Andrew Roe

That’s what Gabriel Garcia Marquez said when asked by a reporter if it was true he’d given up writing, as was widely reported last week.

Seems like every year or two there’s speculation that the 82-year-old writer has put down his pen for good. We get a series of is-he-or-isn’t-he rumors.

But the man himself says no. And here’s another great quote:

“My job is to write, not to publish,” he told El Tiempo, a Colombian newspaper. “I’ll know when the pastries that I have in the oven are ready for the eating.”

Article here.

Francis Ford Coppola has a new movie coming out this summer. It’s called Tetro, and it’s his first original screenplay since The Conversation. (I always think of The Conversation as coming out before The Godfather, but no, actually it came out between The Godfather and The Godfather II.)

There’s a website for the movie, including some interesting facts about Coppola in the bio section.

He says that since a lot has been written about him online, he’d rather talk about a few things you might not know about him. Like this:

“My advice to aspiring filmmakers is to get married and have a family. It’s motivation and inspiration.”

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have the John Malkovich character from Woody Allen’s Shadows and Fog saying family is the death of the artist.

I think I’ll go with Coppola…

Ethan, while in the bathroom and after being queried about his day:

“Daddy, don’t talk to me, I need to get a little energy by myself for a moment.”

You have until March 31. (Short notice, I know.)

I nominated Alicia Gifford’s amazing story “Back Wash,” which appeared in Storyglossia last year.

So hey:

Short Stories Blog recently posted a nice little write-up about my story “Three,” which Wigleaf/Scott Garson published last year.

But wait, there’s more…

SSB also posted something (positive as well) about my story “Please Don’t Tell Me That,” which appeared in Glimmer Train a while back.

I guess you could call it a two-fer. Or not.

This is really nice. You write something. You hope it doesn’t suck. You maybe send it out and then hope for the best (I always think of submitting a story as putting a message in a bottle). And if you’re lucky and persistent and it turns out that you perhaps don’t suck after all, well, that something you wrote gets published somewhere. And then if you’re super lucky, people actual read it, think about it, process it, enjoy it, etc.