POP THE CORK, THE DEAL IS DONE!

It’s official! I’ve signed with Janine O’Malley at Farrar, Straus and Giroux! AFTER THE WOODS (nee RABBIT RABBIT) and CELLOPHANE SISTERS have found their best-possible home. Thanks heaps to my dream agent, Sara Crowe!

I can’t wait to share my longer works with you. This site is going away; stay tuned for my website overhaul in the next few weeks, and for the latest on my adventures in publishing! Cheers!

Publisher’s Weekly Children’s Bookshelf, New Deals

New Flash Fiction in 6MM

http://tinyurl.com/ce7b82p

My flash fiction treatment of a manuscript that stayed in the drawer. Recycling is good for the planet.

(sorry for  URL! Hint: It’s on page 11)

 

New nonfiction in Red Fez. Because the saints don’t die easily.

 nonfiction 

Source Material

by Kim Savage

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THE LITTLE CATHOLIC BOOK OF FEMALE SAINTS was a 99-cent catalog of Disney-Princessified dead girls. At age nine, it became my handbook for living. For six months in 1978, I prayed to God, communed with small animals, and cultivated a serene expression bordering on catatonia.It began with A for Saint Agnes, drawn with yellow sausage curls and full red lips. The text read: When Agnes was twelve, she would not marry a rich Roman, for she loved only God. So she was tied to a spiked wheel, and when the wheel broke, she was beheaded. Each page was a Tasha Tudor tableau, filled with rosebud cheeks and dresses lopping into soft folds. The illustrator favored blue: milk-blue tunics, sapphire skies, cerulean eyes, upcast. It was easy to overlook the thin red slit across Saint Agnes’ throat, the tiny demon chained to Saint Catherine’s wrist, and the eyeballs Saint Lucy presented on a golden plate.After a time, acting good wasn’t enough. I questioned my CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) teacher, who revealed the path to sainthood involved two steps: demonstrating heroic virtue and executing a miracle. I focused on step one and waited for my chance to perform the feat that would bring me closer to securing a glowing saucer above my head. I saw my opportunity when a toddler chased after a kickball at the same moment a matte-black muscle car barreled down our street. I hurled myself upon her and we rolled to safety. The end came soon after, when my mother, Tareyton 100 hanging off her lip and glass of Port in hand, ordered me to stop acting weird or she’d send me to live with Cousin Judy, a threat that implied institutionalization.The book was lost and recovered and eventually sold at a yard sale in a milk crate of paperbacks that included Flowers in the Attic and Lady Chatterly’s Lover. The bundle went for $3.00, which I pocketed to buy bottlerockets. I began sleeping in on Sundays. Grackles leveled my hummingbird feeder, and my hamster died of constipation. God grew quiet and went away. What remains is the source material for every protagonist I have written and will ever write, and their desire to be very, very good.

http://www.redfez.net/nonfiction/469#authors

The Interview

The Interview

Lots of people pointed out I didn’t include the interview on my blog. Truth: my days of being ahead, or even running alongside, the technology curve are LONG over (I still refer to using iCloud as “hot synching”. Like when you rested your Palm Pilot in its little black cradle. Really.)

God please make this work.

THE FELLS Won WBUR/Drum Lit Mag’s Zip Code Stories

Expect the Unexpected. That was the theme for Zip Code Stories, a flash fiction-style contest put on by WBUR and The Drum Literary Magazine.

I had no expectation that my submission would win. In fact, I thought the deadline had come and gone, and someone else had won. I had moved on.

Rewind: last month on vacation in Provincetown, after downing a few hot-pink gumball martinis, I submitted The Fells, where the character is confronted by an unexpected event, and changed.

So when I got an automated email saying The Fells had been accepted, I assumed the submission-tracking system had gone wild. Mercifully, human emails followed not long after. Taping my reading with Anthony Brooks two feet away was a trip. And Drum Editor Henriette Lazaridis Power is just plain cool.

Expect the unexpected. Maybe it’s working for me.