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Anatomy of a Story: Junkie

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Nico’s a junkie.

Sometimes it’s all about the first line. Most times I’m writing, getting that first line is like trying to knock through a brick wall with your bare fists. Other times, that first line is delivered straight from God. That was my experience for the opener for Junkie, my short story just published by GossamerWight Press.

It came. It was there. It’s simple and clear and sets up two characters (Nico and the speaker) and the situation. And it’s provocative. Junkie is a loaded word. Junkie can be considered a statement of fact. It can also be a judgment. Sure, some editors might have scoffed at my story because of that first line (and the title), but I did not care. This was the story I was telling.

Junkie is about Scott, a youngish man who is suffering from a syndrome termed TDS, time displacement syndrome. He frequently finds himself reliving scenes from his past, not just in his thoughts, but in his reality. For this loop, he’s caught in a relationship with his ex, Darya. It’s a doomed relationship. He knows where it’s headed, and despite this looping into the past, nothing he does can ever materially change it.

It’s not revealing anything to say that I love all things speculative when it comes to literature, movies and television. As a fan, I think it’s fun, simple as that. As a writer, it gives me more room to play. Metaphors can do a lot of the heavy lifting in storytelling. Metaphors such as…having a man be caught re-living scenes from a failed relationship in real time.

On the most basic non-speculative level, Junkie is basically about how we can sometimes get caught in mental loops from the past, obsessing over things we cannot change, wondering if only. We all do it. Sure, I could have had Scott thinking about all this. But where’s the fun in that?

Instead I made it real. I made it tangible. I also took another literary risk: I told the story in second person.

Second  person is the most controversial of all storytelling modes. First and third are easy and familiar. You, however, is not. You unsettles people. They ask, is it me? Am I implicated? Who is this you?

I chose second person for a couple of reasons. First, I did want to immerse the reader into this emotional tilt-a-whirl. But I also wanted Scott to distance himself from his own emotions. Rather than saying I feel, he says you feel. He’s putting those feelings on you (or the proverbial you).

With Junkie I also wanted to play with foreign languages. Darya and Scott can’t communicate very well to begin with. Now throw in a little Farsi, and some high school Spanish. I am a writer. It is my role to find the right words to communicate. But in my real life? Just like all 7 billion humans on the planet, I struggle all the time with finding the right words, not only in terms of relaying them to others, but in identifying them for myself. Scott fails at this as well, but not for lack of trying.

Technically this was a challenging story, between the timelines and point of view, not to mention the challenge of writing about a generic failed relationship. It was work but I’m glad I took it on.

Another thing I am glad about is the fact that I ignored my first decision to NOT submit to the magazine’s call for submissions. The theme was unstable realities, and I told myself that my story didn’t quite fit, so why waste my time? Then I reconsidered, my thinking being, let the EDITOR decide that. And I am glad I did. Turns out, the editors thought I nailed the theme.

So the moral of that story is, when in doubt, submit!

Power Prompts: Episode 11

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The challenge: write a short story in 20 minutes using the following:

Characters: a fiery redhead, Conor McGregor

Genre: family saga

Setting: July 4th barbecue

Trope: a distracting fake fight

POV/tense: 3rd/past

The result:

“Who invited that asshole?” grandma asked.

“Shush, mom,” her son David said. “I think Tina brought him.”

“That no good daughter of yours,” grandma said. “She’s still working at that strip joint?”

“Mother. She’s not a stripper. How could you say that?”

“Well, she sure dresses like one.” Grandma took a drink of her beer and cackled so hard that her dentures slid partway out. She tucked them back in and resumed her laughing.

“Grandma, you can’t talk about women like that,” her grandson Robbie said. “It’s not respectful.

Grandma picked up her Marlboro reds and lit a cigarette. She took a draw and let out a hack. “In my day we didn’t have enough time or money to be dressing so fancy like that. Let alone bringing some random Irish gutter rat slash failed fighter to someone’s family party celebrating the founding of our country.”

She eyed Connor McGregor at the far end of the table, hot dog in one hand, tumbler of whiskey in the other. He caught her stare and he winked.

“Oh lordy,” she muttered.

He got out of his seat and swaggered over her way.

“Uh oh, grandma,” Robbie said. “You’ve done it again. Running your mouth and getting in trouble. He’s liable to punch you now.”

“That lug? He couldn’t land a blow on a drugged rabbit.”

Connor stopped beside grandma. “What’s that you’re saying about a drugged rabbit, missus?”

Grandma took a long drag and blew the smoke in his face. “I saw your last match,” she said. “Pitiful.”

Connor bopped from one leg to another. He cracked his neck and took a giant swig of his whiskey. “Wow. Huh. I always love myself a fiery redhead.”

Grandma patted her hair. “It’s fake, if you haven’t noticed. Much like your pre-match trash talk.”

“You’ve no idea how much work I put into my profession, missus.”

Grandma let out a ringing laugh. “Not much at all from what I’ve seen, you little prancing leprechaun.”

David piped up. “You’ll have to excuse my mother, Mister McGregor. She’s got a bit of dementia.”

Robbie scoffed. “Not likely. Grandma’s sharp as a knife. She’s always been like that. Saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. She keeps asking me when I’m going to bring my boyfriend around to meet her.”

“Well, when are you?” Connor asked.

Robbie sighed. “I’m not even gay.”

“Not yet,” grandma said. “Once he looks in a mirror, well then the jig’ll be up.”

She laughed even harder. Connor joined in.

“What are you laughing about?” she tells him. “That’s my grandson.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend.”

“You’re a pussy, McGregor. Just like I suspected.”

“I am not. Look at my ears.”

“Okay, you roided-out mick. You think you’re so tough? See if you can beat me.”

“What? No, missus. I’d never hit a woman.”

“I don’t mean that,” grandma said. “Cornhole.”

So the two of them staggered over to the cornhole boards and they celebrated America in the most wholesome of ways, and despite grandma’s trash talk, Conor McGregor cleaned her clock, and the two foul-mouthed heathens became the best of friends.

And nobody ever figured out who invited him to their family party.

Anatomy of a story: Sueños

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Where does artistic inspiration come from?

There’s one theory on this for writers. Writers either draw inspiration from their inner worlds, or from the world around them.

Why not both at the same time?

For my story, Sueños, which was published here in the journal Empyrean, I used my own experience, and the outside world, to create this story.

First, what’s it about? 

Dylan is a young soldier stationed in El Paso who has to drive across Texas for (…spoiler…)  the funeral of his brother. Along the way his pickup truck breaks down and he’s forced to detour to the small town of Sueños, where he’s brought to a strange house for the birthday party of an unnaturally alluring woman named Veronica. There, he’s given a tempting choice: abandon his grief forever. But, of course, there is a price.

So where did the external inspiration come from?

Some years ago a friend loaned me a book of essays by a Mexican writer named Juan Villoro. Essays aren’t my typical thing, but his were great. One in particular stood out, his recollection of him as a young soldier. While going home one weekend, he gets sidetracked and ends up at a strange party where he meets a beautiful girl. It’s a story of idealized love captured in a moment of time, a story of endless possibility without the messiness of reality.

The story captivated me. I HAD to do something with it. Revisit it. Rework it. Repurpose it. I saw in it  something hidden, something darker. Something supernatural, so I set about re-interpreting it through that lens. In the arts this is called interpolation, where an artist takes an existing work and fashions it into something new and different. Music does this a lot. If I was profiting off this story surely I’d be giving Señor Villoro a chunk of my earnings, but alas, zero divided by anything equals zero. (Don’t go into writing for the money.)

In terms of my interpretation, I added layers of menace and danger along with hints of vampirism. Who doesn’t love a good vampire tale? But I also chose to not be heavy handed.

What about my internal inspiration?

Ten years ago my father was killed in a plane crash. He piloted a small plane that failed upon take-off. Ironically, before he died I wrote a story available here about a guy who was left rich and rudderless after his parents died in a small plane crash. Obviously the worry was there in my mind before my father actually died. After his death I knew of course that this event would surface in my writing, but I never intentionally set out to write about it.

There was one strange thing that happened when my father died, and this is what I chose to focus on. At the time I was working in Manhattan. My mother gave me the call. I made it home to Jersey City and then got in my car to drive the 40 minutes to my parents house. On that drive it still wasn’t real to me. It was just a phone call. There was this great gulf of distance between me and the death, and my thinking was, as long as I am not at their house, it isn’t real. It didn’t even happen! I told myself that maybe I’d had some kind of psychotic break and made it all up (even though I knew that wasn’t true.) That distance gave me distance, which was exactly what I needed at the time.

It was all real, of course. Afterward came the usual stuff associated with a death in the family, the wakes and funeral mass and burial and the visitors and the paperwork and the concerns about the future and all of that. But for a 40-minute drive, none of it was real. I was living in a zone outside of time and life. That’s what I wanted to write about, that blessed denial you know isn’t true and won’t last. That’s where Dylan exists in Sueños, in a land of dreams, and whether he chooses to wake up or not, there will be a price. As one of my characters tells him, there’s always a price.

So my advice for writers out there is to study great writing and storytelling. Learn from it. Read, please. And don’t feel like you have to excavate the tragedies in your life, but don’t keep them buried either.

Power Prompts: Episode 10

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The challenge: write a short story in 20 minutes using the following:

Characters: Haunted house historian, Dumb blonde

Genre: Steampunk

Setting: A church

Trope: Curse of the pharaoh

POV/tense: 3rd/future

The result:

Veronica Cespides will fume with hate for her hair. She’d gotten it dyed by a new woman in her salon, a woman who apparently was too afraid of burning Veronica’s scalp, so instead of platinum it was more like yellowish with a tinge of fire hydrant red.

No one would take her seriously now.

Not like it mattered.

She’ll stand at the entrance of Saint Mary’s of the Sky, one of the oldest churches in the city, ensconced in a blimp soaring above the river. She’ll adjust her bustle and check her pocket watch.

He’s late, she’ll fume silently.

Just as she’s about to power up her jet-pack and steam back to solid ground a hand will tap her on her shoulder. She’ll turn and stare into the eyes of a balding man in an ascot with a monocle. Not stare into his eyes exactly but more like stare down at his eyes.

“Hello, I am Rupert Kenmore. You must be Veronica.”

“No, I am not Veronica. I am…” she’ll fumble for a moment. “I am Mary Skyship.”

He’ll laugh. “Ah, that’s a good one. No, seriously, you are her. I’ve seen your daguerreotype. But I thought you were blonder.” His laugh will falter at her stony reaction. “Well,” he’ll say, “not the best start to a blind date.”

“Blind?” she’ll ask. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize you were blind. It’s amazing how you can train your eyes to look directly into mine. Did they teach you that at blind school? Or is it a hearing thing.”

He’ll laugh with more certainty. “I love a woman with a sense of humor. Then he’ll loop his arm around hers. And what is it you do again, Veronica, aside from looking so effortlessly stunning?”

“I spend a lot of time on charity work. Mostly dogs and cats that are missing a paw. Paws for Pets. They make the most stunning mechanical limbs for our furry friends. Really it’s amazing. And it’s heartwarming to know that I’m making such a huge difference in the world.”

He’ll clear his throat. “Yes, yes, that is amazing. You must be well positioned in life.”

“If you can call it that,” she’ll say. “My father was on one of the expeditions to the pyramids. Apparently there was some sort of curse in one of the tombs and that nasty pharaoh did a job on my father. He came back and fell ill. He swelled up like a rotten potato. Then, boom. He exploded all over the hospital. I was in tears for days. But he set me up for life. So now I can help those poor poor pawless pets.

Rupert will get excited. “Curse of the pharaoh? You have to tell me more. I’m so interested in such supernatural occurrences.”

“Are you? Really?”

“Yes of course. Didn’t your friend tell you about me?”

“She said you were taller. And had more hair.”

He’ll brush her words aside. “Such superficial matters. Anyway. I’m a haunted house historian. I travel the country seeking out the strange and unexplained. I’ve even seen a ghost.”

“A real one? What was his name?”

He’ll laugh. “Ghosts don’t talk. They only moan.”

“Oh, that’s so disappointing. Tell me, Rupert, why did you ask to meet me here at this old abandoned church of all places?”

“To explore, of course. Abandoned churches are the best hunting grounds for ghosts. Especially this one. Did you know why St Mary’s of the Sky is abandoned? There was a satanic ritual that was held here. Four people sacrificed on the holy altar. And I’m here to investigate.”

“Oh that sounds so thrilling.” She’ll look at Rupert with slightly different eyes. “He’ll seem a little taller, and his hair, well it’s more distinguished.”

“Promise me this, Rupert, if we find ghosts here, can we ask their names? I’ve always wanted to talk to a real live ghost.”

Anatomy of a Story: The History of Value Shopping in 21st-Century America

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I’m a fan of short titles. One word is the ideal for me. The reasoning is, if you can boil the essence of your story into as few letters as possible, you’ve got some skill on display. So what explains this story of mine, The History of Value Shopping in 12st-Century America, which is probably the longest title I’ve ever chosen? Is it unfocused? Does it suck?

Suckiness, for lack of a better word, is subjective, and apparently this insanely long titled story did not suck as per the folks at Monkeybicycle, who published it here.

What I think happened, regarding the title is this: sometimes you’ve got to let the story (and title) be whatever it is.

The History of Value Shopping in 21-st Century America is a deceptively simple story. Ellie Sears is a college student working on her thesis (hence the story’s title) by visiting dollar stores. She meets Lucinda, a clerk, a mysterious girl with a secret, and Lucinda brings Ellie along on an adventure. It’s a story of exploration and attraction (non-sexual) and escape. Hidden selves and alter egos. Maybe.

It’s also one of my shorter stories, clocking in at under 1600 words. It began life in a writing workshop as a power prompt, where you’re given two characters, a genre, a trope, a setting, and the POV/tense, and then you write a story. I came up with the bones of this one, and I thought I maybe had something, so I revisited it, and here we are.

I think at the time I was also in love with Bud Smith’s short story collection Double Bird. He’s great at detail and absurdity, so undoubtedly I was trying to incorporate some of his literary styles, play around with them, try them on, and while I would never consider myself an absurdist, I definitely like tossing in a drunken screaming circus clown now and again.

The moral of this post? I don’t know. Maybe it’s don’t insist on having every title be only one word. And let the story be whatever weirdness it insists on being, so it will find its place in the world.

Photo by Cam Ballard on Unsplash

Anatomy of a Story: Little Lamb

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Sometimes you need a little blood to make a story come alive. I’m not recommending you take out a razorblade and cut yourself, or someone else, but do it metaphorically.

I used this mindset in the crafting of my short story, Little Lamb, which was just published here by Epoque Press. The story follows Drew as he ventures to a very bizarre late night beach barbecue at the behest of his friend, Patrick, who in many ways is his Jungian shadow. I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say there is definitely blood involved.

Let’s rewind first. Credit where credit’s due. As I’ve written here before, someone (Virginia Woolf?) once said books beget books. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway was a riff on James Joyce’s Ulysses. I’m a staunch proponent of writers having to READING fiction in order to truly be a great writer (many of them don’t). First, it gives you an insight into great writing and storytelling, and second, it inspires you.

For the past five years or so I’ve been giving myself my own MFA in the craft of the short story, so far covering writers like Flannery O’Connor, Hemingway, Carver, just to name a few. Reading them. Dissecting them. Hand-writing passages from their stories. Another one of these writers was Yukio Mishima.

Mishima, from Japan, was one of the most prominent mid-century writers. I haven’t done too deep a dive into his bio, but he was an interesting and complicated cat. A difficult human, but also one who put his soul into his writing. You can feel the man’s pulse when you read his work. One of his stories, Raisin Bread, jumped out to me. It resonated. It haunted me.

I knew I had to grapple with it. I wrote passages longhand, over and over, and then I examined the characters and the setting and the plot. I took it all apart in my mind, and then I wanted to reassemble it all into something new, something different—take his set-up and veer off in a wildly different direction.

And that is how Little Lamb came to be born.

It’s weird, this deep dive into the craft of the short story I’ve undertaken. I’ve come to get so attached to these long-dead writers: Flannery and Ernest and Yukio, and I want to show them what they’ve taught me. I can’t do that, but I can share it with the world.

Image source: Epoque Press

Power Prompts: Episode 8

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The challenge: write a short story in 20 minutes using the following:

Characters: Fashion victim, A foul-mouthed parrot

Genre: Fan fiction

Setting: Midtown Manhattan

Trope: The last thing I remember

POV/tense: 2nd/past

And the result:

You’ve been stabbed a total of seven times. The first time by your gay boyfriend Billy and Stu at that house party. You survived other stabbings, by your cousin, by Billy’s mom, by your long-lost brother, and by those crazed fans, all donning the ghostface mask. You swore you’d never return to Woodsboro, so you fled to the biggest city in America, no longer Sydney Prescott but some anonymous girl working at the Clinique counter at Macy’s.

And you were late.

In one hand you had your coffee and another a bagel. Tourists swarmed around you. Not just any tourists, but Halloween tourists. Freddys and Jasons, all these wannabe killers and it made your side clench. Which stabbing was that? You couldn’t remember. Too many of them.

PTSD is for pussies. That’s what Gayle Weathers told you, and yeah, she’s a bitch but she has a point. You decided the best thing for you to do was duck through an alley and avoid everyone. As soon as you stepped into the alley your heart calmed. But then halfway alley past the reeking dumpsters a man popped up. At first you thought he was homeless but he was too clean. He wore a cut off t-shirt and Cavarichis and Capezios, looking like some 80s fashion victim.

“Hey baby,” he said to you.

You rolled your eyes. “Not today. I’m late for work.”

He smiled at you. “Aw, come on. I just want to play a game.”

“I’m not in the mood for games.” Behind you you heard people shouting. They seemed far away. So far away. You reminded yourself how you dispatched several of the lamest serial killers who ever lived. This bridge and tunnel twerp was nothing. Still, something about him threw you off. “Just get out of my way.”

He scratched his chin. “Funny, last thing I remember was I was watching a tv program, one of those true crime things. And someone in one of the episodes kind of looked like you.”

“I look like a lot of people.”

“Nah,” he said. “It was definitely you.”

“So what if it was.”

He raised his hands in surrender. “Fine, bitch. Be that way.”

You watched him turn and walk off and your heart settled. Then you hear another voice, this one high pitched. “What’s your favorite scary movie, bitch?”

You looked up and down the alley. No one was there. Then you saw a gostface mask flying through the air, and something white, and something sliver.

“Are you fucking deaf? What’s your favorite scary movie?” the flying mask said.

It hovered in the air in front of you. You pulled the mask off to reveal a white parrot holding a knife in its talons. It lunged the knife at you. It stabbed you in the shoulder. You dropped your coffee and your bagel and reached into your purse and pulled out your revolver and shot. A plume of feathers flew through the air. “You hit me, you whore,” the parrot screeched. Then it dropped to the ground, still clutching the knife.

You walk up to it. The bird lay still. Then it sprung back up and stabbed you in the stomach. You aimed your revolver at the parrot’s head and blew a hole right through it.

Dead. Finally.

“I fucking hate scary movies,” you said as you pressed your hands against your two latest stabbing wounds.

Anatomy of a Story: Time Turns Blood to Dust

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If you’re lucky, some stories come at you all of a sudden like an electric shock. The premise blazes in your brain. The bones of the architecture rise. All in a single moment.

This is what happened to me for my horror story, Time Turns Blood to Dust, just published here in the magazine Uncharted.

Not to say the story was an easy one to write. On the contrary. There was a puzzle I had to solve in crafting the narrative, and it took me what felt like forever to get it just right.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to the beginning. Much like the four protagonists in my story, I was spending an aimless day wandering Manhattan when I saw this tiny nondescript bar. I decided to go in for a drink. The bartender was your average hipster white dude. I took a seat and got an IPA.

And then I went to the bathroom.

Right at the urinal someone had scribbled on the wall: DON’T LOOK UP.

Being both superstitious as hell and a not-quite-nonbeliever of things that go bump in the night, I definitely DID NOT look up. I left the men’s room, finished my beer, and went on with my life.

Of course I knew instantly what just happened: I’d been gifted with the premise of my next story. What if I had looked up? Was there some sort of monster up there waiting to consume me?

But premises are everywhere. Plots are harder to come across. My first question: what happens in the story?

My biggest clue was the graffiti. In my story it was a warning. I had to figure out WHO wrote it, and why. Early on I knew I’d be writing four different perspectives. I wanted the challenge of crafting four complete characters in a tight timeline. I also knew all four characters would be men, since another challenge I set for myself was to capture four different emotional experiences from a distinctly male viewpoint.

But which one would be the graffiti author? How does he do it and why? Where should he be in the order of the four?

Another puzzle was this: how to get to a resolution. The great thing about horror is that it opens up new imaginary worlds. The bad thing about horror is that there’s often no real story arc. I used the four stories within a single story to create a story arc, with the first story setting the tone, the second one amping up that tone, the third shifting, and the fourth going in a different direction, all the while giving the horror its due.

And then came the last challenge. What to name it? Don’t Look Up was the obvious title but there was a movie (that I never saw) with that same name. I thought about Obsidian. I love one-word titles but it left me flat. Then, while reading a Flannery O’Connor novella I came across the phrase “time turns blood to dust.” Bingo. It has the word blood in it (always a plus for horror), it captures one of the themes of my story, and it’s slightly pretentious. Everyone should try and be a little pretentious now and then.