Fiction Mondays: It's That Time Again

I mentioned a few months ago that I was getting back to writing short stories, and last week I realized that even though I have a few polished stories sitting here at home, I don't have any out there, making the rounds to literary magazines. This is a problem--finished stories, or stories I feel are finished, aren't doing anything just hanging around the house. So this week, it's time to start mailing (or e-mailing) them out again. Any suggestions for new and interesting venues to send these stories out to?

I know I was trying to get a book review a week up, but this week the only thing I read was Ghosts by Paul Auster, which was pretty interesting, but was really more of a long short story. It's about a detective watching a man who might be watching him back, and the confusing situation they find themselves in. It had a lot of elements of City of Glass, in which a detective gets so deep into a case that he starts to lose his own identity and question his reality. It's written in a really odd way, as though it's someone years later who only heard about what happened, and it has a lot of nods to itself as a story, which is a big theme in Auster's work.

I have some books at home I'm really excited to read and talk about, including Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned and Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry. With any luck these will be reviewed here next week and the week after. And then there's my ongoing reading of Ulysses, which I really like, but probably won't get done by mid-June (unless I quit sleeping and working and just spend hours of every day with it). But who knows? Maybe I'll read two hundred pages of it next week.

For now, I'm off to work on other stories. I just got through the first edits of one called "Hey Mercury," which I first had an idea for a long time ago and has finally come together, and I'm working on a first draft (handwritten!) of another one that doesn't have a title just yet.