Pete Lit

From north to south

I'm in the early, conceptual stage with my novel, Express. The first section will be about a former jazz musician and now homeless man named Leon. I envisioned his story revolving around Chicago's Near Northwest Side (near Elston and Armitage), taking its cue from this old sketch which I wrote more than ten years ago, while I still lived in the city. The book will be very much about loss, both for the city as a whole (Algren's line "some sort of city-wide sorrow" is always present when I think about this section) and for specific characters. The setting of Leon's section comes straight from that sketch, and involves the departure of heavy industry from that neighborhood and the resulting economic impact.

But this morning I missed my usual train, and had to take the Rock Island Line instead. I ride the Rock Island now and then, and usually sit on the right side of the train, but today I sat on the left side, which provides a westward view as the train rolls through the South Side. This change in perspective drew my attention to the neighborhoods, so much so that I couldn't concentrate on my reading. I set my book aside, and focused on the passing view outside. The South Side is a tough place to begin with, and appears even more grim on a cloudless winter day. As I saw block after block of shabby houses, I was saddened with the realization of how solidly comfortable and middle-class these neighborhoods once were. My mom is a South Sider, having grown up in Auburn Park during the thirties and early forties before the family moved to the western suburbs in 1945. She has only rarely been back to the old neighborhood since, and not all for several decades, so heartbreakingly decrepit as it has become.

I finally came to the realization that Leon's story is, instead, that of the South Side. The North Side may have endured decades of decline, but it's gradually come back during the past twenty years. Much of the South Side, I'm afraid, will never come back. It's been hollowed out by the departure of factories and blue-collar jobs, then white flight and finally the diminished social safety net, leaving behind only the poorest of the poor to mostly fend for themselves. That's not the case with most of the North Side, and thus Leon's story would be much more compelling if set somewhere to the south. The deterioration of the South Side is a metaphor and frame for Leon's steady decline, from the heyday of Bronzeville's jazz clubs to the tumultuous sixties and the exodus of prosperity from that decade onward.

Now I'll have to rethink most of Leon's story. His circumstances will remain mostly the same, but the entire setting would have to shift, to neighborhoods that I'm not as intimately familar with as my old North Side haunts. Writing this won't be as easy, but I think it will be a better story for it.

Gong!

A small East Coast press, which I greatly admire, has apparently declined Wheatyard without even telling me. I sent them a query last summer, and after not hearing anything for months, I asked a writer friend of mine (who has published a book with the press) to casually inquire about the status of my submission. The publisher told my friend that he wasn't interested in my book, and that he doesn't reply to queries unless he's interested. In other words, no news is bad news. Though it doesn't seem like that much of a bother to send a boilerplate email to a writer as notification of a rejection, apparently that publisher feels otherwise. This now makes five official rejections for Wheatyard, but never mind - I just mailed off a new query (with sample chapters) to another East Coast press yesterday. The fact that I went to the trouble of stuffing a manila envelope and trekking to the post office should tell you how much I revere this publisher. Fingers crossed. Onward.

Algren Award

Just made my third stab at the Nelson Algren Short Story Award, submitting my recent story "Echoes Down the Line." Previous attempts were made with "Mahalia" (later published in Midwestern Gothic) and "The Way Business Is Done" (still unpublished). I have pretty much zero chance of winning, but there's no entry fee and they accept online submissions, so I went right ahead anyway. Today is the last day for entries.

What I'm writing

I don't want to make too much of this, given my chronic inability to transform fiction concepts into finished manuscripts, but I just wanted to mark this event in case my latest idea ever comes to fruition. Last night I started writing a novel, with the working title "Express." I've been kicking the story around in my head since the late nineties, but only lately has it finally begun to coalesce. It involves three main characters who live very different and separate lives, and though I have a pretty good idea of each character's story, the biggest challenge will be drawing the three of them together. I'm not interested in writing three discrete novellas, but instead one cohesive novel. I will be focusing on this one for the next few months, then set it aside to simmer while I resume the next round of edits for Marshland.

It's too early to tell if anything will ever come of this, but at least I'll have something creative to occupy my mind for a while.

Milestone

Last night I finished the second draft of my story collection Where the Marshland Came to Flower. After making steady progress with the edits, I had a mechanical setback in November when my older laptop suddenly died (broken hard drive, from the sound of it) and left me without a portable machine. I also lost the second draft of the book's first four stories, which were on the hard drive when it went down. At that point my pace slowed dramatically as I had to edit at home on another laptop (the battery on this one is dead, thus rendering it not-portable) whenever I could. Then in mid-December Julie bailed me out when she got a "new" (factory-refurbished) MacBook and gave me her old one. (Not that my MacBook is at all as inferior or a hand-me-down - it's a big upgrade over the Dell and HP laptops I had been using.) With the MacBook, I was able to write on the train again and whipped quickly through the edits, and I now have a decent manuscript.

I'm sending it to the printer today and soon will hand it off to a few trusted readers. I anticipate two more rounds of revisions before it's ready to send to publishers, which I'm targeting to happen by the end of 2012 at the latest. I'm pretty happy with what I have so far, and have found writing this book to be much easier than Wheatyard was.

Gong!

Wheatyard was just turned down for the fourth time, by one of the very best independent presses out there. They said that while they were "intrigued" by the story's premise, it just didn't fit their fiction needs. Which, for all I know, might just be their boilerplate language for rejections. As has been my habit, I immediately turned around and submitted a query to another great indie. One of these has to hit eventually. Onward.

Note to self...

...write a short story, or at least a character sketch, around this passage from Aharon Appelfeld's The Iron Tracks.

Meanwhile, his buffet is meager, and the customers are few. Once his young wife breathed life into the place, but since her sudden death he has aged. He neglects the buffet and sits by the window most of the day, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.

Brief and plainly written, yet with so much hidden depth.

"...the unknown reader I sometimes say I imagine..."

In The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, James Salter (talking with Dan Pope) brushes past a question about formal recognition of an author's accomplishments (publication, awards, etc.) and reflects on a surprise reader reaction to one of his books:

There are few thrills like the first one, but not long ago at a party a woman I was being introduced to said simply, "Did she really just read a magazine?" She was referring to a scene in A Sport and a Pastime. She assumed I would know. My God, all the things of inconsequence she might have said! I don't remember her name, but she was the unknown reader I sometimes say I imagine, the woman in her thirties or forties who perhaps lives in Buenos Aires.

It must be a thrill for any writer to encounter a reader who mentally retains the big themes or major characters or settings of one of the writer's books, but even more so when they remember a tiny detail like the one Salter mentions. That shows how vividly rendered the tiny detail was, which really points out the writer's skill. Most writers can nail the big theme or major character, but if one can also nail the tiny details, now that's a real writer.

I also like Salter's idea of the "unknown reader", which to me means that one reader out there which the writer is trying to connect with. It might mean simple motivation for the writer ("This is who I'm writing the story for") or a reality check. For me it's the latter. When I'm writing, now and then I imagine a few specific (not "unknown") family members and friends as future readers, and ask myself: "Would my reader think this character is believable? That this is really how people talk? That this plotline is plausible?" All of which keeps me grounded.

Ashtabula

At MobyLives, Paul Oliver has written a nice piece on Ashtabula, Ohio and its local Occupy movement.

While Wall St. is certainly the fortress of everything the movement is fighting against, a city like Ashtabula is everything that the movement is or should be fighting for. The 99% is a wide-ranging demographic, but at its bottom is the forgotten mill and port towns. Places like Ashtabula, Ohio or York, Pennsylvania.

Though I've never been there, Ashtabula will always have a place in my heart, as it was the setting of my first published story, "Ectoplasm". (The inspiration for the story was the same Dylan lyric that Oliver mentions.) Clearly, the same economic conditions that drove my story continue today, and have even worsened. I'm not sure that my protagonist would have still had his teaching job in 2011.

"Halloween Parade"

Yesterday I finished the second draft of my new story collection, Where Once the Marshland Came to Flower. Though the title is a nod to a line to Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make (each story is set in a different Chicago neighborhood), the impetus to my collection was a single line ("and some crack team from Washington Heights") from Lou Reed's "Halloween Parade." That line came to mind one morning five years ago as my train approached the Washington Heights station on Chicago's South Side, and as it stuck with me I began to imagine a collection of Chicago stories, with each inspired by a song from Reed's New York album. The book would never have existed without Lou, and particularly that great album, and even more particularly that memorable song. So in Lou's honor, here's the song:

Lou Reed, "Halloween Parade"

New, at Contrary

My latest column - on my observations and presumptions of a single suburban street - is now up at Contrary.

Gong!

I just received rejection number three for Wheatyard. I really had high hopes for this one. The publisher is an up-and-coming indie outfit that really seems like it has its act together, and they liked the first two chapters I sent last spring well enough that they recently requested the entire manuscript. (For a writer, I suppose that's like getting a second interview from a prospective employer.) Unfortunately, though they said they admired my writing and had many nice things to say about the book, it just didn't quite work for them.

One specific issue they mentioned was a supposed lack of impetus for the narrator's fascination with the protagonist; though other readers have also made this point, I thought the impetus was fairly clear, and if I said it any more explicitly I might as well beat the reader over the head with it. Since I feel like I need to keep moving ahead with my writing and working new material, I'm hesitant to dive back into the manuscript for yet another revision, so for now I'm keeping it as-is. If some publisher likes the book well enough to give a tentative acceptance that's contingent on resolving the impetus issue, then I'll do more revisions.

This rejection was a real disappointment, but I'm not despairing - in fact, I've already submitted it to another well-regarded publisher. Onward.

"Lines For Autumn"

The trees surrender
For another year
Reds oranges golds browns
Wither in resignation
When the winds come up
Leaves shimmer down like sleet
Crackle and pelt the ground
Later to soften with the rain
Bedding for next year's growth.

"...it isn’t so much a city as it is a vasty way station..."

Perhaps the most frequently quoted passage in Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make is this one:

Yet once you’ve come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.

Certainly a memorable quote. Yet it is immediately preceded by this:

You can live your whole life out somewhere between Goose Island and Bronzeville without once feeling that, the week after you move, the neighbors are going to miss your place. For it isn’t so much a city as it is a vasty way station where three and a half million bipeds swarm with the single cry, "One side or a leg off, I’m gettin’ mine!" It’s every man for himself in this hired air.

That attitude - of the disconnected and indifferent nature of city residents - has been with me throughout the writing of my current story collection, Marshland. Most of my characters are loners, and though I greatly admire unified story cycles like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, I didn't even try for such a thing with my book. Each story is set in a different Chicago neighborhood, from West Pullman to Rogers Park, Garfield Ridge to Austin to Dunning, and the characters in each story don't cross paths with characters in any other story, with very few of them even setting foot outside of their immediate neighborhood. And even within those tight confines, few have neighbors who will miss their place the week after they move.

"You have to have two stories to have a story."

In The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, Grace Paley talks (with Nell Freudenberger) about her short story "Somewhere Else", which is set in both China and the Bronx:

You know - the thing is this: if I just wrote about China, it would be a report, more or less. You have to have two stories to have a story. That's what I've been teaching my classes. You need two stories, at least. And for a novel, of course, you probably need more. I couldn't find the other story. I mean, I wasn't conscious of this; my idea that you need two stories came long after I wrote everything. I said, "Oh, that's what I was doing."

I had never thought of story-writing that way, but it makes perfect sense. You do need two stories to make a story; otherwise, it's just a sketch (or, in Paley's words, a report). Unless you have conflict, you don't really have a story. It doesn't have to be two parallel story lines with separate protagonists that ultimately collide; instead, it can be two aspects of a single protagonist: past versus present, internal versus external, work life versus family life.

Thinking about the story collection I'm working on right now (working title: Marshland), I can already recognize that the stronger stories are indeed comprised of two stories, and that the weaker ones may have an interesting premise but are flat because the conflict (those two stories) is absent.

"We Who Are About To Breed"

The group blog We Who Are About To Die has graciously published my guest post, in which I share my thoughts on the intersection of writing and parenting. My sincere thanks to Patrick Wensink for the opportunity.

Closing time

This week at the Powell's Books blog, Amor Towles is discussing "closing time", that brief tentative lull that occurs in bars between last call and heading home (or elsewhere). Yesterday Towles' piece was on Frank Sinatra's "One For My Baby" (a tune I definitely need to download), and today it's Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (which happens to be my favorite Hemingway story). Very interesting narrative. And the shameless self-promoter in me can't resist using this as an excuse to point once again to my own story, "Clean and Bright", which was published at the online journal Joyland in 2009 and retells Hemingway's story from the perspective of the old man in the café.

"Moored"

The abandoned boat bobbed at anchor, rocking heavily when ships lumbered past. Below deck the man labored, hands unsteady and eyesight hazed, cursing as he picked shot pellets from the raw wound in his thigh. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. He prayed there weren't more, that the gin would disinfect well enough, and moved in closer with the needle and Trilene he had found.

Gong!

The second rejection of Wheatyard just arrived. It was from a small publisher that I thought I might have an "in" with (via a mutual friend), though the publisher probably wasn't aware of that connection. When I submitted I refrained from any name-dropping; I kind of want the book to stand on its own merits, independent of any connections, even if those connections might open doors for me. The notification was standard boilerplate ("We've decided to pass on this one") and not too encouraging. Given the volume of submissions that publishers are seeing these days, I'm sure I'll get many more like this before the book finally finds a home, so this doesn't trouble me very much. Onward.

"The Tranquil Peace of the Alley Smoker"

The way was only lightly traveled. The building had no loading dock and no delivery trucks coming and going, with the traffic limited to the occasional taxicab shortcutting through, from one one-way street to the next. From where she sat, on a narrow concrete ledge behind the building, curled over a paperback with a cigarette clenched in her fingers, she was only vaguely aware of the cars that flashed past at the far end of the alley. Their colors flicked by, barely seen at the furthest edge of her vision, their engines growling suddenly before silencing again. For her the street and the rest of the world were far away.

The smoke wisped upward from the dimming ember of ash, the cigarette close enough for the next quick puff while keeping the smoke from her eyes. She pored intently over the words, devouring them, flipping page after page with the thumb of her left hand, unconsciously waving the cigarette in midair like a baton. Soon she would return to the office and work, but for a few moments more she would linger, deep within the mystery, inhabiting it, living alongside the other characters, transported back decades into the past.

Gong!

That subject line is in honor of Chuck Barris, and marks the first time that my recently completed novella Wheatyard was booted off the stage; that is, declined by a publisher. My plan is to post an update here whenever I get an official "no" from a publisher, while keeping all names anonymous. In this instance, the editor was extremely kind, reading the entire manuscript and giving me his decision and constructive criticism in only about nine hours. He also said it was the first time he had received an over-the-transom (that is, unsolicited) manuscript, which is certainly some sort of distinction. Onward.

Archive.org

One of the downsides to publishing online is that sometimes websites go defunct, without warning, and your work is lost. But not always lost forever, as I've pleasantly discovered. I first found the wonderful Internet Archive from its vast library of live music recordings, but only recently learned that it also archives old web pages. So here are two lost stories of mine that I rediscovered yesterday:

"Guaranteed", in Spillway Review: Spillway was a New Orleans-based journal that managed to survive Hurricane Katrina. In fact, I sent them "Guaranteed" before Katrina, but after the storm I just assumed the journal was no more. I was pleasantly surprised to hear from them months later, and the story was published in 2006. But the journal has since disappeared. Reading this early story, I now realize that my work had much more humor than now. Maybe I'm getting old and serious.

"Have a Pleasant Commute on Metra", from This Is Grand: Chicago literary impressario Jonathan Messinger (featherproof Books, The Dollar Store, etc.) once ran this site, which collected true stories from CTA trains and buses. Somehow I managed to convince him to take this brief Metra piece, one of my earliest publications which first appeared in 2004. I later sent in another Metra piece, "So Much On My Mind", but when the site went black soon after the piece was orphaned, and I published it here instead.

Quoting myself

"Heroes can't be emulated if you don't really know how they live."

There it is: the theme (motif?) of my next novel.

Milestone is finally reached

Wheatyard is finished. (Or momentarily finished, until some editor starts tearing it apart.) I first started writing the book in late 2005, and just this morning, sitting in a drafty corridor in Union Station, I typed in the final edits. I didn't even mind the cold. When I stepped outside the sun was shining and I didn't mind the cold there either. I'm relieved and maybe even a little proud of myself for getting this done at last. Soon I'll start hunting for publishers, but for now I'm savoring the moment.

Kindled and Nooked

The debut issue of Midwestern Gothic (ahem) is now available for Kindle and Nook. Really, what are you waiting for?

"Mahalia"

I am thrilled to announce the publication of my short story "Mahalia" in the debut issue of Midwestern Gothic, a sharp-looking quarterly journal from Ann Arbor, Michigan. "Mahalia" is one of the first stories I wrote after finally getting serious about writing, way back in 2003, and after all these years it remains the story that's closest to my heart. It's been rejected over forty times by various journals and contests, and though all of those rejections could have easily brought me great doubt about the worth of the story and even myself as a writer, I never stopped believing in the story. Finally getting "Mahalia" published is, to me, a real validation of my writing, and I couldn't be happier to see it in print. My very special thanks to founders and editors Jeff Pfaller and Robert James Russell.

You can buy Midwestern Gothic here, either in print ($12) or ebook/PDF ($2.99). Plenty of great writers are in the debut issue, which I highly encourage you to check out.

Tools of the trade

Okay, so "tools of the trade" is somewhat misleading, because "trade" implies I make a living at writing, which is certainly not the case. Still, they're tools, specifically: a Hewlett-Packard laptop which mercifully lost its Internet connection to a virus, and is now free of all online distractions; an H-P power cord for recharging; a Maxtor external hard drive for file backup; a Wilson-Jones looseleaf binder for manuscript printouts; a Rhodia notebook for handwritten revisions and random ideas; a Uniball pen for jotting edits; and a lowly but incredibly essential binder clip, which holds the manuscript and/or notebook pages open as I type. And not shown in the photo is my favorite tool of all: a handcarved wooden pen that Julie gave me as a birthday gift very early in our relationship, which I use to write all of my longhand first drafts. All have served me well in whatever writing success I've had.

A

Having a last name that starts with "A" has often had its disadvantages (one being that, with assigned seating, I usually had to sit in the front row in school) but in this case it has really paid off.

What I'm writing

I'm finishing up the fourth draft of my novel-in-progress, Wheatyard. For almost three years now I've been carrying a hard copy of the manuscript (bound in a navy blue Mead binder) to and from work in my messenger bag, for it to be handy should the editing whim strike me while I'm riding the train. That copy is now heavily marked up, and also supplemented by a newer notebook where I've been jotting ideas and longer revisions as they've come to me. During the past few months I've been transcribing all of those edits into a new Word file on my laptop, but even seeing all those words on a screen hasn't prevented me from feeling (undoubtedly aided by the constant presence of that messy hard copy and notebook) that the book is still an unruly mess that's far from completion.

That is, until this morning. I'm still working on one critical section (in the second-to-last chapter, and what I think of as "the revelation scene"), which I wanted to print out in order to do further revisions. However, our home printer recently ran out of ink, so I emailed the document to myself so I could print it out at the office. (Relax, Employer, it's only ten pages and not the entire manuscript.) On the train this morning, while checking email on my iPhone I came upon that self-sent message, and opened up the Word file. And up it popped, looking neat and tidy and not unlike several published ebooks that I've been perusing on my phone.

Immediately it occurred to me that, indeed, this does look like a book. And reading through it, the writing is good. GOOD. Not perfect yet, but good. I now realize that I'm a lot closer to finishing this book than I had assumed. In another month it should be ready to send to publishers. Hurray!

Coming soon...

Another six-word story of mine...

...is up at Six Word Stories. (Kudos to Richard Thompson for supplying the album title that inspired me.) You know, if I was as successful with 6,000 words as I am with 6, I might just make a living with this writing thing.

Malodorous

White Eagle Coffee Store Press (in Fox River Grove, Illinois, right next to my childhood home in Cary) has announced the latest winners of its "Scent Of An Ending" contest, which asked for the terribly-written ending of an imaginary novel, along with the novel's title. My entry, alas, was not one of the finalists:

Clifford Paul, Night Stormy and Dark
The darkness struggled against that, the scanty lamps of the flame agitating and rattling fiercely along the house-tops (in London it lies, for that is our scene), the swept streets checked it up by violent intervals, the wind was occasional except when at a gust of rain in which the torrents fell; a stormy and dark night it was.

That sentence is, essentially, the opening line from Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford, rewritten in reverse. Bulwer-Lytton's novel is the one which famously begins "It was a dark and stormy night...", with that sentence being widely considered one of the shining (or non-shining) examples of a cliched or hackneyed story opening. So I figured if that was a bad story opening, then reversing it might make for a bad story ending. My piece isn't an exact reversal of the original sentence - among other things, I had to repeatedly flip nouns and verbs to make it readable, but other than that it's very faithful to the (terrible) original.

Too bad I didn't win the contest. I really could have used that $89.93 first prize, not to mention the universal acclaim.

Quick update

Hüsker Dü did the job last evening, and I eked out three or four pages of line edits. Not a major accomplishment, but at least it's a start. Slow and steady wins the race, right?

What I'm writing

My weekdays give me two hour-long blocks of down time: the train ride to and from work, morning and evening. Mornings I've set aside for reading, as then I seem to be at my sharpest and most refreshed, which I need to fully engage with serious fiction. But when I'm tired I can't really focus well enough to read, which is why I've devoted my evening train ride to writing, which is a less passive and more mentally engaging pastime. The evening train is also essentially the only time I write, since when I'm home in the evenings and on weekends I focus on family time instead of the relative isolation that writing requires. (Yes, I'm surrounded by others on the train, but I keep totally to myself and have no "train buddies.")

Since my last update on my progress on Wheatyard (a post which seems, when I read it now, overly self-congratulatory and/or self-pitying), I've done almost no work on it. This despite originally wanting to have this draft finished (and readied for submission to publishers) by the end of December, and then (when that didn't happen) the end of March. What little writing I've managed during the past month was a flash fiction piece which, due to its brevity and derivative structure, didn't really require that much effort. The rest of the time I've squandered playing euchre on my phone, browsing The Reader, or napping, which puts me no closer to getting Wheatyard published than I was before. I might even be further away now, as what little momentum I had achieved a month ago was soon left behind.

None of this latest update is at all intended as self-pity, and I hope it doesn't come across that way. I'm just trying to impart what an ongoing struggle this book has been. Inevitably I have my sights on newer, fresher story concepts that I want to pursue, but I know that if I don't show any ability to finish a book - and Wheatyard, despite its stagnation, is the closest I've ever come to finishing - then thinking of other books is totally pointless.

This week I'm trying another tack. Over the weekend I burned three heavy albums onto my iPod - Hüsker Dü's The Living End (live shows from their final tour, in 1987), Minor Threat's Complete Discography and Sonic Youth's Dirty. Those albums are pretty out of character with the lighter, poppier stuff I usually listen to, and I thought it might jar me out of my evening-train rut - not only keeping me awake, but also away from euchre and focused on writing. Those three bands brought such power and passion to their art, and if I can inject even a tenth of that into my writing, it might be enough to get this book finished. We'll see.

Jeff Vande Zande

Based on this strong review, I'm definitely adding Jeff Vande Zande's Landscape with Fragmented Figures to my list. Jeff co-edited On the Clock: Contemporary Short Stories of Work (from Bottom Dog Press, which also published Landscape) which included my short story "The Last Final Copy", so picking up his book is the very least I can do to return the favor.

Hey, the publishing industry is built on quid pro quo/incestuous relationships, like pretty much every other industry. Just deal with it.

What I'm writing

I'm currently in the fourth draft of my novel, Wheatyard. Until recently, the latest revisions have gone well - the existing narrative has been significantly tightened up, while several new sections have been added that provide a clearer view of the narrator. (Thus correcting one of the biggest flaws of the earlier drafts - the focus was too much on the protagonist, Wheatyard, while the narrator was too thinly drawn.)

I've now fully revised five of the six chapters, but have been intentionally writing around (that is, avoiding) the fifth chapter. That one is the longest and thorniest chapter in the book, when Wheatyard finally reveals details about his personal life and his past, which the narrator has been tentatively seeking out for the entire book to that point. Before the holidays I sketched out that chapter, focusing on its key points and identifying parts that could be trimmed or eliminated entirely. Right now the chapter is much too long, wordy and redundant, and needs a lot of intense work. Then during the holidays I set the manuscript aside, partly to take a breather but mostly because I wasn't totally sure I was ready to plunge into heavy revision.

Last night, on the train home, I finally dove in. And I hit bottom. Though I had a sense of what needed to be done, I had little idea of how to go about it. I read through my sketch notes again and again, trying to decide what needed to be cut. I went back and forth between the manuscript and my handwritten notes, which literally required juggling while sitting in a tight train seat crowded by the stranger in the next seat, a woman whose handbag, for further discomfort, was pressed against my hip. As I struggled to organize my thoughts, I accidentally dropped my pen into the narrow gap between the seat and wall, and then later, as frustration mounted further, a stack of looseleaf sheets fell out of the manuscript cover and scattered on the floor. I picked them up, swearing. I was utterly, completely overwhelmed. I shoved all my papers together, stacked them on my lap, folded my arms across my chest, leaned back and closed my eyes, at that moment not caring if I worked on this novel - now five years in the making - ever again.

I stayed that way for several minutes, trying to calm myself - not calm enough to resume writing, but just to feel like a normal person again. Then, to my surprise, when the train's first stop was announced the woman stood and headed toward the exit. I opened my eyes as she departed, and wondered if she was truly leaving, or just tossing something in the garbage or needing to use the restroom. But when she stopped to wait in the line of departing passengers, I realized I had the seat to myself. I shoved my messenger bag to the other seat, leaned my elbow on it and stretched out, cracking open the manuscript again. I was still on edge, but that brief pause and the extra room changed things just enough. I also thought it was best to ignore the big picture for the time being, and instead of thinking about theme and major cuts, I focused completely on line editing - deleting phrases, changing verbs, all the detail work that the manuscript would eventually need anyway. And I made progress, slow but steady.

When the train reached my stop, I packed up and departed, and even the bracing cold outside was unable to dampen my mood. As I walked to my car I felt much better about things - about both the novel's potential and my general self - and decided that I could keep the writing going for a while longer yet.

"Tangled in Wishes"

My short story "Tangled in Wishes" has been published at The Journal of Microliterature. I wrote the story in early 2007, during a pretty dark period of my life, when I was about to lose my job and didn't know where I would end up next. I don't know whether that mood comes out in the story or not, but thought I'd mention it anyway. The title is a nod to Iris Dement's "My Life", a terrific song that was brilliantly interpreted by Joel R.L. Phelps (one of my very favorite musicians) on his 2001 album Inland Empires.

"Lesson"

Waiting, he looks up from a wrinkled magazine, hears the tentative acoustic notes still a half-beat behind the electric, senses those rhythms coming together, smiles.

Another six-word story of mine...

...is up at Six Word Stories.

On The Clock contest - We have a winner!

The On The Clock giveaway contest has now ended. The winner is Rosa, who passed along this great lesson learned from her first job:

My first real job was as a housekeeper at a hotel, the summer after I graduated from college. The most important thing I learned was to always check my paystub. One day a co-worker and I were looking at our timecards, and adding up our hours for the week, and our supervisor walked by and snatched them out of our hands. She told us that we were not allowed to do that. After that, I wrote my hours down every day, and started comparing them with what I was actually paid for, and every check was short a few hours. After about the third time I complained, my checks were right, but each of my co-workers who checked theirs, also found "mistakes".

While all the entries were quite good, this one really stood out. Be cautious, or The Man will stick it to you. Something for all of us to remember.

Book Giveaway Contest: On The Clock

As I mentioned earlier, Bottom Dog Press recently published an anthology, On The Clock: Contemporary Short Stories of Work, which includes my story "The Last Final Copy." I'm working my way through the collection - the stories of Bonnie Jo Campbell and Jim Daniels are particularly good - and have really enjoyed it so far.

To give the book some more exposure, I'm holding a contest here to give a free copy to one lucky winner. To enter, please leave a comment below in which you describe your first real job, and the most important thing you learned from the experience. To get everyone going, I'll offer that my first real job was working fast food - first cashier, then grill cook - at a smaller, third-rate amusement park outside of Chicago. (For Chicago-area natives of a certain age who really care to know, it was Santa's Village, in 1983.) I worked there the summer before I started college, and the most important thing I learned is how important it was to study hard and get good grades in college, and thus avoid having to work fast food for the rest of my life.

To save on mailing costs, I'm limiting eligibility to U.S. participants only. The contest will remain open through midnight, Thursday, September 16. Shortly after that, I'll pick my favorite of all the entries, and that person will win the book. Good luck!

"The Last Final Copy"

Bottom Dog Press is a Cleveland-based indie publisher, established in 1985, which is devoted particularly to Midwestern literature. The press has released a new anthology, On The Clock: Contemporary Short Stories of Work, which is co-edited by Jeff Vande Zande and Josh Maday and is focused on work-related short stories. I am very pleased to announce that the anthology includes my story "The Last Final Copy" which imagines the final hours of Chicago's legendary City News Bureau, on New Year's Eve, 2005, when it was closed for good by its corporate overlords. The story was written four years ago and was in limbo for the past several years as I debated whether to leave it as originally written or expand it further; I ultimately went with the former and am very grateful to the editors and Bottom Dog for taking the story. It's a story that means a lot to me personally, and one that I'm particularly proud of.

On The Clock is now available for sale through the Bottom Dog website, and includes stories by many fine writers including Matt Bell, Michael Martone, Sean Lovelace and many others, and I'm truly honored to be part of their company.

A free novel concept, just for you

As a writer, I'm good at coming up with ideas, but no so good at seeing those ideas through to a completed story or book. It's something I'm working to rectify, but at the same time I'm aware of my limitations, and know that some of my ideas will absolutely, positively never come to fruition and aren't worth my pursuing.

Case in point is this story from this week's Chicago Reader. Essentially, this entrepreneur is working on perfecting the process of cold fusion, with the intent of creating energy reactors for individual homes which, it's hoped, will drastically reduce a home's gas and electrical usage and mostly remove consumers from the energy grid. Although the science is far from perfected - no one is quite sure just how the original experiments in cold fusion created energy - the entrpreneur seems somewhat paranoid, worrying that highly vested interests (big oil companies, oil-producing nations) in the fossil fuel industry are gunning for him, seeing him as a threat to their business. In other words, he seems to think he might be an assassination target. Probably far-fetched, of course - but also great fodder for a thriller novel. It has so many great elements - the lone, little-guy hero, the big bad oil companies, shadowy assassins (whether real or imaginary), an elusive technology and the big overriding themes of global warming and the future of the planet and the human race.

That said, it's a novel that won't be written by me. Thrillers aren't my thing, and I could never do justice to the complicated science of cold fusion. Which is why I'm handing the concept over to you, fellow writers. Free of charge. All I ask is a tiny mention of me on your acknowledgments page.

Coming soon...

"Sherlock Alger"

Today marks the publication of Joe's Luck: The World's Longest Literary Remix, in which 150 writers (myself included) remixed/rewrote a single page of Horatio Alger's 1910 novel, Joe's Luck: Always Wide Awake, under the editorship of Jason Boog at GalleyCat. (Explanation here.) The abridged version can be read here, with my page starting on page 32 of the Scribd viewer (the text between the sentences in red is mine).

For my piece, I took what was originally a fairly uninteresting scene with truly terrible dialogue, and reimagined it as a lost passage from a Sherlock Holmes story. To refresh my memory before I began writing, I re-read some Holmes stories for the first time in years, and was surprised at how densely wordy Doyle's tales were - to create a truly faithful homage to Holmes, I would have needed four or five times the number of words that were allotted to me for this project. Because of this, my version of a Holmes story comes off as almost minimalist in style. But given the constraints I was working under, I'm pretty pleased with the result. And it was certainly fun to write.

What I'm Writing

You heard me, writing.

In the past, I occasionally posted "What I'm Writing" updates here, most of which were stories and novellas which would ultimately remain unfinished. Though at first I might have had a spark of a great fiction concept that excited me - enough so to shout it to the blogosphere - for whatever reason I saw very few of those concepts through to fruition. Getting publicly excited about ideas that would never go anywhere seemed like an increasingly pointless exercise, so I ended the updates. I decided that I'd abandon that practice until I finally had something significant to mention.

And it seems that time is now.

Last summer I revived my concept (yes, yet another concept) for a Chicago-based short story collection that used Lou Reed's New York album as a framework. I first kicked a few stories around several years ago, but like so many other writing projects I simply let the rest languish. Then just about a year ago I had a sudden inspiration - which I'll discuss explicitly in the near future - that threw me back into the collection. Suddenly it seemed like the collection had real potential, and I set a concrete goal for myself: I would write the first draft of each of the remaining twelve stories (for fourteen stories in total, one for each of the songs on New York), one per month, over the following year. With my first attempt at a story collection (circa 2005) having turned out to be a unsatisfying hodgepodge of styles, voices and themes, with the new collection I thought it would be best to create all the first drafts first, before even beginning to edit. This way, I hoped, I could polish the stories, one after the other, and create a steady tone and what I hoped would be a more unified collection. And besides getting an even tone, I knew that this method would greatly increase the likelihood of ever gaining a finished product - if I tried to write each story one at a time, from first draft through endless revisions, the challenge of doing so over and over again, fourteen times, would have been overwhelmingly daunting. I’m not a highly productive or motivated writer, and it doesn’t take much of an obstacle for me to abandon work that once seemed promising.

This week, I finished the first draft of the fourteenth and final story in the collection, and I'm quite pleased with what I've come up with so far. The next step is to transcribe the stories from longhand (written in composition books, mostly on the train to and from work) onto my laptop, and then the editing can begin. Transcribing will probably take a while, but I'm sure it will feel worthwhile and not so tedious, since I have fourteen vivid stories (or the potential for such) to work with, and I'm eager enough to see the final product that all of the labor will have real meaning.

It's been a long, drawn-out process, but one that has really excited and engaged my imagination. During the past six months I've had, for various reasons, periods of erratic sleep, and while lying awake in bed at night I've often found myself working out story ideas in my head, which not only fueled my creativity but also helped pass many long and restless hours until I finally fell asleep or it was time to get up. My current job is also fairly uninspiring and has few intrinsic rewards, and I'm grateful that I've had my writing - and this story collection concept in particular - as a critical creative outlet.

It's been a slow couple of years, but I finally feel like I'm a writer again.

Beneficial compulsion

"Chance has certainly played its part, but one thing that’s certain is their inner compulsion – and the stronger the compulsion, the further one goes."
- Bei Dao, "Once Upon a Time the Zhou Brothers"

Dao's quote muses on the success of the Zhou brothers, Chicago-based artists, in the recent "Chicago Issue" of Granta. Reading that line on the train this morning inspired me to set the journal aside and delve back into the short story I've been writing off and on during the last few weeks. I rarely write in the morning, but thanks to that impetus I knocked off another couple hundred words or so before I arrived downtown. I'm certainly not compulsive with my writing, though a little compulsion would probably do me good and help me "go further."

Vampire

I have another six-word story up, appropriately enough, at Six Word Stories.

Two views of Craigville, Minnesota

This is fascinating - two very different barroom scenes, taken from the same perspective, in the same town (Craigville, MN), by the same photographer (Russell Lee), during the same month (September 1937). Judging by the architectural details of the two rooms, they appear to be separate establishments. The mood of each photograph couldn't be more different - the jovial, boisterous group scene of the first (in fact, part of that image was used in the opening credits of the TV show Cheers) versus the lonely, desperate tone of the second, whose emotional desolation is leavened only by the odd presence of the kitten.

Seeing that first photo today made me scramble to find the second, which I was already familiar with - in fact, it was the inspiration and basis for my short story "Deep in the Northwoods" which appeared in Wheelhouse Magazine in 2007. When I first saw that photo I was so struck by the sadness of the scene that I tried to imagine how it had come about, and where it would lead, with that story being the end result. (Had I had come across the first photo instead, I doubt that I would have been inspired to write a story about it.) The story is part of my chapbook This Land Was Made for You and Me which I've been unsuccessfully shopping around to numerous publishers.

"Conned and Bruised"

I'm very pleased to announce that my comic noir story "Conned and Bruised" has been published at A Twist of Noir. My warmest thanks to Christopher Grant, who is the fastest editor I've come across - I submitted the story yesterday, and it was published today. Can't get a much more prompt response than that. And extra thanks to William Denton, whose Twists, Slugs and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang provided most of the jargon used in my story. Almost every term in that glossary was completely new to me before I wrote the story.