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Criminal, there ought to be a whole lot more . . .

2/6/2013

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"If You Want Blood" by Mark Kozelek, because who the fuck knew there'd be so much pathos hidden right there in an AC/DC song?

It's been about a month. Here are some things that have happened since then.

1) I watched Summerslam 2005 and didn't cry when the giant electronic American flag unfurled behind Hulk Hogan during his entrance. This is a semi-major life-improvement.

2) I applied for a job stocking ice and beer at a casino. I didn't get it. Two weeks later they called me and asked if I want to work part-time checking coats.

2b) I told them to fuck off.

2c) What I actually did was just not call them back after they left a voicemail.

3) I searched for "Iowa" and "Wisconsin" on PornHub. There were a bunch of videos for Iowa and all the chicks looked pretty hot. There were like seven videos for Wisconsin and all the chicks looked like they were made of stale biscuits.

4) Several dumb old photos of me were uploaded to Facebook by other people, such as this one where I'm wearing an XL Pantera shirt and standing next to a cardboard cutout of Shaquille O'Neal and this one where I'm wearing a winged battle-suit I made out of Construx.

5) I locked my keys in my car twice, once behind the coffee shop and once a week later in front of the coffee shop. The same guy from Master Key came to my assistance both time. The first time he was wearing a pink mesh shirt underneath a button-up tank top and when he went into his trunk to get the tools he needed to get into my car, he had to first take out two huge chainsaws and set them on the ground.

6) I got ordained. I'm going to marry so many drunk people at the bar.


7) I met Mick Foley.

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I MET MICK FOLEY, DUDE.

I had some stuff get published recently. It seems like I used to be stoked for weeks after something got published and now I've had three things go up this past month and I'm already back to feeling like I haven't done anything. Writing is better than meth, but only because it doesn't ruin your teeth.

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In a rare showing, I was able to write and publish an essay. It's about Neko Case, and though everything I do is, on some level, about Neko Case, this is blatantly about Neko Case and how her album Middle Cyclone made me learn things about living in and around solitude, the extent to which I should love myself, and respecting fear as it arrives in all humans. It's up over at The Rumpus, and I'd love for you to read it.

"The year 2008 tumbled out of itself and took with it the things that consumed my days. Within a month I had lost my job to the upholding of liquor laws, my college education to an unavoidable graduation, and my girlfriend to youth and general apathy.


I spent a lot of time in bed, not depressed, but reading depressing things—Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems 1966-1987, William Matthews’s Search Party, Rick Bass’s In the Loyal Mountains—often out loud. I read Heaney in an impassioned Irish accent, Bass with a gruff-yet-kind tone of wonderment. I read Matthews sitting up, as if at a podium, addressing a faceless sum of the discontinued millions.

There were certain lengths I was willing to go to in order to not be myself."

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I also had a story called "Trace" that I've talked about here before on the subject of "revising old stuff I wrote and wondering if it's all just a big waste of my fucking time." This one turned out decent for being around so long and going through so many drafts. It's up over at 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, and it'd be really great of you to read it.

"My grandmother spent her last several thousand mornings highlighting the obituaries."

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Lastly, the fourth story in my chapbook/cycle Murmuration is out there in the world now. I'm happy with how this one turned out and, like most of my stuff, it ties in with another story: The Honeybreakers are the band that had dissolved and reassembled in my story "Sometimes We Were Young." Here we find them merely dissolving, as seen through the eyes of our faithful narrator. Please read it over at Bartleby Snopes.

"Revising my dreams into the necessary shapes involved going out to the van every night and playing guitar in the street. I waited until after the show, after everyone had locked into the distractions that would take them through to morning. I would strap on whichever guitar I grabbed first and commence to shredding first against the van and then eventually to the center of the street. This was a small reassurance that my life would eventually resolve itself if attacked from compromising angles."

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The chance of me or my buddy Josh actually learning German: 0%

I've spent so much time playing music that I haven't really had time to sit down and write anything. This isn't really a very good excuse. "Write every day" is kind of the only semi-infallible writing advice out there, and I'm totally blowing it. If this new country-rock project gets off the ground, I'll be in a total four bands in addition to working 40+ hours between two jobs. My options in life turned out to be "one band that does a lot" or "four bands that don't do much." Regardless, none of these bands are getting me laid, so it doesn't really matter.

I'm also going on a micro-tour with the Oakland-based rock & roll band Victory and Associates as a hired gun to replace their real lead guitarist who can't make it because he has a real job, unlike us. My band Legal Fingers played with them back in October and we hit it off and I've been on their podcast not once, but twice, and now we're going to christen our union by piling into a van and making it smell bad for about a week. I've spent the last month learning how to play a dozen or so of their songs and in less than a week I've got to prove that I won't fuck it up. For those not in the know, this is what volume was invented for.

Well, and this.

But still, I haven't had time to write anything because when I'm not at a band practice I'm making a flier for a show or I'm being a fucking dickhead on Twitter or I'm watching The Family Feud at the coffee shop. Murmuration has been done for months now, which means I've been slacking on finishing the wrestling-themed chapbook. One story called "A Comprehensive List of the Least Worst Way To Do Everything" is done and making the rejection rounds, but "Waiting for Andre"--the story about a rich man with a bone disease who learns about and becomes obsessed with the anecdote of Samuel Beckett giving Andre the Giant rides to school--is stuck in revision hell. I've just finally got a decent grip on it after weeks of picking at it here and there, but it's still not close. The title story, "The Road Becomes What You Leave," exists only in the form of an aborted story from years ago. If I finish this book before the end of the year, I'd be surprised.

And I'm working on a novella, but the truth is that I'm not working on it nearly as hard as I'm working on my tweets, which is fucked up.

I hope I have something to show the next time I check in, but I'll probably just have more stories about how drunk girls in bars yell at me and then later on get my phone number and pretend to be Stoya. Mario Kolaric is doing the artwork for my chapbook and Matt Kish is doing the artwork for Justin Lawrence Daugherty's chapbook that I'm putting out through Passenger Side Books. So there's that. But still, I can't take credit for that. All I did was send some e-mails. I did that to Christina Hendricks and NOTHING.

That's it for now. Be wonderful.

RW
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Always nothing left to say . . .

8/8/2012

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"What's Going Ahn" by Big Star, from their 1974 record Radio City. 

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:
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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.

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Also for not being The Model.

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."

Backlit (DRAFT 1, 10607 words, circa fall 2009)

Assuming she was telling the truth, I knew three things about Jayne before she got into the car with us: she had been smoking since she was eleven, her shoes never fit right, and she was going to kill herself. The shoes thing was the easiest to believe. She was standing behind the counter at Venucci’s Vittles in Davenport at two in the morning, barefoot, when we walked in wearing leisure suits and sunglasses. Mikey saw her first, her face partially blank and mostly young, but pale, lined around the eyes, colored and segmented like cauliflower. He turned around to the rest of us and called dibs on her.

Backlit (DRAFT 7, 2200 words, circa summer 2012)

I was just as drilled-through with tedium as anyone. I got in the car and left, and the boulders of effortless routine were immediately replaced with an enthusiasm for new and simple movement. In an hour, I was wore out, wanted comfortable shoes, my favorite song to come on the radio. At the end, because it was like any other tired end, I wanted to go home and sleep for half a day, wake up slowly and then in one sitting eat the equivalent of both the meals I missed.

Some of this was boredom and some of it was boredom’s opposite, something between interest and pleasure. Satisfaction sounds right, but I still don’t know.


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.

And because it's all about me, here's a link to listen to America's Volume Dealers by Corrosion of Conformity, an album that nobody in the world likes except 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
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Breaking up or breaking through, breaking something's all we can do . . .

7/24/2012

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"Dead Men Tell No Tales" by Motorhead, lip-synced live in 1977. (Where can I get that tour shirt with the Girlschool billing?)

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.

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Amongst other things.

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.

TRACE (DRAFT 1, circa late-2008)

Grandpa told me that for the decade or so before Grandma died, she would spend all morning hi-lighting the obituaries. She’d drench the clichés in yellow and then say them—out loud, to no one at all—as if listing what she didn’t want in her own. She’d clear her throat if necessary and say “beloved” or “pillar of strength” and the words would fall into a box nobody wanted to open or look into. Then she’d continue with “light of his life” and a slash of the hi-lighter.

That was just breakfast. Around mid-day she’d go and stand in front of the mirror for hours with her arms crossed over her chest, a rosary entwined between her fingers, calling out to grandpa, “Hoyle, how would this look surrounded by purple satin?” I saw it once when I stayed over.

He came in and leaned against the doorway. “You look fine, Amelia.”

“I’m not supposed to look fine. I’m supposed to look dead.”

“Well, then close your eyes and quit talking.”

He left after that, but every twenty minutes she had a new pose. When she yelled the next time and the time after that, he came back both times. The fourth time, she put her left arm across her stomach and raised her right arm above her head like a spiral staircase.

“Like a dancer, Hoyle.”

“It looks like you’re in the middle of throwing the first ball at a Brewers game.” The rosary dangled from her right hand, and he continued. “You’re dead, not pitching, remember?”       Grandma turned-up the corners of her mouth and whispered, “Strike.”

TRACE (DRAFT 7, circa late-2009)

For the decade or so before the boy’s grandma died, she would spend all morning hi-lighting the obituaries. The page always ended up creased and wavy from how slow she moved over the words—all clichés, all saturated yellow—before saying them out loud, listing what she didn’t want in her own: “beloved” or “pillar of strength.” Around mid-day she’d go and stand in front of the mirror for hours with her arms crossed over her chest, a rosary entwined between her fingers, calling out to the boy’s grandpa. “Hoyle, how would this look surrounded by purple satin?” The boy saw her do it the last time he stayed over. It was late-March and the heartland was thawing out, leaving mounds of gray snow in parking lots while people walked around in gym shorts and thin flannel pants.

The boy’s grandmother was posing in the spare bedroom as the boy watched television.

Hoyle came and leaned against the doorway. “You look fine, Amelia.”

“I’m not supposed to look fine. I’m supposed to look dead.”

“Well, then close your eyes and shut up.”

The boy’s grandpa winked at the boy and left the doorframe. Twenty minutes later the boy’s grandma yelled from a new pose and he came into the room. After twenty more minutes, it happened again, and when it happened the fourth time, she put her left arm across her stomach and raised her right arm above her head like a spiral staircase in a Spanish mansion.

“Like a dancer, Hoyle.”

“It looks like you’re in the middle of throwing the first ball at a Brewers game.” He watched the rosary dangle from her right hand. “You’re dead, not pitching”

She turned-up the corners of her mouth and whispered “Strike.” On the chest at the foot of the bed, the boy turned from the television and towards his grandparents, his grandma with her eyes closed in the middle of the room and his grandpa fixed on her from the doorway, the television giving way to a distant hum, a pulse hitting his temples when he tries to think it through.

The family said “old age” when she died a few weeks later, but they really meant heart failure. The boy’s grandpa told the boy that she woke him up in the middle of the night to say, “A shame, ten years late.” And that was that.

TRACE (DRAFT 9, circa yesterday)

My grandmother spent her last couple thousand mornings highlighting the obituaries. Around mid-day she’d go and stand in front of the mirror with her arms crossed over her chest and ask my grandfather how she would look surrounded by purple satin.

I would sit in the doorway sometimes and watch her put her left arm across her stomach, raise her right arm above her head like a spiral staircase.

“Like a dancer,” she told me.

My family said old age and the doctor said heart failure. For years I confused the two.

I found out later that, the night she died, she woke my grandfather up to say, “Rosebud. That’s funny, right?”


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.)

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I think I love her even more knowing for a fact that she and J Mascis share hair.

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
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    Ryan Werner
    (About Stuff)
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    Writer, rocker, janitor. Lover of pro wrestling, porno, and ice cream. Hater of fingerless gloves, pictures of cats, and goodbyes. 

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