Ryan Werner's Blog, page 3
April 7, 2013
Hey nineteen watch you watch me watch you . . .
A live version of "Hey Nineteen" by Minutes, who are super rad.
Two months and I've been busy doing everything except writing and talking about it on my website, leading to the predictable downfall of my author brand and my rapid crawl back into an even darker obscurity. Meanwhile, this shit happened over the course of the past sixty days or so.
1) I watched Wrestlemania. It took me most of the card to find a good stream of it because $70 for a glorified Raw is too much, not to mention that I'm a terrible person with an unjustifiable sense of entitlement. I found one that held strong through Punk/Undertaker, so tat's all that matters. Looking at the talent pool and the lack of good storylines lately, I don't think it's out of the question to call it match of the year already, probably the best WM match since HBK/Undertaker a few years back.
2) I started working another janitor job in addition to the janitor job I already have. I'm cleaning a bar at this one, which is incredibly less gross than the Wal-Mart I have to clean up otherwise. Other than the glitter I can't get off the stage thanks to the burlesque show we hosted last weekend, things are fine.
3) I went on tour with Victory and Associates. It was awesome. Rock and roll is cool. I ate so much ice cream and saw so many killer bands. Can't wait to do it again this summer. Maybe I'll have the songs learned by then.
4) My roommate fell in love and now he's engaged and now he's not my roommate anymore because he wasn't so much my roommate as much as he was the dude who owns the house I was living in the basement of. Let this be a reminder that love is dumb.
4b) Now I live at home. My mother calls me from the grocery store to ask if I want cottage cheese and then calls me again ten minutes later to ask if I'll split a sub with her if she buys one.
4c) This is not as adorable as you think, so just stop thinking that.
5) I bought $14.46 worth of discount Easter candy.
6) Doritos Locos Tacos are delicious.
7) I tweeted Billy Corgan six times in a row and then got bored with trolling him and tweeted Chuck Billy once just to tell him that he's cool.
8) Literature was apparently declared dead, again. The nerds got pissed.
And I saw Queensryche and I'm pretending like I wasn't stoked and it's not important enough to be actual #9 when really the opposite is true.
One thing that hasn't happened in the past two months is me getting published anywhere. I got a pretty big acceptance from the Indiana Review, which is rad even though I have my doubts as to whether or not anyone actually reads those fancy university print journals, but other than that it's been rejection city.
I've gotten fourteen rejections on seven different stories. That's about two rejections per story, but some of these are only one rejection each, so a couple of them are more heavily rejected than others. Not that any of it really matters, because one acceptance cancels out a thousand rejections, but it's times like these when crunching numbers feels like a really good solution to the problem.
The real solution is to write more, submit more, and hopefully, eventually, do both things better. I haven't finished a story in almost a month, and it's a story I started over a month prior to that, the first story for the wrestling chapbook I'm working on. The only other story close to being done is also for the wrestling chapbook and it keeps adding up wrong, not working as flash fiction, stuck in that odd 2000-word length purgatory. There's a first sentence to a story based on "Shot of Poison" by Lita Ford sitting in a Word document and that's about as far as it goes. I started on a novella told in these little fragments that are somewhere between micro-fiction and severed, re-conjoined thoughts, but that's kind of stalling, too.
The first chapter of that novella is making me fucking nuts trying to figure it out because even though I think in those weird pieces, I don't often write in them. When I do, it's for effect, not as a new medium for creation. Imagine Dinosaur Jr. taking all those little pieces of noise from You're Living All Over Me and making an entire album out of them. The risk/reward is about the same, as is the possible stupidity of the idea. Even though other people have done it, it's not necessarily the thing I do--or Dinosaur Jr. does, if you want to carry that comparison through--so who the fuck knows if it's going to be worth a goddamn.
Experimentation is a wonderful thing. Sometimes it's just a thing.
Even though I haven't been published recently, my book got some coverage over at Untoward Magazine. The wonderful Matt Rowan was kind enough to say nice things about my book for free.
"That’s to say he does a good job of inhabiting spaces. places and things. Maybe intuiting how they’re supposed to be or who knows what makes it all make sense. It does, though. These stories creep inside the souls of their protagonists and whoever else. Things get fleshed out nicely. You come to know them well, and in a very short time, too."
(When you're done reading that, check out Matt's story in the new lit journal Cloud Rodeo, headed up in part by the magical Matthew Burnside.)
I'm trying to make books happen over at Passenger Side Books, which is my micropress, which is actually just me and a printer and a lot of e-mailing from my parents' basement. The same Matthew Burnside that was parenthetically mentioned a couple sentences earlier has a book called Infinity's Jukebox coming out soon. More details to come, but for now, Justin Lawrence Daugherty's Whatever Don't Drown Will Always Rise is the jam of the now.
Cover art by the incredible Matt Kish of One Drawing for Every Page of Moby Dick brilliance.
Ten stories of myths and the roads that sprawl out from them. These are not the stories of Greek and Roman gods, but of the daily hurts and hopes people cling to in lieu of a simple other, the apparitions and rumors of science and tradition that can give or take away. Get it soon.
But for now? Just get rad. Always get rad.
RW
Two months and I've been busy doing everything except writing and talking about it on my website, leading to the predictable downfall of my author brand and my rapid crawl back into an even darker obscurity. Meanwhile, this shit happened over the course of the past sixty days or so.
1) I watched Wrestlemania. It took me most of the card to find a good stream of it because $70 for a glorified Raw is too much, not to mention that I'm a terrible person with an unjustifiable sense of entitlement. I found one that held strong through Punk/Undertaker, so tat's all that matters. Looking at the talent pool and the lack of good storylines lately, I don't think it's out of the question to call it match of the year already, probably the best WM match since HBK/Undertaker a few years back.
2) I started working another janitor job in addition to the janitor job I already have. I'm cleaning a bar at this one, which is incredibly less gross than the Wal-Mart I have to clean up otherwise. Other than the glitter I can't get off the stage thanks to the burlesque show we hosted last weekend, things are fine.
3) I went on tour with Victory and Associates. It was awesome. Rock and roll is cool. I ate so much ice cream and saw so many killer bands. Can't wait to do it again this summer. Maybe I'll have the songs learned by then.
4) My roommate fell in love and now he's engaged and now he's not my roommate anymore because he wasn't so much my roommate as much as he was the dude who owns the house I was living in the basement of. Let this be a reminder that love is dumb.
4b) Now I live at home. My mother calls me from the grocery store to ask if I want cottage cheese and then calls me again ten minutes later to ask if I'll split a sub with her if she buys one.
4c) This is not as adorable as you think, so just stop thinking that.
5) I bought $14.46 worth of discount Easter candy.
6) Doritos Locos Tacos are delicious.
7) I tweeted Billy Corgan six times in a row and then got bored with trolling him and tweeted Chuck Billy once just to tell him that he's cool.
8) Literature was apparently declared dead, again. The nerds got pissed.
And I saw Queensryche and I'm pretending like I wasn't stoked and it's not important enough to be actual #9 when really the opposite is true. One thing that hasn't happened in the past two months is me getting published anywhere. I got a pretty big acceptance from the Indiana Review, which is rad even though I have my doubts as to whether or not anyone actually reads those fancy university print journals, but other than that it's been rejection city.
I've gotten fourteen rejections on seven different stories. That's about two rejections per story, but some of these are only one rejection each, so a couple of them are more heavily rejected than others. Not that any of it really matters, because one acceptance cancels out a thousand rejections, but it's times like these when crunching numbers feels like a really good solution to the problem.
The real solution is to write more, submit more, and hopefully, eventually, do both things better. I haven't finished a story in almost a month, and it's a story I started over a month prior to that, the first story for the wrestling chapbook I'm working on. The only other story close to being done is also for the wrestling chapbook and it keeps adding up wrong, not working as flash fiction, stuck in that odd 2000-word length purgatory. There's a first sentence to a story based on "Shot of Poison" by Lita Ford sitting in a Word document and that's about as far as it goes. I started on a novella told in these little fragments that are somewhere between micro-fiction and severed, re-conjoined thoughts, but that's kind of stalling, too.
The first chapter of that novella is making me fucking nuts trying to figure it out because even though I think in those weird pieces, I don't often write in them. When I do, it's for effect, not as a new medium for creation. Imagine Dinosaur Jr. taking all those little pieces of noise from You're Living All Over Me and making an entire album out of them. The risk/reward is about the same, as is the possible stupidity of the idea. Even though other people have done it, it's not necessarily the thing I do--or Dinosaur Jr. does, if you want to carry that comparison through--so who the fuck knows if it's going to be worth a goddamn.
Experimentation is a wonderful thing. Sometimes it's just a thing. Even though I haven't been published recently, my book got some coverage over at Untoward Magazine. The wonderful Matt Rowan was kind enough to say nice things about my book for free.
"That’s to say he does a good job of inhabiting spaces. places and things. Maybe intuiting how they’re supposed to be or who knows what makes it all make sense. It does, though. These stories creep inside the souls of their protagonists and whoever else. Things get fleshed out nicely. You come to know them well, and in a very short time, too."
(When you're done reading that, check out Matt's story in the new lit journal Cloud Rodeo, headed up in part by the magical Matthew Burnside.)
I'm trying to make books happen over at Passenger Side Books, which is my micropress, which is actually just me and a printer and a lot of e-mailing from my parents' basement. The same Matthew Burnside that was parenthetically mentioned a couple sentences earlier has a book called Infinity's Jukebox coming out soon. More details to come, but for now, Justin Lawrence Daugherty's Whatever Don't Drown Will Always Rise is the jam of the now.
Cover art by the incredible Matt Kish of One Drawing for Every Page of Moby Dick brilliance.Ten stories of myths and the roads that sprawl out from them. These are not the stories of Greek and Roman gods, but of the daily hurts and hopes people cling to in lieu of a simple other, the apparitions and rumors of science and tradition that can give or take away. Get it soon.
But for now? Just get rad. Always get rad.
RW
February 6, 2013
Criminal, there ought to be a whole lot more . . .
"If You Want Blood" by Mark Kozelek, because who the fuck knew there'd be so much pathos hidden right there in an AC/DC song?
It's been about a month. Here are some things that have happened since then.
1) I watched Summerslam 2005 and didn't cry when the giant electronic American flag unfurled behind Hulk Hogan during his entrance. This is a semi-major life-improvement.
2) I applied for a job stocking ice and beer at a casino. I didn't get it. Two weeks later they called me and asked if I want to work part-time checking coats.
2b) I told them to fuck off.
2c) What I actually did was just not call them back after they left a voicemail.
3) I searched for "Iowa" and "Wisconsin" on PornHub. There were a bunch of videos for Iowa and all the chicks looked pretty hot. There were like seven videos for Wisconsin and all the chicks looked like they were made of stale biscuits.
4) Several dumb old photos of me were uploaded to Facebook by other people, such as this one where I'm wearing an XL Pantera shirt and standing next to a cardboard cutout of Shaquille O'Neal and this one where I'm wearing a winged battle-suit I made out of Construx.
5) I locked my keys in my car twice, once behind the coffee shop and once a week later in front of the coffee shop. The same guy from Master Key came to my assistance both time. The first time he was wearing a pink mesh shirt underneath a button-up tank top and when he went into his trunk to get the tools he needed to get into my car, he had to first take out two huge chainsaws and set them on the ground.
6) I got ordained. I'm going to marry so many drunk people at the bar.
7) I met Mick Foley.
I MET MICK FOLEY, DUDE.
I had some stuff get published recently. It seems like I used to be stoked for weeks after something got published and now I've had three things go up this past month and I'm already back to feeling like I haven't done anything. Writing is better than meth, but only because it doesn't ruin your teeth.
----------
In a rare showing, I was able to write and publish an essay. It's about Neko Case, and though everything I do is, on some level, about Neko Case, this is blatantly about Neko Case and how her album Middle Cyclone made me learn things about living in and around solitude, the extent to which I should love myself, and respecting fear as it arrives in all humans. It's up over at The Rumpus, and I'd love for you to read it.
"The year 2008 tumbled out of itself and took with it the things that consumed my days. Within a month I had lost my job to the upholding of liquor laws, my college education to an unavoidable graduation, and my girlfriend to youth and general apathy.
I spent a lot of time in bed, not depressed, but reading depressing things—Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems 1966-1987, William Matthews’s Search Party, Rick Bass’s In the Loyal Mountains—often out loud. I read Heaney in an impassioned Irish accent, Bass with a gruff-yet-kind tone of wonderment. I read Matthews sitting up, as if at a podium, addressing a faceless sum of the discontinued millions.
There were certain lengths I was willing to go to in order to not be myself."
----------
I also had a story called "Trace" that I've talked about here before on the subject of "revising old stuff I wrote and wondering if it's all just a big waste of my fucking time." This one turned out decent for being around so long and going through so many drafts. It's up over at 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, and it'd be really great of you to read it.
"My grandmother spent her last several thousand mornings highlighting the obituaries."
----------
Lastly, the fourth story in my chapbook/cycle Murmuration is out there in the world now. I'm happy with how this one turned out and, like most of my stuff, it ties in with another story: The Honeybreakers are the band that had dissolved and reassembled in my story "Sometimes We Were Young." Here we find them merely dissolving, as seen through the eyes of our faithful narrator. Please read it over at Bartleby Snopes.
"Revising my dreams into the necessary shapes involved going out to the van every night and playing guitar in the street. I waited until after the show, after everyone had locked into the distractions that would take them through to morning. I would strap on whichever guitar I grabbed first and commence to shredding first against the van and then eventually to the center of the street. This was a small reassurance that my life would eventually resolve itself if attacked from compromising angles."
The chance of me or my buddy Josh actually learning German: 0%
I've spent so much time playing music that I haven't really had time to sit down and write anything. This isn't really a very good excuse. "Write every day" is kind of the only semi-infallible writing advice out there, and I'm totally blowing it. If this new country-rock project gets off the ground, I'll be in a total four bands in addition to working 40+ hours between two jobs. My options in life turned out to be "one band that does a lot" or "four bands that don't do much." Regardless, none of these bands are getting me laid, so it doesn't really matter.
I'm also going on a micro-tour with the Oakland-based rock & roll band Victory and Associates as a hired gun to replace their real lead guitarist who can't make it because he has a real job, unlike us. My band Legal Fingers played with them back in October and we hit it off and I've been on their podcast not once, but twice, and now we're going to christen our union by piling into a van and making it smell bad for about a week. I've spent the last month learning how to play a dozen or so of their songs and in less than a week I've got to prove that I won't fuck it up. For those not in the know, this is what volume was invented for.
Well, and this.
But still, I haven't had time to write anything because when I'm not at a band practice I'm making a flier for a show or I'm being a fucking dickhead on Twitter or I'm watching The Family Feud at the coffee shop. Murmuration has been done for months now, which means I've been slacking on finishing the wrestling-themed chapbook. One story called "A Comprehensive List of the Least Worst Way To Do Everything" is done and making the rejection rounds, but "Waiting for Andre"--the story about a rich man with a bone disease who learns about and becomes obsessed with the anecdote of Samuel Beckett giving Andre the Giant rides to school--is stuck in revision hell. I've just finally got a decent grip on it after weeks of picking at it here and there, but it's still not close. The title story, "The Road Becomes What You Leave," exists only in the form of an aborted story from years ago. If I finish this book before the end of the year, I'd be surprised.
And I'm working on a novella, but the truth is that I'm not working on it nearly as hard as I'm working on my tweets, which is fucked up.
I hope I have something to show the next time I check in, but I'll probably just have more stories about how drunk girls in bars yell at me and then later on get my phone number and pretend to be Stoya. Mario Kolaric is doing the artwork for my chapbook and Matt Kish is doing the artwork for Justin Lawrence Daugherty's chapbook that I'm putting out through Passenger Side Books. So there's that. But still, I can't take credit for that. All I did was send some e-mails. I did that to Christina Hendricks and NOTHING.
That's it for now. Be wonderful.
RW
Follow me on Twitter
Become a fan of my micro-press, Passenger Side Books, on Facebook
It's been about a month. Here are some things that have happened since then.
1) I watched Summerslam 2005 and didn't cry when the giant electronic American flag unfurled behind Hulk Hogan during his entrance. This is a semi-major life-improvement.
2) I applied for a job stocking ice and beer at a casino. I didn't get it. Two weeks later they called me and asked if I want to work part-time checking coats.
2b) I told them to fuck off.
2c) What I actually did was just not call them back after they left a voicemail.
3) I searched for "Iowa" and "Wisconsin" on PornHub. There were a bunch of videos for Iowa and all the chicks looked pretty hot. There were like seven videos for Wisconsin and all the chicks looked like they were made of stale biscuits.
4) Several dumb old photos of me were uploaded to Facebook by other people, such as this one where I'm wearing an XL Pantera shirt and standing next to a cardboard cutout of Shaquille O'Neal and this one where I'm wearing a winged battle-suit I made out of Construx.
5) I locked my keys in my car twice, once behind the coffee shop and once a week later in front of the coffee shop. The same guy from Master Key came to my assistance both time. The first time he was wearing a pink mesh shirt underneath a button-up tank top and when he went into his trunk to get the tools he needed to get into my car, he had to first take out two huge chainsaws and set them on the ground.
6) I got ordained. I'm going to marry so many drunk people at the bar.
7) I met Mick Foley.
I MET MICK FOLEY, DUDE. I had some stuff get published recently. It seems like I used to be stoked for weeks after something got published and now I've had three things go up this past month and I'm already back to feeling like I haven't done anything. Writing is better than meth, but only because it doesn't ruin your teeth.
----------
In a rare showing, I was able to write and publish an essay. It's about Neko Case, and though everything I do is, on some level, about Neko Case, this is blatantly about Neko Case and how her album Middle Cyclone made me learn things about living in and around solitude, the extent to which I should love myself, and respecting fear as it arrives in all humans. It's up over at The Rumpus, and I'd love for you to read it.
"The year 2008 tumbled out of itself and took with it the things that consumed my days. Within a month I had lost my job to the upholding of liquor laws, my college education to an unavoidable graduation, and my girlfriend to youth and general apathy.
I spent a lot of time in bed, not depressed, but reading depressing things—Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems 1966-1987, William Matthews’s Search Party, Rick Bass’s In the Loyal Mountains—often out loud. I read Heaney in an impassioned Irish accent, Bass with a gruff-yet-kind tone of wonderment. I read Matthews sitting up, as if at a podium, addressing a faceless sum of the discontinued millions.
There were certain lengths I was willing to go to in order to not be myself."
----------
I also had a story called "Trace" that I've talked about here before on the subject of "revising old stuff I wrote and wondering if it's all just a big waste of my fucking time." This one turned out decent for being around so long and going through so many drafts. It's up over at 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, and it'd be really great of you to read it.
"My grandmother spent her last several thousand mornings highlighting the obituaries."
----------
Lastly, the fourth story in my chapbook/cycle Murmuration is out there in the world now. I'm happy with how this one turned out and, like most of my stuff, it ties in with another story: The Honeybreakers are the band that had dissolved and reassembled in my story "Sometimes We Were Young." Here we find them merely dissolving, as seen through the eyes of our faithful narrator. Please read it over at Bartleby Snopes.
"Revising my dreams into the necessary shapes involved going out to the van every night and playing guitar in the street. I waited until after the show, after everyone had locked into the distractions that would take them through to morning. I would strap on whichever guitar I grabbed first and commence to shredding first against the van and then eventually to the center of the street. This was a small reassurance that my life would eventually resolve itself if attacked from compromising angles."
The chance of me or my buddy Josh actually learning German: 0% I've spent so much time playing music that I haven't really had time to sit down and write anything. This isn't really a very good excuse. "Write every day" is kind of the only semi-infallible writing advice out there, and I'm totally blowing it. If this new country-rock project gets off the ground, I'll be in a total four bands in addition to working 40+ hours between two jobs. My options in life turned out to be "one band that does a lot" or "four bands that don't do much." Regardless, none of these bands are getting me laid, so it doesn't really matter.
I'm also going on a micro-tour with the Oakland-based rock & roll band Victory and Associates as a hired gun to replace their real lead guitarist who can't make it because he has a real job, unlike us. My band Legal Fingers played with them back in October and we hit it off and I've been on their podcast not once, but twice, and now we're going to christen our union by piling into a van and making it smell bad for about a week. I've spent the last month learning how to play a dozen or so of their songs and in less than a week I've got to prove that I won't fuck it up. For those not in the know, this is what volume was invented for.
Well, and this.
But still, I haven't had time to write anything because when I'm not at a band practice I'm making a flier for a show or I'm being a fucking dickhead on Twitter or I'm watching The Family Feud at the coffee shop. Murmuration has been done for months now, which means I've been slacking on finishing the wrestling-themed chapbook. One story called "A Comprehensive List of the Least Worst Way To Do Everything" is done and making the rejection rounds, but "Waiting for Andre"--the story about a rich man with a bone disease who learns about and becomes obsessed with the anecdote of Samuel Beckett giving Andre the Giant rides to school--is stuck in revision hell. I've just finally got a decent grip on it after weeks of picking at it here and there, but it's still not close. The title story, "The Road Becomes What You Leave," exists only in the form of an aborted story from years ago. If I finish this book before the end of the year, I'd be surprised.
And I'm working on a novella, but the truth is that I'm not working on it nearly as hard as I'm working on my tweets, which is fucked up.
I hope I have something to show the next time I check in, but I'll probably just have more stories about how drunk girls in bars yell at me and then later on get my phone number and pretend to be Stoya. Mario Kolaric is doing the artwork for my chapbook and Matt Kish is doing the artwork for Justin Lawrence Daugherty's chapbook that I'm putting out through Passenger Side Books. So there's that. But still, I can't take credit for that. All I did was send some e-mails. I did that to Christina Hendricks and NOTHING.
That's it for now. Be wonderful.
RW
Follow me on Twitter
Become a fan of my micro-press, Passenger Side Books, on Facebook
January 2, 2013
Fuck all the perfect people (who I loved last year) . . .
"Fuck All the Perfect People" by Chip Taylor and the New Ukrainians 
BEST BOOK THAT MADE ME WANT TO WRITE A BOOK LIKE THAT
[Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison]
This book isn't disjointed--it's shattered. Mary Robison had writer's block for years and years so she just started writing down individual thoughts on notecards. After awhile, she assembled them into this book. As a base-level theory, that's somewhere between genius and fundamentally retarded, but Robison is too good. The narrative isn't buried or secondary. It's right fucking there. It just happens to be delivered in the form of 530 short short short stories.
I want people to quit writing stories and poems and collections that try too hard at sounding disjointed and come off as sounding like Mad Libs for MFA dickheads. But, since they probably won't, it really made me want to do it. So I think I'll try that in 2013.
BEST BOOK THAT MADE ME NEVER WANT TO WRITE A BOOK LIKE THAT
[A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley]
Definitely a book I had to slog through at points, but when I finally just gave in and started high-lighting the best lines and paragraphs, everything unlocked. Exley seems like a terrible, wonderful mess: alcoholic, sports obsessive (hence the title), destructively impulsive. I will never write like this, partially because I just don't, but mostly because I can't put my life through the wringer like he did and come out with enough energy--or whatever it is that it takes--to document it, to essentially go through it all over again.
BEST NOVEL BY SOMEONE WHOSE STORY COLLECTION I DIDN'T LIKE VERY MUCH
[The Ask by Sam Lipsyte]
Am I missing something with Venus Drive? I just can't get past the terrible people never learning anything. I went into it after reading (and loving) Homeland and was beyond excited. Venus Drive felt like pointless nihilism to me. I read The Subject Steve next and began to think Homeland was a fluke. Then I read The Ask and realized that Lipsyte is the real deal, beyond capable and into the realm of crushing. His dialogue is unfuckwithable and in The Ask is a grand realization of the promise Homeland delivered on originally: what in this goddamn life is worth it and what is "it"?
BEST NOVEL BY SOMEONE WHOSE STORY COLLECTION I FUCKING LOVE
[The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson]
[Barely edging out Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon, which is brilliantly constructed and written and worth it]
The comparisons to The Royal Tennenbaums are unavoidable, but when it comes down to the meat and mystery of the book, the similarities drip away. Whereas The Royal Tennenbaums was a family torn apart and eventually reassembled by its figurehead, The Family Fang is a family torn apart by art and reassembled by it in a completely different way. The abstractions are big, but Wilson's smart enough to not let them drive the story. I don't think it's as good as his collection Tunneling To the Center of Earth, but I don't think many books are. The point here is that The Family Fang delivers.
BEST CHAPBOOK I CONTINUE TO TAKE EVERYWHERE WITH ME
[Less Shiny by Mary Miller]
It's a tiny, perfect thing. I keep it in my computer bag and use the book more than I use my computer. Everything Mary writes seems like a streamlined play-by-play into a real woman's mind. There's impulse and focus and the magic is that I can see them and not understand them. This book could be a thousand pages and I'd know nothing more and be no less captured by it.
BEST OTHER BOOK BY MARY MILLER I'M LOOKING FOR AN EXCUSE TO PUT ON THIS LIST
[Big World by Mary Miller]
I ordered Big World and spent two days at my shitty janitor job reading it, sneaking off to unmonitored offices to devour it. It makes me want to call up all of my ex-girlfriends and then hang up the phone right away and then do it again. Is there higher praise?
BEST BOOK I DIDN'T REALLY UNDERSTAND
[The Book of Freaks by Jamie Iredell]
[Barely edging out Variations of a Brother War by J.A. Tyler, which I understood a bit more and liked just a bit less than The Book of Freaks.]
I read other books this year that I liked more, but few of them were as interesting as The Book of Freaks. Iredell's a wizard. It's not unlike Louie in the ways in which it shows how each of us, if you move slowly and look hard enough, are special. Louie tends to focus on the ways in which we are individually incredible, whereas The Book of Freaks is a stripped-down outing of just that: freaks. Meaning, of course, all of us. The narrative junkie in me wanted more of a story-story or a character to latch on to, but even those things emerged in time. The story is my life, the character is everyone. I'm not claiming to understand it or its fucked up bits-and-pieces structure, but thinking about this book is one of my favorite things to do.
BEST BOOK ABOUT BASEBALL AND THE MIDWEST
[The Iowa Baseball Confederacy by WP Kinsella]
Baseball stories are great and the Midwest is great. And, except for the time when he ends up sounding like Garrison Keillor--Box Socials fucking sucked--W.P. Kinsella is great as well. This definitely revisits the sort of magical realism of Shoeless Joe (the Field of Dreams book), which is the sort of magical realism I can handle.
It's hard for me to sit through an entire sporting event, but I'll read a good sports story any day. This is one of them.
BEST BOOK I FORGOT I READ UNTIL LOOKING BACK OVER THE LIST OF WHAT I READ THIS YEAR
[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera]
Not only did I forget I read it, I forgot entirely what it's about. Let me take a shot at this:
A young/old man has a sort of existential crisis regarding his age or relationship. A somewhat-tangential side-story about sexuality/politics runs through the entire book and becomes less and less tangential for some odd, philosophical reason.
Close? Probably. I liked the book, but I don't think Kundera's going to blow me away like he did back when I first read The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I gave up on expecting the sort of love I was in at age 20 to keep coming back, and I'm giving up on Kundera "really opening my eyes, man" now that I'm almost 30 and living in a basement and haven't had a blowjob in like five years.
BEST BOOK THAT COMPLETELY CHANGED THE WAY I WRITE SHORT FICTION
[Stories In the Worst Way by Gary Lutz]
Those sentences. Holy fuck. I read A Partial List of People to Bleach before this and liked it, but I wasn't blown away. It took a whole book of Lutz to show me that his compact non-sequiturs run so deep they end up meaning more than any narrative. If Barry Hannah made it off feeling and style, Lutz makes it off style and more style. People complain that he's all voice and no story (on the rare instance I hear people complain about Lutz), but those sentences. Holy fuck. What else is there?
BEST BOOK THAT MADE ME HAPPY I WAS YOUNG AND EVEN HAPPIER THAT I'M NOT ANYMORE
[Legs Get Led Astray by Chloe Caldwell]
[I reviewed this at length over at [PANK].]
Chloe and I have led vastly different lives in terms of sexuality and experimentation, but her feelings are so big that I see myself in these essays--in my early-twenties, not waiting, but actively searching for the next thing that will change my life. Every five minutes.
It's manic and impossible and real and only getting better from here. I think one of the reasons the book works is that those big feelings are their own end at this point, the period in life Coco's writing about. Eventually, she'll have to learn to process all of that into a bigger meaning, tighten things up and strip away the listing and the sections that feel like journal entries, but in Legs Get Led Astray, there's a ghost with too much energy making it all fit together in the scariest, most joyous of ways.
BEST BOOK OF POORLY-DISGUISED AND HIGHLY-EFFECTIVE WITCHCRAFT
[Tongue Party by Sarah Rose Etter]
Sarah, dear, you freak me the fuck out. Never go to Salem or read me a bedtime story. Also, never stop writing, because these stories are like rock candy the dark house on the street gives out on Halloween, and I couldn't be more thrilled about it.
BEST LONG BOOK I DIDN'T THINK I'D FINISH BUT ENDED UP NOT BEING ABLE TO PUT DOWN
[Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S by Jeremy Leven]
Satan getting psychotherapy, as narrated by Satan, who is embodied in a hand-assembled super computer. (This book came out in the 70s). For like 500 pages. I wouldn't have picked this up on my own, but a friend with excellent taste (aside from his dislike of Rush) sent it to me insisting I read it. And he was right. It's excellent and worth the time.The narrative aside from Satan shows the effects of fate and happenstance as they fight against human-made decisions, as embodied in the life of one man, the aforementioned unfortunate Dr. Kassler. All of it together is a solid mix.
BEST BOOK WHERE SOMEBODY DIES IN PRETTY MUCH EVERY STORY
[Phantasmagoria by Thomas Cooper]
Life is a dream and you wake up when you die. Either that or the exact opposite are true. Phantasmagoria doesn't answer the question, but there's so much loss, so much funny magic, that it makes the question an enjoyably honest one, if not full of odd hope. Stories like this made me start to understand flash fiction back when I was just starting to write it. The only ting better than unpacking these stories for study is simply reading them for the reasons I'd take in any sort of a masterwork.
BEST BOOK THAT MADE ME REALLY EXCITED FOR CONTEMPORARY SHORT FICTION AGAIN
[Short Dark Oracles by Sara Levine]
[I reviewed this at length over at [PANK].]
With everything being on the internet, I'm just like everyone else in that i read tons o awesome stuff and tons of bullshit. Every once in awhile, whn the bullshit outweighs the good stuff, I start to wonder if people are interested in writing pure fiction anymore. (I don't mean sci-fi or fantasy, which I've heard people argue is the "real pure fiction" because these people are assholes.) Sara Levine's writing is vibrant and creative and funny and there's a goddamn story there. It has nothing to do with oblique narratives or writing from a constructed personality. Let's hope she writes forever.
BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL I FINALLY GOT AROUND TO READING
[The Watchmen by Alan Moore]
I'm the last person in the world to read this. I think it's great. Go somewhere else for real thoughts.
(Except this one: who picks a fucking owl as their superhero character? Come on.)
BEST BOOK THAT I WROTE THAT WAS PUBLISHED
[Shake Away These Constant Days by Ryan Werner]
I sold a few of these. I think people were mostly neutral towards it. Mostly, I really like the book.
MAYBE YOU SHOULD ORDER ONE FROM ME.
I also read and wrote a ton of garbage this year, but let's try to be positive, all right?
RW
Follow me on Twitter
Become a fan of my micro-press, Passenger Side Books, on Facebook
BEST BOOK THAT MADE ME WANT TO WRITE A BOOK LIKE THAT[Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison]
This book isn't disjointed--it's shattered. Mary Robison had writer's block for years and years so she just started writing down individual thoughts on notecards. After awhile, she assembled them into this book. As a base-level theory, that's somewhere between genius and fundamentally retarded, but Robison is too good. The narrative isn't buried or secondary. It's right fucking there. It just happens to be delivered in the form of 530 short short short stories.
I want people to quit writing stories and poems and collections that try too hard at sounding disjointed and come off as sounding like Mad Libs for MFA dickheads. But, since they probably won't, it really made me want to do it. So I think I'll try that in 2013.
BEST BOOK THAT MADE ME NEVER WANT TO WRITE A BOOK LIKE THAT[A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley]
Definitely a book I had to slog through at points, but when I finally just gave in and started high-lighting the best lines and paragraphs, everything unlocked. Exley seems like a terrible, wonderful mess: alcoholic, sports obsessive (hence the title), destructively impulsive. I will never write like this, partially because I just don't, but mostly because I can't put my life through the wringer like he did and come out with enough energy--or whatever it is that it takes--to document it, to essentially go through it all over again.
BEST NOVEL BY SOMEONE WHOSE STORY COLLECTION I DIDN'T LIKE VERY MUCH[The Ask by Sam Lipsyte]
Am I missing something with Venus Drive? I just can't get past the terrible people never learning anything. I went into it after reading (and loving) Homeland and was beyond excited. Venus Drive felt like pointless nihilism to me. I read The Subject Steve next and began to think Homeland was a fluke. Then I read The Ask and realized that Lipsyte is the real deal, beyond capable and into the realm of crushing. His dialogue is unfuckwithable and in The Ask is a grand realization of the promise Homeland delivered on originally: what in this goddamn life is worth it and what is "it"?
BEST NOVEL BY SOMEONE WHOSE STORY COLLECTION I FUCKING LOVE[The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson]
[Barely edging out Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon, which is brilliantly constructed and written and worth it]
The comparisons to The Royal Tennenbaums are unavoidable, but when it comes down to the meat and mystery of the book, the similarities drip away. Whereas The Royal Tennenbaums was a family torn apart and eventually reassembled by its figurehead, The Family Fang is a family torn apart by art and reassembled by it in a completely different way. The abstractions are big, but Wilson's smart enough to not let them drive the story. I don't think it's as good as his collection Tunneling To the Center of Earth, but I don't think many books are. The point here is that The Family Fang delivers.
BEST CHAPBOOK I CONTINUE TO TAKE EVERYWHERE WITH ME[Less Shiny by Mary Miller]
It's a tiny, perfect thing. I keep it in my computer bag and use the book more than I use my computer. Everything Mary writes seems like a streamlined play-by-play into a real woman's mind. There's impulse and focus and the magic is that I can see them and not understand them. This book could be a thousand pages and I'd know nothing more and be no less captured by it.
BEST OTHER BOOK BY MARY MILLER I'M LOOKING FOR AN EXCUSE TO PUT ON THIS LIST[Big World by Mary Miller]
I ordered Big World and spent two days at my shitty janitor job reading it, sneaking off to unmonitored offices to devour it. It makes me want to call up all of my ex-girlfriends and then hang up the phone right away and then do it again. Is there higher praise?
BEST BOOK I DIDN'T REALLY UNDERSTAND[The Book of Freaks by Jamie Iredell]
[Barely edging out Variations of a Brother War by J.A. Tyler, which I understood a bit more and liked just a bit less than The Book of Freaks.]
I read other books this year that I liked more, but few of them were as interesting as The Book of Freaks. Iredell's a wizard. It's not unlike Louie in the ways in which it shows how each of us, if you move slowly and look hard enough, are special. Louie tends to focus on the ways in which we are individually incredible, whereas The Book of Freaks is a stripped-down outing of just that: freaks. Meaning, of course, all of us. The narrative junkie in me wanted more of a story-story or a character to latch on to, but even those things emerged in time. The story is my life, the character is everyone. I'm not claiming to understand it or its fucked up bits-and-pieces structure, but thinking about this book is one of my favorite things to do.
BEST BOOK ABOUT BASEBALL AND THE MIDWEST[The Iowa Baseball Confederacy by WP Kinsella]
Baseball stories are great and the Midwest is great. And, except for the time when he ends up sounding like Garrison Keillor--Box Socials fucking sucked--W.P. Kinsella is great as well. This definitely revisits the sort of magical realism of Shoeless Joe (the Field of Dreams book), which is the sort of magical realism I can handle.
It's hard for me to sit through an entire sporting event, but I'll read a good sports story any day. This is one of them.
BEST BOOK I FORGOT I READ UNTIL LOOKING BACK OVER THE LIST OF WHAT I READ THIS YEAR[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera]
Not only did I forget I read it, I forgot entirely what it's about. Let me take a shot at this:
A young/old man has a sort of existential crisis regarding his age or relationship. A somewhat-tangential side-story about sexuality/politics runs through the entire book and becomes less and less tangential for some odd, philosophical reason.
Close? Probably. I liked the book, but I don't think Kundera's going to blow me away like he did back when I first read The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I gave up on expecting the sort of love I was in at age 20 to keep coming back, and I'm giving up on Kundera "really opening my eyes, man" now that I'm almost 30 and living in a basement and haven't had a blowjob in like five years.
BEST BOOK THAT COMPLETELY CHANGED THE WAY I WRITE SHORT FICTION[Stories In the Worst Way by Gary Lutz]
Those sentences. Holy fuck. I read A Partial List of People to Bleach before this and liked it, but I wasn't blown away. It took a whole book of Lutz to show me that his compact non-sequiturs run so deep they end up meaning more than any narrative. If Barry Hannah made it off feeling and style, Lutz makes it off style and more style. People complain that he's all voice and no story (on the rare instance I hear people complain about Lutz), but those sentences. Holy fuck. What else is there?
BEST BOOK THAT MADE ME HAPPY I WAS YOUNG AND EVEN HAPPIER THAT I'M NOT ANYMORE[Legs Get Led Astray by Chloe Caldwell]
[I reviewed this at length over at [PANK].]
Chloe and I have led vastly different lives in terms of sexuality and experimentation, but her feelings are so big that I see myself in these essays--in my early-twenties, not waiting, but actively searching for the next thing that will change my life. Every five minutes.
It's manic and impossible and real and only getting better from here. I think one of the reasons the book works is that those big feelings are their own end at this point, the period in life Coco's writing about. Eventually, she'll have to learn to process all of that into a bigger meaning, tighten things up and strip away the listing and the sections that feel like journal entries, but in Legs Get Led Astray, there's a ghost with too much energy making it all fit together in the scariest, most joyous of ways.
BEST BOOK OF POORLY-DISGUISED AND HIGHLY-EFFECTIVE WITCHCRAFT[Tongue Party by Sarah Rose Etter]
Sarah, dear, you freak me the fuck out. Never go to Salem or read me a bedtime story. Also, never stop writing, because these stories are like rock candy the dark house on the street gives out on Halloween, and I couldn't be more thrilled about it.
BEST LONG BOOK I DIDN'T THINK I'D FINISH BUT ENDED UP NOT BEING ABLE TO PUT DOWN[Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S by Jeremy Leven]
Satan getting psychotherapy, as narrated by Satan, who is embodied in a hand-assembled super computer. (This book came out in the 70s). For like 500 pages. I wouldn't have picked this up on my own, but a friend with excellent taste (aside from his dislike of Rush) sent it to me insisting I read it. And he was right. It's excellent and worth the time.The narrative aside from Satan shows the effects of fate and happenstance as they fight against human-made decisions, as embodied in the life of one man, the aforementioned unfortunate Dr. Kassler. All of it together is a solid mix.
BEST BOOK WHERE SOMEBODY DIES IN PRETTY MUCH EVERY STORY[Phantasmagoria by Thomas Cooper]
Life is a dream and you wake up when you die. Either that or the exact opposite are true. Phantasmagoria doesn't answer the question, but there's so much loss, so much funny magic, that it makes the question an enjoyably honest one, if not full of odd hope. Stories like this made me start to understand flash fiction back when I was just starting to write it. The only ting better than unpacking these stories for study is simply reading them for the reasons I'd take in any sort of a masterwork.
BEST BOOK THAT MADE ME REALLY EXCITED FOR CONTEMPORARY SHORT FICTION AGAIN[Short Dark Oracles by Sara Levine]
[I reviewed this at length over at [PANK].]
With everything being on the internet, I'm just like everyone else in that i read tons o awesome stuff and tons of bullshit. Every once in awhile, whn the bullshit outweighs the good stuff, I start to wonder if people are interested in writing pure fiction anymore. (I don't mean sci-fi or fantasy, which I've heard people argue is the "real pure fiction" because these people are assholes.) Sara Levine's writing is vibrant and creative and funny and there's a goddamn story there. It has nothing to do with oblique narratives or writing from a constructed personality. Let's hope she writes forever.
BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL I FINALLY GOT AROUND TO READING[The Watchmen by Alan Moore]
I'm the last person in the world to read this. I think it's great. Go somewhere else for real thoughts.
(Except this one: who picks a fucking owl as their superhero character? Come on.)
BEST BOOK THAT I WROTE THAT WAS PUBLISHED[Shake Away These Constant Days by Ryan Werner]
I sold a few of these. I think people were mostly neutral towards it. Mostly, I really like the book.
MAYBE YOU SHOULD ORDER ONE FROM ME.
I also read and wrote a ton of garbage this year, but let's try to be positive, all right?
RW
Follow me on Twitter
Become a fan of my micro-press, Passenger Side Books, on Facebook
December 12, 2012
The choice is up to you, 'cuz they come in two classes: rhinestone shades or cheap sunglasses . . .
The Sword, covering ZZ Top and doing a fucking awesome job of it.
I don't have shit going on to promote of my own, so here's a few rad things other folks have going on.
Matt Burnside has a continuation of his sage writing advice up at [PANK]. This is "11 More Inflexible Rules For Upstart Writers." The title is either misleading or I actually (sadly) know less than I thought I did, because I'm learning things, too, from reading this. Matt's fucking funny on top of being a super appreciative weirdo, on top of being incredibly smart, on top of being an exciting, solid writer. Some guys have it all. I bet he's got a dick like a Pringles can, too.
Anyways, here's my favorite of this newest batch of inflexible rules:
RULE: Fight the urge every day to be cynical
It’s easy to be cynical, but better to keep your sense of humor/humanity through it all. There are days I wake up and want to beat up a phone booth, but if I can stand back long enough to realize how bad it really isn’t, I can find it in my heart to forgive that phone booth. Cynicism is a virus from hell. It may feel good to blast the world for all its bullshit, but where does that get you, really, in the end? It gets you beating up phone booths, and they hardly deserve it. Negativity has never and will never be sexy. Not only that, cynicism has a way of digging its nasty nails into your work. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. We certainly need that in literature, and I’ve written a lot of cynical stuff, but of late I’ve found it’s much harder and rewarding to write something more earnest because the stakes are higher. Work that approaches the heart of things without all the venom and razors – like walking through a minefield where the slightest misstep could result in sentimentality – is more risky than writing something extremely dark and nihilistic and full of fucks and death and postmodern lines like: LANGUAGE WON’T SAVE US, which I’ve literally written in my work maybe five times now. Because the thing is, language will save us. I think as a writer you’ve got to believe that, even as you suspect how foolish it may be.
Read the rest right here at [PANK].
And speaking of [PANK], they've got a cool holiday deal going on where you can a bunch of stuff for like $50 shipped. I think it's three print issues, a shirt, a book, a sticker, and a button. You'll save a little over $20 and all that stuff should be pretty rad. Myfanwy Collins (Hey, anyone reading this: What the fuck is with that name? I don't want to e-mail her and ask because I'm sure she's been getting shit about that name forever. Can a third party explain this to me? Welsh? Is it Welsh?) wrote the book, called I Am Holding Your Hand. I bet it rules, because Randall Brown said it does and he rules. Simple math. And the shirt's got a typewriter, so, you know. Whatever.
Buy all the things right here.
Chloe Caldwell of Legs Get Led Astray fame and general fucking awesomeness has a new eBook over at Thought Catlog. It's called "The New Age Camp" and I can't read it because I don't have a Kindle. I'm working on getting a PDF or whatever guys like me who still do stupid shit like listen to music on Windows Media Player need to read non-Kindle eBooks. But you should buy it and read it if you can. When has Chloe ever let you down? (I mean that as it pertains to the realm of literature. If she owes you money or puked on your rug or something, I'll apologize right now on behalf of her.)
Buy Coco's eBook right here at Thought Catalog.
(EDIT: If you don't have Kindle, download Cloud Reader and you're all set. Not sure if they have it in a fancy alpine white iPhone color, but use your imagination.) (Dickhead.)
This is all actually just a ploy to quickly regenerate my karma after changing the background of my parents' computer to a picture of a chocolate butthole.
Steven Gillis has a new short story collection out called The Law of Strings and it's worth reading, worth obsessing over. My full review for Heavy Feather Review went up Monday. Read this opening section to his story "The Society for the Protection of Animals."
Uniss had a plan. The situation was dire. No one refuted this, though we knew at first only what Uniss told us.
In her cage, on the floor of our apartment, Uniss did her best to turn. She said it was important to feel as they did, to better understand. I questioned the necessity, wondered, “If we’re supposed to be sympathetic, shouldn’t we be motivated more by instinct?”
Uniss told me to “Think about what you’re saying. How can you understand what you haven’t experienced?”
I could have argued the point, said many things were intuitive, like hunger and love and the want to survive, that understanding them was overkill, but I knew what Uniss would say. She had a way of moving inside her cage, naked and on all fours, up on her toes and fingers, her spine arched as she had learned to do, leaving room so when invited I could scoot flat on my back and lay beneath her, staring directly at whatever she chose to offer.
Wasn't that wonderful? Of course it was. Order the book from Atticus Books right here.
I like to pretend that string third from the left is that dude's dick, because I'm nine years old.
The only story I've got floating around right now is a 1300 word story called "Go Says No" about old men and pinball and being 27 years old. I didn't realize the title was so similar to Monster Magnet's (not that great) album God Says No, but I'm not too worried about it. It can get rejected on its own merits instead of having an ill-conceived title.
I felt good after I wrote it, but I'm worried about the same shit I'm always worried about, namely how many fucking times do I need to write about being lonely and innocent in the Midwest? I realize that lots of writers I like wrote the same thing over and over again: Carver, Updike, Bukowski, Dubus, Ford, Munro (to some extent). I also realize that reading an entire collection by them is often an endurance test comparable to waterboarding.
I don't know about the other ones, but I've read Bukowski's early letters--the ones before he hit it big with Post Office--and he was definitely aware of the ground he was treading, if not worried about wearing it thin. I seem to recall him lamenting over writing another racetrack story or writing in a frenzy to create a dozen or so drunk love poems. Still, he was writing them, and aside from a few journeys into noir, that's all he wrote.
Should I give a shit? Is this sort of deep, unavoidable rumination on a theme a bad thing? It becomes taxing on the reader after awhile, and definitely on the writer, but even if the ratio of good-to-bad ends up looking like shit, the hyper-focus might be its own end. Not Look closely, but look forever.
It's possible that my Midwest is Richard Hugo's Montana, Grace Paley's New York City, Flannery O'Connor's dark south. And I'm fine with that.
It's also possible that my Midwest is Ric Flair's fancy robes, Ric Flair's strut, Ric Flair's WOOOOOOOOOOO!
I started working on the pro wrestling chapbook I've been threatening to write. The first story, "A Comprehensive List of the Least Worst Way To Do Everything," is done. Here's the first section:
I watch my dead brother’s wrestling matches and try to count the number of times he gets hurt for real. In one, a wispy tattooed man named Slash Blast hits him with a monitor from the commentary desk. In the rematch, he hits him with the commentary desk.
I’ve got one of his boots on either side of the television. Maybe there’s a heart attack resting in my chest, too.
I know that only so much of anything is true, but I get lost watching the matches. Rodney knew how to honestly tackle delusion from both sides and I just can’t do it.
Until a lump forms between the top of his trapezius and his Adam’s apple, I really am convinced that nothing is wrong when a hulking Japanese man uses the side of an open hand to knife-edge him a dozen times in the neck.
The thing I'm going to have a hard time with is not boring that wrestling fans--as if any of them will end up reading it anyways--and not going over the head of the non-wrestling fans. (Who also won't read it.) The other stories are "Waiting For Andre" (about how the tangential trivia of Samuel Beckett giving Andre the Giant rides to school severely alters the relationship of a young couple) and "The Road Becomes What You Leave" (about a "loser leaves town" match with more at stake than the results of the match itself). The former will be shorter and the latter will be longer, but either way I'm hoping to have at least two more stories in the collection.
I'm going to go eat ice cream. In honor of the rad date I had Monday with a charming redhead, here's my revised Top Five Fictional Redheads list.
1) Jessica Rabbit
2) Jean Grey
3) April O'Neil
4) The girl on the cover of Candy O
5) The Little Mermaid
Be wonderful,
RW
I don't have shit going on to promote of my own, so here's a few rad things other folks have going on.
Matt Burnside has a continuation of his sage writing advice up at [PANK]. This is "11 More Inflexible Rules For Upstart Writers." The title is either misleading or I actually (sadly) know less than I thought I did, because I'm learning things, too, from reading this. Matt's fucking funny on top of being a super appreciative weirdo, on top of being incredibly smart, on top of being an exciting, solid writer. Some guys have it all. I bet he's got a dick like a Pringles can, too.
Anyways, here's my favorite of this newest batch of inflexible rules:
RULE: Fight the urge every day to be cynical
It’s easy to be cynical, but better to keep your sense of humor/humanity through it all. There are days I wake up and want to beat up a phone booth, but if I can stand back long enough to realize how bad it really isn’t, I can find it in my heart to forgive that phone booth. Cynicism is a virus from hell. It may feel good to blast the world for all its bullshit, but where does that get you, really, in the end? It gets you beating up phone booths, and they hardly deserve it. Negativity has never and will never be sexy. Not only that, cynicism has a way of digging its nasty nails into your work. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. We certainly need that in literature, and I’ve written a lot of cynical stuff, but of late I’ve found it’s much harder and rewarding to write something more earnest because the stakes are higher. Work that approaches the heart of things without all the venom and razors – like walking through a minefield where the slightest misstep could result in sentimentality – is more risky than writing something extremely dark and nihilistic and full of fucks and death and postmodern lines like: LANGUAGE WON’T SAVE US, which I’ve literally written in my work maybe five times now. Because the thing is, language will save us. I think as a writer you’ve got to believe that, even as you suspect how foolish it may be.
Read the rest right here at [PANK].
And speaking of [PANK], they've got a cool holiday deal going on where you can a bunch of stuff for like $50 shipped. I think it's three print issues, a shirt, a book, a sticker, and a button. You'll save a little over $20 and all that stuff should be pretty rad. Myfanwy Collins (Hey, anyone reading this: What the fuck is with that name? I don't want to e-mail her and ask because I'm sure she's been getting shit about that name forever. Can a third party explain this to me? Welsh? Is it Welsh?) wrote the book, called I Am Holding Your Hand. I bet it rules, because Randall Brown said it does and he rules. Simple math. And the shirt's got a typewriter, so, you know. Whatever.
Buy all the things right here.
Chloe Caldwell of Legs Get Led Astray fame and general fucking awesomeness has a new eBook over at Thought Catlog. It's called "The New Age Camp" and I can't read it because I don't have a Kindle. I'm working on getting a PDF or whatever guys like me who still do stupid shit like listen to music on Windows Media Player need to read non-Kindle eBooks. But you should buy it and read it if you can. When has Chloe ever let you down? (I mean that as it pertains to the realm of literature. If she owes you money or puked on your rug or something, I'll apologize right now on behalf of her.)
Buy Coco's eBook right here at Thought Catalog.
(EDIT: If you don't have Kindle, download Cloud Reader and you're all set. Not sure if they have it in a fancy alpine white iPhone color, but use your imagination.) (Dickhead.)
This is all actually just a ploy to quickly regenerate my karma after changing the background of my parents' computer to a picture of a chocolate butthole. Steven Gillis has a new short story collection out called The Law of Strings and it's worth reading, worth obsessing over. My full review for Heavy Feather Review went up Monday. Read this opening section to his story "The Society for the Protection of Animals."
Uniss had a plan. The situation was dire. No one refuted this, though we knew at first only what Uniss told us.
In her cage, on the floor of our apartment, Uniss did her best to turn. She said it was important to feel as they did, to better understand. I questioned the necessity, wondered, “If we’re supposed to be sympathetic, shouldn’t we be motivated more by instinct?”
Uniss told me to “Think about what you’re saying. How can you understand what you haven’t experienced?”
I could have argued the point, said many things were intuitive, like hunger and love and the want to survive, that understanding them was overkill, but I knew what Uniss would say. She had a way of moving inside her cage, naked and on all fours, up on her toes and fingers, her spine arched as she had learned to do, leaving room so when invited I could scoot flat on my back and lay beneath her, staring directly at whatever she chose to offer.
Wasn't that wonderful? Of course it was. Order the book from Atticus Books right here.
I like to pretend that string third from the left is that dude's dick, because I'm nine years old. The only story I've got floating around right now is a 1300 word story called "Go Says No" about old men and pinball and being 27 years old. I didn't realize the title was so similar to Monster Magnet's (not that great) album God Says No, but I'm not too worried about it. It can get rejected on its own merits instead of having an ill-conceived title.
I felt good after I wrote it, but I'm worried about the same shit I'm always worried about, namely how many fucking times do I need to write about being lonely and innocent in the Midwest? I realize that lots of writers I like wrote the same thing over and over again: Carver, Updike, Bukowski, Dubus, Ford, Munro (to some extent). I also realize that reading an entire collection by them is often an endurance test comparable to waterboarding.
I don't know about the other ones, but I've read Bukowski's early letters--the ones before he hit it big with Post Office--and he was definitely aware of the ground he was treading, if not worried about wearing it thin. I seem to recall him lamenting over writing another racetrack story or writing in a frenzy to create a dozen or so drunk love poems. Still, he was writing them, and aside from a few journeys into noir, that's all he wrote.
Should I give a shit? Is this sort of deep, unavoidable rumination on a theme a bad thing? It becomes taxing on the reader after awhile, and definitely on the writer, but even if the ratio of good-to-bad ends up looking like shit, the hyper-focus might be its own end. Not Look closely, but look forever.
It's possible that my Midwest is Richard Hugo's Montana, Grace Paley's New York City, Flannery O'Connor's dark south. And I'm fine with that.
It's also possible that my Midwest is Ric Flair's fancy robes, Ric Flair's strut, Ric Flair's WOOOOOOOOOOO! I started working on the pro wrestling chapbook I've been threatening to write. The first story, "A Comprehensive List of the Least Worst Way To Do Everything," is done. Here's the first section:
I watch my dead brother’s wrestling matches and try to count the number of times he gets hurt for real. In one, a wispy tattooed man named Slash Blast hits him with a monitor from the commentary desk. In the rematch, he hits him with the commentary desk.
I’ve got one of his boots on either side of the television. Maybe there’s a heart attack resting in my chest, too.
I know that only so much of anything is true, but I get lost watching the matches. Rodney knew how to honestly tackle delusion from both sides and I just can’t do it.
Until a lump forms between the top of his trapezius and his Adam’s apple, I really am convinced that nothing is wrong when a hulking Japanese man uses the side of an open hand to knife-edge him a dozen times in the neck.
The thing I'm going to have a hard time with is not boring that wrestling fans--as if any of them will end up reading it anyways--and not going over the head of the non-wrestling fans. (Who also won't read it.) The other stories are "Waiting For Andre" (about how the tangential trivia of Samuel Beckett giving Andre the Giant rides to school severely alters the relationship of a young couple) and "The Road Becomes What You Leave" (about a "loser leaves town" match with more at stake than the results of the match itself). The former will be shorter and the latter will be longer, but either way I'm hoping to have at least two more stories in the collection.
I'm going to go eat ice cream. In honor of the rad date I had Monday with a charming redhead, here's my revised Top Five Fictional Redheads list.
1) Jessica Rabbit
2) Jean Grey
3) April O'Neil
4) The girl on the cover of Candy O
5) The Little Mermaid
Be wonderful,
RW
November 28, 2012
Come on, come on, come on little rabbit, show me where you got it 'cuz I know you got a habit . . .
The Afghan Whigs performing "66" on Conan O'Brien's show back in 1999. Dulli breaks a string!
I dressed up as the Wal-Mart Santa this past weekend and scared the fuck out of some kids. Dr. Pepper/7-Up bought the rights to Santa (in Wal-Mart), so on either side of the bench I sit on is a stack of about 50-70 two-liters of 7-Up. In addition to mini candy canes, I also gave the kids cans of soda. It was all really fucked.
Of course, this happened, too.
Look at how shitty I look as Santa and then think about the fact that the person who was dressing up as Santa before me is female, stands (literally) around four feet tall, has the mental development of an 8-10 year old child, and kept pulling off her beard to take drinks of water, which would have been fine, except she "was too hot" and "about to pass out" with the beard on, so she just left it hanging from her one ear, including during pictures with the kids.
She also decided it was necessary to wear no pants underneath the Santa pants that are designed to go over the pants you're already wearing. Then she informed me that she "got really sweaty" in the suit. I realize that this has an effect on nobody except me, but come on. Goddamn.
Her intentions were top notch, but none of her physical or mental attributes really helped in the way of keeping the spirit of Christmas. You'd think that with all the fat dudes we have working and frequenting our store that we'd be able to rope someone into doing it, but that was apparently impossible. They all claimed to be bad with kids.
How to Be Santa
1) Don't molest the kid. This is a good rule even when not dressed up as Santa.
2) Ask the kid if they've been good this year and believe whatever they say because who gives a shit.
3) If the kid has a brother or sister with them, ask them who's been the baddest. If they don't have a brother or sister with them, ask their parents. If the mom is kind of hot and the dad isn't around, ask if she's been naughty, because Santa does that on stupid sitcoms and everyone's seen Bad Santa and she'll think it's funny. See if you can ask for a "snowjob" without the kid hearing.
4) Ask the kid what they want for Christmas and tell them you'll get it for them for sure. You are not their parents and this is not your responsibility.
4b) If someone asks for a kidney for medical purposes, just be really nice and tell them you'll try. If they ask for a kidney for weirdo shit, just tell them to fuck off.
5) Ask the kid if they like to play in the snow. Some kids will be a bit gunshy, but, ultimately, kids are fucking dumb, so you can really ask them anything and they'll just answer with whatever the fuck they feel like. Ask them about quantum physics or something. I bet they'll answer with a story about a time they saw a really big dog.
All in all, I'm a really awesome Santa. And you can too.
Tis the season to suck it.
Right as I was complaining that I haven't had any work accepted in a long-ass time, I look like a dickhead by getting three acceptances in about a week.
My story "Reruns" (the second story in my cycle/chapbook Murmuration) went up at Monkeybicycle. This is a big deal because Monkeybicycle is excellent, and them having faith in my story kind of gives me a little faith in my story. This one is secretly dedicated to my friend Jon Eagle, who loves television shows more than anyone I've ever met.
"I listened to my family name off local dead people and soon enough began to wish i was one of them."
The other stories that got accepted aren't up yet. One of them is "Pyramid Scheme" (the fourth story in Murmuration). I'm stoked about this going up (at Bartleby Snopes!) for the same reason as "Reruns." That one's about a band called the Honeybreakers, reprising the role they played in my story "Sometimes We Were Young." (My friend Sam Snoek-Brown and I do this stupid thing where every story we write is connected to at least one other story we've written. It's pointless and nobody wins, but if they did, I'd be winning.) I'm working with the crew on some edits right now and even the butting-heads that we're doing on a couple spots have gone way too smoothly. The changes they suggested that I ended up taking helped the story immensely, and, as I had thought, the parts I've always been uneasy with have disappeared.
That leaves only one story for the collection unpublished, the stripper story "Cool Tits, Moxie." I've got that out at a few places now, and if none of them pick it up, I'm fine with it going unpublished. Leaves a bit of incentive for buying the book, I guess. I'll probably end up putting it out myself because I'm too lazy to send it off to publishers, but that's fine.
The other story is called "Trace," going up at 10,000 Tons of Black Ink. I've talked about that stupid asshole story on here before as being a revising nightmare. I actually even revised it after sending it off, because that's what nightmares are for. I'm wondering if I can actually broach the subject of having 10KTOBI publish the revised version without pissing them off. I'm totally going to try.
I've also gotta remember to make a stupid 10,000 Maniacs joke in my next e-mail to them.
I added some friends to the (Has Friends) page. Justin Lawrence Daugherty is a fucking incredible writer who I can guarantee you will hear more from/about very soon. He takes myths and turns them into realistic stories of the absurd. Matthew Burnside is another wizard working with myth and sorrow, one who I didn't even realize until today that I've known for years and years from a guitar forum we both frequent. (Or used to frequent, in my case, as I was perma-banned years ago for several different things, one of which included posting under the name CC DeVilled Eggs and ruining every thread with pictures of Poison's CC DeVille.) Mary Miller wrote two of my favorite books in recent memory, the full-length Big World and the chapbook Less Shiny and I'm kind of in love with her. Check these wonderful people out.
While you're checking things out, go to the website for the micro-press I've started for Passenger Side Books and consider sending me a manuscript. I've got some good work so far and look forward to reading more of it. Let's make books, people.
My (Is Published) page and my (Has Friends) page have both been retooled to be more readable. So read them.
Also, I appeared on a podcast being hosted by my tight bros in the band Victory & Associates. It's called You Can't Stop the Signal and is a must-listen for anyone who's into podcasts or has been in a band or likes talking about ASCII-styled dicks or thinks I'd be a good guy to talk to on the phone for a half hour. They play a bunch of killer angular indie rock and roll, too, so do everyone a favor and listen.
Oh yeah. And this:
Seasons beatings, y'all.
RW
I dressed up as the Wal-Mart Santa this past weekend and scared the fuck out of some kids. Dr. Pepper/7-Up bought the rights to Santa (in Wal-Mart), so on either side of the bench I sit on is a stack of about 50-70 two-liters of 7-Up. In addition to mini candy canes, I also gave the kids cans of soda. It was all really fucked.
Of course, this happened, too.
Look at how shitty I look as Santa and then think about the fact that the person who was dressing up as Santa before me is female, stands (literally) around four feet tall, has the mental development of an 8-10 year old child, and kept pulling off her beard to take drinks of water, which would have been fine, except she "was too hot" and "about to pass out" with the beard on, so she just left it hanging from her one ear, including during pictures with the kids.
She also decided it was necessary to wear no pants underneath the Santa pants that are designed to go over the pants you're already wearing. Then she informed me that she "got really sweaty" in the suit. I realize that this has an effect on nobody except me, but come on. Goddamn.
Her intentions were top notch, but none of her physical or mental attributes really helped in the way of keeping the spirit of Christmas. You'd think that with all the fat dudes we have working and frequenting our store that we'd be able to rope someone into doing it, but that was apparently impossible. They all claimed to be bad with kids.
How to Be Santa
1) Don't molest the kid. This is a good rule even when not dressed up as Santa.
2) Ask the kid if they've been good this year and believe whatever they say because who gives a shit.
3) If the kid has a brother or sister with them, ask them who's been the baddest. If they don't have a brother or sister with them, ask their parents. If the mom is kind of hot and the dad isn't around, ask if she's been naughty, because Santa does that on stupid sitcoms and everyone's seen Bad Santa and she'll think it's funny. See if you can ask for a "snowjob" without the kid hearing.
4) Ask the kid what they want for Christmas and tell them you'll get it for them for sure. You are not their parents and this is not your responsibility.
4b) If someone asks for a kidney for medical purposes, just be really nice and tell them you'll try. If they ask for a kidney for weirdo shit, just tell them to fuck off.
5) Ask the kid if they like to play in the snow. Some kids will be a bit gunshy, but, ultimately, kids are fucking dumb, so you can really ask them anything and they'll just answer with whatever the fuck they feel like. Ask them about quantum physics or something. I bet they'll answer with a story about a time they saw a really big dog.
All in all, I'm a really awesome Santa. And you can too.
Tis the season to suck it. Right as I was complaining that I haven't had any work accepted in a long-ass time, I look like a dickhead by getting three acceptances in about a week.
My story "Reruns" (the second story in my cycle/chapbook Murmuration) went up at Monkeybicycle. This is a big deal because Monkeybicycle is excellent, and them having faith in my story kind of gives me a little faith in my story. This one is secretly dedicated to my friend Jon Eagle, who loves television shows more than anyone I've ever met.
"I listened to my family name off local dead people and soon enough began to wish i was one of them."
The other stories that got accepted aren't up yet. One of them is "Pyramid Scheme" (the fourth story in Murmuration). I'm stoked about this going up (at Bartleby Snopes!) for the same reason as "Reruns." That one's about a band called the Honeybreakers, reprising the role they played in my story "Sometimes We Were Young." (My friend Sam Snoek-Brown and I do this stupid thing where every story we write is connected to at least one other story we've written. It's pointless and nobody wins, but if they did, I'd be winning.) I'm working with the crew on some edits right now and even the butting-heads that we're doing on a couple spots have gone way too smoothly. The changes they suggested that I ended up taking helped the story immensely, and, as I had thought, the parts I've always been uneasy with have disappeared.
That leaves only one story for the collection unpublished, the stripper story "Cool Tits, Moxie." I've got that out at a few places now, and if none of them pick it up, I'm fine with it going unpublished. Leaves a bit of incentive for buying the book, I guess. I'll probably end up putting it out myself because I'm too lazy to send it off to publishers, but that's fine.
The other story is called "Trace," going up at 10,000 Tons of Black Ink. I've talked about that stupid asshole story on here before as being a revising nightmare. I actually even revised it after sending it off, because that's what nightmares are for. I'm wondering if I can actually broach the subject of having 10KTOBI publish the revised version without pissing them off. I'm totally going to try.
I've also gotta remember to make a stupid 10,000 Maniacs joke in my next e-mail to them.
I added some friends to the (Has Friends) page. Justin Lawrence Daugherty is a fucking incredible writer who I can guarantee you will hear more from/about very soon. He takes myths and turns them into realistic stories of the absurd. Matthew Burnside is another wizard working with myth and sorrow, one who I didn't even realize until today that I've known for years and years from a guitar forum we both frequent. (Or used to frequent, in my case, as I was perma-banned years ago for several different things, one of which included posting under the name CC DeVilled Eggs and ruining every thread with pictures of Poison's CC DeVille.) Mary Miller wrote two of my favorite books in recent memory, the full-length Big World and the chapbook Less Shiny and I'm kind of in love with her. Check these wonderful people out.
While you're checking things out, go to the website for the micro-press I've started for Passenger Side Books and consider sending me a manuscript. I've got some good work so far and look forward to reading more of it. Let's make books, people.
My (Is Published) page and my (Has Friends) page have both been retooled to be more readable. So read them.
Also, I appeared on a podcast being hosted by my tight bros in the band Victory & Associates. It's called You Can't Stop the Signal and is a must-listen for anyone who's into podcasts or has been in a band or likes talking about ASCII-styled dicks or thinks I'd be a good guy to talk to on the phone for a half hour. They play a bunch of killer angular indie rock and roll, too, so do everyone a favor and listen.
Oh yeah. And this:
Seasons beatings, y'all.
RW
November 14, 2012
No one gives a hoot about faux-ass nonsense . . .
"No One Gives a Hoot About Faux-Ass Nonsense" by Don Caballero, from their second, aptly-titled, album, Dob Caballero 2.
It's been a month. Here's the loose ends of what happened:
1) I went through a long streak of not writing any fiction, making me go insane and start crying while watching Wrestlemania 21, specifically the part where Hulk Hogan comes out and flexes in front of a giant, electronic American flag.
2) I started trying to watch real films so I have something to offer in conversations aside from Nicolas Cage movies. I'm starting with the works of David Lynch. Blue Velvet was good once it got into the story. Eraserhead was up its own ass. I'm watching Wild At Heart next, starring, oddly enough, Nicolas Cage. Life is a circle/highway.
3) I posted on the Facebook page for the German thrash metal band Kreator, asking if I could join their band. So far, no response.
4) I had the official book party for Shake Away These Constant Days. It went well. In the words of my friend Bob, "It wasn't runnin' a train, but it wasn't a trainwreck."
5) I bought a package of pizza flavored hotdogs, which was the second grossest food-related decision I made all month, right behind eating a pancake that I found.
6) I went to the Goodwill and saw this bootleg Michael Jackson hat, which I bought for $1.50, wore for a weekend, and then sent to Sarah Rose Etter.
Seriously, it doesn't even say what kind of pizza.
I had the first installment in Love Dumb, my all-too-thorough chronological journey through the complete song library of KISS, go up a bit ago. There was a slight hiccup in the posting schedule, but from now on, every Thursday there will be a new column. Check out the first one:
“Strutter” makes considerably less sense than the song it started out as, a little Gene Simmons 60’s psych-rock ditty called “Stanley the Parrot.” This is significant, considering “Stanley the Parrot” had an oblique narrative about the influence of summer in making a man and a two-minute non-sequitur intro and odd bluegrass solos and it’s called fucking “Stanley the Parrot.”
I also had a review of Gregory Sherl's debut full-length collection, Heavy Petting, go up at [PANK]. I was mixed on it, for sure, but the gist of it is that the good stuff was brilliant and the bad stuff was bullshit. There's plenty of both, but as far as first collections go--especially such long ones, it seems--Heavy Petting is as intriguing as it gets.
I say this not to slight his work or age—I liked his poems and he’s only two days younger than I am—but Gergory Sherl is a poet of youth, which is to say that his debut collection, Heavy Petting is saturated with a holy-fuck-I-hope-I’m-right sort of faith.
Lastly, I'm probably the only person to who's done an interview with UW-Platteville--the college I graduated from several years ago--and referenced Motorhead and girls who do cocaine if it's free.
Q: Can you tell us about one or two high points of your life since you’ve graduated?
A: I didn't get married or have kids and it's awesome. I listen to Motörhead as loud as I want, whenever I want. If that sounds like something a fifteen year old kid would say, that's probably because it's all I've ever really wanted since I was fifteen.
Not that I wasn't a fucking dickhead back in college, too.
After I stopped crying and started writing fiction again, I turned out a short story without a title (I'm soft-positive on "Old Winners") that leans pretty heavily on Barry Hannah, specifically his story "Water Liars." He's got an old guy going to the docks to visit other old men who lie about shit in a jovial way. I've got a young guy who goes to an arcade to visit old men who tell him how to win in a competitive-yet-empty way. There are buried problems with women leaking out of everything in both. I'm hoping that using "Water Liars" as a jumping off point--Amy Hempel calls it "response writing"--won't be obvious. But, if I'm going to rip something off, I want to rip something off that rules.
I'm finding that I like style more than I like substance, which isn't to say that I like no substance, I just like style more. There's Van Halen and there's Elvis Costello. Neither one is without traces of what makes the other untouchable, but they are genius opposites.
I haven't submitted this story anywhere yet, but I'm back on the submission train, so I'll be sending it out shortly. I've got every eligible story in my chapbook, Murmuration, out at several places each right now, just sort of waiting on replies. Of the longer pieces I worked in as a second section for the Caketrain contest, only one, the aforementioned story about a millionaire and time zones and girlfriends and ex-girlfriends and a mute Italian girl called "Run the Daylight Down," isn't out anywhere yet. Once I get done watching The League DVDs a co-worker loaned me and insisted I watch, I'll send them out.
It is pretty fucking funny, though.
I started up the micro-press that I've been threatening my life with for the past year or so. This essentially just means that I ordered a printer and a long-arm stapler and have begun the long process of trying to figure out how to use a bootlegged copy of Adobe InDesign, but those are all big, necessary steps.
I'm planning on doing 20-40 page chapbooks of fiction and non-fiction. Magic Helicopter Press and Future Tense Books are both great examples of micro-presses putting out killer chapbooks. I've read their work and am learning from it, and I hope to put out a quality piece of work sometime early next year.
I've accepted the first manuscript to be released, but what little details I have aren't worth spilling right now. I will say that, in , and a human goddamn being.
Passenger Side Books.
(Real website--or at least a blogspot--coming soon. Facebook will do for now.)
Validate me, internet.
RW
It's been a month. Here's the loose ends of what happened:
1) I went through a long streak of not writing any fiction, making me go insane and start crying while watching Wrestlemania 21, specifically the part where Hulk Hogan comes out and flexes in front of a giant, electronic American flag.
2) I started trying to watch real films so I have something to offer in conversations aside from Nicolas Cage movies. I'm starting with the works of David Lynch. Blue Velvet was good once it got into the story. Eraserhead was up its own ass. I'm watching Wild At Heart next, starring, oddly enough, Nicolas Cage. Life is a circle/highway.
3) I posted on the Facebook page for the German thrash metal band Kreator, asking if I could join their band. So far, no response.
4) I had the official book party for Shake Away These Constant Days. It went well. In the words of my friend Bob, "It wasn't runnin' a train, but it wasn't a trainwreck."
5) I bought a package of pizza flavored hotdogs, which was the second grossest food-related decision I made all month, right behind eating a pancake that I found.
6) I went to the Goodwill and saw this bootleg Michael Jackson hat, which I bought for $1.50, wore for a weekend, and then sent to Sarah Rose Etter.
Seriously, it doesn't even say what kind of pizza. I had the first installment in Love Dumb, my all-too-thorough chronological journey through the complete song library of KISS, go up a bit ago. There was a slight hiccup in the posting schedule, but from now on, every Thursday there will be a new column. Check out the first one:
“Strutter” makes considerably less sense than the song it started out as, a little Gene Simmons 60’s psych-rock ditty called “Stanley the Parrot.” This is significant, considering “Stanley the Parrot” had an oblique narrative about the influence of summer in making a man and a two-minute non-sequitur intro and odd bluegrass solos and it’s called fucking “Stanley the Parrot.”
I also had a review of Gregory Sherl's debut full-length collection, Heavy Petting, go up at [PANK]. I was mixed on it, for sure, but the gist of it is that the good stuff was brilliant and the bad stuff was bullshit. There's plenty of both, but as far as first collections go--especially such long ones, it seems--Heavy Petting is as intriguing as it gets.
I say this not to slight his work or age—I liked his poems and he’s only two days younger than I am—but Gergory Sherl is a poet of youth, which is to say that his debut collection, Heavy Petting is saturated with a holy-fuck-I-hope-I’m-right sort of faith.
Lastly, I'm probably the only person to who's done an interview with UW-Platteville--the college I graduated from several years ago--and referenced Motorhead and girls who do cocaine if it's free.
Q: Can you tell us about one or two high points of your life since you’ve graduated?
A: I didn't get married or have kids and it's awesome. I listen to Motörhead as loud as I want, whenever I want. If that sounds like something a fifteen year old kid would say, that's probably because it's all I've ever really wanted since I was fifteen.
Not that I wasn't a fucking dickhead back in college, too. After I stopped crying and started writing fiction again, I turned out a short story without a title (I'm soft-positive on "Old Winners") that leans pretty heavily on Barry Hannah, specifically his story "Water Liars." He's got an old guy going to the docks to visit other old men who lie about shit in a jovial way. I've got a young guy who goes to an arcade to visit old men who tell him how to win in a competitive-yet-empty way. There are buried problems with women leaking out of everything in both. I'm hoping that using "Water Liars" as a jumping off point--Amy Hempel calls it "response writing"--won't be obvious. But, if I'm going to rip something off, I want to rip something off that rules.
I'm finding that I like style more than I like substance, which isn't to say that I like no substance, I just like style more. There's Van Halen and there's Elvis Costello. Neither one is without traces of what makes the other untouchable, but they are genius opposites.
I haven't submitted this story anywhere yet, but I'm back on the submission train, so I'll be sending it out shortly. I've got every eligible story in my chapbook, Murmuration, out at several places each right now, just sort of waiting on replies. Of the longer pieces I worked in as a second section for the Caketrain contest, only one, the aforementioned story about a millionaire and time zones and girlfriends and ex-girlfriends and a mute Italian girl called "Run the Daylight Down," isn't out anywhere yet. Once I get done watching The League DVDs a co-worker loaned me and insisted I watch, I'll send them out.
It is pretty fucking funny, though.
I started up the micro-press that I've been threatening my life with for the past year or so. This essentially just means that I ordered a printer and a long-arm stapler and have begun the long process of trying to figure out how to use a bootlegged copy of Adobe InDesign, but those are all big, necessary steps.
I'm planning on doing 20-40 page chapbooks of fiction and non-fiction. Magic Helicopter Press and Future Tense Books are both great examples of micro-presses putting out killer chapbooks. I've read their work and am learning from it, and I hope to put out a quality piece of work sometime early next year.
I've accepted the first manuscript to be released, but what little details I have aren't worth spilling right now. I will say that, in , and a human goddamn being.
Passenger Side Books.
(Real website--or at least a blogspot--coming soon. Facebook will do for now.)
Validate me, internet.
RW
October 16, 2012
The earth is not a cold dead place . . .
"The Only Moment We Were Alone" by Explosions In the Sky
When I need hyper-emotional instrumental music in the fall, Explosions in the Sky is the go-to. I'll switch to Sigur Ros when the first snow comes down, back to Don Cab when it all melts.
I had a new publication go up at a new publication. Justin Lawrence Daugherty started up a lit journal that intends to scorch the earth. So far, I think he's done a bang-up job. My story is called "The Ultimate Warrior, Sitting In His Kitchen in the Middle of the Night, Practicing Applying His Face-Paint in Anticipation of a Return That Will Never Happen." It's one of those self-explanatory titles. Check it out, along with great work by Aaron Teel, Edward Hagelstein, Helen McClory and many more.
"The thing about being dead is that I have no idea what it’s like.
I got a haircut and took some time off and people started to talk because they either think that life is as fake as wrestling or vice versa.
But remember that guy in the promotion who was pretending to be me? Suicide. When they finally hired the real me, he had a pity spot on the roster as my stunt double and then he got fired and then he shot himself."
Seriously, though, if you talk about how there's been several Ultimate Warriors because the original one died, you're a fucking asshole.
My column proposal, Love Dumb: A Song-By-Song Analysis of the Nonsensical, Incompetent, Sophomoric, Confusing, Beautiful KISS Discography, got accepted over at Used Furniture Review. This, too, is fairly self-explanatory. I'll be analyzing two KISS songs every week for the next two years, at which point I will have dissected all of their songs and decided that I actually fucking hate them. I'm three songs in so far and aside from reinforcing the basics--Peter's not very good at drums, Paul's the weirdest straight gay dude ever--I've learned that I only like KISS when I don't have to think about them. If I'm just feeling the music, they're the best. The second I turn my brain on, they just turn into some mediocre Jews singing about their dicks.
In trying to come up with a name for the column, I called on my friends to help. My buddy Bob suggested, "Get a girlfriend."
Going back to pro wrestling, I'm considering proposing a column to Fear of a Ghost Planet in which I take old wrestling PPVs and compare them based on the month and year in which they appeared. So, Hog Wild '96 (WCW) would go up against Summerslam '96 (WWF). Sure, it was the beginning of Hogan's first title run as a heel and it was the end of Vader's push in the WWF because Shawn Michaels was a real cunt back then, but what about he shows themselves? I'm curious as to which one is better to just put on and enjoy, free of nostalgia, (mostly) free of wrestling-nerd snobbery.
On the surface, these two columns appear to be way more niche than the stuff I normally write: short stories, book reviews, essays. Really, I think it's about the same. It's 2012 and I'm writing stuff that mostly appears on the internet, a place that already has millions of stuffs of all kinds and doesn't necessarily need any of mine.
In short, maybe I need a girlfriend.
"Look, I know I said 'redhead,' but I also said 'girlfriend.'"
I'm not sure why I've taken a sudden interest in writing a column, but I'm afraid it's because I'm running out of ideas. I'm not counting on my chapbook winning the Caketrain competition because they get a bunch of awesome submissions that are probably more geared toward their aesthetic, but they have to choose someone. (Every writer needs this attitude. No journal or zine or whatever exists without shit other people wrote. You could totally be other people. They have to choose someone.) So, on the extremely offhand chance that it wins the contest, I'm pretty much out of publishable material.
The more likely situation here is that it won't win, but I've already got some self-defeating bullshit for that, too. When it doesn't win, I'll shop the first half--the story cycle--around as a short, 20-page chapbook. That leaves the other three longform stories for another collection, which I would then set about finishing using a few older stories that need massive revision and a few newer ones that need to be written. Still, this is only maybe a year's worth of work. That's not a lot considering that I want to write for fucking ever.
So I'm a bit scared that I'm out of ideas. I haven't reached the point where I'm considering making some poor decisions just so I have some shit to write about, but I'm getting there. (A girlfriend? Come on. Desperate times . . .)
This is how I justified watching all of Party Down on YouTube last week. Just, you know, stirring creative juices or whatever.
"Fantasy is bullshit."
Shake Away These Constant Days, my mostly-ignored debut short story collection, is now available for your e-reader. Get the Kindle version on Amazon or, if you think Amazon is the devil, Smashwords.
Also, in an attempt to maybe get some people to buy the book, I'm going completely backwards in terms of logic and giving away two copies. Head over to Goodreads and sign up for the Shake Away These Constant Days Giveaway.
I'm selling a surprising number of books at the bar I work at. Drunk people love feeling smart. I did, however, have a better reaction to the ice cream I brought in and scooped for everyone. I knew my book couldn't compete against mint chocolate chip. Regardless, a busty girl named Floro took a picture of me scooping her an ice cream cone and texted it to her mother as a means of informing her of our inevitable marriage. We then discussed the finer points of the Aggro Crag from the Nickelodeon show Guts.
Things are fine, everyone.
RW
When I need hyper-emotional instrumental music in the fall, Explosions in the Sky is the go-to. I'll switch to Sigur Ros when the first snow comes down, back to Don Cab when it all melts.
I had a new publication go up at a new publication. Justin Lawrence Daugherty started up a lit journal that intends to scorch the earth. So far, I think he's done a bang-up job. My story is called "The Ultimate Warrior, Sitting In His Kitchen in the Middle of the Night, Practicing Applying His Face-Paint in Anticipation of a Return That Will Never Happen." It's one of those self-explanatory titles. Check it out, along with great work by Aaron Teel, Edward Hagelstein, Helen McClory and many more.
"The thing about being dead is that I have no idea what it’s like.
I got a haircut and took some time off and people started to talk because they either think that life is as fake as wrestling or vice versa.
But remember that guy in the promotion who was pretending to be me? Suicide. When they finally hired the real me, he had a pity spot on the roster as my stunt double and then he got fired and then he shot himself."
Seriously, though, if you talk about how there's been several Ultimate Warriors because the original one died, you're a fucking asshole. My column proposal, Love Dumb: A Song-By-Song Analysis of the Nonsensical, Incompetent, Sophomoric, Confusing, Beautiful KISS Discography, got accepted over at Used Furniture Review. This, too, is fairly self-explanatory. I'll be analyzing two KISS songs every week for the next two years, at which point I will have dissected all of their songs and decided that I actually fucking hate them. I'm three songs in so far and aside from reinforcing the basics--Peter's not very good at drums, Paul's the weirdest straight gay dude ever--I've learned that I only like KISS when I don't have to think about them. If I'm just feeling the music, they're the best. The second I turn my brain on, they just turn into some mediocre Jews singing about their dicks.
In trying to come up with a name for the column, I called on my friends to help. My buddy Bob suggested, "Get a girlfriend."
Going back to pro wrestling, I'm considering proposing a column to Fear of a Ghost Planet in which I take old wrestling PPVs and compare them based on the month and year in which they appeared. So, Hog Wild '96 (WCW) would go up against Summerslam '96 (WWF). Sure, it was the beginning of Hogan's first title run as a heel and it was the end of Vader's push in the WWF because Shawn Michaels was a real cunt back then, but what about he shows themselves? I'm curious as to which one is better to just put on and enjoy, free of nostalgia, (mostly) free of wrestling-nerd snobbery.
On the surface, these two columns appear to be way more niche than the stuff I normally write: short stories, book reviews, essays. Really, I think it's about the same. It's 2012 and I'm writing stuff that mostly appears on the internet, a place that already has millions of stuffs of all kinds and doesn't necessarily need any of mine.
In short, maybe I need a girlfriend.
"Look, I know I said 'redhead,' but I also said 'girlfriend.'" I'm not sure why I've taken a sudden interest in writing a column, but I'm afraid it's because I'm running out of ideas. I'm not counting on my chapbook winning the Caketrain competition because they get a bunch of awesome submissions that are probably more geared toward their aesthetic, but they have to choose someone. (Every writer needs this attitude. No journal or zine or whatever exists without shit other people wrote. You could totally be other people. They have to choose someone.) So, on the extremely offhand chance that it wins the contest, I'm pretty much out of publishable material.
The more likely situation here is that it won't win, but I've already got some self-defeating bullshit for that, too. When it doesn't win, I'll shop the first half--the story cycle--around as a short, 20-page chapbook. That leaves the other three longform stories for another collection, which I would then set about finishing using a few older stories that need massive revision and a few newer ones that need to be written. Still, this is only maybe a year's worth of work. That's not a lot considering that I want to write for fucking ever.
So I'm a bit scared that I'm out of ideas. I haven't reached the point where I'm considering making some poor decisions just so I have some shit to write about, but I'm getting there. (A girlfriend? Come on. Desperate times . . .)
This is how I justified watching all of Party Down on YouTube last week. Just, you know, stirring creative juices or whatever.
"Fantasy is bullshit."
Shake Away These Constant Days, my mostly-ignored debut short story collection, is now available for your e-reader. Get the Kindle version on Amazon or, if you think Amazon is the devil, Smashwords.
Also, in an attempt to maybe get some people to buy the book, I'm going completely backwards in terms of logic and giving away two copies. Head over to Goodreads and sign up for the Shake Away These Constant Days Giveaway.
I'm selling a surprising number of books at the bar I work at. Drunk people love feeling smart. I did, however, have a better reaction to the ice cream I brought in and scooped for everyone. I knew my book couldn't compete against mint chocolate chip. Regardless, a busty girl named Floro took a picture of me scooping her an ice cream cone and texted it to her mother as a means of informing her of our inevitable marriage. We then discussed the finer points of the Aggro Crag from the Nickelodeon show Guts.
Things are fine, everyone.
RW
October 8, 2012
I'm still hangin' 'round cause I'm a little bit small . . .
Steve Earle and the Dukes performing "Fearless Heart" live on Austin City Limits.
With the exception of the working class itself, almost everything with a "working class" tag bites shit. Steve Earle does simple right.
I've kept somewhat busy since I last posted, meaning that I haven't kept very busy, meaning that I still mostly hate myself.
I had a story go up at Juked called "Western v. Eastern," probably the last story from the Our Band Could Be Your Lit stuff worth publishing. (Except my story based on "A Little Longing Goes Away" by The Books, though I'm the only one who likes that story it seems.) "Western v. Eastern" is based on the song "The Running Kind" by Zoe Muth and the Lost High Rollers. I told her about it and she never got back to me. Still, she's a nice girl with wonderful songs, and I was kind of a weird idiot the both times I met her, talking about Queensryche the first time and complaining about Jackson Browne the second time. So that's understandable. The story itself is pieced together from various bits including professional wrestling, bailiff work, Motley Crue, dissolving relationships, a fear of death, smoking weed, artificial appendages, and Bullitt starring Steve McQueen. Check it out.
"Semi-important things about tort claims and a federal district court’s level of jurisdiction and some other stuff are being decided through the case of Jane Eastern and Anthony Western. The gist of it is that they were married and now they’re not and soon enough one person will take none of the blame and all of the money even though there’s enough of both to go around." - from "Eastern v. Western"
I also had a story go up at SmokeLong Quarterly, my favorite lit journal. There was a bit of please bargaining done on the ending, but I'm satisfied with that we came up with. (I will, however, be changing the ending when the story goes into the chapbook.) "Jalapeno Summer" is the story, the big opening gambit in my Midwestern story cycle called Murmuration, and the story that finally got me into SLQ after nearly a dozen rejections throughout the years. SLQ staff member Josh Denslow interviewed me about the story and I didn't sound too incredibly stupid, so you should check that out. As for the story, it's one of my favorites of mine, the exact blending of all the things I want a Midwestern story to be: humor and sadness, action from boredom despite no solution.
"The summer I turned eighteen, we drove a car off a cliff every Sunday. Gas was still a buck a gallon and all of us were moving away in August to places where polka music wasn't a dogma." - from "Jalapeno Summer"
In the process of trying new things, I've got another book review up at [PANK], this time for Sara Levine's brilliant short story collection Short Dark Oracles. Anything I say about it now will just ruin it. The short of it: buy this goddamn book.
"[Short Dark Oracles] is a champion in the blowout of my soul, a reaffirmation of life through creativity and craft. At the intersection of those two qualities is a triumph of artistic merit, a testament to narrative labor and a reminder for me to pay attention, always, for somewhere in the world there is magic at work."
Okay, I'm done plugging shit. Until this other story I wrote goes up this week.
I'm not the worst salesman ever.
Oh yeah, I also had a book come out. I talked about it a lot, so I'm going to stop now. That's what happens, I think, when you work on something. You talk about it until it happens, and then it's other people's responsibility. I've only gotten one review so far, from Joey Pizzolato over at Curbside Splendor.
The good: "These stories are subtle and delicate; it never feels as if Werner is shoving meaning down the reader’s throat. In fact, it’s the opposite. Readers are forced to interact with each story, and are allowed—with a modest grace—to use their own feelings about the historical moments and figures included in these stories to decide what is important."
"Each story is short and powerful, complete with terse and refined prose that are quick like a boxer’s jab."
"Coupled with the freshness and honesty by which he writes, Shake Away These Constant Days is an impressive debut from a young and exciting voice."
The not-so-great: "these stories are almost too short; and, coupled with the quantity of stories included, it’s easy for them to melt together, especially if you find yourself reading from cover to cover."
He's right on the money about the not-so-great stuff. I like to think of SATCD as a mixtape I made for someone. I love all the songs on it, but that person won't love all the songs. They'll love a handful of the songs. It's just too much to take in at once, and some stuff will understandably get lost due to simple saturation.
Not this kind, unfortunately.
I swallowed a tiny portion of my irrational fears and submitted to the Caketrain Chapbook Competition. I realized my original chapbook, the aforementioned Murmuration, was about 5000 words short of the minimum length. So I added a second section of short stories, ones with more Midwestern themes. Here's what I ended up with.
Part I: Murmuration (A Midwest Story Cycle)
Jalapeno Summer (869 words)
Reruns (844 words)
Cool Tits, Moxie (1030 words)
Pyramid Scheme (1382 words)
Murmuration (2305 words)
Part II: Heroics
Shoot Out the Bright Lights (5588 words)
Run the Daylight Down (3796 words)
Two Halves of a Tornado (3635 words)
This means very little to most of you, as I realize only a handful of people have read these stories, but there are things to pick up on within a table of contents. I think it'll hold up. I don't really think it'll win the contest--the genius Sarah Rose Etter won it last year, and I'm nowhere near her level--but it's something I'm happy with. When I get the rejection, I'm going to send Part I to Magic Helicopter Press. When I get their rejection, I'll probably just self-publish. So, no matter what, look for Murmuration in early 2013.
I played a lot of rock and roll in the past couple weeks. I look forward to playing more. Let's rock, people.
RW
With the exception of the working class itself, almost everything with a "working class" tag bites shit. Steve Earle does simple right.
I've kept somewhat busy since I last posted, meaning that I haven't kept very busy, meaning that I still mostly hate myself.
I had a story go up at Juked called "Western v. Eastern," probably the last story from the Our Band Could Be Your Lit stuff worth publishing. (Except my story based on "A Little Longing Goes Away" by The Books, though I'm the only one who likes that story it seems.) "Western v. Eastern" is based on the song "The Running Kind" by Zoe Muth and the Lost High Rollers. I told her about it and she never got back to me. Still, she's a nice girl with wonderful songs, and I was kind of a weird idiot the both times I met her, talking about Queensryche the first time and complaining about Jackson Browne the second time. So that's understandable. The story itself is pieced together from various bits including professional wrestling, bailiff work, Motley Crue, dissolving relationships, a fear of death, smoking weed, artificial appendages, and Bullitt starring Steve McQueen. Check it out.
"Semi-important things about tort claims and a federal district court’s level of jurisdiction and some other stuff are being decided through the case of Jane Eastern and Anthony Western. The gist of it is that they were married and now they’re not and soon enough one person will take none of the blame and all of the money even though there’s enough of both to go around." - from "Eastern v. Western"
I also had a story go up at SmokeLong Quarterly, my favorite lit journal. There was a bit of please bargaining done on the ending, but I'm satisfied with that we came up with. (I will, however, be changing the ending when the story goes into the chapbook.) "Jalapeno Summer" is the story, the big opening gambit in my Midwestern story cycle called Murmuration, and the story that finally got me into SLQ after nearly a dozen rejections throughout the years. SLQ staff member Josh Denslow interviewed me about the story and I didn't sound too incredibly stupid, so you should check that out. As for the story, it's one of my favorites of mine, the exact blending of all the things I want a Midwestern story to be: humor and sadness, action from boredom despite no solution.
"The summer I turned eighteen, we drove a car off a cliff every Sunday. Gas was still a buck a gallon and all of us were moving away in August to places where polka music wasn't a dogma." - from "Jalapeno Summer"
In the process of trying new things, I've got another book review up at [PANK], this time for Sara Levine's brilliant short story collection Short Dark Oracles. Anything I say about it now will just ruin it. The short of it: buy this goddamn book.
"[Short Dark Oracles] is a champion in the blowout of my soul, a reaffirmation of life through creativity and craft. At the intersection of those two qualities is a triumph of artistic merit, a testament to narrative labor and a reminder for me to pay attention, always, for somewhere in the world there is magic at work."
Okay, I'm done plugging shit. Until this other story I wrote goes up this week.
I'm not the worst salesman ever. Oh yeah, I also had a book come out. I talked about it a lot, so I'm going to stop now. That's what happens, I think, when you work on something. You talk about it until it happens, and then it's other people's responsibility. I've only gotten one review so far, from Joey Pizzolato over at Curbside Splendor.
The good: "These stories are subtle and delicate; it never feels as if Werner is shoving meaning down the reader’s throat. In fact, it’s the opposite. Readers are forced to interact with each story, and are allowed—with a modest grace—to use their own feelings about the historical moments and figures included in these stories to decide what is important."
"Each story is short and powerful, complete with terse and refined prose that are quick like a boxer’s jab."
"Coupled with the freshness and honesty by which he writes, Shake Away These Constant Days is an impressive debut from a young and exciting voice."
The not-so-great: "these stories are almost too short; and, coupled with the quantity of stories included, it’s easy for them to melt together, especially if you find yourself reading from cover to cover."
He's right on the money about the not-so-great stuff. I like to think of SATCD as a mixtape I made for someone. I love all the songs on it, but that person won't love all the songs. They'll love a handful of the songs. It's just too much to take in at once, and some stuff will understandably get lost due to simple saturation.
Not this kind, unfortunately. I swallowed a tiny portion of my irrational fears and submitted to the Caketrain Chapbook Competition. I realized my original chapbook, the aforementioned Murmuration, was about 5000 words short of the minimum length. So I added a second section of short stories, ones with more Midwestern themes. Here's what I ended up with.
Part I: Murmuration (A Midwest Story Cycle)
Jalapeno Summer (869 words)
Reruns (844 words)
Cool Tits, Moxie (1030 words)
Pyramid Scheme (1382 words)
Murmuration (2305 words)
Part II: Heroics
Shoot Out the Bright Lights (5588 words)
Run the Daylight Down (3796 words)
Two Halves of a Tornado (3635 words)
This means very little to most of you, as I realize only a handful of people have read these stories, but there are things to pick up on within a table of contents. I think it'll hold up. I don't really think it'll win the contest--the genius Sarah Rose Etter won it last year, and I'm nowhere near her level--but it's something I'm happy with. When I get the rejection, I'm going to send Part I to Magic Helicopter Press. When I get their rejection, I'll probably just self-publish. So, no matter what, look for Murmuration in early 2013.
I played a lot of rock and roll in the past couple weeks. I look forward to playing more. Let's rock, people.
RW
September 23, 2012
Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 30: "Things That Are Glacial, Things That Are Gone")
My upcoming book of short short stories, Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.
Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.
Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber, as suggested by writer/nuisance Stephanie Momot, was the inspiration for the story "Things That Are Glacial, Things That Are Gone"
Originally OBCBYL #31. Either different types of short short fiction have been properly labeled in the past several years or I stopped caring. If it matters, I consider his more of a prose poem than a piece of flash fiction.
I don’t often start writing something and not know what it’s going to be. At the very least, I’ve got a final image in my head and a list of points that need to be hit, scenes or conversations that need to happen. It’s even more rare that I finish a story and don’t know what it is. This isn’t an experimental piece of fiction by any means, nor is it the sort of frivolous emoting that reads like a journal entry. I can see the craft and the way things hook onto one another, but I’m not sure if it’s a story.
The song was the only piece of classical music I had to deal over the course of the entire project. It’s a bummer of a tune, probably on a lot of mixtapes labeled “SUICIDE MIX” that belong to the sorts of somber, terminally serious people who would never kill themselves in the first place.
That’s probably where a lot of the imagery comes in, talk of the end of the world and creationism and all other sorts of heavy things people like to get drunk and ruminate on. Always being the sober person at bonfires has opened up a lot of avenues for listening to sophomoric prattle, none of which made it into the story in specifics, but definitely manifested itself in the actions that the story resolves in: hold your breath and wait for it.
This is unhealthy, and I swear I’m trying to be a better person. However, some things are glacial. Some things are gone. I cling to the nonsense of my guts.
SATCD on Goodreads
Pre-order the book, because after this, there is no pre-.
September 22, 2012
Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 29: "Refund")
My upcoming book of short short stories, Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.
Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.
"On To You" by The Constantines, as suggested by musician Kevin J. Frank of Haymarket Riot, was he inspiration behind the story "Refund"
Originally OBCBYL #38. The romance in strippers is usually either in the idea of rescuing them or banging them. I’ve often wondered if I’m the type of person who could have a relationship with a stripper or a porn star. To do so, I think I would have to rise above those two original notions, that the woman is not by default a damsel in distress or a public depository.
Of course, I’m totally not that good of a person. As a far more righteous surrogate, Rob in this story is hooked up on a date with a stripper and is already beyond caring about what she does.
At the time, I was kind of obsessed with Marisa Tomei’s character in The Wrestler. The parallels—and differences—in the redemption stories of her character and Mickey Rourke’s character are obvious and many. But, as endearing as Randy the Ram is, he proves in the end that, above all else, he’s a wrestler, an identity that transcends being a human being. The same cannot be said for his female counterpart, who is “merely” a human being who strips.
I obviously didn’t have the space to do the same sort of development as a full-length film, and with that being my most solid reference point, I’m not sure if I did the right thing with the female character, as she comes off as any other nineteen year old girl with problems. On the other hand, it’s possible that that’s exactly why it may have worked.
Tomorrow: A story named "Things That Are Glacial, Things That Are Gone" that is based on the piece of music Adagio For Strings by Samuel Barber. Suggested by writer/nuisance Stephanie Momot.
SATCD on Goodreads
Pre-order the book so nothing will ever hurt again.
