SJ Rozan

Akashic Books asked its NOIR series contributors for short-short stories — 750 words — for their website. I couldn’t resist so I set mine in and around Ulan Bataar, Mongolia. Here’s the link. The Republic of Mongolia, by the way, bears the same relationship to Inner Mongolia as Mexico does to New Mexico. The former are independent nations; the latter, states of other nations. (The U.S., and China.)

To refresh your memory:

In the city, Ulan Bataar, turn your back on this:

and you’ll see this:

Out in the countryside, there’s this:

It really was. My favorite part, as always, is hanging with people I don’t get to see very often, and there was plenty of that, mostly involving food. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee or beer with Laurie R. King, Joseph Goodrich, Sharon Potts and Kris Montee, Doug and Eve Allyn, Dan Hale, Reed Farrel Coleman; cocktail parties with at least a glimpse of, and a brief conversation with, a slew of people: among others, Hank Phillippi Ryan, who had just won the Mary Higgins Clark Award and was having trouble actually conversing. I was on a symposium panel with Charlaine Harris, Toni Kelner, and Ben Winters (who went on to win Best Paperback), moderated by the much too competent Dana Cameron. We discussed monsters, quite rationally. The banquet itself went off hitch-free and the food was even good; I sat next to Jim Fusilli, whom I don’t see often enough though he lives in NYC. I saw Henry Chang, and Ed Lin and Ed’s wife Cindy Cheung; they both looked fabulous even though they have a tiny new baby at home. (Maybe they looked fabulous because the baby was at home.) I knew one of this year’s Grandmasters, Margaret Maron, was wonderful in all ways, but I was delighted to find out that Ken Follett, the other one, was a sweet, funny, charming guy. Patricia Smith got the Robert L. Fish Award for debut short story and gave me a shout-out from the podium, which I totally deserved because she never would have written that story without a chain of events that began with me putting my foot in my mouth.

So that’s why you haven’t heard from me in the last couple of days. All that business is now done, however, and here I am again, ready to get back to work work work.

Line of redbud trees.

Pink dots along trunk and branch,

Waiting for green leaves.

Old men in huddle

Watching two play Chinese chess

In bright cold sunlight.

Ladies in three lines

Wave red scarves, make graceful turns,

To tinny music.

The Mayday Rozan Report, for those of you not on my mailing list, and if not, why not?*

*If you want to be, send your email address to sjrozan@sjrozan.net

Jason Collins’s announcement that he’s gay didn’t lead off the 11:00 news, wasn’t story #2, in fact didn’t come until 11:08 on the station I was watching. At which point we got about a minute of former coaches and teammates (he used to play for the Nets) saying what a great guy he is and how they support him. For the negative side, all they could find was one NFL player tweeting that with all the beautiful women in the world he didn’t get why guys were interested in guys. The haters appeared on the Sports Illustrated website comments, of course, but haters appear in the comments to every story like ants at a picnic. And there was one ESPN commentator who said that Collins is “walking in open rebellion to God” and was told to shut his pie-hole by none other than Karl Malone, who twenty years ago didn’t want to play against Magic Johnson after Magic admitted he had AIDS. People do change.

It’ll be interesting to see if Collins, who’s a free agent, gets signed for next season, maybe by a team thinking about a whole demographic they could grab — gay men, the way Houston thought about Asians when they signed Jeremy Lin. Meanwhile, it makes Mike Rice calling his Rutgers players “faggots” look even more moronic, doesn’t it?

Jason Collins, NBA center, is gay. This announcement has made my day!

Women jocks are often assumed to be gay because what straight woman would want to bulk up her muscles and run around sweating instead of thinking about clothes and shopping? Lots of us, actually.

Men jocks are always assumed to be straight because what gay man would want to bulk up his muscles and run around sweating instead of thinking about clothes and shopping? Lots of them, actually.

And though there will always be haters, I echo the NBA’s hope that this whole announcement is greeted, in general, with a collective shrug. If not, Jason Collins can handle it. I mean, what the hell. He handled playing for the Celtics, didn’t he?

If you happen to be both a jock and a geek. Walked to the gym in the splendid early sunlight. Spent the morning playing basketball (won two, tied one, lost one). Walked back in the warm light of noon, showered, ate lunch reading a book. Walked over to the Skirball Theater for a Beijing Opera. The White Snake, new to me. I’ve seen a lot of Beijing Opera, some of it done by this same company, Qi Shu Fang, and I think this was the best production I’ve ever seen. Great seat, too — no one in front of me! Walked back in the late afternoon, gathered some stuff, and up to an anniversary dinner of two of my best buddies who got married last year. Other best buddies also in attendance. Yummy food, good company. Subwayed home on subways that claimed to not be running well, except, somehow, for the one I was on, which chugged back downtown and left me right where I needed to be. Sometimes little things just work out.

Three squirrels issue onto a low branch. They stop. The middle one dives for the fence. The outer two dive after him, like a dance routine. They all scoot down the fence and across the yard in triangle formation. When they hit the next fence, the middle guy goes up, the left guy goes left, and the right guy goes right.

Meanwhile Bella the Cat really, really wants the mourning dove on the fire escape.

spotting the bird

clawing the glass

trying to climb right up the window

Just fyi, Sam Cabot is engaged at the moment in going through a set of the smartest, most painstaking proofreader queries in the history of publishing. BLOOD OF THE LAMB features internal monologue and much dialogue, all rendered in English but transpiring in fact — fictional fact, don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about — in five languages. It’s not an easy book to edit, copy edit, or proofread, and though I say it as shouldn’t, the people at Penguin/Blue Rider are doing a helluva job. Which doesn’t mean Sam is enjoying himself. A little obsessive almond-eating may be going on. But still, a helluva job.