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.
"Alcoholiday" by Teenage Fanclub was the inspiration behind the story "What Burns Never Returns"
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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