I just finished writing a review of 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill for next month's Bookslut. What a great short story collection! I found Hill through a chapbook, Voluntary Committal, at Subterranean Press. If you don't know about Sub Press then really you need to jump right over there and at least buy a sample issue of their great magazine (I subscribe to it). I've bought several books from Sub Press over the years and raved about their collection, To Charles Fort, With Love from Caitlin Kiernan. They seem to have a knack both for publishing the underappreciated and also releasing nice smaller projects or reprints from well known authors. (Case in point, Triskell Tales 2 from Charles de Lint who I will be interviewing for June's issue.) Hill was another great discovery for them and their $15 chapbooks are a nice inexpensive way to get your hands on some great fiction from writers you might otherwise let pass you by.

As for 20th Century Ghosts - well, it is one of the best short story collections (horror, fantasy, whatever you want to call it) that I've read in a while. He keeps you on the edge of your seat in some stories and then gives you a sweet dose of growing up in others. All in all these are generally intense stories, but not all horror filled and certainly not splatter and gore. Mostly they are just good, and I had a lot of fun writing a big gushy fan letter to the collection by way of my review.

Lots of review catch-up going on today, and keeping Tori Amos's new video collection playing in the background. I still have my daily words on the YA book to write - I know what needs to happen but I'm still working on voice. I have a feeling that much work will be done on the beginning of this book in a couple of months, not to change the plot but because by then I will have the characters nailed down better and will be able to make them sound more like themselves. That's okay though, that kind of rewriting doesn't really bother me. It's just richer writing in the longer run, deeper writing.

And all of this is designed to keep me from screaming about a civil war that isn't. I wondered today what they thought in Washington after Ft Sumter was fired upon in 1861. Did everyone think that the Civil War had begun or did they just brush it aside? It's like Lexington and Concord. We learn that as "the shot heard 'round the world" but did the British see it as the beginning of bloody revolultion? Who really knows when an undeclared war officially begins except the historians?

Or maybe you should just read someone in the middle of it and see what she thinks.