I Pause In My Quest To Meet My Deadline To Say: If You Live In LA, Go See Amy Hempel Tonight

I have another, oh, several thousand words to write before I'm done with a book that already has a cover and a listing on Amazon, but I wanted to pause, here at 1:06am, as I try to figure out what more to say using different words from the ones I've already written, to encourage all of you to go to the Hammer Museum tonight (Tuesday) at 7pm to hear Amy Hempel read. If you love short fiction, you probably already love Amy, but if you don't love short fiction, going to see Amy will make you love short fiction.

It's a free event. There's plenty of seating. I'm going. Wendy's going. I think many of my students are going. Rumor has it the entire cast of Celebrity Rehab are going and Chyna is again going to say she never did steroids, despite that porn video of hers where her labia is the size of a pitched tent and actually held a man down until he tapped out, and Jeff Conaway is going and he's going to moan and threaten to leave, but he'll stay, because he loves Amy Hempel. And Shifty? Well, shoot, all I can say come my lady, come, come, my lady.

And, as an added bonus, the mystery of the Emmylou Harris issue will finally be solved.