Rasmenia

“My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.”  -S. E. Hinton

“Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.” -Kim Addonizio

“To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.” -Robertson Davies

***

A few nights ago, Olivier, the cat & I were curled up in bed, enjoying our pre-sleep reading time. Me & Cat with a paperback; Olivier reading my latest short story published by an online literary journal.

When he finished, he turned to me & said, “Yeah, I know where you got that idea from.”

“What? No you don’t. I made it up.”

“Sure. Parts of it, but I recognize a few traits in the main character & the setting. I see the parts you didn’t make up.”

“How?”

He shrugged. “Probably because I already know so many of your real-life stories. Most of your fiction is a Frankenstory made from bits of your imagination stitched together with chunks of your experiences.”

I admit it. I’ve cannibalized people that I’ve encountered in my life. I’ve taken bits & pieces of one person, mixed them with another person & given them the physical appearance of another. Fragments of conversations & memorable incidents get thrown in. The character that appears in the story is something akin to my very own Frankenstein’s monster, all made up of stitched together scraps from various impressions that others have left on me.

For me personally, I try to stay away from putting an exact copy of a living person in one of my fictional stories – for several reasons.  But, other people have been known to do it – with great success.

Read any novel by Céline, Hemingway or Kerouac. Or Bukowski. Or John Fante. Or Tom Spanbauer & a million others. There’s truth & real life in their fiction. Sometimes, only the names have changed. The roman à clef has been around for hundreds of years.

Even some of the most famous & well-loved fictional characters were inspired by real people…

Without so many weird & fascinating real-life characters, we couldn’t have so many great fictional ones. So, from time to time, a writer must cannibalize. The title story of my short story collection, Human Detritus, is about this very thing.

It’s not only the fictional characters that are born from reality. It’s the places, too. Anyone who was hanging around me in the offline, real world from 2002-2003 will recognize the seedy apartment building from my stories Shit Water & Evan Fading. Not to mention the cities & landmarks in stories like A Moment in Montmartre.

This is what “write what you know” means. It doesn’t mean if you really know a lot about growing tomato plants & removing stubborn stains from boxer shorts that you should only write about a gardener who shits himself a lot. It means you need to open yourself; to rip yourself apart at the seams & pull out the stuffing. Extract the memories, emotions & experience. Examine the scars. The guilt. The anger & the hilarity.

It’s the reason why Harry Crews never wrote about slick Wall Street guys in New York City & why Bret Easton Ellis doesn’t tell many stories about skid-row types down south running dog fights.

So… what’s up with writers? Why do we think we’re so fucking special that our lives & our stories, our feelings & our experiences are worth telling?

Because we wrote this shit down. Really. It is that simple.

Okay, some people are better at writing shit down than others. Some have a greater imagination. That has something to do with it, too. However, in the end, the most significant difference is Those Who Grabbed a Pen vs. Those Who Didn’t.

But, why? Why the compulsion to invent stories based on our memory fragments & mind movies?

I can’t answer for all those other writers. I can tell you that for me, it’s an attempt to make sense of being alive. It’s capturing a fragment of human existence in a tiny shard of amber. It’s an exorcism. It’s taking an enormous shit to relieve myself of relentless stomach cramps.

It isn’t all about me, though. Once someone else reads it, it stops being about me. A reader brings their own shit into it & in many cases, reads something completely different than what I’ve written. Telling my truth under a fictional façade isn’t just about ripping myself open to show you all of my ugly & ridiculous insides. It’s about reaching a hand out to another person & saying, “Hey, fucked up things happen. People are capable of terrible things. Life is complicated & it hurts a lot, but we face it. We go through it & until we are pressed down into ashes & dust by the World, we will have proven that we can be so much more than fleeting flecks of goddamn nothing.”

Since Olivier is the very first person to see any of my work, before anyone in my critique group, before editing & way before publishing, he’s pretty much read everything I’ve written so far. So, when he told me he was able to see all the stitching, seams & knots on my Frankenstories, I began quizzing him about various stories I’d written to see if he really could spot the truth. The pieces of the real me hiding between the lines. He knows me better than anyone & is the best equipped to find me lurking anywhere.

“Well, what about the one I just finished that took place in Denmark?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I could see traces of a couple of people we met there. And my uncle.”

“Your uncle? That’s weird,” I said. “I wasn’t really thinking of your uncle when I wrote it.”

“Really? Huh.” He opened his book, pulled out the bookmark & turned his head away from me & toward his story about WWII. “Weird. I guess I brought him into it myself.”

“Yeah. I guess you did.”

***

“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” -Fellini

“She was a published writer. I imagined how thrilling it must be living such a life, going around the world and making up things about it.” -E. L. Doctorow

***

Well, not so thrilling, as it turns out. Interesting, yes. Fun, definitely. Boring… never. Most of the time is spent not zipping around the globe, but here in this corner, in this room, at this desk where I sit now. I scribble in notebooks, make faces at open documents in Word & lean my head on my hand as I read submission guidelines for one literary journal after another until my eyes go all googly.

And research… entire days of reading, searching & asking questions.

On really good days, I sit curled up in a comfy chair with my iPad while working on a piece of flash fiction.

It’s really not that thrilling, but it does make me feel glad & complete inside. I don’t believe in sitting around waiting for “the muse” & I find most romantic notions about writers to be clichéd horseshit that gets tossed around by people who like to act like a writer more than they want to actually do the work.

So, speaking of the work, here’s where I write one of those blog posts that says, “here’s the work I’ve been doing & here’s the stuff that’s gonna happen later.”

I don’t post a blog each time one of my stories appears in a lit mag because writing a short post about that each & every time would bore the shit out of me & if I’m bored writing, the only result will be that you’ll be bored reading. While I’m okay with amusing you, or pissing you off, I don’t want to bore you.

However, the past couple of months have been somewhat eventful & there’s some forthcoming stuff happening, so I decided to risk the potential boredom.

The first week of September, Stains From the Mint Julep I Never Tasted appeared in the Autumn issue of The Lowestoft Chronicle.

The Lowestoft Chronicle is one of my favorite journals. Its focus is humor & travel, without feeling like a travel guide.

During that same week, my story Still Life Without Abigail was published in Issue 20 of The Ranfurly Review.

If you follow the link to the site, you can download the entire magazine for free as a PDF file.

I was thrilled when The Ranfurly Review picked this one up – this story is one of those examples of how we as writers make an attempt to give second life to those whose first life was cut too short.

Later in September, Scattered Among So Many Dead Poets was published at the Foundling Review.

This is a really excellent issue, full of emotion. Being included more than makes up for all of the rejections I’ve received from Foundling Review.

Yes, I do keep all of my rejections.

Most recently, my flash fiction piece, Our Sickness was published at Fiction365.

If you like to read some decent short fiction, this is a great publication to subscribe to – you get a new story every day.

In the near future, I’ve got some fiction forthcoming at both Crack the Spine…

… & The Rusty Nail. I don’t have precise publication dates, but they’ll be showing up in the near future.

Right, then… I think that covers the recent lit journal news. Now we can move on to the anthology news.

A couple of months ago, I received news that Every Day Fiction will be releasing a new anthology, The Best of Every Day Fiction Four & will be including one of my stories in that volume. As far as I know, this book will be in print only, with paperback & hardcover editions available through Amazon. I’m sure I’ll have more detailed information once the book is released.

The Molotov Cocktail will also be releasing a print anthology on the first of December & yeah… I’ll be in there somewhere. If you haven’t had a look at The Molotov Cocktail, I highly recommend doing so. Their submission guidelines state that they’re “interested in volatile flash fiction, the kind of prose you cook up in a bathtub and handle with rubber gloves.”

How could anyone not dig that?

Lastly, Rainstorm Press will be releasing the third volume of their “I’ll Never Go Away” series which is a collection of stories about stalkers & will include my story, Protector.

I don’t have any detailed information yet as to the release date for I’ll Never Go Away, Volume III, but I’ll make some kind of announcement when it becomes available.

Of course, there’s still the follow-up to Human Detritus. It’s coming. I know, I’ve been saying that for a while, but it is & now I can tell you that we’re looking at a springtime release. It is going to be another collection of 9 stories, but with a much different tone than Human Detritus, which is a somewhat angry book. There are plenty of other emotions worth exploring besides anger. Probably.

I scattered my energies a bit too much earlier this year; I was working on too many projects at once. The result is good & bad: I didn’t release the second book this year as I originally intended, but also the third book likely won’t take quite so long to see the light of day.

And, this feels like a good time to say: thank you to my fellow Internet Writing Workshop members for letting me learn from you. Thank you to everyone who clicks on the links & reads my work when I post something on Facebook or Twitter about new fiction I’ve got out there. Thank you for buying my little book. All of the messages I’ve received from people about how they could relate to this story or that one is fucking awesome. That’s a big part of why we write – to touch your special inside places.

And if you’re ever in need of some light reading while you’re on the throne, the Stories page is regularly updated.

No, it’s not thrilling. But it’s fulfilling, so I’ll keep going around to as much of the world as I can, making up stuff about it, hoping to reach your special inside places.

“I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought.”  – Gertrude Stein

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”  – Cyril Connolly

“A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.”  – Alfred North Whitehead

…

A little more than 10 years ago, I signed up for the class.  “Freelance Writing” was the name of the course.  I was about 23 years old & was working in a factory.  I registered for the course because of the buzzing in my ear that constantly nagged me, reminding me that I had never set out to work in a noisy, stinking factory.

Well…the buzzing could have been from the machinery in the factory, but either way, the message was the same.

I signed up for the class, I paid the fee.  I did the work, I finished the course.  I walked away with a piece of paper that said that I was now qualified to whore sell my work to this publication or that one.

Did it make me a better writer?  No.  Of course, there isn’t much to bitch about – it hardly made me a worse writer.

The only problem that I encountered was the fact that I didn’t much feel like spending my days working on submissions, query letters & rejections.

So, I got up the next morning & went to work.

Eventually, they fired me, which freed up some of my time & gave me the perfect opportunity to make use of everything that I had learned in my Freelance Writing class.  Of course, that wouldn’t pay my bills – the things that I learned wouldn’t buy me cheeseburgers or cigarettes.

I finally stopped working in those shitty factories.  The pages that I had written continued to stack up & I stopped thinking about how to whore sell my work to this publication or that one.

So, I went back to school.  I took more classes.  Philosophy.  History.  English.  Psychology.  Literature.

Did it make me a better writer?  Hell if I know – but it sure didn’t make me any worse.

I had given it plenty of thought.  Could I write with a deadline?  Sure.  Did I want to?  Fuck no.  Could I write what people told me to?  Without a doubt.  Was I willing to do that?  Nope.

And the stack of written pages grew higher.

So I wrote what I wanted to.  I’ve sent a few submissions to this publication & that one.  I’ve received rejections on each & every short story that I’ve ever sent.

Am I insulted?  No.  Discouraged?  Absolutely not.  I simply don’t care enough about what other people think, whether they work for a magazine or a publishing company.  If they don’t want to publish it, I just assume that something is wrong with them & I move on.  I suppose that I’m just too arrogant & self-important to dick around with trivial shit like that.  I’m ok with this.

There’s also the fact that spending all of that fucking time on sending in submissions, writing query letters & keeping all of that shit organized is like actual work – it drastically cuts into time spent writing, pooping & playing video games.  I’ve got my priorities.

Here’s the thing: I write short literary fiction.  These are the stories that either you like it, or you don’t.  I won’t be bothered with writing things in such a way to please this person or that one.  I also can’t be bothered to think of possible rewards, income or audience.

There is this awkward & skinny little kid – she writes stories about people on a yellow legal pad with a pencil that needs sharpening.  She doesn’t think about how much money this story can make, or how many people will or won’t read it.  She doesn’t care.  She only knows that the story needs to be told – regardless of which classes she has or hasn’t taken, the story has to be told & she won’t be able to sleep until it is.

She looks at the stack of written pages.  “What are you going to do with all of that?”  she asks.

I look at the pile, the pile that chases me in my sleep.  “Fuck all if I know.  Probably nothing.  No one wants to read any of these stories.”

“What difference does that make?”  She laughs.  “It only matters that you tell the story.  Did you not know that?”

Sometimes the me that I was is smarter than the me that I am.

I’ve been going through the stack & I’ve been adding more to it.  Over the past few years, I’ve created a decent mess of short fiction that I’ve got to clean up & more stories that need to be told.  Lucky for me, the business of self-publishing has improved quite a bit over the past few years, so whoring appealing to this publisher or that one won’t be necessary.  I can do whatever I want.  Well, not that this is always a good thing, but still…you get the point.

Now, usually I prefer to keep my writing endeavors separate from this blog.  I don’t consider “blogging” & “writing” to be the same thing (most of the time) & generally prefer to keep those worlds from colliding.  I think I just needed to take a break from all of these characters that live in my head, needing to have a story told.

Now…I have this pencil that needs sharpening.

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