Has it really been four months already? Here's some shit.

1) The job I spoke about previously as being a possibility, barring background checks and whathaveyou, totally happened. Now I spend five days a week telling four-year-olds about wrestling and Ozzy.

1b) I acted like I only tolerated it at first, but it's really awesome. I wore an Anthrax shirt in my school pictures, because time won't change for me and vice-versa.

1c) My phone is a veritable cesspool of adorable pictures of kids helping me cook lunch. I'm worse than a grandmother.

2) I got the NUMBER ONE HIGH SCORE on the South Park pinball machine at the bar. Suck it, automated high scores that come pre-loaded onto the machine.

3) I've been watching a lot of wrestling. I realized there's a lot of stuff from right before the Attitude Era that I haven't seen all the way through. Here's to Survivor Series '96 and The Rock looking like a Ribbon Dancer tried to fuck a pineapple.

4) I started a band and joined another one, bringing the count to an unnecessary, over-committed FIVE BANDS.

4b) This is much less impressive when you consider that, much like other prolific songwriters--not that I'm really one of them--of previous and current times, I really only write three or four different kinds of songs. I just sort of change the nuances a bit to fit what I'm doing, because I'm a liar, essentially.

5) My friend Kylie and her friend Matt (who is kind of my friend, too, though I barely know him) made a documentary about me. It's just called Werner and it's about twelve minutes long, which is all it takes to sum up my life, including gag reel.

5b) It's actually a really well-made documentary, and Kylie and Matt did a great job. I was worried I'd look like I was too serious or too much of a joke, but she blended it well. Better than I do in my life, at least.

5c) It'll be available to watch online sometime in the near future once all the paperwork and red-tape of whatever goes along with these sorts of projects is cleared. They're film students and this was for a class, so I'm not sure exactly what needs to all happen. Other than CGI enhancements of my abs.

6) I saw Charles Bradley play a show in Madison and it was pretty incredible. I still need to see the documentary about him.

6b) I missed Lee Fields the month before, though. Only so much soul I can handle, apparently.

7) I downloaded Snapchat and don't understand it. Why wouldn't you just text someone? On the bright side, I wish all selfies had a built-in disappearing point.

8) My computer died. Just flat-out fucking ate shit. Luckily, I have most of my important stuff--music, wrestling, writing, porn--on an external hard drive. The stuff I deserve to get bummed about losing is some writing and pictures. Everything else was pirated. Even I'm not delusional enough to think I had a right to that.

8b) David Atkinson is a beautiful man with a heart of gold, and he hooked me up with a replacement right quick. Buy him cigarettes and coffee and build a statue of his out of a meat of your choice. Then feed it to a homeless person, because the world needs more people paying it forward.

9) I got a hat that says BOOB POLICE on it for Christmas. Happy birthday, Jesus.

10) I became an uncle. My brother and his girlfriend had a kid and named it Maddux, which is a cool name spelled in a fucking dickhead way.

10b) My brother spells his name "Nikolas" with no "c" in it, so whatever. Hereditary, I guess. I'm just glad I'm not "Ryen" or some shit.

Writing-wise, I'm doing better than I was when I last checked in. I've written six stories since then and five of them have been picked up. The sixth one is a really bad retelling of a Kenny Loggins song about Winnie the Pooh that Matt Burnside suggested I write about for Cloud Rodeo, and I never submitted it because in addition to being mind-numbingly shitty, I lost it in the computer crash. If I need to find it, I'm sure it's in an e-mail or Facebook message, but I might just call this one a loss. (Sort of.)

Some of the stuff I wrote is already up. The surge in writing came from the Cease, Cows contest for Halloween. They had a 1000-word cap and a theme of "hallow/hallowed" that stories needed to fit into. One submission for $5, three submissions for $10. I wrote three stories and got an honorable mention with one. (And a Pushcart nomination!)

The winner of this batch according to Cease, Cows was the story "Atavism." I started writing this under the theme of "hollow" instead of "hallow" because I'm a goddamn idiot. I gave the woman empty bones and then, when I realized I was writing about the wrong word, just decided to keep that idea and work around it. So, a haunted house, some hollow bones, and the things people do when they're afraid.

Melanie thought that humans descended from birds. Back in the middle of her snap, she paid an old man strung out on heroin fifty bucks to read her past lives, to do a palm reading on the place where her hand was supposed to be but wasn’t. So he ran his finger down the scar that sealed the end of her arm up and then he told her that God created sparrows and some evolved into humans.

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The other new thing that went up already is the story "My Friend Wallace Eating a Candy Apple at the End of the World." I wrote this last for the contest, in a quick burst. It's the shortest thing I've written in a long while, maybe the shortest thing I've ever had published. As is the way with DOGZPLOT, it's under 200 words, so I'm not going to excerpt it. You've got time to click a link.

"My Friend Wallace Eating a Candy Apple at the End of the World"

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The non-story I got published recently is a review of my bro Dena Rash Guzman's debut poetry collection Life Cycle. It's a damn fine book made by a rough-neck that might also possibly be a red-neck. Part ghost and part glitter, part sweet and part bitter. (Not everyone gets the Macho Man Randy Savage-style intro, DRG.) Check it.

Guzman’s vision is true to itself, right down to the faults. This is proof that the book has been nurtured and then shot out, more creation than craft and goddamn all the better for it.

---------------------

I almost forgot that I had a story get published right after that last blog went up, the aforementioned "There Is No Joy between the Last Thing and the Next Thing" up at Jersey Devil Press. It's about friendship and trust and moving forward, always.

When they called on me to testify, I told them I didn’t know Eugene to have a history of violence. What I meant was that spent knuckles and a dozen years of broken glass don’t add up to bank statements or toe tags, but, there they are.

The rest of the stories will be up in the months to come. "If There's Any Truth In a Northbound Train" was the second story written for the Cease, Cows contest and it'll be up at SmokeLong Quarterly in the spring. It's about twins and fate and what it means to be an older brother, if it means anything.

I also got solicited for a couple stories by Meg Tuite, one for the Sante Fe Literary Review and one for Connotation Press. SFLR will be publishing my story "Mexico," about sleep and reality and what happens when the amounts of each get thrown off together. Connotation nabbed up my story "Banzai Skydiving" about the difference between a lack of opportunity and a lack of skill. Both of these will be up fairly soon, if I understand it right.

The Indiana Review with my story "Shoot Out the Bright Lights" arrived in the mail the other day and it looks awesome. I've never been in a big journal like this, something with history and very slick production values.

I can't really do a year-end book round-up because I didn't read shit this year. Or, to be more specific, I read a bunch of shit this year, but not a lot of it in book form. I spent a fair amount of time reading manuscripts for Passenger Side and reading stuff online trying to find stuff I loved to solicit for manuscripts, but as far as books go, I didn't have a lot of luck or time.

The two books I put out on PSB that weren't my book are my favorites. They had to be and have to be and are. Justin Lawrence Daugherty's Whatever Don't Drown Will Always Rise is brilliant, the biggest heart of the hardest warrior. Matthew Burnside's Infinity's Jukebox is really that: the tunes of a lifetime, every lifetime. (ORDER HERE!)

Aaron Teel's Shampoo Horns is my favorite book I had nothing to do with other than sitting down and reading it cover-to-cover. It's dirty and tender and says a lot about what it means to grow up with nothing more than yourself and the people around you.

I read Brian Allen Carr's Vampire Conditions, too, and really dug it. Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas did nothing for me. I didn't even finish it.

I don't know why I didn't read, other than time. I know my old job killed a lot of my creativity and ability to focus on creative endeavors. Maybe next year will be better. It kind of has to be, right?

I always forget that reading and writing go hand in hand, and in a year when I played a bunch of shows with a bunch of different bands and wrote a lot of music, some strange and some in the box, for several groups, I can name a list of a dozen killer records I spun over and over again. One feeds into the other, which doesn't make it less of a struggle to think of something to pull from the air, but it does make the air a bit thicker.

There's a stack of books I bought this year from a lot of great writers. Amber Sparks, Matt Bell, Jon Konrath, David Atkinson, Sam Snoek-Brown and on and on. I know they're all talented and enjoyable. This one's on me.

Hopefully I'll tune in sooner than every four months to this thing, but incase I don't, here are my new tour dates, reading in a city near you. (Maybe.) March 2014! NO COAST SPRING BREAK!

Thursday, March 13: Rock Island, IL
Friday, March 14: St. Louis, MO
Saturday, March 15: Carbondale, IL
Sunday, March 16: Nashville, TN
Monday, March 17: Louisville, KY
Tuesday, March 18: Cincinnati, OH
Wednesday, March 19: Fort Wayne, IN
Thursday, March 20: Grand Rapids, MI
Friday, March 21: Chicago, IL
Saturday, March 22: Madison, WI

More info as it comes. Booking a DIY book tour without doing Universities and trying to avoid book stores and the (somewhat justified) 40% cut they take from sales is hard. I knew that going in, having booked the tour this previous summer, but I forgot how often writers don't leave their house and how many places don't have reading series. I've talked to a lot of cool, helpful people in booking this, but I've also hit a lot of odd, dead ends.

Regardless, I'll be in the car on March 13th and I'll be in these cities, doing my thing. Join me if you can.

Until then, party like you want it.

RW

A very nice review of my chapbook, Murmuration, went up at Heavy Feather Review. Austin Hayden was too kind.

Ryan works life’s incongruities. The Midwest he puts on the page is at once vast and closed-off. Even (at times, especially) alongside his friends, or girlfriends, or family members, his speaker is alone out there. His POV character is calloused but endearing. Both sarcastic and earnest. The yin and yang of Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld meshed into one voice.

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And, actually, now that I think about it, a killer review of Justin Lawrence Daugherty's Whatever Don't Drown Will Always Rise went up at HFR a bit before mine, thanks to the wonderful Kate Kimball.

There is a bridge that dogs jump to their deaths from that symbolizes the broken heart of a man. A man swearing there is a bomb on the lawn, which later, the character who believes him tries to pry the metal from the earth. A teenager works on competitive eating to impress a father who is a Marlboro Man in Japan. Whatever Don’t Drown Will Always Rise introduces unexpected situations, but is able to create a strong affect in those situations. Daugherty’s characters are believable, endearing, and refreshing. His use of ironic humor, believable dialects, and uncanny conflicts work to symbolize the innate human quest for rediscovering nature.

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And while I'm on the subject of all thing Passenger Side Books, Matthew Burnside's Infinity's Jukebox has a birthday and artwork! September 9th, people. Here's one of the covers we'll be using in addition to seven other killer color schemes.

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

Ritchie's important, but it ain't Deep Purple without Jon Lord. It's incredible that he survived rock & roll culture in the 60s and 70s, let alone lived to be 71. A Hammond B3 has never sounded sweeter than when it was in the hands of Jon Lord. (Fuck Rick Wakeman.)

I've got a couple new publications up, one a review for J.A. Tyler's newest book Variations of a Brother War and the other a piece of flash fiction that will be in my upcoming short story collection.

Excerpt from my review of Variations of a Brother War (at [PANK]):

This stacking of dualities—of trialities, really, with each character being part fairness and part love and part war—allows Tyler to create depth in small pieces. By cutting up the story and characters into three 100-word sections each on multiple topics and then pasting them back together in the vicinity of their congruent parts, a straightforward love triangle set against the backdrop of the American Civil War gains a certain spongy quality that allow it to breathe and contract and, most importantly, wander.

Excerpt from my short short story "Wide Right Game" (at Jersey Devil Press):

There’s an apartment building I used to steal from when I was old enough to know better but young enough to be forgiven. The people who lived there were described as lower middle class, but bullshit aside they were poor people who owned a few small things like CD players and deep fryers. Often enough they hoarded comic books and sports memorabilia that they refused to part with. Mostly they just buried all their stuff in a pile somewhere and forgot about it. 

I'm currently stuck in the hell of asking people who are more known and more talented than I am to blurb my book. I feel like a dickhead writing to people and essentially saying, "Hey, I know you don't know me, but will you read my book--for free--and then think of two sentences worth of really nice things to say about it/me--also for free?" I'm only asking people whose writing I respect, so buttering them up with praise is effortless--I've sent e-mails to people before simply to tell them I admire their work, not even asking for a reply--but I feel like I'm taking advantage of an unspoken fan/artist relationship. I don't have a problem counting on the goodwill of people, especially writers, since we all started at about the same level of not know shit about fuck and we've all had to ask people to blurb our books, but there's a nagging sense of entitlement that I can't seem to get rid of whenever I send an e-mail for a blurb request. I deserve this because I like your work. I know that's not true, and I know I don't feel that way, but I don't want the authors I ask to think I feel that way, either. It's like subtle Midwestern racism: I hope this black person I'm talking to doesn't think I'm racist. Guess what? That's fucking racist.

That said, I'm lucky enough to have three incredible writers already agree to blurb Shake Away These Constant Days. I don't know if it's in good taste to say who it they are--I don't know the social constructs of the indie lit community, the same one that most likely doesn't read my blog and probably doesn't care about me anyways--so to play it safe I'll just say that I've loved and respected their work for a long time, knew immediately upon reading them that they would become an inspiration to me in many forms.

W.P. Kinsella hasn't gotten back to me yet, though. I will say that.

I'm ready to move onto the fourth story in my chapbook, Murmuration. I nailed down a solid first draft of "Cool Tits, Moxie" and I've got my first and last story set in stone. I also decided to pitch this thing as "A Midwest Story Cycle" when it's all complete. Shit like that's important to not exactly creating a mythos, but in rounding out the edges of a persona. I would love to be known as a Midwest writer, someone who writes the sort of stories that the fly-over states can hang their collective hat on, and I think it's my responsibility to plant that seed. It's possible that people would pick up on that right away upon reading the work--the inadvertent celebration of ennui and the prolonged unfulfilled desires are obvious--but I want to write my own history.

You think Bob Dylan is an accident? Come on.

The cover for my book has gone past the "talking about how my book needs a cover" stage to the "Duff started working on the cover for my book" stage. We've decided on a sort of washed-out, layered photograph look, similar to the cover for Elliott Smith's album XO. (Which I like, but didn't really realize they were the same until after we had already decided on the theme.) She's taking the pictures for it this week, and the only thing I told her was to get different shots of people in different states of interaction as well as pictures of people by themselves, all from different distances and angles. I'd also like it to have a cut-out/pasted-on look when it's done, too. Mostly what I want is for it to not look like like some butthole made it in five minutes with stock photos. Really, though, I've got total faith in Duff, despite how often she tells me to fuck off.

Okay, I've got Ted Nugent records to listen to.

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

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

I can't get enough of old psych-rock and heavy blues shit lately. As a bonus, it's always fun to fuck with Opeth fans by telling them I like Blackwater Park only to later reveal that I meant the German band and not that stupid album with the quiet parts that don't make sense next to the loud parts.

Writing-wise, I've made some progress on both the leg-work for the book and the writing-work for the chapbook. The first story for the chapbook--I mentioned it last week in a sideways way as "he's just wrecking cars with his buddies as of now"--is done. It's called "Jalapeno Summer" and it's a bit shy of a thousand words. It'll be a great story to kick off a collection with and it's a nice lead in to the next story, which starts off with the line, "My least favorite stripper was obsessed with past life regression." Thanks to my friend Joan LaRosa for texting me a picture of her holding two dozen VIP passes for Club Silk in Milwaukee and getting me hooked on strippers again.  Also, I get a stupid number of ideas and interesting things to add to a story just by listening to WTF with Marc Maron.

When I said that I've made some progress on the leg-work for the book, I actually meant Mike Sweeney has made progress on the leg-work for the book. We had a pool of about 70 stories to chose from and less than half of them were going to be in the book. I told Mike the ones I liked, the ones I liked but needed work, and the ones I thought kind of sucked. He read all 70 of the stories--most of them for the second or third time, this time with a collection in mind--and sent me back a tentative table of contents and title that looks something like this:

This Is How Long a Second Lasts: 30 Stories

Back and to the Left
Sergei Avdeyev
Look At How Fast I Can Go Nowhere At All
The King
Plots
Wide Right Game
When There Is No Road
It's Been Far Too Long Since You Woke Up In Someone Else's Shoes
Monsters: A Series of Non-Chronological Vignettes
Rust
The Vikings
Signal
--:--
The Sounds of the Earth Precede Us
God as a Jigsaw
Haunt
Follow the Water
Focus
Facts
Sweet Tooth
What Burns Never Returns
Let’s Go Shoot Her While She’s Crying
Jests At Scars
This Illusion
Where Is Your H?
Mythology
B Sharp, C Flat
Flood
Refund
Things That Are Glacial, Things That Are Gone

About a third of these are new stories that haven't appeared in the original Our Band Could Be Your Lit project, and most of those have never appeared anywhere before. This is definitely tentative, but I like the moves. Opening with "Back and to the Left" threw me a bit, but I can see it working, this sort of odd step into not an alternate universe, but an absurd one. The faux-time travel in "Sergei Avdeyev" solidifies that. It twists into the odd apocalyptic stories in the middle and then launches back into my standard storytelling before ending with "Glacial," my big abstract story that was half in response to the way I think kids write these days that ended up sounding pretty much exactly like how I write anyways. I wouldn't have thought of any of this myself, but I can see it now. Mike gets definite props for giving my work some vision, which it more than I can say for myself.

I'm not sold on the title, but that too is tentative. Mike's against the idea of making up a title specifically for the collection--my suggestion of I Scratched Your Name Behind the Jukebox was shot down for sounding too much like a title someone made up for a book, which I can't deny--and he really wants the title to come from the collection, either in the form of a story title or a line. We're leaning toward It's Been Far Too Long Since You Woke Up In Someone Else's Shoes which he's not sure of because of the length (and I'm not sure of because even though it's a literal thing with the shoes and the waking in the story, it sounds a little "my mom has this on a magnet on the fridge" as a stand-alone). Jests At Scars was brought up, but it's a line from Shakespeare and I totally can't pull that off. When There Is No Road was a possibility, too, but I've got a story/collection in the works called The Road Become What You Leave. (Stolen from the name of a documentary on Magnolia Electric Co. Which reminds me, I need to e-mail and get permission to do that.) I'm kind of at a loss for ideas.

Whatever. I'm working on it.

I'm glad I got to start reading some more, too, now that shipping out CDs has slowed down. Sara Levine's Short Dark Oracles just rocked my goddamn world. I ordered the six-pack from Caketrain for $32 (shipped!) and this is the winner. I did not like the MFA Mad Lib style of Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake by Heidi Lynn Staples or Cure All  by Kim Parko. I think Ben Mirov's Ghost Machine is interesting enough and it's fun to try to interpret it, but in the end I thought it was several hundred beautiful sentences that didn't do anything. The Weather Stations by Ryan Call was solid and inventive, which is what I'll also say about Tongue Party by Sarah Rose Etter, except Etter's book is fucking creepy.

But Short Dark Oracles. Man. There's a lot of dialogue, which really adds a cinematic quality, but there are still enough moments that can only happen in a short story that make me truly believe that the book is operating on it's most pure level, that it aspires to be nothing but literature. There aren't any gimmicks or tricks here. The turns aren't twists, and when it gets to the point where the story rounds the corner, it actually rounds it. No need to twirl. It's enough to get there, and Levine took me there.

In short, I'm glad I found another talented writer to resent for all of their skill and success.

UNLESS YOU DONATE TO THE KICKSTARTER FOR MY BOOK AND THE OTHER BOOKS IN THE JERSEY DEVIL PRESS 2012 COLLECTION. THEN YOU'RE COOL AS FUCK, DUDE.

Okay. Be a real person.

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

I've had the Kickstarter discussion with lots of people. It's something I'm torn on. I think it's good for artists to support one another morally and financially, but I also think that it's not exactly the most noble of causes to ask people for $5000 to release your debut LP on 200 gram bleach-splatter vinyl in a double-gatefold foil wrapper. Then you're just being an asshole.
 

That said, I think it's possible to do Kickstarter right. I've donated to my friend Tim Connery's sci-fi full length feature film Easton's Article and to  Wifebeaters and Cut-Offs: Southern Summer Comfort Book Tour (featuring Chloe Caldwell, Elizabeth Ellen, Mary Miller, Brandi Wells, and Donora Hillard). (Still active! Donate now!). No big amount. A few bucks. Nothing you can buy a decent meal with or anything. Still, I saw merit in these projects and wanted to see them come to fruition.

So yeah. Jersey Devil Press, the dudes putting out my book in the fall, have started a Kickstarter for both my as-of-now-untitled short story collection and the other book they plan on releasing this year, Eirik Gumeny's Exponential Apocalypse: Dead Presidents. The best way to utilize Kickstarter is to have it basically be somewhere between a way to organize pre-orders and those candy sales outside of department stores where you buy a $0.75 candybar for $1 because it goes to a good cause. Or at least I like to think so.

Really, though, I think the rewards are pretty rad. Nobody's offering to come over and cook you dinner for a $500 donation. You get actual stuff, and because I'm assuming you're all as shallow as I am, that's a good thing.

I know some of you disagree with Kickstarter still, regardless of how it's done. And that's fine. Don't donate. Feel free to be upset about it if you'd like. (There are more important things out there to be upset about, but the choice is, like, yours or whatever, dude.)

Or you can toss a few bucks our way. If you want to know if I'm worth it, check my (Is Published) page and decide for yourself.

I ain't too proud to beg. Do it.

RW