Red Room Where the Writers Are

glberen's Blog

• Smell like Metal, Pet the Cat

  November 20, 2008

  • Have you ever sat outside at night dipping a manuscript into the furious tongue of a Zippo?  How about hovering your spade thumb over the backspace, a vast square of blue highlight glowing over th

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• The Binding of Isaac

  November 18, 2008

  • Imagine a rash that only itches when you look at it. Most things are like this; they flare into their known states when fed with attention.

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• The Only Things Remaining

  November 14, 2008

  • The call came in as soon as I'd arrived at work.  "She's fallen." my mother said in a rush.  "We're at the hospital in Madill.  Her brain is bleeding."  My grandmother, the

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• An Inch from the Spider

  November 11, 2008

  • Hazy Mitchell was small, large enough to have grown out of toddler walking some time ago but too small to leap between the bales of hay stacked behind her house.

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• The Unknown Emptiness

  November 7, 2008

  • I finished Donigan Merritt's Possessed by Shadows on the plane back to Dallas from LA.

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• A Cult of Many Rutted Roads

  November 4, 2008

  • Don't take the brush out of the bathroom.  Leave it on the sink, the right-hand side, please, bristles up.  Keys go on the kitchen counter, next to the wicker basket, not inside.  The wallet goe

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• Still, I stand and watch the waves

  October 31, 2008

  • Huntington Beach was thick with fog, gray and slow with fog.

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• A Day of Ice Cream and Motion

  October 27, 2008

  • A brown blur of smog slouches over Los Angeles.  Sunlight slips down the long and slow sides of the roaring buses at the airport.  Palm trees shiver out of concrete squares.
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• The Tribulation of Space Mountain

  October 21, 2008

  • One person behind a desk or computer can determine a writer's fate.  One person with a headache.  One person who just read forty stories in three days, thirty-three of them unfortunately dealing

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• Exiting the Black Silence

  October 17, 2008

  • Pages 500-532 are misaligned in The Man Without Qualities, bound about a half-inch higher than the rest and cut off at the top.

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• Days of Wind and Blood

  October 14, 2008

  • I kicked Elmo's ass today.  An epic battle involving the Elmo Knows Your Name toy cell phone, the Fisher Price website, and a scavenge hunt for a mini-USB cable with which to program it.  My daug

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• The Labor of Love

  October 11, 2008

  • Each morning Hector waited, crouched in the bushes along the path to the graveyard, to watch Juanita eat the roses off the old man's grave.

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• An inch of light

  October 9, 2008

  • The tape contained her hot breath. An inch of light under the door, stuttering as someone moved past.

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• What the morning light reveals

  October 2, 2008

  • He is like a storefront going out of business.  Each new day reveals diminishing goods.  Shelves empty and prices are marked down.  Eventually parts of him will be given away, be trundled to the

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• Swelling a fear of porcelain eyes

  September 30, 2008

  • A doll on the counter. Fluffy sleeves, blank face. An evil about it, like a knife glinting on a table during an argument. Askance in a small wood chair, looking at me. I ask my wife about it.

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