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 I wasn't going to pay $70 for a glorified Raw, 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 that'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.
Sometimes 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 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
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