• Thursday night at 8:00 at The Sweetwater Tavern I'll be part of "Their Peculiar Ambitions," a reading of presidential fictions.
• Starting at 10:30 Friday morning I'll be signing copies of Why We Never Talk About Sugar at the Braddock Avenue Books booth (Y17) at the bookfair.

Get ready. These are not your mother's bedtime stories. In this mesmerizing debut collection, Aubrey Hirsch will lead you into the darkest recesses of human life, where hope and longing and love and loss look all too much like one another. Each of these sixteen stories may be filled with its own kind of despair, but they are not despairing as Hirsch enters with deep sympathy into the souls of lonely women (Cheater, Hydrogen Event in a Bubble Chamber, Made in Indonesia), broken men (Leaving Seoul, Advice for Dealing with the Loss of a Beloved Pet), young recruits (The Specialists), and dutiful daughters (Strategy #13: Journal, No System for Blindness). With a hard intelligence, Hirsch considers the toll of heartache (Why We Never Talk About Sugar, Certainty) and loss (The Borovsky Circus Goes to Littlefield, Paradise Hardware) and the simple cost of longing. Taut and tension filled, these stories will transport you into the heart of what it means to be human. But be careful. Hirsch's compassion arrives on a knife blade. And you just may find your own heart cut open.

Get it here!

• An essay in the new issue of Third Coast called "Other Aubreys I Have Known." It's about me...kind of. It's about recognizing myself in other people. Here's an excerpt:

Aubrey #1

I don’t know her real name, but she is me, sort of. My friends and I call her Aubrey because she looks like me. And I mean, wow, she really looks like me. We both start college at the same school in August, but I don’t actually see her until well into October. At first, I only hear about her.

• A story in CEDARS called "The News and What it Means to Noah." You can read this one online. This is a very science-y story, reflecting my love of all things particle physics. I had a great time doing the research for it and I learned a lot! Maybe you will, too. If not, there's a story in there somewhere, I promise!
• A story in the new issue of Whiskey Island Magazine called "The Specialists". The website seems to be dragging behind their printer, so my piece is in issue 59 not 58, but I got my copy already and it is lovely! Here's a sample from this story:

I thought I'd offer some of my revision strategies here for anyone else who might be struggling.

• Focus on the first half. Because we all learn about our stories as we're writing them, sometimes the back half is richer and stronger voiced than the beginning. When I find this gradation in my work, I read the last few pages to get their "voice" in my head and then rewrite the first few completely. Once that's done, I can usually just do a bit of tweaking on the rest to get the language to shine.
• Take it a piece at a time. For longer projects, I often get overwhelmed thinking about the amount of work my manuscript needs. To make it manageable, I look at one scene or chapter at a time. I try not to think about the rest of the story, I just focus on the part I'm looking at right then.
  
• Revise in layers. If there are specific issues present throughout the whole manuscript, you can instead go through the manuscript a few times, addressing one problem on each pass. For example, you might go through once looking at all the dialogue. Then again focusing on the actions of a single character. Breaking it down like this can make a big rewrite less intimidating.
• Save multiple drafts. When I'm making big revisions, I always save my work draft by draft. This helps free me up to make big changes, because I know I can always go back to a previous draft if something isn't working.

What works for you?

I took second place with "Certainty," which was published in PANK this summer. I'm going to shamelessly share the judges kind words about this story because they left me smiling from ear to ear:

“Certainty” is one of those rare stories that walks that fine,
unsettling line between the world as we know it and the magic of
infinite possibilities.  Although it deals with social issues (like
lesbian parenting) and relationship conflict (namely, differing
expectations in relationships), it is neither an issue story nor a
relationship story.  Rather, it stands out as a modern day fable of
doubt and love, and most of all, the hope that allows the latter to
overcome the former.    It is truly a remarkable piece, reminiscent of
the finest work of Shirley Jackson and Elizabeth Graver.  Ms. Hirsch
has certainly raised expectations that she will have a major influence
on the short form in years to come.” -Jacob M. Appel

"Excellent writing, great pace. Movement, emotion. Wonderful
ending, great story." -Shelley Singer

"The characters in Certainty are beautifully fleshed out and instantly
compelling; I was rooting for them right away. The attention to craft
was very evident as well and I found myself right there with the
narrator at the end, staring at the test box, hoping..." -Kevin A.
Couture

• You're probably already familiar with National Novel Writing Month, where optimistic writers set out to write 50,000 word novels during the month of November.
• 750 words is similar, but you can use it 12 months out of the year. It encourages users to write 750 words (about 3 pages) a day. You can earn badges for your writing by being speedy and consistent.
• Written? Kitten! Give you a fresh image of a super-cute kitten every 100 words (or 500, or 1000; it's up to you). This is a surprisingly good motivator, but it is hard to resist the urge to cut and paste the same 100 words over and over again!
• Write or Die utilizes the stick, rather than the carrot. If you stop typing for long enough, it will start to delete what you've already written. I imagine this would be especially useful for shutting up an over-active inner-editor who never lets you get out a sentence unless it's perfect.

If you know of any others, leave them in the comments! How are you getting motivated this year?

I took this picture myself (the day I bought the dress), which is why most of my head is missing.

And even if it did, what was I "preserving" it for? No one else in my family or close circle of friends was likely to wear it. It was too distinctive. And, if I'm being honest, I realize that not everyone sees the appeal of a dress that walks so fine a line between "swan" and "chicken".

I also think that wedding dresses have their moments. I don't know a single women around my age who wore her mother's dress. Our mothers' dresses may be beautiful, but they look old-fashioned. As a generation raised to be independent, each of us wants to do her own thing. I won't kid myself into thinking my hypothetical daughters will be any different. I probably wouldn't want them to be.

I knew I could sell the dress on e-bay, but it felt weird to put a price tag on so sentimental an object. I also doubted I'd get much for it. The dress was easily the most expensive dress I've ever owned, but even so the price was fairly modest (some people spend more on their cell phones). Some friends suggested re-purposing it into another kind of object. I joked that I could probably turn it into a down pillow just by turning it inside out. But that felt weird, too. It was a dress. A special dress. I didn't want it to be anything else.

I hung onto it without too much serious examination until our one-year anniversary (moving it across the country twice—carefully). Then I started to worry about the dress aging. I really didn't want to unzip its garment bag one day and have it not be beautiful. To me, that would be much sadder than having it not be there at all.

So, I went into research mode. There are more than 2 million weddings in the US every year. What are people doing with all these dresses? After much searching and thinking, I found what seemed to me to be the perfect solution: a charity called Brides Against Breast Cancer. BABC collects donated wedding gowns, sells them (at a discount) in a nation-wide tour, and uses the money to grant wishes for women with metastasized breast cancer.

I loved the idea that my wedding dress would be another person's wedding dress. I so loved wearing it and it made me really happy to think about someone else feeling the same way. The fact that it would be someone who might not otherwise be able to afford the dress of their dreams just made it sweeter. I could also imagine this other wearer preserving the dress for her daughter or granddaughter, making it into something new, or watching it age as she did. Wedding dresses are treasured objects and I knew my dress would be in good hands with Bride #2.

And then there is the money it would bring in, the wishes it would help grant. I spent a lot of time on BABC's website reading about the work that they do (and, yes, crying a fair bit). The women they help are so strong and grateful. And their wishes are so humble. One woman asked for a video camera so she could tape a message to her yet-unborn grandchild. Another woman asked for a plane ticket so she could properly say good-bye to her mother.  These seem like such basic things: the ability to be remembered, or to say good-bye. It hadn't occurred to me that some people wouldn't have them. After spending some time reading their letters, it was obvious to me what I'd do with my dress. It seemed so fitting and perfect and clear and...inevitable, really.

My husband snapped this candid of me saying goodbye to the dress with his cell phone.

I could make this a much longer story if I included the six months it took for my sweet, sentimental husband to be ready to let it go, or how I almost gave the dress to him instead. I could tell you what it felt like to put the dress on one last time, in the middle of our crappy apartment in Pittsburgh, barefoot, my hair undone.

I could also write about finding a box just the right size and packing the dress away. The walk to the post office. Watching the box disappear behind the counter. But the only important thing to say is how good it felt.

Yesterday I sent the dress away. Today I looked at some wedding pictures. Seeing the dress in them, I didn't feel sad or wistful. Instead, I thought about my dress's future, where it will go, what it will do. Now, it's even more beautiful to me.