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 finally got to watch Lemmy, the documentary about Motorhead's Lemmy Kilmister. What cool guy. "Don't die." Great advice, Lem.

I've got some new additions to the (Has Friends) page here. Such as poet Michael Lambert, who I sort of know from college but moreso know from him coming into the record store I worked at and talking about whatever dickheads in record stores talk about. Pavement or fucking whatever. Also, essayist Sean H. Doyle, who I know from the internet, where, I believe, dickheads were invented. Sean isn't one of them, though, as far as I can tell--even if he does like John Bush-era Anthrax. Last, and he's only last because I don't think he yet knows that he's my friend--we've exchanged several e-mails and he's following me on Twitter and JUST LOVE ME ALREADY, THOMAS COOPER--short fiction writer Thomas Cooper, whose flash fiction collection Phantasmagoria I finally ordered, after being a fan of his for years and only being able to read and re-read the few pieces he has online.

Seek these people out and admire them. Be their friend. It's what the internet is for.

I finally submitted a short story to Midwestern Gothic after talking about it for months. I found out on Friday that the deadline for their new issue--on the theme of "nostalgia" and, as always, the Midwest--was on Monday. I immediately thought of a story I wrote a few years ago called "Trace," in which a young boy's eclectic grandmother dies, leaving him and his grandfather to deal with a life without her. That story was awesome at the time--I learned a lot about characterization, shifting perspectives, and revision--but going back and rereading it kind of made me realize how much of a navel-gazing butthole I used to be.

So I hacked the fuck out of it. The story was about 4100 words in the most recent draft, draft seven, last edited on 8/21/2009, and I cut somewhere between 2500 and 3000 words and added somewhere between 500 and 1000 words. I added a character, an older sister named Wendy, and changed the narration from third to first. It's better, and I hope it's good enough.

I think this is actually my most revised story. The differences are pretty staggering. Here is the opening scene to a few different drafts.

From first to third and back. Short to long to shorter. You can't see the space breaks in here, but there isn't one in the first draft at all--it was only a 1200 word story, 300 words of which were talking about popsicles (no idea). The seventh draft doesn't have one until page four, at which point it switches into a whole bunch of other bullshit that also sucks. This newest draft has one of my favorite tricks, the short first section, and then breaks up the rest of the story into several more sections. It's tighter all around, better sentences all over the place.

(I wonder if I can look back through my old writing and pinpoint the exact moment I began reading Amy Hempel.)

There's a 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.

The young adult writing workshop I run every summer ended this Monday. It was one of the best groups of kids I've ever had, and I'm already bummed that they're all going to get drivers licenses next year and not want to hang out with an old shithead like me. I hope they learned something other than "Just be better and you won't suck as much" and "When you grow up, get a shitty job and then don't do it."

In tangentially-related literary news, Ryan W. Bradley and I are working on some music together. He's programming the drums, sending them to me, and then I'm sending them back with guitars and bass. Then he's going to do some rad vocals. Then we're going to tour the world and probably be the best band ever. Either way, I'm going to bang a ton of chicks.

That's all. Party forever.

RW