I bought a Jazzmaster and I shouldn't have. I don't know anything about jazz, but I know a lot about J Mascis. The way "Freak Scene" sounds is enough reason for me to go back to saltine/peanut butter sandwiches for a couple more months.

I took some time to type up the non-story pages for Shake Away These Constant Days. Got the legal/business junk and dedication (it's for my parents . . . and those about to rock) on one page in the beginning and then a page at the end for acknowledgments (yes, Shawn Michaels is thanked) and another page for the details on who suggested what song for each story. We were thinking about doing an essay explaining the Our Band Could Be Your Lit project, but I'm lazy. In the end, we decided to not pitch it as an OBCBYL book at all.

One of my dream publications finally came through. A few blogs ago I mentioned a story I wrote about a guy who just crashes cars with his buddies. It turned out to be about a little bit more than that--not much, though I do finally get a chance to use the phrase "marble dicks" in a piece of writing and get it published--and Smokelong Quarterly picked it up. When it comes to flash fiction, no place is better. They've published Dan Chaon, Kevin Wilson, Thomas Cooper, WP Kinsella, Steve Almond, Sara Levine, and dozens of other awesome writers who I love. And now me.

One of the editors there was kind enough to not reject my story wholesale despite not liking the ending, and after sending in a couple new drafts, we came to an agreement. It was kind and I was grateful, because I've been rejected a lot by Smokelong, more than any other journal. "Jalapeno Summer" was the eighth story I've submitted to them. I guess this just proves the old saying right: If at first you don't succeed, use the phrase "marble dicks."

My friend Dena's manuscript is almost done on my end. One last piece to go, and while it's the longest one, it's still the last one. She sent me a bunch of e-mails asking me why I used a bunch of fancy words, to which I had t reply, "Because I want people to think I'm smart." I had to look up "ennui" the other day to figure out if someone was talking shit about me. Turns out they were just being accurate. Dena's going to get into the real nitty gritty of editing this week, so wish her luck. Or don't. She doesn't need you. She's a pioneer, motherfucker.

On my other friendly philanthropic endeavors, my first YA workshop ditched me this week. No clue why. One of them submitted work, even. I'm trying to think if I made a bad joke about not showing up the week prior. I'm trying to think of anything that isn't "They just think I'm a weird dickhead." The second group made it just fine, though. We read "Mexico" by Rick Bass and talked about it. I'm trying to find the one thing that they'll latch onto and make theirs. "How To Be a Writer" by Lorrie Moore is on the table in the next couple of weeks, which I think they'll respond well to.

Monkeybicycle posted something on Facebook today saying that they want some new columns and features on their website. I sent them an e-mail that included this paragraph:

"I've been thinking lately about a column wherein I do an album-by-album review of an almost arbitrary band with lots of albums. Like .38 Special--also known as the dudes who sang "Hold On Loosely" and "Caught Up In You." Did you know that they have 12 studio albums and 3 live albums? Kansas have 14 studio albums and 6 live albums and one song from a Will Ferrell movie that came out 25 years after it really mattered. Chumbawamba have 20 albums. (Right Said Fred have 8, which, though fewer, is still impressive when considering that they're the band who did "I'm Too Sexy" and nobody has ever cared about them beyond the potential for using their song title to justify making a stupid joke when taking off their Marlboro jacket.) Tom Cochrane/Red Rider--that goddamn "Life Is a Highway" song that's so bad that even cover bands in small Midwestern towns won't even play it--has 13 albums. Figure it out.

I went on to explain this in detail, which, regardless of what you may already think about the idea, was most likely overkill. I also offered to review books if they agree to send me free ones. Then I offered to review anything. I'll consider any response that isn't "Please never e-mail us again" a victory.

I've got shit on YouTube to watch while I'm busy not writing. Stay handsome, America.

RW

I went on vacation to Grand Rapids and played more pinball in a weekend than I played all last year. I was tearing up Simpsons Pinball Party on Saturday night and some guy asked me if I felt like The Who's Tommy. Then the ball went down the middle, and I said, "Yeah, I feel blind, deaf, and dumb." I was never a Who guy anyways.

Then I saw Reigning Sound in Chicago on my way back. They make me think that the fifties were badass. I was always partial to odd-numbered decades anyways.

I didn't get any writing done when I was gone, which is not fine. I was still looking toward the time off I was going to take in April anyways, so I guess I'll count that as now. I'm still working on that chapbook, but it's still going slowly. No new thoughts on whether or not to throw away my old stories or rework them, which makes me think I should go back and actually read them again. I'm only going to go back a few years on this, though. Nobody needs my bullshit from 2008 except maybe other people who were boring pricks and want to relive the navel-gazing glory of twenty page stories where nobody talks to each other, later on describing their story as having "a subconscious arc to the narrative, lending it organic qualities than really bloom upon multiple readings." (Also: Fuck.)

My friend Dena's manuscript is shaping up. (Probably. I haven't actually read the second draft, but she's a smart little firecracker and I trust her to work hard at it.) I'm sixteen pieces away from finishing up my comments on it for her, at which point I'll sit back and see if she wants me to look at the second draft or if she'll be sick of my shit by then. I'm pretty sure I say "This does nothing" and "Take it a bit further and see what happens" far too often, to everyone about everything, that I myself am sick of my own shit already when it comes to advice.

It's also that time of year where I run a weekly writing workshop for young adults at the public library about twenty minutes away. Sign up is down this year--I was assured that sign up for all things at the library was down this year, though I'm still considered the reckless, nonsensical one in the library hierarchy--and I think a lot of it has to do with Harry Potter and Twilight both dying down in popularity. A couple years ago when those books were a cultural phenomenon, kids thought it was cool to be a writer. Now that the YA thing has fizzled a bit, they all want to go back to doing whatever it is that kids do normally.

So I've got two groups of kids: four 12-14 year olds (1 age 12, 3 age 14) and four 15-17 year olds (3 age 15 and one age 17). All girls except one fifteen year old dude named Matt who totally has his shit together. He's working on three screenplays and a "psychological thriller." When I was fifteen I was working on new ways to masturbate and lists of my favorite wrestlers. I look forward to resenting his success.

I showed the older group "The Harvest" by Amy Hempel. They had never seen anything like it before, and I think it added something to their thoughts about what writing is, rattled loose some thoughts that were already there. That's what any good writing should do, especially "The Harvest," a story I read about once a month. I'm trying to find other stories to share with them during our time together, but it's tough because we're only in workshop for an hour and a half each week, and I want to make time to show them how to workshop each other's work. Even if we did have time, though, I'm not so sure I want to sit down and have them read a twenty page short story out loud to one another. I'm already bored by that option. But I am going to show them stories each week. I'm thinking Barry Hannah's "Love Too Long" next, but he says nigger a couple of times in there and the violent sexuality might be a bit much for kids who are just learning about what all that stuff is for.

For the younger group, I'm really trying to focus on in-workshop writing. Lots of exercises, lots of stuff just to get the juices flowing. The first session together was taken up mostly by introductions, including me rambling incoherently for 45 minutes in an attempt to tell them, simply, that I am 27 and have a book coming out. They all said they had stuff written already, so I want to do some traditional workshop stuff with them, too, but it'll mostly be hammering ideas into their heads through prompts.

In previous years, the groups weren't separated, which was a hassle for everyone. Everything changes once kids get into high school, so the cut was perfect: incoming Freshmen and younger in one group, everyone up to recent graduates in another. Other than me finally realizing that I am not cool, have never been cool and am no longer able to convince myself that I am cool as a means of survival, and that I am an unfortunate adult in the eyes of teenagers instead of just a rad guy who happens to be a bit older, things are going fine so far.

I'm trying to figure out a way to reference the show It's Like, You Know . . . but I'm pretty sure I was the only one
who watched it, proving that it really isn't a generational gap that makes me look like a goddamn loser.

I want to end this by thanking everyone who donated to the Jersey Devil Press 2012 Collection Kickstarter. It was funded last week, which means Eirik won't have to fork out the cash from his pocket, which means that he can live comfortably and still support rad things like my book. There's still a week and a half left, and any money over the scant $630 goal goes toward a third book that JDP will be doing. Really, though, thank you so much to everyone who donated. You will be receiving your promised rewards this Fall when the book is released, in addition to a bonus reward from me. Because I'm a pal like that.

Thanks, pals.

RW

I've got ten months left to choke on my own vomit. Then I'll be 28 and rock & roll won't care if I'm alive or dead.

In the meantime, I don't know what to do with all my old stories.  There's a window of opportunity in revising older material, a temporal self (or whatever) to remain faithful to. This, of course, makes no sense. I don't owe the me of five years ago anything except maybe the satisfaction of knowing that I became his possibilities.

It's an issue of style more than ideas, really. My characters have always been Midwestern people. Desperate, self-contained, and home. Boredom and obsession and the river and the Jayhawks and the Replacements and long car rides to elsewhere. That much hasn't really changed. But in 2006 I wanted to be Nick Hornby. In 2007 I wanted to be Raymond Carver. In 2008 I wanted to be Rick Bass. In 2009 I wanted to be John Updike. In 2010 I wanted to be Rick Bass again, only this time with a bit of Barry Hannah thrown in. Then I got really into Amy Hempel and Lorrie Moore. Tom Franklin's been floating around in there for years. Richard Brautigan and Charles Bukowski really fucked me up. Reading Kerouac and Kundera at the same time I was taking philosophy classes in college was, in hindsight, a poor decision that had to be made. Dan Chaon made me rethink the 20-page story. Debra Monroe showed me the Midwestern people I know and love, on the page, at last. Kevin Wilson's short stories blew my mind at a time when I had thought I had seen it all in short stories--and this was only last year.

Just tonight I was forwarding an e-mail to someone and, in a tiny comment of mine above the e-mail, I used the phrase "cobble together." I never use that phrase, and upon closer inspection, I realized that it was used in the body of the e-mail I was forwarding. Shit like that scares me. I'm not a natural writer, I'm a natural colander.

What this means is that my style is a collage. I'm aware that this is hardly an original concept. I've read articles on the idea that, due to the embarrassment of riches we call current day information, that everyone's style is a collage. Your style is a combination of your Facebook page, the headlines of articles you don't read, the videos you watch on YouTube, the Etsy store you stumbled on accidentally, the New Yorker/People magazine you flipped through on your lunch break, and, lastly, the stuff you read for real.

My point is that I'm afraid I'm never going to write like myself. If I'm concerned about revising the old stories due to some inane and unjustified responsibility I feel toward the way I was whenever it was I wrote them, then doesn't it make sense to not revise them? There are good lines and good sections and good everything that's good about stories in my old stories, just not all at once. It's like that old saying about finding a girlfriend. HOT, SANE, INTELLIGENT: YOU MAY CHOOSE TWO.

So I'm considering cutting my loses. Publication is my end goal. It may not be yours (you fucking liar), but it's definitely mine. If I'm not doing this to get published, I'm just writing a really fucked up journal for people inside my head who don't even exist for anyone else. That's not even exciting for me, and I'm the guy with the ideas. If I stop taking the time to publish these old stories--we all know the process of write, revise, submit, get rejected, revise again because we've changed our minds about what the story is capable off despite it being "totally finished and fuck anyone who doesn't see the vision that I'm proud of" upon its last round of submissions, get rejected again, revise "for the final time" again, and then get rejected again--I will theoretically have time to work on new stories.

This idea of new things all the time is something really popular in the world of comedy right now. Ever since Louis CK decided he was going to do a new hour of comedy each year (he said he got it from Carlin, but Carlin was every two years) and then subsequently blew up when his popularity fell in line with his ability to realize his vision, every comedian worth their salt seems to be finding it necessary to do a new hour every year. When talking about his moment of realization, Louie essentially wondered what would happen if he threw away all the shitty material he had been trying to make work for the past fifteen years and started digging deeper. It's like writing with no ideas: this is what you have when you make yourself have something despite having nothing.


Of course, Louie's a fucking genius and I'm not. Still, there's an allure to trimming the inventory, good or bad. It's a certain sort of bittersweet reverie to live completely in the now and immediate future, but in art, it's almost necessary to lean in that direction.

Then again, if this really is just a style thing, why don't I use the characters and ideas and just rewrite the fuckers? Everything old is new again. If I write differently now, fine. Just use the plots of the old stories as prompts. It's not like there's nothing there to work with . . .

* Guy with a deaf/mute Italian ex-girlfriend goes on cross country plane trip on Daylight Savings Account day and considers his relationship as his rich uncle breaks up with his three different girlfriends in three different time zones in an attempt to cause universal time/space confusion and "tie the rope of time" into a knot to redeem himself.

* An old man kills himself and leaves a note requesting that his landlord decapitate him and bury the head 19 hours away in Pascagoula, Mississippi, to which the landlord agrees in an attempt to find something in his life worth caring about since he no longer has feelings for his young girlfriend, job, or life in general.

* On a random road trip to St. Louis, three men and one woman in their early twenties stop at a gas station and pick up the woman working there after she claims she's going to kill herself at the end of her shift, which is never found out to be true or false due to the fact that she drives the group into Tennessee and subsequently disappears later on in the night after all but one person, the guy who invited her in the first place, has gone to sleep at a bar that has agreed to let them stay the night.

It goes on like this. I'm not a genius like Louie or Carlin, but there's some direction in these little summaries. Am I just lazy? Do I feel that this is indeed not writing a new story, but writing the same story again? Doing the work twice? Double handling? A waste of my time? I think so, which is why I'm leaning toward tossing them all in the first place. But I know better than to be lazy. Reading back over those capsule synopses of the above stories, I think, "Yeah, I'd totally fucking love to read that story." That means I should write that story. Rewriting is writing. Revising is writing. Separating the two from each other or writing itself is how people trap themselves like I have. If it has to be again, it has to be again, even if it means taking away my satisfaction in retrograde.

I was writing this blog to try to figure out what I was going to do with the old stories, and I was hoping to have come to a conclusion by now. Unfortunately, I've pretty much just managed to justify ripping people off, hated myself in reverse, and done no actual fiction writing. I've got to learn that revising after several years with a different mindset isn't a betrayal of my vision.

If there's a moral to this thing, it's this: just fucking write something. Even if you have to write it again.

(And eat some ice cream. You earned it if you made it through that rambling.)

RW

Naming songs is easy because I write stupid songs. If I want to call a song "Fake Tits (Real Problems)" I totally can. "Release the Grease" is a go. "Ready, Set, Get Wet" is a must. As long as it's about having sex or drugs or just generally being rad, I can just ramble on about whatever.

That's why I'm having a fuck of a time naming this book. We went through and looked at the the story title first, because that's the easiest way to go about things. Most of my favorite short story collections are named that way, too, so it's not like I could have any sort of pretensions about not coming up with a new title for the whole thing. So when none of the titles looked like a good representation of the book as a whole, I was pretty much fucked.

So I had to read my book again. It's a good book. I'm happy with how it's turning out. But I was pretty sick of myself by the time I had to read it for the third time in a week. I had already read it for sequencing purposes and again for typos and grammatical issues. And now once more to see if a title was buried somewhere in the text? I'm dumb.

I came up with a long list of shit from the text that stood out, none of which I was particularly blown away by upon review.

All At Once It Becomes Important
(From "Sergei Avdeyev." Not a bad title, but I don't want people to think I'm bragging. If I went with this, I might as well include a free video download of me singing "I'm the Man" by Anthrax and flexing.)

Only the Black of the Birds
(From "Plots." It's good, but not for this collection. Maybe I'll write something about crows someday, but probably not, since I only passed my college zoology class because I cheated on all those tests with the stupid Scantron sheets.)

The Band Has Been Around Too Long
(From "When There Is No Road." Because we've decided not to pitch this as an OBCBYL book, it's probably best to back off on any music-related title. Plus I didn't want Gene Simmons to sue me.)

An Old Television Turned Off And Then Back On Quickly
(From "When There Is No Road." It's fucking dumb, that's why.)

And the Way They Swing Around
(From "It's Been Far Too Long Since You Woke Up In Someone Else's Shoes." This one's just not very good, is it? Too vague--they?--and a bit stuffy with that "and" at the beginning. IBFTLSYWUISES was considered as a title, too. Not as an abbreviation, but look at that abbreviation. If that's the short way to write your book's title, you're an asshole.)

Climbing Toward the Sun
(From "Haunt." It was originally about tendrils or vines or whatever, which makes sense. I just can't bring myself to go with any title that could be turned into that of a self-help book by adding "MAKING YOUR LIFE THE BEST LIFE" in the sub-heading.)

How I've Earned My Darkness
(From "After I Threw the Ball At Thomas Hernandez and Before It Killed Him." Sounds like the title of a self-published memoir.)

Whatever You Do
(From I can't remember because it's so generic, and I refuse to go back and check the word doc. Who cares?)

Seven As A Threat
(From "Follow the Water." I must have been tired when I pulled this.)

Long Enough Will Be Long Enough
(From "Follow the Water." Or maybe not too tired, because this one I like. But I'm a bit torn on it. It sounds a bit like a simple truth and a bit like something my mom would have on a magnet on the fridge.)

Bite Off Your Tongue and Tell Me
(From "Follow the Water." This is a paraphrase of the end of the story, and while it sounds cool, it might be a bit too hard for what the book is doing. I do a lot of soft endings, so maybe this stood out for being considerably less soft. And I don't want to give away my punchlines.)

With Suddenness
(Again, no idea what the fuck I was thinking.)

Distortion
(Yep, really grasping here. I think this is from "Signal" but I have no idea. It doesn't matter. We're not going with it.)

Pure Smoke
(From "Refund." This is one of the few later ones I really liked. The word that keeps coming up when I think about the themes of the collection is "ephemerality." I think Pure Smoke has that built into it, plus it's punchy. Still, it didn't grab me by the collar and tell me it was the title, so onto the burner it goes.)

I Imagine A Few Moments From Now
(This could be from any of the stories, really. No clue.)

You Can Be Twenty Things
(From "Refund." Another paraphrase, this time from dialogue. I was definitely barely awake when pulling this aside.)

You Think of Breathing Out
(From "Things That Are Glacial, Things That Are Gone." I don't mind this one, but it's nothing special. I almost like the title of the story better for the collection title.)


Somewhere in the middle of all this bullshit, I came up with a couple titles that weren't from the text.

Shake Away These Constant Days


and

Every Day A Juggernaut

After all that deliberation to find something from the text, the two I like the best aren't even from it. "Shake" and "juggernaut" are two of my favorite words--I had planned a solo album years ago called Shake that never happened (the cover was going to be me in the pose from Electric Warrior) and "Juggernaut" is my favorite Rick Bass story.I e-mailed all of this (sans commentary) to Mike at JDP and he once again told me to settle down, that we've reached the point of diminishing returns on new titles, and that we should pick from what we have. This is sound advice, somewhat, which I wouldn't say if I wasn't already partially in love with Shake Away These Constant Days. Barring a rejection from JDP fearless-leader Eirik, that's going to be the title of the book.

What a long, drawn-out process of explanation for no reason.

On the chapbook front--the title of that is going to be Murmuration--I'm about halfway through the second story. It's called "Cool Tits, Moxie" which I'm excited for because writing about strippers is always fun and I haven't used "tits" in a story title since I was in third grade. My band starts recording our first EP and second full length today, so time will now officially be split between writing and rocking, not that I'm trying especially hard at either one.

I'm reading Home Land by Sam Lipsyte right now--The Ask is still waiting--and it's so fucking rad. If I would have had this in high school instead of The Catcher In the Rye, shit would be significantly different.

Also, the older I get, the more I aware I become of how I write, meaning that I can love Lipsyte's stuff and not feel compelled to rip him off. Not all genius is transferable. (I wouldn't mind copping his dialogue, though.)

Okay, we all stopped giving a fuck about what I think somewhere in that title mess. I'm out of here

AFTER I QUICKLY PLUG THE JERSEY DEVIL PRESS KICKSTARTER PAGE FOR THEIR 2012 BOOK COLLECTION, WHICH IS IN NEED OF YOUR HELP. KILLER REWARDS FOR ALL, INCLUDING SUPER SECRET SPECIAL REWARDS FROM ME. DO IT.

Let's rock.

RW