October 31, 2013

From “The Muse Rides Again” by Altos Wexan

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“So, it’s that time of year again,” says my muse through a fog of cigar smoke and with cheap Pabst heavy on his breath. “What are you going to fail to finish this year?”

I don’t like the tone of my muse’s voice, or the various odors issuing from his maw, and I could do without the stained wifebeater and torn sweatpants he’s sporting. “You’ve got a lot of nerve talking like that,” I riposte. “I’m beginning to regret ripping you off as a concept from Stephen King.”

“The process of ripping off, be it from On Writing or your own blog posts from last year, is irreversible,” my muse replies, punctuating the remarks with a throaty belch. “Ripping off is like heat transfer, it only goes one way until the eventual, and inevitable, Ripoff Death of the Universe. Now answer the question.”

I sigh. “A western,” I say. “I’m going to try writing a western. A heady tale of humor and betrayal, gunslinger grrls and black-hatted villainesses.”

“A western?” chortles my muse, frabjously. “Well callooh-callay, aren’t we fancy this time around. Who the hell writes westerns anymore? The genre’s been dead as a doornail since the Sputnik launch.”

“It’s a genre I’ve never tried before,” I reply, more than a little defensiveness in my voice. “Would you rather I wrote a Harlequin romance?”

“At least then you’d have an excuse for female characters all over the place,” my muse snorts. “They didn’t have female cowboys there, hoss. I mean, that’s encoded right there in the name cow-BOY.”

“I’ll think up an explanation,” I shoot back. “And the western isn’t all about historical accuracy. Sergio Leone had a gun from 1889 in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and that was set in 1862.”

“And when you have the track record with westerns that he has, maybe you’ll get away with it. Maybe. But if you want to cough up an unfinished western when the genre is deader than Louis L’Amour, don’t let me stop you.”

“I’m going to finish this year, too,” I say. “NaNoFiMo, National Novel Finishing Month. Set in stone.”

“Just like the last 5 novels?” My muse laughs. “Or the one you actually did finish…six months later? Or the only one you finished by November 30, by undoing all your contractions at 11:50pm, but refuse to speak of?”

I roll my eyes. “I don’t refuse to speak of it, I just openly admit that it was dog crap. That’s what happens when you try to expand a 1000-word story by 50 times. Now are you with me or not?”

“Fine, fine.” My muse opens a fresh can of rotgut and clips the head off a fresh cigar. “We’ll see who was right in 30 days on the dot. Happy National Novel Writing Month, my rootin’, tootin’ friend. Good luck–you’ll need it.”

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August 25, 2013

From “Finishing Touches” by Aaron Mikhail Fedotov

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“Harry, you really need to relax,” said Greg. “Stressing like this, missing sleep…it’s not good for anybody, let alone someone who’s…not well.”

Harry was ensconced in a hospital-style bed, surrounded by crumpled pieces of looseleaf paper, open composition notebooks, and three laptops (his current model and the two previous ones) on the tray that was supposed to hold his food. “You need to call a spade a spade, Greg,” he said without looking up. “End-stage pancreatic cancer isn’t ‘not well.’ It’s ‘dying.'”

“You know, they say that a positive mental attitude helps,” Greg said. He shuffled through a few of his old friends’ papers, which seemed to date all the way back to their high school days. Reams of faded pencil told of the stories Harry was always scribbling in class when he should have been paying attention.

“They don’t say anything about a realistic attitude, though,” Harry replied, his eye still riveted to his computer screen. “This is a hospice, Greg, not a hospital. The most positive mental attitude in the world isn’t going to change six to eight weeks left into anything but six to eight weeks and seventeen seconds left.”

Greg sighed. The nurses had told him that Harry had been at his computers and in his notebooks constantly since he had them shipped in the day after he had arrived. He’d barely slept, ate only enough to keep from starving, and refused to partake in any of the activities or painkillers that had been proffered.

“Marilyn says her prayers are with you,” Greg said. “I ran into her in the supermarket the other day. Perhaps she’ll come to visit.”

“Well, that’s more than most people get from their ex-wife, so be sure to thank her for me.” Harry’s fingers were flying over his keyboard. “Maybe if she’d managed to crank our a kid or two with me, instead of McPherson, there’d be a better reason for a visit.”

Greg pulled up a chair. “Is this really how you want it to end, Harry? Cut off from everybody, with me as your only visitor? I’ve seen the logbook.”

“Everybody was cut off from me long ago,” said Harry. “My own doing, so caught up in that goddamn firm that I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. I made my bed, and now I’m quite literally sleeping in it. Wailing and gnashing my teeth aren’t going to help.”

Greg glanced at the computer screen; it looked like Harry was writing prose fiction with a separate window open for an outline. “Well, at least one thing hasn’t changed,” he said, trying to force a smile. “Still writing your stories.”

“After a fashion, yes.” Harry hadn’t shifted his gaze from the monitor since Greg had come in, the glow making his wan features, ravaged by disease, seem even more drawn and angular.

“Goddamn it, Harry, will you stop that?” Greg cried, fed up with being all but ignored.

“Don’t you see that I can’t, Greg?” Harry shouted back. He met his friend’s gaze for the first time, and Greg could see that his eyes were teary.

“Why not?”

“Every day for fifty years I wrote a little of this and a little of that,” Harry said miserably, indicating the accumulated papers and laptops with a sweep of his hand. “Hardly finished anything, never published anything, because I told myself that there would be time later on. The firm or Marilyn or some other little bit of life always came first.”

“It’s natural to think that, looking back with 20/20 hindsight,” said Greg. “That doesn’t mean that you have to bear yourself up over it now.”

“No,” Harry said. “No, no, no, no. I have to finish them, Greg. I have to finish them all: every novel I ever abandoned, every story I left half-finished, every poem that needed the right rhyme, every play that could use a better ending! I have to finish them all, and there’s not much time!”

“Why? Why do you need to finish them so badly?” Greg said. “Why is it more important than living what’s left of your life, Harry?”

“Because when I die, every piece of information that’s up here,” Harry tapped the crown of his head, “dies with me. All the endings, all the plots, all the characters, dead as a doornail. Unfinished forever. It’s like burning a library full of books that have never been written, and it’s my own damn fault for putting it off for so long.”

“So what?” Greg continued. “People leave unfinished stuff all the time.”

“You don’t understand,” Harry said desperately, plaintively. “The life I led, the choices I made…these stories are all that will be left of me after I die, Greg. They’re the only thing I have left to give the world, and the only part of me that has any chance of living on. I can’t let it end with them all unfinished. I just can’t.”

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July 20, 2013

From “The Poindexter Papers” by by Adam McMahon Fischer

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The teacher announced his arrival by slamming the door hard enough to rattle Sirrap Community College’s exterior windows. Thirtysomthing and well-built, he sported thick black eyeglasses and an ill-fitting tweed suit coat with a Starfleet arrowhead as a tie tack. With the chap air conditioning struggling–and failing–to hold back the bitter South Carolina July raging outside, sweat beaded visibly on his dark features.

“Greetings. this is ENGL 127: Introduction to Creative Writing, and I am your instructor.” The pose he struck, legs spread and arms clasped behind his back, was textbook military. “Some of your husbands or fathers may know me as Drill Sergeant Poindexter from the base just up the road. They probably do not know me as a published author, perhaps because all my writing has been published under various pseudonyms! But if any of you have ever read The Girdle of Mistvale, credited to Swain Longbottom, or The Asteroids of Megas-Tu, credited to Jackson Roykirk, you’ve read me.”

There was some murmuring among the students but no reply.

“Repeat after me: “This is my pen. There are many like it, but this one is mine.”

Dutifully, fearfully, the students squeaked out the phrase.

“My pen, without me, is useless. Without my pen, I am useless. I must guide my pen true. I must write straighter than my enemy who is trying to critique me!”

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April 12, 2013

From “The Labyrinth-Woman” by Eveline “Ewe” Coldoff

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Her poem “Of the Labyrinth-Women” remains highly anthologized, with its haunting and lyrical language oft-quoted:

for they are the labyrinth-women
twisted within as twisted without
bent inwards upon a mockery of a path
forward to dark and darkward to death

– M. Alethia Markridge, Of the Labyrinth-Women (1935), third stanza.

For all the success and fame that her poetry brought, Alethia Markridge did not live a happy life. She increasingly turned to alcohol and isolation, to the point that her daughter Olive was all but abandoned with her parents in Montauk. “I feel a husk,” she wrote in a 1937 letter, “squeezed-out dull as the name I hide behind full-stops before my true self.”

In the later years of her life, and especially after the publication of A Thousand Strands to the Present in early 1938, Markridge became increasingly obsessed with her first name, Marie, by which she had rarely been called but upon which her devoutly Catholic grandmother had insisted. She called it her “true self” in many letters, and wrote of her fear that it presaged a domestic mundanity to which she was doomed. “To return to the washboard and the oven, the husk-party and gossip-mongery…that is what I fear the most,” she confided in a 1939 note to her sister. “I say return because I feel that all I have ever done and will ever do is but a postponement of the destiny inherited by a million Maries, the destiny they’ll pass on to a hundred more.

Markridge’s final collection, tentatively titled Love-Serenade to the Maries of the Universe, was never completed.

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March 25, 2013

From “1001 Irreverent Writer’s Aphorisms” by Georg Anntra

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227. If you think the book was bad, you should have seen the query letter.

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March 8, 2013

From “The Secret of Goldie’s Bowl” by Carmelia Nardelli

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Children have such a wonderful way of investing everything they see with an anima, an animating spirit, and it’s beyond their young comprehension that the playthings and pets they talk to might not understand or absorb every word, every secret.

Zoë’s parents had bought Goldie the goldfish on a whim, expecting a sailor’s funeral for him in a month. But to their surprise, the bowl’s water was changed, aerated, and sprinkled with nourishing flakes with astonishing regularity for a flighty six-year-old. But Zoë saw Goldie as a full member of the family, and he enjoyed her full confidence.

In fact, late at night–after her bedtime–Zoë would often sneak out of bed and hand her head over Goldie’s bowl. With the two of them lit only by light leaking in from the hall, or a nightlight, Zoë would talk to her fish. Her day at school, who’d been mean to her, questions about the water temperature and fish food…Goldie was better than a diary written in Zoë’s halting hand because he had his own wants and needs and opinions. Even if he couldn’t express them.

One night, not long after Zoë’s seventh birthday, she couldn’t sleep and approached Goldie’s bowl as usual. “How are you doing tonight, Goldie?” she whispered brightly.

“I’m doing fine, Zoë,” said Goldie. “How are you?”

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February 14, 2013

From “Thumbing My Nose at Mr. D’Nealian” by Carlie Q. Tufts

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Even in grade school I was an overachiever, and often looked ahead in the book or had an idea of how to write letters and numbers before our official instruction came along.

But in first grade, in the middle of our intense instruction in the D’Nealian style of block printing, I was told that a number of my characters were formed wrong and needed to be relearned. In particular, I drew the number “5” like an “S” with a kink in it, starting at the top right and drawing it all in one stroke.

My first grade teacher insisted that I needed to write the “5” character the proper D’Nealian way, which starts in the upper left and requires you to draw a hook straight out of Peter Pan before capping it at the top in a separate stroke. It was pounded into me over the course of a year, and I wrote it that way for decades.

Then, as a college student, I came to realize that no one way of forming the character was better than any other. In particular, I recalled the case of the uppercase cursive “I” and uppercase cursive “Q.”

In second grade, I got bored with a lesson and read ahead in the book along with my friend Jen. We knew that we’d have to do a worksheet on the capital cursive “I” because it had already been handed out, so we worked on it while everyone else was occupied. With no directions, we wrote the cursive “I” beginning with the crooked arm that differentiates it from the lowercase “L.” When the lesson started, however, Jen and I were shocked to see that the other kids were taught to do the crossbar of the crooked arm as a separate step. Since the worksheet was already done, we were never caught–and I continue to write my cursive “I” the “incorrect” way to this day.

I was sick on the day, later that year, when the uppercase cursive letter “Q” was taught. So I never did that worksheet and never learned it, with only the rarity of uppercase “Q” in scholastic writing saving me (we’d done lowercase “q” separately). When I finally saw the D’Nealian uppercase cursive “Q,” I was appalled: it was a sickly creature that looked like an emaciated “2.” So starting in third grade, I simply wrote a normal print “Q” in place of that abomination. Nobody noticed.

Fast forward 15 years. In college, my handwriting was often praised for its legibility, having never quite lost the childish look that in most people gives way to cramped scribbles, and I decided that it was time to reclaim my number “5.” Like the “I” and the “Q,” I started writing it my own way, the way I had before first grade. It was as easy as riding a bike after a long absence.

Of course, now my “5” is easy to mistake for an “S” especially when I’m in a hurry. But it was worth it to reclaim that bit of my childhood and thumb my nose at Mr. D’Nealian.

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November 30, 2012

From “A Muse’s Unvarnished Perspective” by Altos Wexan

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“Another year, another novel that hasn’t quite been finished but has the requisite number of words.” My muse, a blatant appropriation of Stephen King’s concept thereof as expressed in On Writing, cracks open the fridge and retrieves a cold beer. I keep it on hand for guests, being a de facto teetotaler myself; I don’t know where he got the Cuban cigar that billows smoke all over my single-room downstairs.

Since my muse is an insubstantial personification of my creative drive, albeit one ever so slightly ripped off from a more successful author, I don’t suppose it really matters.

“It’s not just the number of words,” I say. “I’ve takes one of the stories I wanted to tell and given it a good start. It barely existed before and now it’s 300k on my hard drive.”

“300 unfinished k, you mean.” My muse emerges from the fridge with beer and leftover barbecue chicken strips. “Don’t you think it’s about time you finished the others?”

“What others?” I bristle. “There’s only the project at hand, nothing else.”

I mean it as a metaphor, but it’s taken literally. “The story about those kids finding alternate dimensions with giant landsquid for one,” my muse says. “Don’t forget the unfinished noir detective novel about a librarian, and the comic wish-fulfillment tale of the assassin and the accountant.”

“I’ll get to them in time,” I say, a little defensive. “It doesn’t matter if they’re finished. What matters is that I wrote something that didn’t exist before. It’s good even if it’s a little rough.”

The muse sits down heavily on my couch and fires up the Xbox. “What about the one from 2008, where you tried to stretch that 500-word short story into a tale ten times its length, and wound up so desperate for wordcount that you undid all your contractions a half-hour before midnight on the last day?”

“Don’t bring that one up,” I snap. “It was an election year and I had a new job. Too many distractions!”

“Whoa there, killer,” my muse says without looking up from the first-person shooter he’s working away at. “Did I touch a nerve? Don’t forget that it was a failure for me too. Or do you think part of a novel each year and a blog post a day is nothing for me?”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s a stressful time even without the novel.”

“But you’re glad you did it again this year?”

“Yeah.”

“Well then,” my muse says, wreathed in smoke and barbecue beer fumes. “That’s all that matters.”

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July 13, 2012

From “A Lone Red Tree” by Oscar F. Veen

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As sensational a bestseller as Dalva’s book was, its success was quickly sullied by lawsuits. After its 10th straight week on the New York Times bestseller list, a representative of Kyoto Processed Ricepaper Concerns Press filed a suit claiming that A Lone Red Tree had been plagiarized from Jina Himenashi’s novel 偽翻訳 (roughly “red tree standing among dead chrysanthemum blossoms”), which had been published a full six weeks earlier.

Dalva protested that he couldn’t read Japanese, and his lawyer added that while 偽翻訳 had been a Japanese bestseller there were no records of copies being sold or shipped overseas. Himenashi’s legal team presented a compelling argument, displaying translated excerpts of 偽翻訳 and Lone Red Tree side-by-side. With suitable differences to account for the differences in language structure, the descriptions and events were largely identical.

Particularly damning was the central piece of Dalva’s prose, which told of “a single red tree standing in a dead forest ringed by forever stormfronts.” The comparable phrase of Himenasi’s novel, “いない本物の英語日本語への翻訳,” meant essentially the same thing without definite articles and dead cherry trees where Dalva had conifers. The central thrust of each plot, with a protagonist haunted by the image of that tree until they seek it out and are driven mad in the attempt, was also the same, save that Dalva’s title was set in his native Portland and Himenashi’s tale began in Sapporo.

A guilty verdict and a massive recall of Dalva’s book—to say nothing of a black eye for the press and reviewers behind it—seemed inevitable. But then a representative of Spanish author Cristobal Carminha came forward, claiming that the book Un solitario árbol rojo, which had been a modest seller in Galacia, was a dead match for both 偽翻訳 and Lone Red Tree and predated either by almost a year. The trial broke up in disarray not long after as the judge demanded a more thorough investigation.

Agents for the publishers in question soon found that no less than 150 books had been written in the previous two years featuring the haunting, maddening image of a single red tree standing in a dead forest ringed by forever stormfronts. Most had been rejected by publishers, but over 40 had made it into print in everything from vanity editions to professional bound copies.

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July 5, 2012

From “Secrets of the Marlowe Days Festival” by Melida N. Wrisley

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I even tended to refer to him with the informal pseudo-affectionate nickname “Teddy” even though I knew through a little bit of research that he’d hated being called that by anyone who wasn’t a close family member. Then again, Theodore Marlowe was the sort that knew the value of a name: born John Theodore Marlow, it had taken the judicious dropping of a too-common first name and the addition of an unnecessary vowel to make his a name fit for literary immortality.

Deerton held its annual Marlowe Days events at the same time as the county fair as the only vestige of tourism a tiny burg like that was able to eke out. After all, Teddy had been born at what was then Deerton General (now Infrared Health Systems Mid-Michigan Campus no. 27) and attended what was then Deerton Elementary (now John T. Seymour Elementary) until the age of 10, when his family had moved to Grand Rapids and thence to Detroit. He’d been shortlisted for a Nobel, his novels and stories were still in print, and film adaptations had made millions of dollars over the years.

I prickled a little under the management role I had in Marlowe Days, though, for the simple reason that Theodore Marlowe hadn’t been all that find of Deerton at all. Biographies tended to give us a sentence, if we were lucky, before going into exhaustive detail on Marlowe’s days in Grand Rapids and Detroit. I had been through reams of interviews, and all the man ever had to say about us was negative. There was the CBS interview from 1969 where he talked of “escaping the stultifying atmosphere of small-town mundanity,” for instance, or the 1978 radio talk where he said “everything that made me who I am is of the furniture and automotive cities.”

As in not Deerton.

After moving away, he hadn’t visited once despite plenty of Marlow and Higginsfield relatives. Invitations to speak at DHS commencements or other events were returned unopened. His books, powerful as they were, spoke to the salad days of Michigan industry giving way to the rust belt.

Big city problems.

Only in death, it seemed, did Teddy have anything for us. His estate agreed to Marlowe Days less than two months after the author died in 1980.

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