Sudden St.

Contrived Confessionals

Not too long ago, I had a conversation on early-stage story development with Mr. Greg. The gist of my advice was that the better stories are difficult to write. Not in the sense that it's agonizing to dredge up every fucking dotted i and ampersand. No, I mean that the story's there the whole time, waiting patiently, it's just painful to type, or scratch, or tell. As if your shame, fear, and regret has been sown into some godless Frankenstein monster, and writing it down is the animating electric charge from above. You may not want to be in the room when the monster opens its eyes. Construction alone was pure emotional vivisection.

At any rate, I'm working on this story called Negative Space, which I'm planning to submit to a contest held by a Canadian journal of 'outlaw' fiction and prose. I realized I was playing it safe, that is, by writing about two lesbians in Amsterdam and a tryst gone wrong. I realized that it would be far more difficult (and probably more engaging to me-- engaging in the sense that passing a wreck on the highway is 'engaging') to write the story about two homosexual men, especially since the story's first person and borrows some from the memoir tradition (Sorry Craig). Not being gay, it's kind of a stretch, the plasticky kind that goes in all directions. But then, I've never been a lesbian, either, and I was all-too glib about starting the story from that perspective. Oh well. If Annie Proulx can write about two buggering shepherds, I guess I can take a shot at describing what it's like to give a blowjob.

So I guess we shall see. Can I convincingly pull off a narrative from a bisexual man's perspective? Will the story be another shattered fragment of my twisted mind, a veritable Rorschach inkblot to belie my cool exterior, another diurnal emission? Will I choke, i.e., will I sacrifice story craft over my editors' perceptions of my sexuality? Or worse, will it finally emerge from the depths as some hackneyed, quotidian nightmare, unworthy of the paper or pixels that host it? Perhaps the work will be like my largest dog-- grateful just to be inside, where there's air conditioning.

Choo-Choo, Chug-A-Lug

I want to be in Glimmer Train so bad, I can't express it. It's not like I'd trade my dog or anything, but please don't make me choose.

Tonight I paid $12 to make a run at Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers. (Apparently, 'new' is a euphemism for 'not previously good enough to garner substantial circulation.' Which is fine, because that's what I am.) I offered them Surprise Me With Something Familiar, which I think is (technically, classically) the best story I've ever written. Only four people have read it, and all of them have breasts. Three of them have kids. Well, the fourth is Carolynn and she has me, so maybe they all do.

I have also quit drinking. Almost five whole days.

So now I shall do nothing but dedicate my spare to time to (re)reading Craig's manuscript, which I should have finished some time ago. I am a jerk, but he is an idiot. At least according to the title.

a salam a laikum

I went to see an old friend today, and I did. Though not just the
one I intended. This is for her. It's a story published in Mobius,
but thankfully re-broadcast over the interweb (thanks, Craig) for all of us who hate trees, leaves, and the stinking offal of the paper mill.

Sex & Chuckles

Oh, I almost forgot. I got published gain. Clean Sheets, the literary/erotica journal that published my sex-less sex comedy, Ol' What's Her Face, graciously included it in their print anthology, Sex & Laughter.

Check out Clean Sheets. It's the only lit mag (I know of) that also hawks sex toys... As if writing isn't masturbatory enough.

This Is How Competitive I Am

I didn't want to post anything about the Austin Chronicle Short Story Contest until after the deadline, on the extremely small chance that a) someone would read this blog, and b) they'd remember to submit to the contest and thereby negligibly decrease my already minuscule chance of winning.

But hey, it's a hard, hard world. And the dying industry of printed fiction is Hobbsian by nature. Sometimes I intentionally give fellow writers bad advice, as if it might make me look better by comparison. "No, no," I'll say, rubbing my chin in a contrived affectation of deep thought, "I think you should definitely keep the part where the wizened old man re-tells the story of the time he thought he'd found a nickel on the sidewalk but it was only a sunflower seed, and the woman listening says 'Ooh!' and her boobs fall out of her blouse and by extrapolation the lesbian midgets suddenly realize that they've been on Earth the whole time. That's like, the crux of the whole denouement."

John Gardener would approve, I'm sure.

Anyway, email me (benjamin.alden@gmail.com) and I'll send you a copy of my story. Then, after the results come in, we can all have consensus on how I, truly, deserved to win, and how [Insert Name of East Coast PhD] can't write his/her way out of a paper bag that already has some holes in it.

Guinness, Jameson & Me

Did you know that Irish writers don't pay income tax? I made my first small step toward joining that enviable lot when I published Some Action in the 30th issue of Albedo One, Ireland's preeminent literary magazine of science fiction.

Yes, science fiction. Because I can.

And because I've always admired Rod Serling. And because it seemed the most fitting place to submit a story about a guy who tests life-like and fully interactive cybernetic sex partners for a living.

The TRS2 team at BugPowder.com called the story "irresistible" and said it was proof that Albedo One still has some life in it yet. But don't believe me, read for yourself.

Interestingly, Albedo One doesn't pay its contributors. Instead, readers vote for their favorite story of each issue, and the winner solely receives all monies that would normally be divided up into trivial sums and meted out to each writer, helping us justify the $20,000 our parents spent to make us English majors. Uh... you probably shouldn't vote for me until you've read it. If you don't want to risk your six Euros (or five pounds sterling) getting lost in the mail, you can download it here. Oh yeah, Clive Barker's in it too.

Oh, by the way, I asked the fine editors of the Lusk-based Albedo One if the Irish truly prefer Jameson whiskey, or if that's just the impression we Yanks are meant to get. He said they drink Hennessy... which just reveals just how savvy you and your friends can get by staying home and getting into Cognac-fueled slap-fights after arguing about the botched representation of the space-time continuum in Back to the Future 3.