It’s time for another highly overdue edition of Hey, Internet!

Keith & Fran’s Arty Geodesic Dome Home

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live inside a geodesic dome?  Wonder no more!

Mars Rover Twitter Feeds

A friend recently alerted me to the fact that Spirit and Opportunity, Phoenix, and Curiosity all have their own Twitter feeds.  The feeds are often written in the first person, which produces an interesting sort of anthropomorphized narrative for the rovers.  Why aren’t there more Mars rover POV stories out there?  Get it together, nerds.

The Cartoonist’s Goal

Daniel Clowes talks about art.  I kind of laughed when the narrator of this short suggested that I might not know who Daniel Clowes is.

The Best Recent Stories

HTMLGIANT polled readers on what they thought were the best recent short stories.  The results are worth a look.  The list includes “The Navigators”, a Mike Meginnis story that was one of my favorite pieces of 2011.  Anyone want to get me a subscription to Hobart for my birthday?

Fifty Shades of Fan Fiction

The Millions discusses, among other things, the fact that the latest bestselling erotic novel is really just Edward/Bella slash fiction.

Checking Out

Speaking of erotica, here’s an examination of the sexy librarian trope.

 The Hat, by Rachel Levy

You know what? Just leave the hat on.

Over the last few days I’ve been thinking a lot about the above Bukowski poem. I think I stumble over microfiction because I keep forgetting that it needs to have the precision, timing, and rhythm of poetry. I haven’t written poetry since I was 17. I keep trying to write microfiction, though, because one day I’d like to be able to tell a story as concisely and brutally as that poem does.

I am working on two pieces of microfiction right now. One is called “Paperback Romance” and the other is called “Mars”.  The first is somewhat satirical, the second is sincere, and both of them are steeped in my usual sort of genre melancholy.

Microfiction is a puzzle I am trying to figure out.  My brain is extending tender new dendrites in its direction.

I’m reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.  The translation I have is a good one, and the text retains Bulgakov’s distinctive voice.  I don’t have a copy of the Russian text to compare, but the Burgin and O’Connor translation actually makes me feel like I’m reading Russian prose.

“But no, no! The seductive mystics lie, the Caribbeans of this world are gone – desperate marauders do not sail across them, chased by covettes, the cannon smoke does not hang low over the waves. There is nothing, and there never was anything! The stunted linden tree over there is all there is, and the iron fence, and the boulevard behind it… And the ice melting in the little bowl, and someone’s bloodshot bull-like eyes at a neighboring table, and it’s awful, awful… Oh gods, oh my gods, give me poison, poison!”

I’m completely enamored with the novel’s omniscient, third person narrator.  It’s refreshing to encounter a disembodied narrator who grabs readers by the lapels and violently rattles them into understanding.  This has, of course, made me want to write a story with a maniacally present third person omniscient narrator.  I might do so.  But!

A month or so ago one of my close friends was reading Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84.  She texted me, “This seems like what you would write if you were a middle-aged Japanese man.”

That’s not surprising.  Reading Murakami as a teenager, and then again in writing workshops as an undergraduate, is partially what convinced me that I could write the kind of fiction I wanted to write.  (See also: Katherine Dunn, Mary Gaitskill, ect, ect.)  My teenage brain imprinted on Murakami, and some of his patterns are bound to creep into my own writing.

This happens.  Maud Newton, for example, has talked about the virulent infectiousness of David Foster Wallace’s prose style.  During the summer I read Infinite Jest, I often caught myself sliding into footnotes and parentheticals.

This doesn’t happen to me when I read someone like Gary Lutz, at least.  I’d have to reread Stories in the Worst Way many, many times before I could start writing in Lutzian grammar.

Of course, nothing is new and everything is borrowed or stolen.  It’s perfectly all right to have influences, even if we can’t shake our anxiety about them.  But if I slip into someone else’s voice like it’s a borrowed coat, am I still developing my own?  Is this an effective form of experimentation, or a crutch, or an echo chamber?  Is voice creep just an unavoidable part of reading and writing?

Unstuck publishes literary speculative fiction.  Or, if you prefer, speculative literary fiction.  If you have a polished piece of specu-literary short fiction or poetry lying around, consider sending it our way.

If you’re curious, you can read more about Unstuck in this New York Times blurb or in this  CultureMap feature about one of our readings.

So, you may have noticed that I got to about day 11 of the FFFTTD and then stopped entirely.  I could make excuses for myself.  I was recovering from a bout of tendonitis.  I was preparing for a giant benefit concert at work.  I was traveling for a week.

 But, truly, it’s nobody’s fault but my own.  I managed my time poorly, didn’t pace myself, and thus burned out halfway through.

Despite flunking out of FFFTTD, though, I still found it to be an entirely worthwhile experience.  Here’s some of what I learned.

 Writing Microfiction is Hard

It is very difficult to write a satisfying story in under 150 words.  One of my major challenges during FFFTTD was trying to keep things short.  I was often so excited about the concepts the prompts would pull out of my brain that I would just want to write and edit for two hours or more.  The trouble is, writing and editing for two hours a day isn’t really sustainable for me.  I need to go to work, and read submissions, and work on contracting projects, and cook food for myself, and call my friends back, and maybe go the gym.

I’ve been really attracted to microfiction as a form and as a challenge to myself, especially after reading great pieces on sites like Wigleaf.  Generally, though, I feel like I need to have a very sharp, compact idea lined up to write a tiny story that works.  I do get ideas like that sometime.  In the past, I used to pack those ideas away because they weren’t big enough to fill 5-20 pages.  Now, though, microfiction feels feels a valid options for those ideas that seem more like a stiletto than a broadsword.

In order to be able to find the right tool for the job, though, it helps to be familiar with all of the tools.  FFFTTD definitely gave me a crash course in the mechanics of microfiction.

Writing Daily Is Not My Thing, But Writing Regularly Is

Sometimes I’m just not feeling it.  My best stories tend to be written in intense, focused bursts.  I enter a state of flow, and before I know it it’s 3 hours later and I have the first draft of a story.  Forcing myself to slog through a piece of fiction makes that state of flow harder to find.

Having a deadline and a sense of urgency, however, was wonderful.  I spent a lot less time after work playing Xbox and a lot more time writing.  Blocking out regular times for writing means I actually get things done, especially the not-so-fun things like proofreading stories and researching markets.  I’m going to try to carry that forward into my future work habits.  I like the idea of committing to planned chunks of writing time that can be spent on research and notes as well as actual writing.

And while the FFFTTD may not have left me with many polished stories, but it did give me an awful lot of ideas to draw from later on.

Community is Awesome

Seriously.  It was wonderful to have a group of people holding me accountable, encouraging me to work, and sharing their own work with me.

Also, reading and giving feedback on the work of other writers gives me energy to work on my own writing.  It’s not a sense of competition, but more like being lifted up by a mutual wave of creative excitement.  The ideal writing community simultaneously encourages you to keep going and pushes you to do better than what you’re doing.  I definitely felt that from the FFFTTD group.

It was also, of course, fascinating to read different writers’ responses to the same prompts.  Even after I dropped out of the FFFTTD, I really enjoyed reading a whole month of stories from the other participants.

I recently joined a bi-weekly writing group down here in Austin, and that’s definitely lit a fire under my shoes.  I’m also hoping to start managing my time well enough to attend a session or two of Write By Night.

Today is both the last day of February and the last day of FFFTTD.  If you missed them before, now would be a good time to go catch up on the work of the other participants.

Tara

Christian

Pinky

Olivia

Hey, guys. My return from a day trip to Fort Worth got unexpectedly delayed because it started snowing during my ride home.  This wasn’t a problem for me, native New Englander that I am, but the other Texas drivers on 1-35 slowed to a crawl.  I just got home, I’m very tired, and I’m not going to be able to get to this prompt tonight.

This is, however, a wonderful prompt.  So I might just try to double up tomorrow night.  Watch this space.

Oh, and go check out the other fighters’ responses.

Tara

Christian

Pinky and Olivia, are you guys still participating? I hope so, because I’ve been enjoying your responses.

After he called me and told me that he had found someone better, I fell into a brief period of absolute despair.

My tiny studio apartment became a sty to wallow in.  The recycling bin overflowed with empty bottles of fancy beers I couldn’t really afford. The varnish of my coffee table was permanently be-ringed from the bottoms of cold glasses.  Soon even those vanished as the surface of the table was covered by weekly newspapers and books about other people who were suffering as much as or more so than I was.

It smelled.  It smelled like old food and unwashed clothes and me.  I stank of sad, my body emitting some kind of chemical trail that warned other humans to stay far away.

A week after I was dumped, I spent my Friday night drinking myself into a stupor in front of a Bogart movie.  I slurred the lines along with the film.  “Here’s looking at you, kid,” I said, swirling the dregs of warm beer at the bottom of my glass.  “HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU, KID.”

I half woke up on the couch in the middle of the night.  I was in one of those dream states where your eyes are open, but you can’t move your arms or legs.  I felt like something was sitting on my chest.  It was covered in dark, wiry hair.  A tail lashed against my thighs.  It was about the size of a cat, but it was definitely not a cat.

The thing growled at me through its whiskery mouth.  There were guttural, foreign words in that growl, but I couldn’t decipher them.  I wanted to say that I didn’t understand, but I couldn’t speak.

The thing flicked me hard on the nose.

I woke up to Saturday morning sunlight streaming in through my single window and piercing my head like little spears.  As I stumbled up off the couch, I stepped on something sharp in my bare feet and cursed.  The floor of my apartment was littered with tiny screws.  I didn’t know where they came from.  Somewhere in my home, something was broken.

I sat back down on the couch.

“Get a grip,” I said to the empty air of my apartment.  “Get yourself together.”

I spent the day getting it together.  I showered, picked my dirty underwear off the floor, and did a load of laundry.  I cleared the surfaces of my table and my bed and carried bags of trash to the curb.  I turned on public radio and diligently rid myself of the pile of dirty dishes in the sink.  I brewed tea.  I threw out the moldering leftovers in my fridge and made a pot of brothy cabbage soup.

When my apartment was clean, I still couldn’t figure out where the screws had come from.  I looked suspiciously at the cheap bookshelves that lined my walls.  If they collapsed, I would probably be crushed to death by the resulting avalanche of hardcovers.  I put the pile of screws on my coffee table so that I wouldn’t lose them and read a book before bed.  I put it back on the shelf gingerly when I was done.

In the morning the screws were gone.  When I padded over to the couch, I found that I didn’t have to brush a film of dust off of the soles of my feet when I sat down.  The floors had been swept.  I never sweep.

That night I left a dish of milk and salted bread in front of the stove, like I remembered my great-grandmother doing when she was still alive.  “I’m sorry,” I said.  “Stay with me.”

———-

Idea came largely from this Exploding Dog comic, which has been haunting me for weeks.  Also, domovoi, because I really love the concept of domestic spirits. The title is just the transliteration of “home”.  This story is more about mundane objects appearing instead of disappearing, but I’m going to say it counts because the screws did disappear from wherever they were supposed to be. 

Tara

Christian

Pinky

Olivia

Oh, yes.  More filing.  Lovely.  Maybe next we can answer some phones.  Did you know your phone voice is different from your real voice?  Phony.  Phone-y.  When you were a child you wanted to be a paleontologist.  You should be ashamed of yourself.

I am bored. I am so bored that I am going to scream.  I am going to scream right into your ear, shrilly, until you rise from your ergonomic chair and run gibbering into the wilds that surround the office park.

That, at least, would be interesting.

———-

This is the first prompt I was completely stumped by. I kind of wanted to make this piece be from the point of view of Crippling Self-Doubt Demon or Baseless Social Anxiety Demon or one of my many other neuroses.  But literally all I did yesterday was answer phones, come home, drink a beer, watch the second half of The Two Towers, and go to sleep.  I am tired.  Sorry, personal demons.

Tara

Christian

Pinky

Olivia

After my nosferatu hatched, I hand fed it on drops of blood from my finger until it imprinted on me.  When it became old enough to leave its nesting box, it would follow me around the house and peep for my attention.  I named it Cornelius.

Now Cornelius eats beef blood and butcher scraps, but he still sticks to me like a shadow.  He likes to lay his head on my lap with his chin pressed to backs of his long, clawed hands while I watch television on the couch.  I stroke his bald head and scratch his leathery ears.  Cornelius seems to like nature shows the best.  I think it’s because the animals on the screen all look small enough to eat.

My apartment is completely free of mice.

———-

Yes, Nosferatu is supposed to be uncapitalized in this piece.

Tara - “Blood in the Shoe”

Christian - “Aging Blood”

Pinky

Olivia

The masks were magic, my brother said.

The masks let us scavenge above ground for food and other supplies while others choked and died in the war air.  There were too many civilians down in the shelters and the war was lasting too long.  Uncontaminated food was hard to come by.  My brother told me that people would start starving soon.

But not us, he said.

The masks were soldier masks, heavy and plated and triple filtered.  When we put them on our shoulders our heads looked too big for our bodies.  The first time I saw my brother in his mask, I thought a soldier had come into our shelter and I screamed until he took it off.

We had to hide the masks from the other civilians.  My brother told me that if anyone else saw the masks, they would kill us and take the masks, or they would take the masks and not kill us and we would die anyway.

Did you get the masks from a solider, I asked.

No, said my brother.

———-

I really need to write more stories about siblings.

Tara – “The Mask”

Christian – “An Artist’s Gallery”

Pinky

Olivia