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. 

Originally OBCBYL #19. My friend Alice has to remind me periodically that old men are not heroes, but I think Hank in this story might be. He’s actually middle-aged, but he seems older. He keeps going to live-band karaoke and amateur fight nights. He’s spiritually willing but physically unable. He’s as big as he’s always been, which is why it was so fun to peel him back and show his weaknesses.

This is another boxing story, somewhat, though it was actually before the other, more traditional story. In fact, there’s even less fighting in this one than there is in “The King.” There’s nothing wrong with a dramatic play-by-play, but I like it when sports stories have all the action displaced, when something has already happened or is about to happen. There’s a different sort of emotional resonance in the moment as opposed to the anticipation of the moment.

I started to experiment with really short sections sometime around this time. The story’s about 700 words split up into five sections, the last of which makes up over a third of the story. This is why I want to say I was cribbing Amy Hempel, but something like Bass's novella “Where the Sea Used to Be” makes me think it was actually Bass. (Plus all the turns of phrase, especially at the end of the sections, are totally Bass.)

The song itself is good, but I found it hard to incorporate much aside from having the live karaoke represent rock & roll. Finally, with the last image, I think I nailed it. It took the whole story, but that's what endings are for. Why go on longer than 700 words if I don't have to?

Also, another thing that points to this being a Bass story is the name "Jim Mikinez" showing up in the text. I must have been reading one of Bass's books on wolves at the time, because "Mike Jimenez" is the name of the wolf expert Bass frequently consulted and went on excursions with. It's all making sense now and goddamn I love Rick Bass.


Tomorrow: A story named "It's Been Far Too Long Since You Woke Up In Someone Else's Shoes" that is based on the song "Misunderstood" by Wilco.


SATCD on Goodreads
 
Pre-order the book so I can maybe afford a fog machine someday.  

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. 

Exclusive to SATCD. For years there was just a HelpsBothWays.doc file on my computer with only one sentence in the body: “If you want a prostitute to lick your ass, it costs the same as a blowjob.” (Source: Some stupid show on HBO.) Thankfully, this idea morphed into something completely different in which a small-time crook sneaks into a man’s apartment and finds him dead. At that point, he’s faced with a choice of an easy looting or a complete turnaround.

The song itself has no words except the announcer of a football game, which immediately made me think of a dark apartment with just a TV on, flickering with a game. The prostitute thing makes absolutely no sense to me now, but the football game idea was always there.

I did have to figure out which game I wanted to do, though. I don't know enough about sports to fabricate a game, and I'm pretty sure I just ended up Googling "famous football games." Eventually, I came across Superbowl XXV, the Wide Right Game. It had struggle, failure, and, most importantly, redemption, built into it already. Formatting around it was embarrassingly easy. Once I embodied the title of the song in there somehow—mainly around what the two characters have done for one another through their somewhat insalubrious actions—I was done.

I always think of my buddy Josh's dad when I think of "poor people who owned a few small things like CD players and deep fryers." My senior year of high school, he dropped way too much money on a three-foot wizard statue carved out of stone. The only purpose we could figure out for it to serve involved my buddy Ben getting drunk and trying to fight it.

The pretty Irish girl with bad eyes is a very real girl who is really named Jacqueline. I can't remember her last name and I didn't really know her that well. She was in one of my writing classes and I thought she was tiny and adorable, so of course I made a comment one day that would have been humorous if I had gotten sheepish at the last moment and just come off as a dickhead. I guess this is as close as she'll ever get to an apology.

Tomorrow: A story named "When There Is No Road" that is based on the song "Rock N Roll" by Paleface. Suggested by musician Monica "Mo" Samalot of Paleface.

SATCD on Goodreads

Pre-order the book so I can get extra Taco Bell.  

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. 

Originally OBCBYL #24. I don’t write about mother/son relationships because I don’t think I have anything interesting to say on the subject. Hamlet and Freud pretty much covered it. Besides, a man’s most interesting parental tension is usually with his father—Marc Maron calls it a “battle to the death”—and because I don’t have anything much to say about that, either, I don’t. My mother makes me lunch every Monday and my father’s feelings on me waver consistently between tolerable and favorable. What more is there?

That said, I think the mother in the story was a good choice for a foundation. I pulled a bunch of concrete imagery from the song: Pet Sounds, Mona Lisa, an aneurysm, Black Russians, black birds, and the title itself. I wish I could remember how chess became a sort of odd backbone for the story, but I'm drawing a total blank. It could have been the movie Angus, for all I remember. I'm assuming I looked up something about Pet Sounds and worked my way back from there to find a teenage narrator, stumbling upon the 1960s and not wanting to suck its dick in the usual ways.

Before this, my knowledge of chess extended to pretty much knowing that I wasn't very good at it and that there was that Bobby Fischer movie in the 90s. (That movie didn't actually have anything to do with Bobby Fischer, I think I later found out and stopped giving a shit about immediately.) Something about Russian names really appealed to me, too—in small doses only, as my multiple failed attempts to tackle Chekhov will prove—so just having Boris Spassky be mentioned a couple times at least gave me a faux-sophistication I could rest my hat on long enough to finish the story.

I go back and forth about the girl in the story, whether or not she’s a tool or a worthwhile character. I’d like to someday rewrite the story from her perspective and find out. Also, like when I worked at a gas station and a meat processing plant, my narrators have been getting custodial jobs ever since I got one. Punch me in the face if I ever start writing about writers.

Tomorrow: A story named "Wide Right Game" that is based on the song "Helps Both Ways" by Mogwai. 

SATCD on Goodreads

Pre-order the book if you either love cake or have diabetes. 

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. 

(Check out "The King" in JDP's gracious preview of Shake Away These Constant Days.)

Exclusive to SATCD. Aside from a few archaic, illogical outliers—Rollie Fingers in baseball, Jay Novacek in football, Manute Bol in basketball—I’m wholly uninterested in sports. My sense of competition is the sort that leads to either rage-induced yelling or obnoxious gloating. I am, occasionally, the worst person ever.

Laterally, I’m a wrestling fan, too. Boxing appeals to me because it’s one-on-one and people get hit in the face. I don’t remember how “The King” came to be boxing story. I probably just figured it was about time to do one. Hemingway always wrote some great boxing stories and Rick Bass, too, has a killer story called "The Legend of Pig-eye" that I went back and reread a couple times. Plus, it gave me a chance to crack open that book on the history of Jewish boxers that I bought for a dollar.

I think I ended up with a Mexican coach because I just wanted a chance to call someone an asshole in Spanish. I remembering being stuck at one point and turning the "puppet on a string" line of the song into a section where the narrator is literally a puppet on a string, with Montoya pulling his arms all over the place as he boxed. (Whenever I got stuck on a story when writing from a song, I took the figurative literally and the literal figuratively and it almost always worked.)

I ran into a problem when I found out that Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott—the real hero of the intelligent working class—is a bit more vague than someone like, say, Bruce Springsteen. (Sorry, Jersey Devil Press. The guy can go fuck himself.) Even though that's probably why I like Springsteen less, who always seems to be trying too hard and whose coolness often comes across as manufactured, it didn't make writing a story based on Thin Lizzy lyrics any easier.

I didn't have a title in mind until I wrote the end. In the song, Phil has a little spoken word outro that fades with the song. "Elvis is dead. The king of rock & roll is dead." It didn't occur to me until writing this that song may have been about Elvis trying to break free from his songwriters and management, so I just wound the story down with a random non-sequitur flashback and hope that it tied everything together. If nothing else, at least I got to call someone an asshole in Spanish.

Sports stories, in general, appeal to me because there's a winner and a loser, the exact reason competing in sports doesn't appeal to me. I had considered making the fight at the climax—if it happened, mind you—a scene instead of just something mentioned, but decided against it. We don't know who wins or loses, and it doesn't matter, because life, as the narrator finds out, is about more than boxing. Life, however, is exactly like boxing: you are singular, you are the fist and the mind and the world.

Tomorrow: A story named "Plots" that is based on the song "Transatlantic Foe" by At the Drive-In. Suggested by writer/musician Philip Chavez.

SATCD on Goodreads

Pre-order the book so they don't just sit in my car once they're printed. 

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.

(Check out "Look At How Fast I Can Go Nowhere At All" in JDP's gracious preview of Shake Away These Constant Days.)

Originally OBCBYL #27. I've really got no business writing about war or recovering from war or any sort of war-related incident aside from, possibly, a critical look at the Black Flag album My War. I was considering enlisting in the Marines my senior year of high school—to be in the band—but I quickly realized that I was not very good at saxophone and was quite the wuss.

The thing about fiction, and the thing about that old "write what you know" saying, is that you can just make shit up if you're self-aware enough about exactly how clever and shallow you are. Anything worth writing about shares the same dozen or so approximations of natural feelings: confusion, joy, triumph, isolation, etc. The experience of going to war doesn't compare to the experience of just kind of being bummed out that you're home by yourself on a summer night in suburbia, obviously. Just put on The Cure or something and invent something good.

That said, this was one of those stories whose first draft ended up being some sort of shitty, told-by-a-bystander alternate universe prologues that I had to delete. Nothing was helped by the fact that I hated the song, a vapid piece of dance pop whose lyrics are the equivalent of a shirt with #YOLO on it.

Sometimes when I read other people's stories I tell them to delete everything except the last sentence and then write forward from there. Nobody wants to hear shit like that—especially when it's internal dialogue. The original draft ended with one character being compared to the hands of a clock and the other character being the pin that holds them. I shitcanned the rest of the story—a guy watching his grandfather interact with a woman who he only sees every ten years—and had pretty much just that one sentence left for a few days. I tried to convince myself I was a big enough dickhead to call that one sentence a story and leave it as is, but no dice.

I spent a lot of time walking around at my job trying to think about what the hell I was going to do. The guy's grandfather was supposed to enlist in the Navy with the woman, but he didn't make it and she did. By chance, one of my friends at work, Keith—a Navy vet—ended up randomly telling me about the USS Indianapolis, whose sinking at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Navy led to the greatest single loss of life at sea in the history of the U.S. Navy.

Call it good, simple fortune. I went home, looked up some more details on the USS Indianapolis, and quickly wrote a draft that closely resembles the one in the book. A couple of the cities mentioned are off-hand references to other things: Ybor City is repeatedly name-checked in a few Hold Steady songs and Philipsburg is a nod to the poet Richard Hugo, whose poem "Degrees of Gray In Philipsburg" fucking rules.

This story got picked up by amphibi.us, too, when I was madly in need of validation and searching for journals that took previously published material. What good is writing if people won't figuratively blow me over it?

Tomorrow: A story named "The King" that is based on the song "Do Anything You Want To" by Thin Lizzy. 


SATCD on Goodreads
 
Pre-order the book so nothing will ever hurt again. 

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.

(Read "Sergei Avdeyev" in JDP's gracious preview of Shake Away These Constant Days.) 

Originally OBCBYL #28. Writing about isolation means writing through isolation to evoke empathy. A story that makes a reader feel alone goes against the one morality we can almost all agree that storytelling is supposed to achieve. What good is a cathedral without people in it? 

The story itself came about pretty quickly once I stumbled upon Russian cosmonaut Sergei Avdayev, which took for fucking ever to stumble upon. Sergei holds the record for time dilation experienced by a human being. What this basically means is that he was in space for so long at such a rapid speed--a cumulative 747 days at an average speed of about 27,360 km/h--that he actually aged roughly 0.02 seconds less than an Earthbound person would have. He is, and this is how simple my brain works, a traveler in time.

In my head, the narrator was stranded in Moscow for a similar reason Ethan Hawke's character in Before Sunrise was stranded in Europe before meeting up with Julie Delpy's character: translatlantic travel that resulted in a break-up upon arrival. When I wrote this, I was finally becoming sick of writing bad relationship stories--both stories that were about bad relationships and bad stories about relationships. I left the "lovesick and stranded" part out of it entirely.

Really, though, I don't think it matters why the narrator's in Moscow. He's just there. Sometimes people end up places by themselves, which the narrator subtly notes right away in the first sentence. This goes back to the idea of isolation in writing: if there's nothing that can be done, then you have to do nothing.

I was worried about the interaction with Sergei because I didn't want to have to keep saying shit like "Sergei spoke elegantly in Russian and gestured toward WHATEVER." I can't remember if I was too lazy to actually find out if Sergei knew English or if I searched around for about five minutes and didn't find anything to confirm that. Regardless, it worked out in my favor. Sergei is silently stoic and all their interaction is physical, which really helps the scenes play out. The narrator and Sergei playing darts is one of my favorite things I've written.

I submitted this story to Cartographer and they got back to me--on my birthday, no less--saying they'd agree to publish "Sergei Avdeyev" upon deletion of the last sentence. I offered them an alternate last sentence that was a nice compromise between what I had--a punchline--and what they wanted--less of a punchline. I never heard back from them.

And that's why I don't celebrate my birthday.

Tomorrow: A story named "Look At How Fast I Can Go Nowhere At All" that is based on the song "Life Passed Me By" by Super Stereo. Suggested by writer Monica Rodriguez.


SATCD on Goodreads

Pre-order the book so I have a reason to leave my basement. 

The content of 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.

(Read "Back and to the Left" in JDP's gracious preview of Shake Away These Constant Days.)

Originally OBCBYL #21. This was the first story I wrote after coming back from a long hiatus. I think around the time I wrote this story I also wrote a song called "Sex In Your City," if that gives you any indication as to where my mind was.

"Brain of J" is, I'm pretty sure, about JFK. The only thing I was more positive about than the world not needing another spin on the JFK assasination was a strong affirmation of my own laziness. So, a JFK assination story it became.

I like to think this is one of the better ones--it kicks off the book, too, so Mike Sweeney at Jersey Devil Press must have thought the same thing. I figured I could get away with a story like this if I took the aspect of saving JFK's brain and sort of manifested it in a living JFK, one who didn't die but is now, for real this time, dead as fuck.

Plus, I think a small part of me just wanted to see JFK die twice.

The reason there's a small part in the story about anagrams and Scrabble is because, in addition to spending a lot of time writing songs about cunilingus and stuff, I spent a lot of time thinking I could be a really great Scrabble player. I read a book called Word Freak and watched a documentary called Word Wars, both about Scrabble. The Scrabble/anagram related part in this story is about all I really got out of it.

It's got a nice flow to the end, a really solid rising cadence. The last line is lovingly cribbed from The Maltese Falcon. In it, Sam Spade says the closing simile as a tossed-off description of suddenness. Mine's a commentary on a county finding satisfaction through grief, which, in itself will always remind me of the William Matthews poem "Why We Are Truly a Nation" and is, therefore, a mini-crib of its own. (A post-modern, collage-based mindset is a wonderful thing when it comes to justification.)

The title is taken from one of the many creepy scenes in Oliver Stone's JFK that dissect the Zapruder footage. Unfortuntely, I was unable to fit any odd references in about my Jr High history teacher who was obsessed with JFK. I think he eventually got fired for getting busted with a Playboy in school, but don't quote me on that.

Tomorrow: A story named "Sergei Avdeyev" that is based on the song "Traveller in Time" by Uriah Heep. Suggested by musician Mike Conte of Early Man.


SATCD on Goodreads

Pre-order the book so I can love myself again.

I spent a lot of time listening to Teenage Fanclub in 2007 and became convinced that four chords and nice harmonies were about the only necessities in life.

I've got Stories In the Worst Way by Gary Lutz out on inter-library loan and it's overdue. Do libraries still charge fees for overdue books? "Things happen when you are younger and have it in you to pinpoint your satisfactions."  I wish I would have written that sentence.

There are going to be a lot of blog posts coming up in the next month or so. About thirty of them. The plan is to do one a day starting on the 25th of this month. Thirty days, thirty stories, thirty explanations. Because of that, I'll keep this short.

My chapbook, Murmuration, is almost done. I've got one story left to finish, and, with apologies to the band Police Teeth, it'll be called "Pyramid Scheme." It's about rock & roll and being 25 and realizing that one of those things will win and one of those things will lose and that you won't be able to tell which one it was until it doesn't even matter anymore. After this, the book is done. I'll have some tweaking and revising to do to a couple of the stories, but I'm expecting to be able to send this thing out by the fall and recieve some rejections by winter and eventually get pissed and self-publish it by the spring.

Sam Snoek-Brown is on vacation right now and taking the entire collection. We're like the mortal enemies in comic books who need each other to exist. But we're pals, too, and I trust him to make some good edits/comments on my stuff because he's completely addicted to fiction. (He's pretty good at it sometimes, too. His newest prose poem up on the ridiculously-named online journal Visceral Uterus is called "Duel." What a doozie.) Also, he recently turned an age I won't reveal, though I will say that he should be gearing up for some prostate exams.*

In an attempt to keep my author brand fresh and interesting, I'm going to be branching out onto a few more social networking mediums. Never mind I don't really know what an "author brand" is ad that I just wanted to sound official.

So, I'm on Twitter now/again. Follow me. RyanWerner and pretty much every variation--except possibly XxRyanWernerxX, but I'm not a goddamn dickhead, so I didn't even bother trying--were taken. So, @YeahWerner it is. Chelsea Peretti and I already shared a brief moment concerning cats and fingerless gloves. The internet is a wonderful place.

And I'm officially a Goodreads author. Become a fan of me and give my book five stars even if you don't mean it. The page for the book, Shake Away These Constant Days, is here. It's not out yet but you can add it to your "to read" shelf and become a fan of me, of which I have two at the moment. At practice last night, our drummer replaced various lyrics of the song "Sara" by Jefferson Starship with the title of the book, and I can't unhear it.

The first blurb for SATCD has come in, and I'm already loving this whole idea of people I love and respect saying nice things about me for free. This one is by the incredible Sarah Rose Etter, author of Tongue Party, one of the best short story chapbooks I've read in the past few years:

"Each of the stories in Ryan Werner’s Shake Away These Constant Days ends with a sentence that’s a fist to the ribs. The collection builds into repeated shots to the soft part of your guts, a beautiful pummeling. By the end of Shake Away These Constant Days, you won’t even notice the bruises, the missing teeth, the pain. You’ll only want to go another round."

Of course my natural reaction to anyone complimenting me is to adamantly deny it, but I'm trying to be a better person. THank you, Sarah. May the Flyers win lots of hockey games I most likely won't watch.

I recently learned how to do laundry because my mom got headbutted by a horse. She was riding in South Dakota and a hailstorm spooked her horse, who, while being corralled into the trailer, flipped his shit and hit her in the face with his face. His face was significantly larger and harder. Tough break, ma.

I'm still plugging the writing contest over at HAL Literature that is free to enter and comes with a sweet prize. Here are the details:

"The theme is open to interpretation and can center around China, the history of China, life in China, life after China, life without China, fortune cookies (which actually are not Chinese, but whatever, we don’t care, we are open to anything), grandma’s china plates, Chinese take-out, Shanghai, being shanghaied, stuff for sale at Target, trade deficits, foreign affairs, NAFTA, firecrackers or gunpowder, silk dresses, opium dens or railroads in the American wild west, the struggle of Chinese immigrants to the West, Richard Nixon, Chinatown, or any other conceivable application of the theme ”China.” We might not be ready to read Deadhead stories about China Cat Sunflower, but if that’s what you’ve got, send it in."

Three finalists will be chosen, with first place winner receiving

1) $50 USD, or the converted equivalent to US dollars at the time the award is made
2) publication in Shanghai at www.haliterature.com
3) One copy each of HAL’s Party like it’s 1984: stories from the people’s republic of; and Middle Kingdom Underground: stories from the people’s republic of, as well as a copy, upon publication, of HAL’s forthcoming book I Am Barbie by HAL author W.M. Butler.
4) winning story will be read live, in whole or in part, at a H.A.L. Lit event in Shanghai, China by a regular contributor to HAL residing in Shanghai at the time of the event. Alternately, the winner may travel at his or her expense to perform the piece in person, or send an audio or video recording of the piece along like a literary postcard of freedom and joy.

Second and third place winners will be published online by HAL.

Deadline for entry is September 15, 2012 at midnight Pacific Standard Time. Winners will be announced by October 15, 2012.

GO.

Okay, that's it for me. Look for several upcoming book reviews on [PANK], including glowing praise of Sara Levine's Short Dark Oracles and Gregory Sherl's Heavy Petting.

Stay loud.

RW

Alex Chilton is bad at talking to girls but really good at musically documenting it. That's always comforting.

My book has a face. Here it is:

Katie Duffy designed it and did a great job. We went through a lot of brainstorming, looking at book covers we admire and talking about big abstract ideas that gave me sweaty flashbacks to the times in college when I actually had to think about stuff. I've done some minor design work for local and touring bands when they come through the area--some of it good and some of it questionable--so I'm not a complete idiot when it comes to design. Still, Duff is a pro, both at art and at telling me that I'm a fucking dickhead.

With this cover, she hit all the key spots we talked about--ephemerality, time as a confuser, open space, redheads--and ended up with something I'm proud to have visually represent my first book. I'll let you do your own interpretation, but I like how it all blends, how there are blue spots between and tons of white space, a big redhead at the center of everything. I'm going to get her some pencils or mescaline or whatever shit artists use. Thanks to Holly Wilson and Terrance Maule for being the models.

I also got a galley of the newest issue of Fractured West, a UK-based literary magazine who accepted my story "--:--" late last year. The issue will be out soon and I'm excited for a number of reasons.

1) Fractured West is a really great magazine that publishes excellent writing.
2) I can now say that I'm an internationally-published writer.
3) Publishing a story with an unpronounceable title, in addition to calling myself an internationally-published writer, puts me in the running to be the biggest dickhead in literature, right next to Garrison Keillor and that dude from one of my college writing workshops who told me his novel doesn't need an editor because his mom read it and said it's good.

Seeing that galley actually made me want to get back on the submission train, but I used up almost all of my A-material on the book. I did find a piece of flash called "Western v. Eastern" and a long-form story called "Shoot Out the Bright Lights" that are both ready to go, so I'm working on sending them out. I also tested the waters with a revision of the story "Trace" (which I previously talked about taking through almost a dozen drafts over the course of four years) and a revision of the story "Backlit" (which is in the same revision purgatory as "Trace").

And, as I did with "Trace," here are two different version of the opening to "Backlit."

That first draft was more of a slow burn. It starts off with a nice line, if not too-easy line--that listing technique with an oddball third item. There's a lot of wasted space, though: that second sentence is essentially pointless, and the stuff about leisure suits and sunglasses doesn't add much of anything except a sort of "look at us being silly" quality to the narrator that isn't exactly appealing. The stuff with Mikey and Jayne goes nowhere after this, too, just some material for awkward conversation and bad segues. Also, whereas the opening section of Draft 7 stops right where it stops above, the first section in Draft 1 goes on for 2192 words, almost the entirety of Draft 7. I think it may have been worth it, to some degree, once the story got moving, but absolutely no one wants to wait four pages for a story to warm up.

The opening in Draft 7 is about as abstract as I get. I think the sentences are all great, though. "Drilled-through with tedium" is a nice phrase, as is "an enthusiasm for new and simple movement." As an introductory section, I think it serves its purpose better. We know none of the characters--even the narrator is obscured by the hazy summary of what is, essentially, the entire story--but because it's so short and the next section immediately goes into both the characters (Mikey and "the rest of us"--the narrator's two other friends--have been cut) and the story, it works. Or, at least, it works for me.

Let's not forget about the writing contest over at HAL Literature, too. It's free to enter and comes with a sweet prize. Here are the details:

"The theme is open to interpretation and can center around China, the history of China, life in China, life after China, life without China, fortune cookies (which actually are not Chinese, but whatever, we don’t care, we are open to anything), grandma’s china plates, Chinese take-out, Shanghai, being shanghaied, stuff for sale at Target, trade deficits, foreign affairs, NAFTA, firecrackers or gunpowder, silk dresses, opium dens or railroads in the American wild west, the struggle of Chinese immigrants to the West, Richard Nixon, Chinatown, or any other conceivable application of the theme ”China.” We might not be ready to read Deadhead stories about China Cat Sunflower, but if that’s what you’ve got, send it in."

Three finalists will be chosen, with first place winner receiving

1) $50 USD, or the converted equivalent to US dollars at the time the award is made
2) publication in Shanghai at www.haliterature.com
3) One copy each of HAL’s Party like it’s 1984: stories from the people’s republic of; and Middle Kingdom Underground: stories from the people’s republic of, as well as a copy, upon publication, of HAL’s forthcoming book I Am Barbie by HAL author W.M. Butler.
4) winning story will be read live, in whole or in part, at a H.A.L. Lit event in Shanghai, China by a regular contributor to HAL residing in Shanghai at the time of the event. Alternately, the winner may travel at his or her expense to perform the piece in person, or send an audio or video recording of the piece along like a literary postcard of freedom and joy.

Second and third place winners will be published online by HAL.

Deadline for entry is September 15, 2012 at midnight Pacific Standard Time. Winners will be announced by October 15, 2012.

FUCKIN' DO IT.

And that's it for me, folks. Stay raw.

RW