I'm two days away from a self-imposed deadline to finish selecting stories for the longlist for Best American Fantasy 4. I've already sent one batch of 20 magazines/journals to the guest editor, Minister Faust, so he can start making the final selections. Over the past week or so, I've increased my journal reading quite a bit (thus no reviews or even books completed this month), reading as many as 9 literary journals (or at least their fiction sections) a day/night.

Sometimes, one will come across a batch of stories that are a bit, umm...outside of the reader's normal interests. In the past few days, I have read no less than a half-dozen stories that either explicitly or metaphorically discuss at length a woman's menstrual cycle. I have also had to endure reading a story about where a woman tries to learn how to "squirt." Then there was that one story that if it weren't so poorly written I could have classified it as a slipstream story: a woman is frigid, barely can feel anything when her boyfriend is humping her. Then she turns into a couch and feels more pleasure experiencing TV and having men masturbate to XXX videos on top of her/it.

Yes, these stories have appeared in some of the more august lit publications. Amazing how these things come in cycles in the reading (pun intended?) and how hard it can be to relate to some of these tales, fantastical or not as they may be in their structure/content.

Oh, and you can thank me later for conjuring such images while you read this