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.

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.

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.

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

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 think Bible of the Devil guitarist Nate Perry is the last of the real deal rock and roll heroes. Too dumb to live, too cool to die.

On the writing front, I've started working on a chapbook story collection/cycle using the narrator from my short story "Murmuration." That story appeared in the April issue of Jersey Devil Press. I got the idea for the story after someone posted a video on Facebook of a murmuration of starlings fucking around in synchronicity above a lake. They put ambient music in the background and probably turned it in as part of their art school thesis, but whatever, it was still pretty rad.

I finished the story in a couple quick drafts and was just sort of throwing ideas around, writing quickly and in a style I'd describe as "a shitty Amy Hempel story from Reasons to Live" meets "a really good story as told in the comments section of the AV Club website." There's a dead dog, a burn victim named Nurse Diamond (not a real nurse), pudding cups, and a bunch of sideways references to Whitesnake and KISS. I had just finished working on a story with a heavier, more labored-over tone called, at this junction, "Shoot Out the Bright Lights." After starting it a year or two prior I, with the help of the Chet Baker documentary Let's Get Lost, was finally able to really do justice to the parallel redemptions of an old jazz dude and a young widower. Needless to say, I was ready to do something a little more off-the-cuff and a little less heady after that 5500-word behemoth.

At this time I was also working on a story called "Who Wants To Live Forever" about a woman with OCD (based on what Maria Bamford multiple descriptions of her "unwanted thoughts syndrome") who keeps running into a guy who may or may not be in a Queen tribute band, as well as a story called "Devotion and Doubt" about a drunk dude. I tried to figure out something else to say about it, but that's pretty much it. He tries to fuck a pair of twins but just eats a bunch of breakfast.

Anyways, "Murmuration" turned out to be one of my favorites, and I had such a good time writing it that I'm going to track the narrator from the summer right after high school until the events in "Murmuration" ten years later. I'm shooting for 7500 words total on the chapbook. Doing a story for each year is out--"Murmuration" takes up a third of that space already, so I'm looking at about four pieces of flash fiction in addition.

As of right now, he's just wrecking cars with his buddies.

I've got some work to do. I'm looking at a friend's manuscript for her, too, and resisting the urge to do a complete line-edit on it. I'm addicted to working at the sentence level on everything, which is good for everything except issues concerning time.

The book through Jersey Devil Press is at the stage where I'm just waiting for the editor to shoot me a tentative table of contents. Once that rolls in, everything else rolls in behind it: editing, title, layout, artwork, etc. Mike Sweeney, the editor in question, and I have a lot of the same beliefs when it comes to short story collections, and so far the only problems that have arisen have come from me being overbearing and anxious. No, I can't keep adding stories. No, I can't just make up a random title because I think it sounds cool.

I'm finding out that a first book is like a first girlfriend: I don't know where to put my hands. I trust Mike and JDP head-honcho Eirik, but my natural response was to do everything. I'm used to the DIY rock and roll band mindset: write your song, play your song, record your song, design your album, press your album, promote your album, sell your album. Book the shows. Load the gear. Talk to promoters. I guess I'm just not used to having other people who will do some of those things. I'm not a control freak, but, well, I just don't know where to put my goddamn hands.

Okay. Enough of this. I need more time to read. I've been too busy packaging up CDs to get any reading done lately, and I've got The Ask by Sam Lipsyte calling my name. And there was one other thing.

DONATE TO THE KICKSTARTER FOR THE JDP FALL BOOK RELEASES, INCLUDING MY BOOK.

I'm not above a shameless plug.

(This blog post was brought to you by Taco Bell.)

(Let's sell out, kids.)

RW