Category: Wrestling

Things that can happen, happen to you . . .

8/2/2014

"Unreal Is Here" by Chavez, with a great Bon Jovi video/Mentos commercial

Another several months of terribly sporadic internet promotion. Here are some things.

1) I met some wrestlers (and Randy Couture) in Waterloo, Iowa, at a little Wrestling Hall of Fame between a strip club and a gas station with a Burger King built in. Diamond Dallas Page was a super awesome dude. The Steiner Brothers were kind of standoffish and weird. Jim Ross once again made it a point to prove that he didn't really want to be there.

1b) Wrestling fans are the best. Of the two dudes I was stuck between in line, one of them reads stuff on the internet but doesn't process it into actual thought ("Brock Lesnar's going to win at Summerslam. I read it online," followed by twenty similar comments) and a guy who thought wrestling was real and posed the question of whether or not Undertaker is in the Illuminati, which is also real.

1c) DDP is obviously in the Illuminati, as his hand symbol makes a triangle.

1d) In complaining about this guy to my friend Jim, he said that most people believe in angels and nobody's ever seen one, so if someone wants to believe in wrestling, at least everyone's fucking seen Stone Cold Steve Austin.

2) I'm mostly reading graphic novels and nothing else. Writing has been slow because all I want to do is sit down with Punisher MAX and play guitar because I'm fifteen.

3) I got a library card, finally. (So I can read comics for free.) I immediately cashed in on any goodwill I may have rallied up in the ten minutes I was a member by shitting in the women's restroom, something even the homeless dudes who mostly bathe there frown upon.

4) I thought I wasn't too old and frail to be front row at a hardcore show, but I was fucking wrong. Two songs in--this equals about 45 seconds--and someone landed on my head, sending my glasses directly underneath the feet of like 150 malnourished kids in black t-shirts.

4b) I got new glasses, which I will now use to watch hardcore bands from a comfy position off to the side of the stage along with the rest of the 30-year-olds who still want to be cool.

5) My girlfriend was in Reefer Madness. I watched most of it but my buddy Scotty showed up and started playing me videos of him doing trick basketball shots like halfway through.

6) I've gotten really into eating lots of chili dogs lately.

6b) "lately"

7) If the crowd who frequent the bar I work at is any indication, lots of people either don't really read books or there's a new thing people do where they explain to strangers how books work using James Patterson and Chuck Palahniuk as examples.

8) Got another email from an agent, which is awesome except for the fact that he essentially said, "If you have a novel, great! If you have a short story collection, write a novel."

9) I'm trying to downsize things and having a hard time, which means I packed up two giant boxes of books and still have five and a half bookshelves worth of stuff that I "can't possibly part with" even though I'm never going to read my copy of Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon books that I've read the first twenty pages of take up about a foot and a half of shelf space.

Also, working with kids is awesome.

No publications since the last time that I can think of, though I just remembered that I need to send Austin Hayden of 90's Meg Ryan the audio file of me reading a story about karaoke.

I did do an interview with Jon Konrath over at Paragraph Line. Here's an excerpt:

PL: Who are your favorite three members of Krokus other than Chris Von Rohr, Fernando Von Arb, Marc Storace, Mark Kohler, and Mandy Meyer?

RW: They’re all drummers, actually. Freddy Steady, because he kind of sucked but really loved being in Krokus, which is admirable. (Sort of.) Steve Pace, because he played drums and his last name was Pace. Stefan Schwarzmann, because he’s like the foreign metal version of some asshole like Matt Sorum, who just plays in every band after their prime. He was on one of the Krokus albums in the mid-2000s, which he left Helloween to play on.

As you can tell, it's very insightful. Here's the whole thing.

Other than that I've been the least busy I've been in years. I mentioned in a previous blog post that my writing is slowing down and that I feel all right about it. I tried working my novella a bit this summer, the aforementioned Soft that is told in hundreds of shattered pieces and, so far, has had some mixed reactions from the people who have read what's done of it. I wrote an essay about a Drive-By Truckers song and never revised it. I wrote that story for Austin Hayden. I started some more stories about a guy named Marty and haven't finished them. And, like I said, I'm all right with that.

I've been playing guitar, writing songs for the three or four bands I've been ignoring while I do all this book/tour stuff. Finally getting back into comics has been great, too, especially since I've got some monthlies that have grabbed me, Saga and East of West. I've even been playing some shitty tower defense computer games just because I realized that I can.

I don't remember the last time I took a break from things--writing, working on publishing, booking a tour, doing stuff for Passenger Side, feeding my ulcer cream soda--for more than a week or two. I go back to my day job at the school in a few weeks, but until then, I've finally figured out how to relax. Talk all you want about the satisfaction of writing, but it's easy to forget that satisfaction and not the writing is the endgame.

And I've been saving lots of pictures of wrestlers wearing fanny packs to my computer. Interests are weird.

I'll be doing a couple more readings this summer before packing it in and doing weekend warrior shit during the school year. Here are the last two dates:

8/6 - Champaign, IL - Institute 4 Creativity (w/Bob Bucko Jr & heavy metal belly dancers!)
8/7 - Rock Island, IL - Rozz-Tox QC (w/Bob Bucko Jr, Mystic Dolphin, KAB)

As for the readings I did this summer, they were all pretty awesome. Plenty of shit to talk, plenty of kind strangers. I made enough money to cover gas and a shitload of pinball, I never went hungry, and I had a place to crash every night. Everything else is a cherry on top. Let's do it again soon.

I'm going to rewatch all of The Larry Sanders Show now. Party time.

RW

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What you did to me on those long nights with short skirts . . .

8/20/2013

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"Jamie" by The Bismarck, from their new album "Wild Prairie Rose"

I guess it's been about three months. Lots of things have happened.

1) I quit my job as a janitor at Wal-Mart. It was really bumming me out because, in addition to the inherent shittiness of a title like "Wal-Mart Janitor," my boss was a dick, I was forced to do things that were blatantly not my job, and I didn't have time or patience to write or read anymore.

1b) To be fair, I spent the majority of my four years there sneaking off to a non-monitored office or the family restroom (which locks) and reading books. I still did some work occasionally, at least as much as they deserved for the shit pay and shit treatment, but that majority is barely a majority. Most of the fuck-around time took place in the first two-and-a-half years. After that it was Buttfuck City.

2) I went on a cross-country tour of the US with Justin Lawrence Daugherty. We did readings in ten different states over the course of two weeks, putting almost 4000 miles on his Toyota Corolla, also known as the Toyota Rock 'n' Rolla. A full recap of this will be up on the Sundog Lit blog soon.

3) I moved out of my parents' place.

3b) Again.

3c) It's not that I didn't like living at the farm, something I hadn't done in about eight or nine years, but the driving was killing me. And I hate my mom's cats and choice of television shows that she must blare on televisions in two separate rooms simultaneously. But yeah, I fell asleep at the wheel a couple times from the half hour drive back and forth on long, boring country roads and was spending so much money in gas each month that I could actually afford to rent an apartment in the city I was driving to and come out ahead on cash.

4) I went on a week-long tour of the Midwest filling in on guitar with the Oakland-based band Victory and Associates. I also did some sitting in with our tour-mates, Louisville-based riffers Trophy Wives. Playing a lot was rad, but even better than that, I met a bunch of cool, old school punk rock dudes who proved my theory that punk rock and having your shit together are not mutually exclusive.

4b) We played with a band in Minneapolis called Gay Witch Abortion.

4c) We also played the surprise 50th birthday party for Jeff Moody, one of the coolest dudes in music. He's the sort of guy who only wants to talk passionately and positively about the things he loves, and is worth listening to for those and several other reasons.

4d) Kentucky seems like an odd place.

5) I got a rollerdog grill. It's like the ones in the gas station but it has a bunch of gaudy plastic shit all over it to make it look old-timey.

6) My girlfriend moved in with me. We're currently arguing about who is more poorly dressed in an attempt to get out of answering the door, which has been being knocked on for a minute or two now.

7) Summerslam was great, I just wish Randy Orton wasn't the guy they're going with for this "Daniel Bryan is a B+" thing. He's fucking boring. I think the "R" in "RKO" stands for "resthold." And he looks like the wall of a tattoo shop threw up on his arms. He's six or seven years past his two or three year prime. The angle is good and it broke my heart in all the right ways, but Orton's a clowndick.

7b) If any of this results in the Evolution theme being used again, all is forgiven.

8) I got the number 4 score on the South Park pinball machine at the bar I work at. That means I'm fucking awesome.

9) Barring a background check and fingerprints and all the paperwork that needs to happen when you're going to work with kids, I might have an additional job as a cook at a Montessori school, because life is weird.

9b) I was going to just work at the bar and tighten up spending-wise and then just tour as much as I can, but this kind of seems like an opportunity I can't pass up. It's only thirty hours a week and I'll be done at 1:00 every day. That means I can still work at the bar and have time for band practice. Plus, with seasonal breaks and all the other times kids get off for essentially no reason, I'll be able to tour about as much as I would anyways. My only real sacrifice is having to hang out with kids all the time and make up lies out stuff that they will no doubt believe, because they are dumb.

10) Gwen Beatty got published. This is cool because she's a great writer and that aforementioned girlfriend and there's no better return on the good karma she's created by having to see me naked on a regular basis than by having her talents be recognized. You should read her story "I Thought About How the Sea" and then send her stories to read for her new gig at the journal Cease, Cows.

Do you even be gross, bro?

In this time, I've done very little writing. Or reading. I've read manuscripts for PSB and done edits on other people's stuff, but I haven't done much of anything for my own work. This is called an "excuse" because I'm "lazy" and "currently mostly playing computer games."

The whole "write every day" thing is an idea I try to live by it. It seems to be the one piece of advice that almost everyone agrees upon. There a part in the Comedians of Comedy documentary where Patton Oswalt talks about being obsessed with doing stand-up, to the point where it was all he did for two or three years. Open mics, crafting jokes, listening to other people do it. He says that every serious artist probably goes through this at some point, just drowning themselves in their craft.

I did that already. I did that when I was 20 and 21 and 22 and 23. I stayed home on weekends and revise stuff. I spent my entire Spring Break when I was twenty writing for six or seven hours day. I wrote before work and after work and couldn't think of anything but narrative and character whenever I watched television or a movie.

This was to no immediate benefit to the outside world. I was working on a novel that I knew wouldn't get published, something uneven and very blatantly the first thing I'd ever written. The last page is infinitely better than the first page, because I learned everything I know about writing just by working on that one giant thing.

Then I fell into an easy sort of routine--Mark Doty said he only write 400 words a day, so that's what I did. I've even shortened it in the past year or so: 100 words a day and one perfect sentence. I usually end up doing more than that, but sometimes I don't, which is fine. The one rule of writing is "feel good." I figured out how to write--or at least how I write--and I do that and it's very satisfying, the ways I still manage to surprise myself, running with the same themes and motifs and building up a series of personal archetypes the way Bob Dylan or Jason Molina or Raymond Carver did.

That I do the same thing they did, on a smaller, less successful level, is still incredible to me.

But recently, I haven't done shit. I've been preoccupied with other endeavors, some creative and some not: bands and a micropress and Twin Peaks and making dinner and pinball and all that stuff. Even now that I've been working a mere twenty hours a week I've only been writing four or five days of it.

Back when I was neck deep in my writing, I couldn't go two days with getting panicky about not writing. I just went a few months without doing much of anything, and I feel all right.

I'm not sure what this has to do with anything other than I don't know if I'm becoming less self-obsessed or if I actually might not write forever. I don't like to think that I can be perfectly happy not doing something I spent so much time grinding my life around.

"There's too much fucking perspective now."

Still, I managed to write a few things during a brief explosion of productivity. One of the stories will be for a special issue of Jersey Devil Press. I get my old Our Band Could Be Your Lit project up and running again for ONE NIGHT ONLY, thanks to a suggestion of "write about a Lita Ford song if you can't think of anything" by Mike Sweeney. From that has come the story "There Is No Joy Between the Last Thing and the Next Thing." It's based on "Shot of Poison" from Lita's pretty-awesome album Dangerous Curves. It's about friendship and emptiness and the big, scary future. Look for it soon.

(Unfortunately, I missed Lita Ford when she came to the casino in town. I made a promise to my pubescent self that I would have sex with her, but bailed at the last minute because I didn't want to take off work and Lita kind of looks like old dinner rolls now.)

Another thing I wrote and managed to get published right away in a kind of silly "the internet is a wild place" sort of way is an essay called "How to make -$1377 the Hard Way" about starting a micropress, booking my own cross-country book tour, DIY attitudes in indie lit, jealousy, success, satisfaction, and other things I secretly and not-so-secretly obsess about when it comes to writing. The ever-badass Jennifer A. Howard picked it up immediately and pushed it through to publication right away for the Passages North WRITERS ON WRITING column. I'm very happy to be a part of it.

Punk rock means that not only do all the eggs go in the basket, but you decide what the eggs and the basket are. Anyone who understands this probably doesn't need the reminder and anyone who doesn't understand it probably isn't going to have a revelation concerning it, so I’ll stop being indignant before I get wet under the arms about it.

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Some other things I wrote awhile back that were published during my period of soul searching/watching Agent Dale Cooper eat pie include this story about brothers and pro wrestling and what the truth really is and what it's good for. It's called "A Comprehensive List of the Least Worst Way to do Everything" and it's up a Necessary Fiction.

I watch my dead brother’s wrestling matches and try to count the number of times he gets hurt for real. In one, a wispy tattooed man hits him with a monitor from the commentary desk. In the rematch, he hits him with the commentary desk.

I’ve got one of his boots on either side of the television. Maybe there’s a heart attack resting in my chest, too.

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And this review of Ken Nash's The Brain Harvest, also up at Necessary Fiction.

What this really taught me was the same thing that The Brain Harvest by Ken Nash taught me: precision and compression and crazy hope, how if we zoom in far enough in anyone’s life, the absurdities reveal a depth of honesty and wonder. There’s something amazing in everyone’s life, something historic in everyone’s town.

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And, lastly, this review of Adam Marek's wonderful short story collection The Stone Thrower, up now at Heavy Feather Review.

Before even reading Adam Marek’s short story collection The Stone Thrower—a book that openly states its themes of parental protection and vulnerability right on the back cover—I began to worry that I would be slogging through a dozen or so stories written by someone who has been made soft and sentimental by the idea of what they do to nurture their offspring or, perhaps even worse, stories written by someone who has been made hard, writing for the aforementioned softies.

Thankfully, The Stone Thrower is none of that.

Most of any tour is a variation on this picture of an unclean Justin Lawrence Daugherty devouring a burrito with gravy in it at a truck stop somewhere in northern Idaho at 8:00 AM shortly before describing some guy's balls as smelling like nuclear fallout.

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.

Order all of this stuff right here at the cheaply-made PASSENGER SIDE BOOKS website.

After that Passages North essay went up, I got a lot of traffic to this site, and most of the information on it was from months ago. I'm going to try to not make it that long between updates. If you're new here now, take a look around. I'm doing things, occasionally. I hope you are, too.

With love,

RW

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August is over, so when are you coming back . . .

5/13/2013

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"Younger Days" by Mount Moriah, off their new record Miracle Temple.

Another month gone that I'll never get back, because that's how time works until you're dead and it doesn't matter anymore. Here's what I've been doing.

1) I went and talked to a temp agency about getting me work in an office because I hate my job at Wal-Mart, mainly because I can't fuck around as much anymore.

1b) I realize this makes me sound incredibly lazy and part of a much larger problem concerning the new adults of America, but it's a matter of right more than anything. I signed up for a shitty job that pays under $10 an hour and has no responsibilities. Being a fuck up is built into it. It's a job for retired people who want to push a broom all day or kids in high school who are waiting for their lives to start. I'm using it as a way to have a job I can leave there when I walk out the door, which it hasn't been, thanks to a clause in my "Wal-Mart contract" that says I agreed to help out where needed, meaning that if this fucking dildo assistant manager I hate tells me to eat shit and bark at the moon, I have to eat shit and bark at the moon.

1c) That dude's a dick.

2) I saw Bret Michaels of Poison at the casino in town. It was one of the worst shows I've ever seen. He opened up with two Posion songs, so fine, I wasn't pissed. Then he went off stage to change his shirt and came on to play "Sweet Home Alabama." Then he dedicated "Something To Believe In" to the troops and the people of Boston. His twelve-string acoustic sounded like Steve Albini's Shellac tone, which was kind of awesome but entirely inappropriate. Then he changed his shirt again, came back out, and played "What I Got" by Sublime after giving a shout-out to Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray. He played for under an hour, which is kind of an odd thing to complain about--"This food is terrible, and such small portions!"--but he didn't play "Ride the Wind" so I'm pissed.

3) Some dude came into the bar I work at and stole my screen-printed, hand-numbered Melvins poster from the wall in the little room I do door in. We took a screenshot of the security footage and did a public shaming of him online. I happened to run into him the next day on the street, where I called him a fucker, asked him where my poster was, and then opened up the back door of his car to grab it while he made excuses. He's a white dude with dreads, so fuck him.

3b) I put the poster back up and it disappeared that same night. I asked the owners to check the footage the next day and they never did, so I assumed they just didn't care. A week later, I saw the poster hanging back up in the room. The middle of it was completely burned through and then entire thing was ruined. I was immediately bummed. Ten minutes later one of the owners comes through the door holding the real Melvins poster, then explains to me that he saw it on the ground that night and took it home. He went to CopyWorks, made a cheap black and white copy, stained it with coffee, colored it with colored pencils, and then burned out the middle. He and the other owner were watching the security footage to see my reaction and he ran down to the bar as soon as he saw I was about to kill myself. A total dick, but what a wonderful prank.

4) I've been eating people's ice cream out of the freezer at work because I'm a rotten human.

5) I started writing fake horoscopes under the name Dr. McCracken for a local entertainment magazine.

5b) Here are three of them:

Aries: You will argue for forty-five minutes with an IKEA representative about the best way to design a pit. Enjoy naps in lieu of the sun, which will eventually burn out anyways. Someone in your professional life will dream of lighting your shoes on fire. Life is debatable.

Taurus: A new love interest will appear and replace all of the light switch covers in your house with photocopies of your baby pictures. Do not be shaken by the unknown. Cry in your bathtub at every opportunity.

Gemini: More than ever before it is important to remember that the human body's age limitations are ultimately usurped by the fact that cancer is unavoidable in all life forms past the age of 150. You will drown your motivation with ice cream.

6) My buddy Zach made me a custom leather guitar strap that has my name written in the scoops of an ice cream cone.

7) I started watching this video series on YouTube where some Irish guys talk about old wrestling PPVs for like an hour and a half over-top the footage they're talking about. I'm halfway through the Wrestlemania I episode and yes, they make an interesting point with the placement of Lord Alfred. Very odd. And yes, my life is disappearing.

8) I found out that I'm Jewish. My mother was explaining something about my grandmother being an old Jew, which made me realize--thanks to David Cross--that if her mother was a Jew, then that means she's a Jew. That means I'm a Jew. A loophole Jew, but still a Jew.

8b) Nobody was surprised.

Seriously.

After what felt like a million years but was actually only like two months of minor complaining about not being published for two months, I got e-mails telling me that my story "Go Says No," about pinball and the doldrums, will be going up at BULL: Men's Fiction and my story "A Comprehensive List of the Least Worst Way To Do Everything," about a dead wrestler and his brother dealing with it, will be going up at Necessary Fiction, both in the near future.

Part of why I went so long--"so long," I guess, since it really wasn't a very long time--without getting anything accepted for publication was because I didn't have a lot floating around out there, and what I did have floating around was at the big-time journals that take at least three months to respond. Nothing was helped by the responses I actually was getting, which were all rejections, one of which addressed only to "Dear [name]." I am a human, I swear.

But anyways, those should be out soon, and I'm sure I won't shut the fuck up about them once they get here. "A Comprehensive List" is the first story (that I have written, maybe not the first story in the collection) in a pro wrestling based chapbook I'm working on called The Road Becomes What You Leave, a title I pinched from a Magnolia Electric Co. song lyric, one that was actually already pinched several years ago for a short documentary about the band. (Magnolia Electric Co. singer/guitarist Jason Molina recently died after a long battle with alcoholism, and though I've been planning on using the title for years and years and Molina probably wasn't a huge wrestling fan, I'm still very dedicated to the idea of using it.)

"Go Says No" isn't a part of any collection, at least not yet, and that's somewhat exciting, because it means that in a few years, if I can keep writing, I'll hopefully have a handful of stories to pull from to make a new collection. It'll be interesting to see what themes emerge from the group of stories. I plan out what I'm writing about, at least in terms of what I want to get across emotionally or thematically, as much as I can ahead of time, so the idea that a book that doesn't exist yet is going to come together from a bunch of stories that also don't exist yet kind of blows my mind.

How inexplicable shitty this Tom Keifer of Cinderella solo album is also kind of blows my mind. For some reason.

The Passenger Side Books website is finally up and running, and the first two titles are available as fuck. Justin Lawrence Daugherty's Whatever Don't Drown Will Always Rise and my Murmuration are$5 shipped each or $9 shipped as a bundle. People said nice things about each of them, like this from Amber Sparks about Justin's book:

"Justin Lawrence Daugherty has not just a voice, but a hulking, goose-pimpling presence on the page - like something buried in the earth too long and about to burn its way out. He is an acute and devastatingly honest observer of the current human condition, and his characters limp and bayonet their way through Whatever Don’t Drown Will Always Rise like soldiers of some wounded new century."

Or this from Mary Miller about my book:

"The five stories in Ryan Werner's Murmuration, which are dedicated to the Midwest, bring me into the heart of a world where boys drive cars off cliffs and have least favorite strippers, where dreams must be revised into "necessary shapes" by playing guitar in the street at night. Ryan writes with authority, skill, and passion, not only about the Midwest, but about youth and what it means to be young."

Get them both right here at the Passenger Side Books site.

Also, Murmuration is on Goodreads.

And so is Whatever Don't Drown Will Always Rise.

AND ALL THIS SHIT IS ON TWITTER NOW.

Here's our logo. Isn't it rad? Order now and get a free sticker or two with this on it.

I had a couple things go online recently, despite my endless whining about not being published. The first one, my story "Back and to the Left" up at Jersey Devil Press, I totally forgot about because they're the ones who published my first book, where this story originally appeared. We worked out a loose arrangement and now it's here and I'm stoked. It's like finding twenty bucks in an old pair of pants. Anyways, this story is based on the song "Brain of J" by Pearl Jam, and it has to do with the idea that JFK didn't really die--until now--and wasn't really up to anything anyways. OR as I like to call it, REALITY, DUDE.

Aside from his relations with Marilyn Monroe and being the most powerful man in the United States for a little bit, JFK wasn’t the luckiest guy around. He was accident prone, more than anything. Still, he kept his humor. He’d call me a few times a year and say something like, “I just slammed my hand in a car door. First I get shot in the head and now this.”

The other thing I had go up is a review of Roy Kesey's Any Deadly Thing up at Heavy Feather Review. I didn't really like the book, but here's me being diplomatic.

In these large, faraway places are usually two people experimenting with the space they’re forced to cohabitate. In the portion of their lives we’re presented with, the good stuff often seems ready to arrive despite the stories all beginning and ending in odd spots, the story going on, always.

If you liked Roy's book and you're upset that I didn't, keep in mind that this is just one of many pictures of CC DeVille I have saved to my computer.

I didn't talk much about what I'm working on because I'm not working on shit. I've been busy finalizing the PSB stuff and working and playing in four or five bands. And I hate reading more than one book at once, so I've been stuck on Ken Nash's The Brain Harvest, trying to read it at the slow points in my work day, which isn't exactly ideal or productive. However, I just finished the review for The Brain Harvest (and a review for The Stone Thrower by Adam Marek, which was wonderful), so I'm going to reread The Watch by Rick Bass and some new shit by Gary Lutz and I'm going to generally get back into the swing of writing again. Because I like writing. I think.

All right. Let's get incredible.

With love,

RW

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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.

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."

----------

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."

----------

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."

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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The choice is up to you, 'cuz they come in two classes: rhinestone shades or cheap sunglasses . . .

12/12/2012

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The Sword, covering ZZ Top and doing a fucking awesome job of it.

I don't have shit going on to promote of my own, so here's a few rad things other folks have going on.

Matt Burnside has a continuation of his sage writing advice up at [PANK]. This is "11 More Inflexible Rules For Upstart Writers." The title is either misleading or I actually (sadly) know less than I thought I did, because I'm learning things, too, from reading this. Matt's fucking funny on top of being a super appreciative weirdo, on top of being incredibly smart, on top of being an exciting, solid writer. Some guys have it all. I bet he's got a dick like a Pringles can, too.

Anyways, here's my favorite of this newest batch of inflexible rules:

RULE: Fight the urge every day to be cynical

It’s easy to be cynical, but better to keep your sense of humor/humanity through it all. There are days I wake up and want to beat up a phone booth, but if I can stand back long enough to realize how bad it really isn’t, I can find it in my heart to forgive that phone booth. Cynicism is a virus from hell. It may feel good to blast the world for all its bullshit, but where does that get you, really, in the end? It gets you beating up phone booths, and they hardly deserve it. Negativity has never and will never be sexy. Not only that, cynicism has a way of digging its nasty nails into your work. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. We certainly need that in literature, and I’ve written a lot of cynical stuff, but of late I’ve found it’s much harder and rewarding to write something more earnest because the stakes are higher. Work that approaches the heart of things without all the venom and razors – like walking through a minefield where the slightest misstep could result in sentimentality – is more risky than writing something extremely dark and nihilistic and full of fucks and death and postmodern lines like: LANGUAGE WON’T SAVE US, which I’ve literally written in my work maybe five times now. Because the thing is, language will save us. I think as a writer you’ve got to believe that, even as you suspect how foolish it may be.

Read the rest right here at [PANK].

And speaking of [PANK], they've got a cool holiday deal going on where you can a bunch of stuff for like $50 shipped. I think it's three print issues, a shirt, a book, a sticker, and a button. You'll save a little over $20 and all that stuff should be pretty rad. Myfanwy Collins (Hey, anyone reading this: What the fuck is with that name? I don't want to e-mail her and ask because I'm sure she's been getting shit about that name forever. Can a third party explain this to me? Welsh? Is it Welsh?) wrote the book, called I Am Holding Your Hand. I bet it rules, because Randall Brown said it does and he rules. Simple math. And the shirt's got a typewriter, so, you know. Whatever.

Buy all the things right here.

Chloe Caldwell of Legs Get Led Astray fame and general fucking awesomeness has a new eBook over at Thought Catlog. It's called "The New Age Camp" and I can't read it because I don't have a Kindle. I'm working on getting a PDF or whatever guys like me who still do stupid shit like listen to music on Windows Media Player need to read non-Kindle eBooks. But you should buy it and read it if you can. When has Chloe ever let you down? (I mean that as it pertains to the realm of literature. If she owes you money or puked on your rug or something, I'll apologize right now on behalf of her.)

Buy Coco's eBook right here at Thought Catalog.

(EDIT: If you don't have Kindle, download Cloud Reader and you're all set. Not sure if they have it in a fancy alpine white iPhone color, but use your imagination.) (Dickhead.)

This is all actually just a ploy to quickly regenerate my karma after changing the background of my parents' computer to a picture of a chocolate butthole.

Steven Gillis has a new short story collection out called The Law of Strings and it's worth reading, worth obsessing over. My full review for Heavy Feather Review went up Monday. Read this opening section to his story "The Society for the Protection of Animals."

Uniss had a plan. The situation was dire. No one refuted this, though we knew at first only what Uniss told us.

In her cage, on the floor of our apartment, Uniss did her best to turn. She said it was important to feel as they did, to better understand. I questioned the necessity, wondered, “If we’re supposed to be sympathetic, shouldn’t we be motivated more by instinct?”

Uniss told me to “Think about what you’re saying. How can you understand what you haven’t experienced?”

I could have argued the point, said many things were intuitive, like hunger and love and the want to survive, that understanding them was overkill, but I knew what Uniss would say. She had a way of moving inside her cage, naked and on all fours, up on her toes and fingers, her spine arched as she had learned to do, leaving room so when invited I could scoot flat on my back and lay beneath her, staring directly at whatever she chose to offer.

Wasn't that wonderful? Of course it was. Order the book from Atticus Books right here.

I like to pretend that string third from the left is that dude's dick, because I'm nine years old.

The only story I've got floating around right now is a 1300 word story called "Go Says No" about old men and pinball and being 27 years old. I didn't realize the title was so similar to Monster Magnet's (not that great) album God Says No, but I'm not too worried about it. It can get rejected on its own merits instead of having an ill-conceived title.

I felt good after I wrote it, but I'm worried about the same shit I'm always worried about, namely how many fucking times do I need to write about being lonely and innocent in the Midwest? I realize that lots of writers I like wrote the same thing over and over again: Carver, Updike, Bukowski, Dubus, Ford, Munro (to some extent). I also realize that reading an entire collection by them is often an endurance test comparable to waterboarding.

I don't know about the other ones, but I've read Bukowski's early letters--the ones before he hit it big with Post Office--and he was definitely aware of the ground he was treading, if not worried about wearing it thin. I seem to recall him lamenting over writing another racetrack story or writing in a frenzy to create a dozen or so drunk love poems. Still, he was writing them, and aside from a few journeys into noir, that's all he wrote.

Should I give a shit? Is this sort of deep, unavoidable rumination on a theme a bad thing? It becomes taxing on the reader after awhile, and definitely on the writer, but even if the ratio of good-to-bad ends up looking like shit, the hyper-focus might be its own end. Not Look closely, but look forever.

It's possible that my Midwest is Richard Hugo's Montana, Grace Paley's New York City, Flannery O'Connor's dark south. And I'm fine with that.

It's also possible that my Midwest is Ric Flair's fancy robes, Ric Flair's strut, Ric Flair's WOOOOOOOOOOO!

I started working on the pro wrestling chapbook I've been threatening to write. The first story, "A Comprehensive List of the Least Worst Way To Do Everything," is done. Here's the first section:

I watch my dead brother’s wrestling matches and try to count the number of times he gets hurt for real. In one, a wispy tattooed man named Slash Blast hits him with a monitor from the commentary desk. In the rematch, he hits him with the commentary desk.

I’ve got one of his boots on either side of the television. Maybe there’s a heart attack resting in my chest, too.

I know that only so much of anything is true, but I get lost watching the matches. Rodney knew how to honestly tackle delusion from both sides and I just can’t do it.

Until a lump forms between the top of his trapezius and his Adam’s apple, I really am convinced that nothing is wrong when a hulking Japanese man uses the side of an open hand to knife-edge him a dozen times in the neck.

The thing I'm going to have a hard time with is not boring that wrestling fans--as if any of them will end up reading it anyways--and not going over the head of the non-wrestling fans. (Who also won't read it.) The other stories are "Waiting For Andre" (about how the tangential trivia of Samuel Beckett giving Andre the Giant rides to school severely alters the relationship of a young couple) and "The Road Becomes What You Leave" (about a "loser leaves town" match with more at stake than the results of the match itself). The former will be shorter and the latter will be longer, but either way I'm hoping to have at least two more stories in the collection.

I'm going to go eat ice cream. In honor of the rad date I had Monday with a charming redhead, here's my revised Top Five Fictional Redheads list.

1) Jessica Rabbit
2) Jean Grey
3) April O'Neil
4) The girl on the cover of Candy O
5) The Little Mermaid

Be wonderful,

RW

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No one gives a hoot about faux-ass nonsense . . .

11/14/2012

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"No One Gives a Hoot About Faux-Ass Nonsense" by Don Caballero, from their second, aptly-titled, album, Dob Caballero 2.

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.

Seriously, it doesn't even say what kind of pizza.

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.

Not that I wasn't a fucking dickhead back in college, too.

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.

It is pretty fucking funny, though.

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

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The earth is not a cold dead place . . .

10/16/2012

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"The Only Moment We Were Alone" by Explosions In the Sky

When I need hyper-emotional instrumental music in the fall, Explosions in the Sky is the go-to. I'll switch to Sigur Ros when the first snow comes down, back to Don Cab when it all melts.

I had a new publication go up at a new publication. Justin Lawrence Daugherty started up a lit journal that intends to scorch the earth. So far, I think he's done a bang-up job. My story is called "The Ultimate Warrior, Sitting In His Kitchen in the Middle of the Night, Practicing Applying His Face-Paint in Anticipation of a Return That Will Never Happen." It's one of those self-explanatory titles. Check it out, along with great work by Aaron Teel, Edward Hagelstein, Helen McClory and many more.

"The thing about being dead is that I have no idea what it’s like.

I got a haircut and took some time off and people started to talk because they either think that life is as fake as wrestling or vice versa.

But remember that guy in the promotion who was pretending to be me? Suicide. When they finally hired the real me, he had a pity spot on the roster as my stunt double and then he got fired and then he shot himself."

Seriously, though, if you talk about how there's been several Ultimate Warriors because the original one died, you're a fucking asshole.

My column proposal, Love Dumb: A Song-By-Song Analysis of the Nonsensical, Incompetent, Sophomoric, Confusing, Beautiful KISS Discography, got accepted over at Used Furniture Review. This, too, is fairly self-explanatory. I'll be analyzing two KISS songs every week for the next two years, at which point I will have dissected all of their songs and decided that I actually fucking hate them. I'm three songs in so far and aside from reinforcing the basics--Peter's not very good at drums, Paul's the weirdest straight gay dude ever--I've learned that I only like KISS when I don't have to think about them. If I'm just feeling the music, they're the best. The second I turn my brain on, they just turn into some mediocre Jews singing about their dicks.

In trying to come up with a name for the column, I called on my friends to help. My buddy Bob suggested, "Get a girlfriend."

Going back to pro wrestling, I'm considering proposing a column to Fear of a Ghost Planet in which I take old wrestling PPVs and compare them based on the month and year in which they appeared. So, Hog Wild '96 (WCW) would go up against Summerslam '96 (WWF). Sure, it was the beginning of Hogan's first title run as a heel and it was the end of Vader's push in the WWF because Shawn Michaels was a real cunt back then, but what about he shows themselves? I'm curious as to which one is better to just put on and enjoy, free of nostalgia, (mostly) free of wrestling-nerd snobbery.

On the surface, these two columns appear to be way more niche than the stuff I normally write: short stories, book reviews, essays. Really, I think it's about the same. It's 2012 and I'm writing stuff that mostly appears on the internet, a place that already has millions of stuffs of all kinds and doesn't necessarily need any of mine.

In short, maybe I need a girlfriend.

"Look, I know I said 'redhead,' but I also said 'girlfriend.'"

I'm not sure why I've taken a sudden interest in writing a column, but I'm afraid it's because I'm running out of ideas. I'm not counting on my chapbook winning the Caketrain competition because they get a bunch of awesome submissions that are probably more geared toward their aesthetic, but they have to choose someone. (Every writer needs this attitude. No journal or zine or whatever exists without shit other people wrote. You could totally be other people. They have to choose someone.) So, on the extremely offhand chance that it wins the contest, I'm pretty much out of publishable material.

The more likely situation here is that it won't win, but I've already got some self-defeating bullshit for that, too. When it doesn't win, I'll shop the first half--the story cycle--around as a short, 20-page chapbook. That leaves the other three longform stories for another collection, which I would then set about finishing using a few older stories that need massive revision and a few newer ones that need to be written. Still, this is only maybe a year's worth of work. That's not a lot considering that I want to write for fucking ever.

So I'm a bit scared that I'm out of ideas. I haven't reached the point where I'm considering making some poor decisions just so I have some shit to write about, but I'm getting there. (A girlfriend? Come on. Desperate times . . .)

This is how I justified watching all of Party Down on YouTube last week. Just, you know, stirring creative juices or whatever.

"Fantasy is bullshit."

Shake Away These Constant Days, my mostly-ignored debut short story collection, is now available for your e-reader. Get the Kindle version on Amazon or, if you think Amazon is the devil, Smashwords.

Also, in an attempt to maybe get some people to buy the book, I'm going completely backwards in terms of logic and giving away two copies. Head over to Goodreads and sign up for the Shake Away These Constant Days Giveaway.

I'm selling a surprising number of books at the bar I work at. Drunk people love feeling smart. I did, however, have a better reaction to the ice cream I brought in and scooped for everyone. I knew my book couldn't compete against mint chocolate chip. Regardless, a busty girl named Floro took a picture of me scooping her an ice cream cone and texted it to her mother as a means of informing her of our inevitable marriage. We then discussed the finer points of the Aggro Crag from the Nickelodeon show Guts.

Things are fine, everyone.

RW

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I'm still hangin' 'round cause I'm a little bit small . . .

10/8/2012

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Steve Earle and the Dukes performing "Fearless Heart" live on Austin City Limits.

With the exception of the working class itself, almost everything with a "working class" tag bites shit. Steve Earle does simple right.

I've kept somewhat busy since I last posted, meaning that I haven't kept very busy, meaning that I still mostly hate myself.

I had a story go up at Juked called "Western v. Eastern," probably the last story from the Our Band Could Be Your Lit stuff worth publishing. (Except my story based on "A Little Longing Goes Away" by The Books, though I'm the only one who likes that story it seems.) "Western v. Eastern" is based on the song "The Running Kind" by Zoe Muth and the Lost High Rollers. I told her about it and she never got back to me. Still, she's a nice girl with wonderful songs, and I was kind of a weird idiot the both times I met her, talking about Queensryche the first time and complaining about Jackson Browne the second time. So that's understandable. The story itself is pieced together from various bits including professional wrestling, bailiff work, Motley Crue, dissolving relationships, a fear of death, smoking weed, artificial appendages, and Bullitt starring Steve McQueen. Check it out.

"Semi-important things about tort claims and a federal district court’s level of jurisdiction and some other stuff are being decided through the case of Jane Eastern and Anthony Western. The gist of it is that they were married and now they’re not and soon enough one person will take none of the blame and all of the money even though there’s enough of both to go around." - from "Eastern v. Western"

I also had a story go up at SmokeLong Quarterly, my favorite lit journal. There was a bit of plea bargaining done on the ending, but I'm satisfied with that we came up with. (I will, however, be changing it when the story goes into the chapbook.) "Jalapeno Summer" is the story, the big opening gambit in my Midwestern story cycle called Murmuration, and the story that finally got me into SLQ after nearly a dozen rejections throughout the years. SLQ staff member Josh Denslow interviewed me about the story and I didn't sound too incredibly stupid, so you should check that out. As for the story, it's one of my favorites of mine, the exact blending of all the things I want a Midwestern story to be: humor and sadness, action from boredom despite no solution.

"The summer I turned eighteen, we drove a car off a cliff every Sunday. Gas was still a buck a gallon and all of us were moving away in August to places where polka music wasn't a dogma." - from "Jalapeno Summer"

In the process of trying new things, I've got another book review up at [PANK], this time for Sara Levine's brilliant short story collection Short Dark Oracles. Anything I say about it now will just ruin it. The short of it: buy this goddamn book.

"[Short Dark Oracles] is a champion in the blowout of my soul, a reaffirmation of life through creativity and craft. At the intersection of those two qualities is a triumph of artistic merit, a testament to narrative labor and a reminder for me to pay attention, always, for somewhere in the world there is magic at work."

Okay, I'm done plugging shit. Until this other story I wrote goes up this week.

I'm not the worst salesman ever.

Oh yeah, I also had a book come out. I talked about it a lot, so I'm going to stop now. That's what happens, I think, when you work on something. You talk about it until it happens, and then it's other people's responsibility. I've only gotten one review so far, from Joey Pizzolato over at Curbside Splendor.

The good: "These stories are subtle and delicate; it never feels as if Werner is shoving meaning down the reader’s throat. In fact, it’s the opposite. Readers are forced to interact with each story, and are allowed—with a modest grace—to use their own feelings about the historical moments and figures included in these stories to decide what is important."

"Each story is short and powerful, complete with terse and refined prose that are quick like a boxer’s jab."

"Coupled with the freshness and honesty by which he writes, Shake Away These Constant Days is an impressive debut from a young and exciting voice."

The not-so-great: "these stories are almost too short; and, coupled with the quantity of stories included, it’s easy for them to melt together, especially if you find yourself reading from cover to cover."

He's right on the money about the not-so-great stuff. I like to think of SATCD as a mixtape I made for someone. I love all the songs on it, but that person won't love all the songs. They'll love a handful of the songs. It's just too much to take in at once, and some stuff will understandably get lost due to simple saturation.

Not this kind, unfortunately.

I swallowed a tiny portion of my irrational fears and submitted to the Caketrain Chapbook Competition. I realized my original chapbook, the aforementioned Murmuration, was about 5000 words short of the minimum length. So I added a second section of short stories, ones with more Midwestern themes. Here's what I ended up with.

Part I: Murmuration (A Midwest Story Cycle)

Jalapeno Summer (869 words)
Reruns (844 words)
Cool Tits, Moxie (1030 words)
Pyramid Scheme (1382 words)
Murmuration (2305 words)

Part II: Heroics

Shoot Out the Bright Lights (5588 words)
Run the Daylight Down (3796 words)
Two Halves of a Tornado (3635 words)

This means very little to most of you, as I realize only a handful of people have read these stories, but there are things to pick up on within a table of contents. I think it'll hold up. I don't really think it'll win the contest--the genius Sarah Rose Etter won it last year, and I'm nowhere near her level--but it's something I'm happy with. When I get the rejection, I'm going to send Part I to Magic Helicopter Press. When I get their rejection, I'll probably just self-publish. So, no matter what, look for Murmuration in early 2013.

I played a lot of rock and roll in the past couple weeks. I look forward to playing more. Let's rock, people.

RW

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Went to bed, but I'm not ready, baby, I've been fucked already . . .

8/20/2012

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"Alcoholiday" by Teenage Fanclub, from their album Bandwagonesque, which is about as perfect a title as any album in the early 90's alt-pop-rock scene is going to have.

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.

Textually short, that is. I'll still have plenty of semi-related photos and YouTube links.

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.*

*Semi-official 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.

Only one thing matters when I think of Philly.

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.

She refuses to go to the hospital. I told her that her face is broken as fuck and she needs to go. She told me to mind my own business and then
bitched at me about a parking ticket I recently got. Then she made me lunch, because my mom is the best mom.

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

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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:

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 go od and some of it questi onable--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.

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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Things that can happen, happen to you . . .

What you did to me on those long nights with short skirts . . .

August is over, so when are you coming back . . .

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

The choice is up to you, 'cuz they come in two classes: rhinestone shades or cheap sunglasses . . .

No one gives a hoot about faux-ass nonsense . . .

The earth is not a cold dead place . . .

I'm still hangin' 'round cause I'm a little bit small . . .

Went to bed, but I'm not ready, baby, I've been fucked already . . .

Always nothing left to say . . .

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