Just the Facts, Man

• D.Z. Allen has announced that Muzzle Flash, his “completely independent fiction site featuring the finest in Pulp and Degenerate Flash Fiction,” will begin publishing on a bimonthly schedule (instead of in dribs and drabs, I guess), and that short stories submitted to Muzzle Flash “are now eligible for publication in the brand new 5 Minute Read section of Out of the Gutter magazine!” I recently received a copy of Gutter’s first issue; and though I haven’t had a chance yet to finish reading it, much less make intelligent remarks about it, I did notice that Allen appears on the masthead as a deputy editor. Nothing like a little cross-fertilization and publicity, eh?

• During an online exchange this weekend at Gerald So’s Chatterific site, author Victor Gischler (Shotgun Opera) talked about his “vulgar nonsense” writing, how the novel he’s just finished might be the hardest to sell, bringing back Charlie Swift (from Gun Monkeys), his process of book composition, and how he’s “never read a book on writing.” (Really?) Catch up on the whole discussion here.

• At M.J. Rose’s Backstory site, Ed Lynskey delivers the skinny on why he chose to take private eye Frank Johnson away from his Virginia hometown in The Blue Cheer, and how he had to do much more research for that story than he did for his previous Johnson novel, The Dirt-Brown Derby (2006). “You know the adage telling writers to use what’s at hand to spin their tales?” Lynskey remarks. “Not true for me.”

• And are things really “not looking good for the NBC series Crossing Jordan”? That’s what TV Squad says, after the announcement that the beautiful Jill Hennessy’s medical examiner series will be moved to Wednesday nights in March--just the latest in a string of movies the show has had to endure over its five-year-plus history. I hope the Squaders are wrong, because as I’ve written before, Crossing Jordan is one of the few crime dramas out there that isn’t a CSI or Law & Order franchisee. And it has the leavening humor that both of those much-cloned shows so seriously lack.