Eraserhead Press To Publish HOW TO EAT FRIED FURRIES (And Other Cool Publishing News)

I’m pleased to announce that Eraserhead Press will be publishing my first book, How To Eat Fried Furries later this year as part of their New Bizarro Author Series. Fried Furries is a Monty Python-esque dark satire set in a world where farmers raise furries – yes, that’s right, people in animal costumes – as livestock.

The cast of characters is as motley and grotesque as one would imagine given such a premise. There’s the misshapen, proto-furry cast of the ’70s action-adventure show, Ferret Force Five. Chainsaw-wielding midgets. An invading armada of alien squirrels who cling to their second amendment right to keep and bear ray guns. Angels in biplanes. Louisville, Kentucky’s shady tea-houses where washed-up actors go to be flayed. The Amish and the even more despicable Pseudo-Amish. Reverse-Furries. Reverse-Reverse-Furries. And, in the end, a blood-stained panacea for the economic downturn that would make Thomas Malthus proud.

Whether an avid Bizarro fan or a newcomer to this cresting wave of weird fiction, you’re bound to be satisfied once you take a bite out of How To Eat Fried Furries. Keep your eyes on this blog for more news about this release as it becomes available.

What’s that you say? You can’t wait until later this year to get your Cushing-fix? Well, you’re in luck. I have two short fiction pieces I’ve recently placed.

My short story “Herman Sligo Is Flayed & Living In Louisville, Kentucky” appears in the hot-off-the-presses issue of the Journal of Experimental Fiction (issue 37). Editors Eckhard Gerdes (author of My Landlady The Lobotomist) and Jeff Burk (of Shatnerquake fame) put together a nice lineup for this issue that also includes Bizarro luminaries such as Gina Ranalli, Mykle Hansen, Kevin L. Donihe, and that wunderkind Cameron Pierce. The Journal is available for purchase on Amazon.com, – just click this link http://www.amazon.com/Bizarro-Fiction-Journal-Experimental-37/dp/1884097375/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&s=boo

Also, my short story “Youth to Be Proud Of” will appear in a forthcoming online issue of the absurdist zine Bust Down The Door & Eat All The Chickens. I’ll be posting a link to that one once it becomes available.

There’s also a huge short fiction sale that I’m not quite able to talk about yet, but I can’t wait to share the news with you once I can. I’m pretty psyched about it.

Okay, so that’s enough publishing news to sate y’all for awhile. In the meantime, I’m continuing to work on my novella (which I’m about 1/3 of the way through right now). My plan is to then embark on a novel. These are exciting times. I am just so grateful to be alive, writing, and starting to find my audience.

Can’t Blog Now: Eating Ferret For Breakfast

I’ll fill y’all in on how this all happened later!

It’s Not All Ferrets and Leprosy At Casa De Cushing

It’s not all ferrets and leprosy at Casa De Cushing.

There are days where things are considerably calmer.  Right now we’re engaged in finishing out some remodeling projects and doing some fall cleaning.

It’s a modest abode — but it’s home.  And things are considerably calmer in the neighborhood since Ma Kettle got quarantined.  I pray to Jesus to remove this hardness of heart I have toward her — it’s a terrible thing to wish leprosy on your neighbor.  Hardly “loving your neighbor” at all.  *sigh*

I just finished (a few weeks ago) a novella-length project, and I’m taking a wee bit of a break from writing — at least through the end of the week.

I mean, I have written, but it’s just goofy little mouse-turd-sort-of-scribbling.  For example:  I have wasted devoted some time writing Bizarro haiku for Every Tree Has a Face.  Sometimes I entertain morbid thoughts, like what would happen to me if I died prematurely.  What would my literary legacy be?  Surely, if I were to die in some car accident or something at this point, I would be memorialized as Mistress of the Bizarro Haiku.  Then maybe they’d set up the Cushing Memorial Bizarro Haiku award, and I’d be given a place in the Haiku Hall of Fame in Nagasaki, Japan (yah, everyone knows about the atomic blast there at the end of World War II, but that notoriety eclipses the fact that the Haiku Hall of Fame is there, too).  It’s pretty bad for any art form when no one really knows where its Hall of Fame is.

I hate that haikus have to lurk in the a-bomb’s shadow.

Anyway, I certainly hope I don’t die an untimely death.  No offense to haiku, but I want a literary legacy a bit more meaningful than “Mistress of the Bizarro Haiku”.  I mean, the heyday of the American haiku was at least one hundred years ago.  I’d wager that the majority of the American populace doesn’t even have the vaguest sense of what a haiku is.

That’s not the best way to build a career.

I wish I could swear off haiku, the way some people swear off hard drugs.  But I can’t — they’re addicting.  If you’re a writer and you’ve been tempted to engage in haiku — please don’t.  It only leads to a world of heartbreak, a world where you spend hours stringing together 17 syllables  into little mouse-turd-size poems for people to wake up in the morning and discover (to their disgust) on websites like Every Tree Has a Face.

Don’t.  Do.  It.

Diagnosis: Leprosy

It probably doesn’t come to the suprise of any of you to find out that Ma Kettle’s ferret three-legged wasn’t really attacked by coyotes.

Turns out, it has leprosy.

My neighbor found the little guy today in the crawl space underneath her trailer.  When she saw him alive, she dismissed her coyote theory and  — unwittingly using Occam’s razor — decided Rudolfo must have been hit by a car.  I think that’s how he lost his leg, in the first place.  So it seemed like a reasonable assumption.

So she took him to the veterinarian — who did some blood work and then quarantined her, the ferret, and everyone there at the hospital.

She just called me a few minutes ago and asked if I’d go to her house and feed her cats.  But look — I’m not stupid.  Cats are independent creatures, after all.  And Ma Kettle never was the best housekeeper, so I’m sure there are lots of vermin skittering all over the floor of inside there.

Let them eat mouse!

Find Rudolfo (Ma Kettle’s Three-Legged Ferret)!

I arrived home from work to find a disturbing sight.  My neighbor, Mrs. Keitel (who I like to call “Ma Kettle”, just ’cause I’m the mischievous type) has lost her three-legged ferret, Rudolfo.

I knew something was wrong when she was sitting on the hood of my old Ford Taurus, holding Rudolfo’s disembodied tail.

“Coyotes,” she sighed.  She was on the verge of tears.

“At least you have something to remember him by,” I told her.  I always try to look on the bright side.  After I make this post I’m going to look in the yellow pages for counselors who might have some experience with this.  Wish me luck.

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