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.

Originally OBCBYL #26. Small town baristas—waitresses of any kind, really—are the best girls, and there are days where I think I could live forever just through the love of a pretty girl with tired legs.

The baristas are only a minor point of entry for the real story, in which innocuous poetry readings during the summer in a college town reveal a layered, odd relationship between a couple thought to be undeniably right.

I worked not at a coffee shop in a small town, but, even worse, at a record shop in a small college town. Neither one did particularly well in the summer, but the coffee shop is still open and the record store isn’t, if that tells you which one did worse. The coffee shop would only be open for about four hours in the mornings, about long enough to afford to keep the lights on and pay the barista.

We ran a couple readings there when I was in college, but nothing nearly as exciting as an imploding marriage came from them.

The whole thing with the H was something I said to an ex-girlfriend’s sister once, a Sara, but not the one in the story. About the only thing I knew was that, biblically, Sarah (with an “h”) was holier than Sara (without an “h”). If this sounds like a rather flimsy thing to build a story on, that’s because it is. I had to research the letter “h” for about an hour just to round out the climax of the story.


Tomorrow: A story named "Mythology" that is based on the song "Bullet and a Target" by Citizen Cope. Suggested by writer Keith Scribner.

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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 "This Illusion" over at Prime Number Magazine)

Exclusive to SATCD. Big Star really only fired the same few longing-related synapses over and over, so I knew immediately that the story was going to be about a guy and a girl and a disappointment sitting comfortably between them. What I ended up with was a guy dating one of “exactly four-dozen registered female magicians in the United States.”

I remember being obsessed with magic when I was younger. Not real magic—I’m obsessed with that now, though it’s even more fruitless than the other kind—but magic tricks, the kinds done with prop metal rings and slight-of-hand. I had books and learned some tricks and, until I decided I wanted to be a pro wrestler, was convinced I would be a magician someday.

Obviously, this never happened. I knew a magician in high school tangentially. His sister was in my grade. His license plate said MAGICEJ and he was kind of a fucking dork. The ghost was long given up, but that wasn’t very endearing.

I’m sure there’s a bit of GOB Bluth in here somewhere, but mostly it’s just a bunch of stuff I made up. I may have gotten the idea for a “female magician convention” from a porno. If that doesn’t actually exist, someone should make it.

As for the story, I think it was a bit of a turning point in my writing. After years of doing it accidentally, I finally figured out a way to be a little funny while still having that feeling of a big, functionless Midwestern heart somewhere at the center of it all.


Tomorrow: A story named "Where Is Your H?" that is based on the song "Smile & Wave" by Headstones. Suggested by writer Tim Trenkle.

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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. Barring a total void of talent, the idea of a troubadour is one of the more romantic things I can think of. Shakespeare, too, is kind of a big deal when it comes to that shit. Combining them was another one of those simple, dumb things

The romance of being a troubadour isn’t just a matter of love—possibly not at all even a matter of love—but is instead a matter of excitement and mystery. The ill-fated nomadic hurt both inside and out along the musician’s path is, most likely, not really a thing anymore. I think the internet sort of hipped everyone to that idea and now everything is some base-level variation on irony. It’s a sad thing.

I got halfway through this one and realized I had fucked myself on an ending, so I gave away the ending in the middle, blatantly, through exposition. I pretty much forced myself to come up with something better, which I’m hoping I did.

A few words on the songs in here: “$1000 Wedding” by Gram Parsons is in there because someone, I can’t remember who, said it was the saddest song ever. I don’t necessarily agree, but it’s a great title to throw out there based on name alone. “Help Me Make It Through the Night” by Kris Kristofferson is a song I read a 20+ page essay on around the time I wrote the story, so I had to throw it in so I could feel I took some useable knowledge from it. “She’s No Lady” by Lyle Lovett is a song I used to quote when asked about my girlfriend, back when I had girlfriends. “The French Inhaler” by Warren Zevon is one of my favorite WZ songs that I didn’t discover until watching old Larry Sanders Show reruns. “Changed the Locks” is Lucinda Williams, so it’s great. No questions.

The story itself came together quickly. How could it not have? Steve Earle creates the sort of highway love songs that practically rise up from the speakers and lay themselves out in front of one’s vision, for as far as it will go.


Tomorrow: A story named "This Illusion" that is based on the song "Feel" by Big Star. 

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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.

Originally OBCBYL #39. The question of “what makes a man?” is only slightly less interesting than “what makes a woman?” in that, after it’s been squared away that we’re all human, I think that there’s more depth to a woman. I don’t mean this in the manner of sitcom tropes—the Simple Husband, the Confusing Wife—but more in the manner that the world makes it more difficult to be a woman than it does a man, and the success or failure of any woman that is even tangentially related to their gender is, for better or worse, a point of curiosity.

I’m not saying I’m very good at writing in the first person voice of a woman. I’m not even saying that I’m a good feminist. I’m certainly better at both than I was when I was, say, twenty years old and thinking I was really doing some good by writing first person as a woman. As you can imagine there was a lot of internal dialogue about “supple-yet-firm breasts” coming out in a voice eerily similar to that of a sexually frustrated boy with good intentions.

The stories in the book that are told from the first person POV of a woman, this one and “Focus” and “Jests At Scars,” weren’t meant to be statements of any sort. I’m guaranteeing I would have fucked it up had it been my intention to do otherwise—I’m not entirely sure I didn’t fuck it up anyways.

If the stories succeed on any level, I think it’s one of delightful inoffensiveness. I want people to finish the story and think not about how I did writing in the voice of a woman or whether or not I painted a fair portrait of a female, but to instead wonder about the fate of the characters I’ve created, in all their human glory.

Also, the scene where the musician boyfriend is on set is based on the episode of the Valerie Bertinelli sitcom Café Americain where her real life husband Eddie Van Halen played a minor role as a coffee shop guitarist. And by “based on” I mean that I’ve never seen it but I know it happened. I will send $10 to anyone reading this who’s actually seen an episode of that show.


Tomorrow: A story named "Jests At Scars" that is based on the song "Hard-core Troubadour" by Steve Earle. 

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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. I follow enough porn stars and pro wrestling divas to know that stupid girls don’t interest me much. Crazy girls, on the other hand, are endlessly interesting. Unfortunately, it’s hard to realize right away that an attractive girl who gets drunk and lights garbage cans on fire is both completely charming and entirely relationship-proof.

The story isn’t about much, just two people who shouldn’t be trying anymore finally realizing it. I don’t (purposely) write many things without an arc, so I like rereading this one every once in awhile just to remind myself that I don’t need to be such a slave to narrative all the time. Sometimes people can just light shit on fire and then punch one another and then possibly have sex later on and that’s all that needs to happen.

This story was actually written a couple years before the OBCBYL project started up, but it was, in fact, written about a song. I used “Alcoholiday” as the name of the original story, too, because it was too good to pass up. The current version is titled with apologies to the band Don Caballero.

Tomorrow: A story named "Let's Go Shoot Her While She's Crying" that is based on the song "Black Coffee" by Sarah Vaughan. Suggested by writer Dena Rash Guzman. 

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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.

Originally OBCBYL #2. Because there is no such thing as unrequited like, we will constantly heed the tension between any two people bound by unrequited love.

One brother in “Sweet Tooth” has everything, including the problems. It’s a rather uncomplicated set-up.

My own brother and I get along just fine, so I had to pull the majority of inspiration for this one from the excellent Tom Franklin story “The Ballad of Duane Juarez.” They’re similar stories—the “brother dynamic” manages to run deep with few variations—except his is, of course, better. If only I had thought of shooting a bunch of cats at the conclusion of mine.

This story is also one of the few where I was able to work in musical elements of the song—the sleigh bells, the piano. As this was the second story in the series and I was coming off a long stretch of not writing, I found a lot of ideas and details from my life rushing out. Shipping Wisconsin beef 2000 miles to California was something someone actually did when I worked at the meat processing plant, and San Diego is one of the few places outside of the tri-state (WI/IL/IA) are I’ve actually visited.

I’ve got real fights with my brother I could have pulled from if they weren’t all ancient and meaningless, but nobody wants to read about the time I punched a door because he wouldn’t let me use his Nintendo 64.

Tomorrow: A story named "What Burns Never Returns" that is based on the song "Alcoholiday" by Teenage Fanclub. 

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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.

Originally OBCBYL #3. There’s a lot of sophomoric ranting to be done on the subject of truth, whether or not it’s a matter of majority rules (“Terministic Screens” and the such) or if it’s a matter of actuality (Science and whatever). But I’m not the one to do it. I’m sure that, if cornered a decade ago, I would have been more than willing to tell it like it is, as only a seventeen-year-old can.

I’ll settle for this story, in which a photographer takes nude photos of a barely-legal Czechoslovakian girl, who later catches him taking the pictures into photoshop and turning her into something fairly grotesque.

Not that it should matter with the exercise being what it is, but I had a hard time with this because I fucking hate The Talking Heads. I’m barely comfortable with coming out on this, especially on the internet, which is full of exactly the sort of nerds who would love The Talking Heads. Don’t execute me, please.

I had a hard time deciding on a Czech name for the girl. They all sort of sounded like something from a Longmont Potion Castle skit. I settled on Zuza--graceful lily—because it sounded nice. Thankfully, after getting stuck at some point, I went back and looked at the meaning of the name again. Of course that’s what a beautiful eighteen-year-old woman would be named when completely naked and questioning her beauty, proving that I’ve got dumb luck, but at least I’ve got luck.



Tomorrow: A story named "Sweet Tooth" that is based on the song "I Wanna Be Your Dog" by The Stooges. Suggested by musician Ted Nesseth of The Heavenly States.

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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.

Originally OBCBYL #5. I love Manic Pixie Dream Girls, but if I had to pick another favorite harmful, terribly-affected female stereotype, it would be its opposite, an Unwilling Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

The problem with someone like Natalie Portman in Garden State or every character Zooey Deschanel has ever played is that they really play into it. Not that it isn’t charming, but there’s really no self-awareness to anchor the personality to anything. At least Kate Winslet’s character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind know what she was being pigeonholed as, and rejected it in favor of figuring her own life out. (And good on her for doing do.)

The narrator in “Focus” is in a similar situation, I think. She’s not interested in being the solution for unhappy men. When a MPDG is reformed, when she decides not to let her purpose in life be defined by her relation to helping out the sad souls of young white men, what remains is a person trying to suss out their problems.

Zelda Fitzgerald ended up in a mental institution and Edie Sedgwick died of a drug overdose. Fucked up girls who don’t love themselves aren’t supposed to stay that way just to possibly help a young man “find himself.” They’re supposed to figure out how to love themselves, which is hard enough as is.

Then again, Natalie from Sports Night could really turn my life around, I think.


Tomorrow: A story named "Facts" that is based on the song "Crosseyed & Painless" by The Talking Heads. Suggested by writer Kirk Nesset.

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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. Even when excluding failed experiments in Catholicism, faith never did me much good. Even this book wasn’t supposed to be a book, wasn’t something I really believed in until I saw it happen.

I had never written anything like “Bloodlines” before—an oblique story of addiction told backwards in three parts—and upon finishing it I really thought it would make a difference in what I was hoping would be a writing career. But nobody wanted it. I’ve had over a dozen rejections on it, almost all form letters.

That doesn’t sound like a lot, but at some point it would make sense to maybe retool the story a bit, wonder why it keeps getting rejected. And I never do, which either makes me ostentatious or stupid. Either way, it’s not genius.

As far as stealing goes in this one, I took the spelling of “family” as “fambly” from the name of a Grandaddy album. The use of Lima, Ohio is a reference to the wrestler Al Snow’s billed-from hometown. Not sure where I got the Secretariat stuff from. My mom’s mom wasn’t named Pearl, but my mom’s mom’s mom was—holla back, Zombie Pearl.

Regardless, I’m proud of this, my one hold-out. I still think it’s a seriously heavy-hitter in my back catalog, even if I’m the only one. 

Tomorrow: A story named "Focus" that is based on the song "Hyperballad" by Bjork. Suggested by writer Reosenbaum.

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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.

Originally OBCBYL #7. A cool thing to say is that I never tried to do drugs, I just fucking did them. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be true. I’ve never done drugs at all, and not just because there are some things I do that are definitely drugs that I don’t consider drugs—I know pill poppers and potheads who “don’t do drugs” too.

I’ve never tried a cigarette and I don’t drink and I only recently started to allow small amounts of caffeine back into my body. (Arnold Palmer, you’re killing me.) Cautionary tales are much more interesting, though, so I’ve studied them instead of the prettier opposites that are the facts of my life. Motley Crue and Robert Evans and Len Bias and so on.

The Circuit described in the story is based in Chicago. I was trying to write something that might work for Victor David Gyron’s Curbside Splendor journal, which was more urban-themed at the time. It ended up working out nicely, as I needed a place bigger and dirtier and weirder than the small faceless Midwestern towns I normally set stories in. It’s easier to believe the drug-addled weirdos in a bigger city as well. A guy like Drano Dave would surely die in my hometown of 1100 people, he can somehow exist in Humboldt Park with no problems.

The whole story has a sort of circus feel to it that I can really only compare to that of a Lifter Puller song. The Cramps are there, for sure—loose and forceful, the pain in recreation and vice versa—but Lifter Puller are everything ridiculous and harrowing about a scene built on drugs and confusion.

And that soft second person voice here. I think it works. I think it sounds like someone standing around outside a fountain somewhere explaining to you how things are going to go, which is exactly what you need, always.


Tomorrow: A story named "A Few Thoughts On Bloodlines" that is based on the song "Cure For Pain" by Morphine. 


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