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 #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-.