Fool For Love

January 31, 2009

Ooof. Long week. But a good one.Started at the second college and also a night class at a writing school downtown. All that and I managed to go to my office and work on my book!

This week, amid all of the chaos and driving to and from the schools I got in the mail the two copies of the anthology, Fool For Love: New Gay Fiction, featuring my story “Party Planning.” It’s been a long road for this book, but it’s finally out (ha ha, out, get-it?). The editors, Timothy J. Lambert and Becky Cochrane are my heroes; they persevered as the book changed publishers, and all the time remained so positive and gracious and kept us informed on what was going on (special thanks to Richard Labonte, too, who helped find a new home for the book).

I hadn’t seen/read the story in, wow, maybe almost a year? So strange and wonderful to read it again in print. It’s a story I first wrote about four or so years ago that went through so many revisions in the last few years. One thing about it is that it is not at all autobiographical. Many (but not all) of my stories have shades of my life in them or are loosely based on my own experiences but this one was completely made up.

I’m also thrilled to be included among these writers, a few I’ve met, many I haven’t, all exceptional:

Thai Angel, by David Puterbaugh
Love Taps, by Mark G. Harris
Matchmaker, by Shawn Anniston
A View, by Brandon M. Long
Gratitude, by Felice Picano
Happy Hour at Cafe Jones, by Famous Author Rob Byrnes
Trunk, by Trebor Healey
De Anima, by Joel Derfner
Like No One’s Watching, by Josh Helmin
At the End of the Leash, by Jeffrey Ricker
Two Tales, by Paul Lisicky
Heart, by ‘Nathan Burgoine
Party Planning, by Rob Williams
Two Kinds of Rapture, by Andrew Holleran
Everyone Says I’ll Forget in Time, by Greg Herren
Angels, What You Must Hear on High, by John H. Roush

I mean, hello! I’m shoulder to shoulder with Andrew Holleran! In the same book as Paul Lisicky (actually this is our second anthology together…), Joel Derfner (author of Swish and Gay Haiku), Felice Picano, famous author Rob Byrnes, the always awesome Trebor Healey,  Jeffrey Ricker (one of my favorites in the anthology), Greg Herren, Mark Harris, and the others i’m eager to discover.

Here’s the first page of my story, perhaps it’ll entice you to buy the book…

Party Planning by Rob Williams

We were on our way to set up for Linda Simon’s sweet sixteen birthday party when my mother, who was driving, slammed on the brakes of our burnt-red station wagon, causing the entire contents of the back seat, including tablecloths, multi-colored disposable plastic cups, streamers, rolls of butcher paper, and Mrs. Kingston to come hurtling to the front of the car. Mrs. Kingston, our neighbor and my mother’s new party planning assistant, was fine, if a little disheveled and shaken, but the tiny black pillbox hat she had attached to her head with an elastic band had slid further forward so that it was just below her forehead.

“Cocktail napkins!” my mother screamed at her. “For God’s sake, how hard is it to get simple cocktail napkins!”

Poor Mrs. Kingston. She was a novice. She’d only been assisting my mother for a few days after begging for years to let her tag along, to help out. (“I’ll just watch from the sidelines. I won’t be in the way.”) My mother said she just didn’t have the knack for parties. Her taste in streamers was appalling. But her husband left her three months ago and my mother took her under her wing. A new project. My mother was famous for her projects.

And now Mrs. Kingston had made a mistake. She’d bought rectangle-shaped paper dinner napkins, and not the square, thin, cocktail napkins with the shell embossing that my mother had asked for.

“You can’t fan a dinner napkin!” she screamed again.