Bali. At least I expected it then. This time? St. Louis.)

The good news, though, is that the unseen forces that tug and push at our fortunes saw I'd had a really crappy (sorry) weekend and decided to give me a little pick-me-up in the form of getting my contributor's copies of Cimarron Review on my doorstep yesterday afternoon. The summer issue is out and it looks slim and dense and fantastic. Can't wait to read it. The story of mine that's in there, Purgatories, is one I've worked on literally for years, so it's wonderful to see it finally in print.

Cimarron also chose Puragtories to be their sample story online right here. You can read it in its entirety. As proof that writers will question even the best of news, for a second I wondered WHY they chose Purgatories to be the sample story online. Is it because they hold back the good stuff for paying customers? Am I low-hanging fruit? I suck, don't I? Then I slammed my head in a door a few times and realized I was being a dumbass. Whatever the reason, I'm glad it's out there in the ether, and I'm downright bouncy that it's in print in Cimarron Review. Both of which are a far sight better than being hunched over a toilet.

Great news is also in the works for another sci-fi short story. More soon!

The nice folks over at Astroshorts asked us to post the trailer to our Star Party documentary on their site. And so we did. (The documentary, shot by resident polymath David Croy, originally aired on Colorado Public Television in 2003. Or 2004.)

It's in their Recently Featured section for now. Be sure to dig around for other random goodies. Yesterday, I got my apocalypse fix with this little dandy of Japanese animation.

This week, I also had the extreme pleasure of seeing the galleys for a short story coming out in the next issue of Cimarron Review. The story, "Purgatories," has been around for a long time, one of the first I workshopped at Lighthouse years ago. Cimarron Review graciously accepted it last year, and I've been waiting ever since to get a letter that said, "You know what? On second thought, we're gonna pass. Buh-bye." Instead, it's actually coming out. Though not until the first of August, so maybe I should shut my mouth.

And right now, I'm listening to things for which MySpace can't find convenient little icons.

The latest Believer Annual CDaganza, full of wonders by Deerhunter, Zach Condon (wow), Grizzly Bear, I'm From Barcelona, Oxford Collapse, and on and on (that last one isn't a band...but it'd be a good one, don't you think?).

The other is The Hood Internet, daily mash-ups that can be hit or miss, but worth the try. Hard to beat The Shins vs. Crime Mob and Snoop Dogg vs. Architecture in Helsinki.

For the rest of the month, you can read my story "In The Workshop" while flying high on Frontier Airlines. It's featured in the Jan/Feb issue of Wild Blue Yonder, the in-flight magazine.



This glossy little opportunity came about through Lighthouse Writers Workshop's short fiction contest for Wild Blue Yonder. For each issue, Lighthouse accepts submissions based on a particular theme. Winners actually get a cash prize as well as publication and a free workshop. It's a fantastic contest being run by the people who are putting Denver back on the lit map. Why not enter right now?

You've been looking for it for such a long time, and now here, finally, is the truth. Enjoy.

An open letter.

On Fluid Pudding today, I engaged in pure bloggery, recounting our Christmas In Bali years ago. It involves hordes of cockroaches, poisonous Hotel Rini Chicken and drunken European caroling.

And the reason it's bloggy instead of something possibly more interesting? Because my four-month-old has decided he doesn't like sleeping so much, and the way he's eating, we fully expect to wake up to a sixty- or seventy-pound baby in the crib, legs and arms dangling out, a bemused look on his face as he says, with perfect diction, "Mother, Father, I seem to have grown considerably over the evening hours."

So I haven't been writing a whole helluva lot.

Over at Fluid Pudding today. And know that I say these things with nothing but wookie love in my heart.

SmokeLong Quarterly has published its online Winter Issue right here. SmokeLong presents flash fiction, specifically fiction that can be read in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. And even though I don't smoke, they have been kind enough to include my short story "Fresh Dirt." Another facet of SLQ I like are their author interviews, which give you a little behind-the-scenes peek. Kinda fun, though nervous, to be on the receiving end of their disarmingly smart questions.

Speaking of peeks, I was slipped a preliminary layout of the story that's going into this January/February's Wild Blue Yonder. I didn't realize it until now, but this will be my first glossy experience. I mean, holy crap, it's 4-color. That's three more than I'm used to.

Today is also, you guessed it, Friday. A Fluid Pudding Friday, to be exact. Today's post concerns The Long-Overlooked Opportunity of Literary Product Placement.