J Chris Rock profile picture

J Chris Rock

Folie a deux

About Me



Glad You Asked
It's only recently that I've begun to more fully embrace the stereotype of the copywriter with a manuscript in his top drawer. Instead of the Great American Novel, mine is a pile of short stories constantly in search of a printed home. I've written fiction as long ago as the sixth grade. (It was a play loosely based on the big Dallas cliffhanger, Who Shot JR? Turns out none of the other 6th graders wanted to skip recess to rehearse. Go figure.) It wasn't until about three or four years ago that I started to focus on it again. I joined the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver for roughly a year. My wife and I then moved to Shanghai, where she taught English and I concentrated on writing full-time. When we returned to the States, I started sending things out in earnest.
So far I've been fortunate enough to find homes for a handful of stories in Opium , Hobart , Barrelhouse , Cimarron Review, , Asimov‘s Science Fiction and Wild Blue Yonder (the in-flight magazine for Frontier Airlines), as well as a few pieces online in McSweeney's Internet Tendency , Yankee Pot Roast , Opium and Barrelhouse again, and The Science Creative Quarterly . I've had the pleasure of co-authoring a few of those online pieces with John Leary, a painfully funny man with a good haircut who still lives and writes in Shanghai.
At this point, my life revolves more around my toddler, wife and work than the written word, but the stories are still in the drawer, still occasionally pushing to get out.

My Interests

Writing, and other things.

I'd like to meet:

My son in thirty years.

Movies:

The one where Harvey, the giant Pookah, tells Jimmy Stewart about a swamptown in Florida where people amputate limbs in attempts at insurance fraud only to be attacked by aliens that emerge every eclipse, and then ol' Chucky Bronson shows up and tells the guys "You brought two horses too many" and bang bang bang and the music swells under a shot of the snowblown Minnesota highway as a short, kinda funny-looking guy buries a bag full of money. I love that one.

Books:

Forget entire books for a second (though you can keep E.L. Doctorow's City of God top-of-mind if you like, and, why not, Cormac Mccarthy's The Road), and let's talk short fiction. Annie Proulx's The Mud Below, Mister Squishy by David Foster Wallace, a wee bit o' the new classic with Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders, A Distant Episode—Paul Bowles, Pilgrims—Julie Orringer, The New Automaton Theater—Steven Millhauser, Runaway—Alice Munro, The Library of Babel—Jorge Borges, The Ceiling—Kevin Brockmeier, The Snows of Kilimanjaro—ol' Ernie Hemmingway, Double Birthday—Willa Cather, The Half-Skinned Steer—Annie P again, The Bees—Dan Chaon and then the other ones I can't quite come up with right now.

My Blog

Are you a political critter?

I'm not sure anyone feels politically represented by either a jackass or an elephant, or whatever the hell the mascot for the Independent party is. At first I was thinking maybe everyone's mascot coul...
Posted by J Chris Rock on Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:39:00 PST

Check me out in a Portuguese tag cloud!

As tiny as tiny can be.Right here.In fact, I'm pretty sure you'd have to do a search of the site to find me. And how I made it onto an author tag cloud in Portuguese, I'll never know. Other reviews of...
Posted by J Chris Rock on Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:56:00 PST

It's been a while. How are you?

I just don't seem to blog much. I'm not into public sharing as much as maybe I should be, and any time I do get the itch to spout to an online microcosm, I do so via my agency's blog, Notchweiner.com....
Posted by J Chris Rock on Fri, 11 Jul 2008 02:20:00 PST

Humbly ecstatic

I believe the phrase I'm looking for is "holy crap." Or similar.Cimarron Review has nominated my short story Purgatories for a Pushcart Prize, and I couldn't be happier. It was one of those stories yo...
Posted by J Chris Rock on Fri, 30 Nov 2007 06:40:00 PST

2x2x1

The 2X2 meme, courtesy of Captain Jason Pettus. I'm assuming that if I'm getting this, everyone else on the internet (or cybernet, as I like calling it) has already done it. Twice. So I won't be forwa...
Posted by J Chris Rock on Thu, 11 Oct 2007 12:14:00 PST

A Geek Dream Achieved

Asimov's Science Fiction has graciously accepted Lucy, a short story that originally appeared on the Science Creative Quarterly site a few years ago. Since then, the story has been revised and revised...
Posted by J Chris Rock on Fri, 21 Sep 2007 01:46:00 PST

Cat Tag

I love that the tag from last week has officially now gone cat....
Posted by J Chris Rock on Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:32:00 PST

But...he just got his teeth. Oh cruel milestone timeline.

My one-year-old son has been flirting with walking for several weeks now, cruising around any stationary object, holding on less and less tightly, taking a tentative step or two before plopping down o...
Posted by J Chris Rock on Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:03:00 PST

My First Tag (Blush)

I've been tagged by a good friend and will, for the first time, actually attempt to play along with said tag. Here are the laws laid down. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits or embarras...
Posted by J Chris Rock on Wed, 05 Sep 2007 12:50:00 PST

Sci Fi Rights Squabble

See if you can decode the following acronym-heavy statement:The SFWA has been accused of abusing the DMCA in order to remove infringing work on Scribd, including CC-licensed work.The non-turbodork tra...
Posted by J Chris Rock on Tue, 04 Sep 2007 08:00:00 PST