My upcoming book of short short stories, Shake Away These Constant Days, originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

Exclusive to SATCD. Eventually, I was able to separate the girl from the songs we shared, but not this one. The truth is more effective here than any sort of dissection of the story itself. So:

I had a KISS tribute band, but we only talked about a Valentine's Day show, never actually played one. And I really did snap some KISS CDs trying to scrape off my windshield, but that was with a different girl, one who didn't have to run a relationship by Jesus first but one who, ultimately, worked out just the same.

The girl in the story cooked something, but it wasn't chicken cacciatore. I built something, but it wasn't a bookshelf. We weren't house-sitting, and our periods of manic compatibility lasted much longer than a week.

We had a conversation about her breaking up with her high school boyfriend due to faith-related issues, but I much prefer the one I wrote, in which I'm very clever and tactful as opposed to neither, which is what I actually was.

"Stop. It's all right as long as I don't cum," was what she said, but I couldn't make it sound like I wasn't making it up.

Discussing our futures as they pertained to one another was beyond never discussed. It was actively avoided. We had a minor argument about nothing in particular, but that wasn't the end. I don't know what the end is because I don't know if it's happened yet—residuals, and whathaveyou.

We hung out in cornfields, but only in the non-snow months. I don't think the dancing in the headlights thing ever happened. I also don't think it matters.


Tomorrow: A story named "Rust" that is based on the song "Your Friend and Mine--Neil's Song" by Love. Suggested by musician Bob Bucko Jr.


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Pre-order the book so the sun comes out again.  

My upcoming book of short short stories, Shake Away These Constant Days, originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you. 

Exclusive to SATCD. That first line--“Back in high school you had a girl and a band and you thought both of them would last forever”—is something I used to say about myself in college. It's possible that this one is more autobiographical than the others—a guy at a party playing with his old band for all of his old friends while trying to beat all of his old habits—but I can't even really tell. Once rock & roll gets mixed up in things, it all just sort of blurs together. I can't separate what I've experienced from what I've only heard about or seen.

I try to write in the second person sparingly. It almost always works, but the gimmick of it all too often usurps the story. I think I fell into a lot of the traps of second person writing, lapsing into a tone where it sounds like I'm giving stage directions and motivations. (“You do this and then that. You feel this way and then someone comes in. They say this. It makes no sense and you wonder whatever." Etc.) Second person is like Taco Bell in the sense that it's the same five ingredients turned into well-designed garbage that people feel the need to enjoy only in shameful privacy.

The story itself wasn't too much trouble. “Misunderstood” has always been, despite me usually feeling pretty well understood, one of my favorite songs. The narrative was essentially one of many variations on the “I used to be in a band” story. It's like a choose your own adventure book. “To bang your old girlfriend, go to page 32. To drink more and keeping talking about Aerosmith with those smelly dudes, turn to page 8.”

The ending is lovingly cribbed, as so many endings have been, from Raymond Carver.


Tomorrow: A story named "Monsters: A Series of Non-Chronological Vignettes" that is based on the song "Snow & Lights" by Explosions In the Sky.


SATCD on Goodreads

Pre-order the book so I have a reason to leave my basement.  

My upcoming book of short short stories, Shake Away These Constant Days, originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you. 

Exclusive to SATCD. For years there was just a HelpsBothWays.doc file on my computer with only one sentence in the body: “If you want a prostitute to lick your ass, it costs the same as a blowjob.” (Source: Some stupid show on HBO.) Thankfully, this idea morphed into something completely different in which a small-time crook sneaks into a man’s apartment and finds him dead. At that point, he’s faced with a choice of an easy looting or a complete turnaround.

The song itself has no words except the announcer of a football game, which immediately made me think of a dark apartment with just a TV on, flickering with a game. The prostitute thing makes absolutely no sense to me now, but the football game idea was always there.

I did have to figure out which game I wanted to do, though. I don't know enough about sports to fabricate a game, and I'm pretty sure I just ended up Googling "famous football games." Eventually, I came across Superbowl XXV, the Wide Right Game. It had struggle, failure, and, most importantly, redemption, built into it already. Formatting around it was embarrassingly easy. Once I embodied the title of the song in there somehow—mainly around what the two characters have done for one another through their somewhat insalubrious actions—I was done.

I always think of my buddy Josh's dad when I think of "poor people who owned a few small things like CD players and deep fryers." My senior year of high school, he dropped way too much money on a three-foot wizard statue carved out of stone. The only purpose we could figure out for it to serve involved my buddy Ben getting drunk and trying to fight it.

The pretty Irish girl with bad eyes is a very real girl who is really named Jacqueline. I can't remember her last name and I didn't really know her that well. She was in one of my writing classes and I thought she was tiny and adorable, so of course I made a comment one day that would have been humorous if I had gotten sheepish at the last moment and just come off as a dickhead. I guess this is as close as she'll ever get to an apology.

Tomorrow: A story named "When There Is No Road" that is based on the song "Rock N Roll" by Paleface. Suggested by musician Monica "Mo" Samalot of Paleface.

SATCD on Goodreads

Pre-order the book so I can get extra Taco Bell.  

My upcoming book of short short stories, Shake Away These Constant Days, originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

(Check out "Look At How Fast I Can Go Nowhere At All" in JDP's gracious preview of Shake Away These Constant Days.)

Originally OBCBYL #27. I've really got no business writing about war or recovering from war or any sort of war-related incident aside from, possibly, a critical look at the Black Flag album My War. I was considering enlisting in the Marines my senior year of high school—to be in the band—but I quickly realized that I was not very good at saxophone and was quite the wuss.

The thing about fiction, and the thing about that old "write what you know" saying, is that you can just make shit up if you're self-aware enough about exactly how clever and shallow you are. Anything worth writing about shares the same dozen or so approximations of natural feelings: confusion, joy, triumph, isolation, etc. The experience of going to war doesn't compare to the experience of just kind of being bummed out that you're home by yourself on a summer night in suburbia, obviously. Just put on The Cure or something and invent something good.

That said, this was one of those stories whose first draft ended up being some sort of shitty, told-by-a-bystander alternate universe prologues that I had to delete. Nothing was helped by the fact that I hated the song, a vapid piece of dance pop whose lyrics are the equivalent of a shirt with #YOLO on it.

Sometimes when I read other people's stories I tell them to delete everything except the last sentence and then write forward from there. Nobody wants to hear shit like that—especially when it's internal dialogue. The original draft ended with one character being compared to the hands of a clock and the other character being the pin that holds them. I shitcanned the rest of the story—a guy watching his grandfather interact with a woman who he only sees every ten years—and had pretty much just that one sentence left for a few days. I tried to convince myself I was a big enough dickhead to call that one sentence a story and leave it as is, but no dice.

I spent a lot of time walking around at my job trying to think about what the hell I was going to do. The guy's grandfather was supposed to enlist in the Navy with the woman, but he didn't make it and she did. By chance, one of my friends at work, Keith—a Navy vet—ended up randomly telling me about the USS Indianapolis, whose sinking at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Navy led to the greatest single loss of life at sea in the history of the U.S. Navy.

Call it good, simple fortune. I went home, looked up some more details on the USS Indianapolis, and quickly wrote a draft that closely resembles the one in the book. A couple of the cities mentioned are off-hand references to other things: Ybor City is repeatedly name-checked in a few Hold Steady songs and Philipsburg is a nod to the poet Richard Hugo, whose poem "Degrees of Gray In Philipsburg" fucking rules.

This story got picked up by amphibi.us, too, when I was madly in need of validation and searching for journals that took previously published material. What good is writing if people won't figuratively blow me over it?

Tomorrow: A story named "The King" that is based on the song "Do Anything You Want To" by Thin Lizzy. 


SATCD on Goodreads
 
Pre-order the book so nothing will ever hurt again. 

My upcoming book of short short stories, Shake Away These Constant Days, originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

(Read "Sergei Avdeyev" in JDP's gracious preview of Shake Away These Constant Days.) 

Originally OBCBYL #28. Writing about isolation means writing through isolation to evoke empathy. A story that makes a reader feel alone goes against the one morality we can almost all agree that storytelling is supposed to achieve. What good is a cathedral without people in it? 

The story itself came about pretty quickly once I stumbled upon Russian cosmonaut Sergei Avdayev, which took for fucking ever to stumble upon. Sergei holds the record for time dilation experienced by a human being. What this basically means is that he was in space for so long at such a rapid speed--a cumulative 747 days at an average speed of about 27,360 km/h--that he actually aged roughly 0.02 seconds less than an Earthbound person would have. He is, and this is how simple my brain works, a traveler in time.

In my head, the narrator was stranded in Moscow for a similar reason Ethan Hawke's character in Before Sunrise was stranded in Europe before meeting up with Julie Delpy's character: translatlantic travel that resulted in a break-up upon arrival. When I wrote this, I was finally becoming sick of writing bad relationship stories--both stories that were about bad relationships and bad stories about relationships. I left the "lovesick and stranded" part out of it entirely.

Really, though, I don't think it matters why the narrator's in Moscow. He's just there. Sometimes people end up places by themselves, which the narrator subtly notes right away in the first sentence. This goes back to the idea of isolation in writing: if there's nothing that can be done, then you have to do nothing.

I was worried about the interaction with Sergei because I didn't want to have to keep saying shit like "Sergei spoke elegantly in Russian and gestured toward WHATEVER." I can't remember if I was too lazy to actually find out if Sergei knew English or if I searched around for about five minutes and didn't find anything to confirm that. Regardless, it worked out in my favor. Sergei is silently stoic and all their interaction is physical, which really helps the scenes play out. The narrator and Sergei playing darts is one of my favorite things I've written.

I submitted this story to Cartographer and they got back to me--on my birthday, no less--saying they'd agree to publish "Sergei Avdeyev" upon deletion of the last sentence. I offered them an alternate last sentence that was a nice compromise between what I had--a punchline--and what they wanted--less of a punchline. I never heard back from them.

And that's why I don't celebrate my birthday.

Tomorrow: A story named "Look At How Fast I Can Go Nowhere At All" that is based on the song "Life Passed Me By" by Super Stereo. Suggested by writer Monica Rodriguez.


SATCD on Goodreads

Pre-order the book so I have a reason to leave my basement. 

The content of my upcoming book of short short stories, Shake Away These Constant Days, originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

(Read "Back and to the Left" in JDP's gracious preview of Shake Away These Constant Days.)

Originally OBCBYL #21. This was the first story I wrote after coming back from a long hiatus. I think around the time I wrote this story I also wrote a song called "Sex In Your City," if that gives you any indication as to where my mind was.

"Brain of J" is, I'm pretty sure, about JFK. The only thing I was more positive about than the world not needing another spin on the JFK assasination was a strong affirmation of my own laziness. So, a JFK assination story it became.

I like to think this is one of the better ones--it kicks off the book, too, so Mike Sweeney at Jersey Devil Press must have thought the same thing. I figured I could get away with a story like this if I took the aspect of saving JFK's brain and sort of manifested it in a living JFK, one who didn't die but is now, for real this time, dead as fuck.

Plus, I think a small part of me just wanted to see JFK die twice.

The reason there's a small part in the story about anagrams and Scrabble is because, in addition to spending a lot of time writing songs about cunilingus and stuff, I spent a lot of time thinking I could be a really great Scrabble player. I read a book called Word Freak and watched a documentary called Word Wars, both about Scrabble. The Scrabble/anagram related part in this story is about all I really got out of it.

It's got a nice flow to the end, a really solid rising cadence. The last line is lovingly cribbed from The Maltese Falcon. In it, Sam Spade says the closing simile as a tossed-off description of suddenness. Mine's a commentary on a county finding satisfaction through grief, which, in itself will always remind me of the William Matthews poem "Why We Are Truly a Nation" and is, therefore, a mini-crib of its own. (A post-modern, collage-based mindset is a wonderful thing when it comes to justification.)

The title is taken from one of the many creepy scenes in Oliver Stone's JFK that dissect the Zapruder footage. Unfortuntely, I was unable to fit any odd references in about my Jr High history teacher who was obsessed with JFK. I think he eventually got fired for getting busted with a Playboy in school, but don't quote me on that.

Tomorrow: A story named "Sergei Avdeyev" that is based on the song "Traveller in Time" by Uriah Heep. Suggested by musician Mike Conte of Early Man.


SATCD on Goodreads

Pre-order the book so I can love myself again.