Dearest Reader,

My name is Jon Harahan. I was born Jonathan C. Harahan. Don’t ask what the C stands for because I am not going to tell you. Most people just call me Jon. I graduated from Shippensburg University in 2008 with a Bachelor of Arts in English with an emphasis in writing and a minor in History and Philosophy. My senior year the university gave me six hundred dollars to write on the subject of metafiction. So in turn I wrote five short stories all with a metafictional twist. My muses included Kurt Vonnegut, Art Spiegelman, and Italio Calvino. God bless them.

I’m not religious. Some people call me agnostic, and some say I just need proof; I’ve had proof. I’m just skeptical. If you’re going to label me religiously, call me a skeptic. Oftentimes Professors of English will tell students “show, don’t tell” in your writing. Instead of trying to show you, I’m telling you: Religious Skeptic.

***

I created many characters during my metafiction experiment. These people included, but were not limited to, Josh Kory, Adam Richards, Benny Allen, and Theo Blanton –who is not to be confused with Joe Blanton, a Philadelphia Phillies pitcher, and the first pitcher in Major League Baseball history to hit a homerun in the World Series.

Theo Blanton, in my mind, is an old writer, and philosopher, living in Denver Colorado, who enjoys hanging out and occasionally teaching at his local university. He is a famous and successful writer. He is old and smokes a lot, but his brain is sharp, and his wife is physically attractive for her age. Theo loves her because she challenges him. He pretends to be a pessimist, or perhaps he pretends to pretend, and actually is. Maybe he would like people to think that he is faking so as to not depress them more than he intends. I’m not sure. You’d have to ask him.

He has silver hair on his face and head. Most of it is curly. He usually does not wear glasses. He has bags under his eyes which are to reflective of his hard work and success.

He has not been on any fantastical adventures in any stories that I have written. He walks around a lot, smoking and drinking, and dishing out worldly advice through the Socratic Method. This sometimes makes him look like a friendly, curious old man. Other times it makes him look like a dick.

In only one of my stories do I have him actually sit down and write. And in that story he only does it to accelerate global warming, which we all know he did not need to do. We are doing that all by ourselves. He is a famous writer who steals many of his ideas from other famous writers. Good writers borrow, great writers steal, he’d say. I’d agree.

***

Often times of course I wonder what Theo Blanton would say about this or that, or how he would react to certain situations. This is to help my writing and my character development of Theo Blanton. He is essentially loosely based off the real life writer Kurt Vonnegut, who is up in heaven now. Vonnegut had a few recurring characters in his novels, the most famous being Kilgore Trout, and who was based off of the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. This is where Theo Blanton’s first name comes from. Originally I too was going to use a type of fish as Blanton’s last name, but I decided against it, mainly because I do not know many types of fish, and also because Theo Blanton’s real name is just that. Theo Blanton is in no way related to Carsie Blanton, a relatively unknown folk and blues singer who performs her music in and around the Philadelphia area.

***

In many metafictional stories the author may put him or herself into the story as a character. Rarely do the writer and character meet outside the pages. I was hired to run and manage a fitness gym a few months ago and was fired after a month. The next day I got a job at a brewery/restaurant selling kegs of beer to people and busing tables.

After about month I was still working. After about a month I was busing a table, and the man at the table behind me asked if I could get him a porter on Cast. I turned around to tell him I would. He winked at me and laughed. I wanted to take a picture of him. He honestly looked as I would picture Theo Blanton. I smiled shrugged and got him his beer.

The next day the man was back, and the day after that. I thought little of it except for his resemblance to a fictional character that I had invented out of my own mind.
I was working in the retail shop a few days later. The retail shop: where people can come to buy clothing, glassware, merchandise, and beer at almost any quantity. Fortunately though, customers are a rarity in the retail shop, and I can spend my time reading or writing, or playing online poker. The shop is away from both the brewery and the restaurant, even the bathrooms. It is down a dimly lit, well tiled, hallway leading to six unmarked doors. I’m not kidding: five are locked, and the other is the retail shop. If I’m feeling sociable, I’ll prop the retail door open with a case of beer so if anyone who gets lost and wanders down the hallway can learn of my existence. If I’m really bored, I’ll even play some music down the hallway in hopes of someone finding me.

A few days after getting the strange old man’s beer, he found himself in the retail shop. It was not a good day for me. I was still hung over from the night before and I had kept the door closed in hopes of deterring anyone from bothering me. Of course, this man found the right door at the end of my hallway and came in.

***

Now, listen: This is the point in the story where I should hint for a few pages that the old man is in fact Theo Blanton. Then, after explaining why the reader would be skeptical at such an unrealistic event occurring, but trying to prove its legitimacy regardless, I make the claim that Theo Blanton has found his way into the real world. You however are a smart reader and saw all this coming. So I am going to waste neither your time reading nor my time writing such events. It is not laziness but intelligence that guides us forward. Although this is the flaw of man, we shall embrace it. Let us assume that the details are worthless and get back to the meat and potatoes and the matter at hand. What is the matter at hand? That Theo Blanton, a once fictional character, has become unstuck from the ink and paper that I have created and bound him to.

As a well read and intelligent individual, you of course see that the pages and words you now read must be that of fiction, for it must be impossible for a fictional character to come to life. You are correct, and also would be correct in questioning my (the narrator’s) reliability as well as identity. I think that my name is Jon Harahan, right? Shall we assume that it is or that I am a liar? Is the narrator and author the same person? Who is the author? If the narrator and author is the same person then the author is either a liar or of course simply creating a work of fiction. I assure you most of what I write in this story is not fiction. Perhaps I think I am the author, when in reality the author and narrator are two very different people.
These thoughts have all gone through your mind simultaneously within a subconscious millisecond of the opening pages of this story. You are neither surprised nor impressed with the way in which this story has been going. However, you have left something out. Perhaps this is a sort of framed story, or a double framed story. Who knows, maybe it is triple framed. Yes. Maybe Theo Blanton has not become unstuck in Jon Harahan’s pages. Perhaps Theo Blanton has put Jon Harahan into his own pages. Maybe Blanton is the real author, reader. Maybe Jon is stuck. Perhaps Theo Blanton in creative enough to create himself in a character’s life, in which he created, and is fictional, as a fictional character on the pages of his own fictional character’s writing. Yes? Perhaps Jon Harahan does not realize he is a fictional character, and in fact is. Maybe the one with all the control is actually being controlled by his own creator. Maybe Theo created Jon Harahan, the retail shop, the brewery, porter beer on Cast, and the world. But to you reader, if you research any of these things, you will find to be true. Perhaps reader, you are fictional. You too maybe a creation of Theo Blanton’s or Jon Harahan’s. You don’t know and have no reason or need to know. You will continue to live your life the way you always do after reading this story. The way you were meant to.

Maybe this is the first time you’ve read this piece. It is a first date of sorts. I hope you are having an enjoyable time. I wrote this with you in mind, reader. I sincerely hope you do not feel you have wasted any time fooling around with these words.

Thanks for sticking around.

Love,
Theo Blanton

END

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the illustration for this piece is the cover illustration for the 1974 Pocket Book edition of Barry N. Malzberg’s The Destruction of the Temple. Malzberg is the best kind of self-referential or metafictional writer and the art from his fine novel is typical of the kind of art associated with 70s metafiction

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Jon Harahan was recently awarded the Mabel E. Lindner Creative Writing Award as well as $600 for an undergraduate research grant project entitled The Metafictional Aspect of Postmodernism. He has been published in The Reflector.

Ears flat, the pink of the inside of his nostrils spluttering, he was drowning.

What would we do? Wait for the body to wash ashore or let it just sink, and how would I explain a missing horse? Mouse was floundering in the surf, as waves churned foam in his eyes.

Then he started to swim. Pounding the water, using tired muscle, fear moving him to live. I could feel the push and surge of the dark water pass me as we both started to cut through the sea.

We were headed out, away from land.

‘Help me!’  I held on to a frantic Mouse.

I had to turn him toward the shore. I pulled on the rein; the pressure turned the pounding barrel of the swimming horse. But a wave swung over us slowly, and like a sailboat at summer camp Mouse began to capsize. He started to slip to the right. With no yaw in his leg movements, and his rotund body, Mouse was tipping over.

Terror in his eyes and another wave coming, my cold skin prickled with fear, I had to do something. Why shouldn’t a horse work like a small sailboat? So I slipped off of the left hand side of him, held onto his mane, and used my weight to pull him straight and he completed the turn.

Now, faced toward shore he focused. He pounded for his life out of this water, and I held onto him like he was an orca whale.

Jeffrey Ford is an icon of literary science fiction and fantasy. He is the author of The Well Built City Trilogy, many terrific short stories some of which were reprinted in his collections The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and the The Empire of Ice Cream, and several novels including The Girl in the Glass. His most recent novel is The Shadow Year and his upcoming short story collection The Drowned Life is due out next month.

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Q: The name of this blog is How to Write Stories about Writers. Can you name a story about a writer that has influenced the way you work, or the way you think you ought to work?

A: The things that influenced the way I work have more been my circumstances – where I lived, what job I had, my responsibilities in raising my kids. Over the years, I developed my own way of how I work, and I don’t and never really did pay attention to what other writers are or were doing on that score. Good god, you see a lot of advice from writers on the internet to other writers about this kind of stuff. It cracks me up. Still, I can give you a title of a story about a writer that I think is good. “Guy De Maupassant” by Isaac Babel. I don’t think I’d want to used it as a model, though, for how I work.

Q: You were a student of the novelist and professor John Gardner at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Gardner’s didactic books “The Art of Fiction” and “On Becoming a Novelist” are perhaps more well known and well read than any of his novels. Do you agree with Gardner’s central thesis that fiction should be moral? Did you write fantasy or speculative fiction in his class, or did those stories come later? Do you feel you’ve fallen to the ghetto from the literary heights, or has science fiction and fantasy moved up?

A: Ask any writer who is publishing today who had Gardner as a teacher and they’ll tell you he was great at it. We didn’t bother with the Moral Fiction bullshit when he was teaching me, he was trying to show me how to edit and talking to me about irony and suspense and the things that make a good plot. I have somewhere a sheet of paper on which he wrote out for me the rules of the comma. He told me his theory of teaching writing, he said, “I can’t make you a writer, but I can show you some of the pitfalls and problems you’re going to face in writing and how to get around them. This is stuff that if you stuck with it you would probably learn, yourself, but I could save you five or ten years.” The two books you mention that are about writing, they’re definitely worth a look. The exercises in the back of The Art of Fiction are really sharp. I don’t do them, but I like to think about them. As for On Moral Fiction, I could never tell if it was merely a cunning attempt to gain notoriety or whether it was meant to be something more or both at the same time. The argument at hand never really interested me and in Gardner’s own fiction it’s pretty evident that it didn’t interest him that much either. He paid a pretty heavy price for his hubris, though. I think it got to him some after he wrote Mickelsson’s Ghosts. It’s an incredible novel – so wonderfully dark and crazy – but a lot of the reviewers ignorantly slashed it as, I believe, a kind of backlash against On Moral Fiction. As far as his writing goes, the works of his that interest me are: Grendel, The King’s Indian, Freddy’s Book, Mickelsson’s Ghosts, and “Julius Caesar and the Werewolf.”

Gardner was a big fan of Science Fiction and Fantasy. He’d entertain anything in class – Romance, Horror, Mystery… He was down with it if it was a good story, interestingly told. Beyond that, at that time, with writers like Gardner, Pynchon, Carter, Calvino, Garcia Marquez, Borges, Oats, Coover, Barth, the fantastic (or whatever you want to call it) was business as usual in the “literary” world. I wrote plenty of bad fantasy for his class.

There are no heights to fall from. All that is an illusion. If you buy into it as a writer, you’ll be driven by the belief in a legitimate hierarchy in which you’ll feel compelled to find a place, but if you ignore the illusion that struggle vanishes and what you have left is simply the writing.

Q: The world is going to hell socially and politically. To what extent do you feel pressed to be engaged by the political and social world in which you live. Is all art political?

A: I don’t feel “pressed” per say, but I am engaged by and in the political and social world. If you have kids, if you work a full-time job, if you pay taxes, have a mortgage, car payments, etc., you can’t help but be engaged by it. I look at America and see it moving with the speed of a freight train out of hell straight down the toilet. The last eight years have been a nightmare of torture, deceit, death on a grand scale, fear, and an economy run by thieves. Where’s my flag lapel pin when I need it. The grim nature of it bubbles through you and into the fiction. I’ve written a number of stories recently that I sense are colored by that nightmare – “The Drowned Life,” “The Seventh Expression of the Robot General,” “The Hag’s Peak Affair.” I do think all art is political. There is always vested interest, there is always the manipulation of power.

You do not know what slipstream is, and so you ply the net, sifting through half-remembered conversations and fine discriminations, more Fisher King than Grail Knight.

One page glows about the curious unsettling effect slipstream is supposed to have upon the reader, and so, just to keep your head off-kilter, you begin to write on upside down pages, back to front in a spiral notebook from Dollar General.

“What are you doing?” your oldest daughter asks, and suddenly you’re back in Chucky Cheese’s realm amid the electronic noise and clamor of the young devoted crusading for more of Chucky’s paper ticket manna.

“A story,” you say, hoping you have not lost the thread, fearing that it’s gone forever. You try to dive back into it, your pen a staccato flash of blue across the upside-down pages.

But now she’s interested. “Who’s it about?” she says, tongue darting out to clean tomato sauce from around her mouth.

You put your hand to your receding hairline, laughing at how that could be one of the worst possible questions she could have asked right now. “No one.”

“No one! How can a story be about no one?”

“I’m not sure,” you say, because you aren’t, or because the story is too far beneath the surface still to really explain. Or (telling the truth now) because you hate to admit that the story is about yourself, and how you have no idea what slipstream is.

She slips out from her side of the plastic booth and curls around next to you, alert eight-year-old eyes squinting at your cursive title. “You don’t know what what is?” she asks.

“I can hardly explain it to myself,” you tell her, hoping the answer will suffice to send her off to Whack-a-Mole, or whack her little sister, or whack some other cartoony thing too fresh and unjaded to be worrying over writing a story about not knowing what slipstream is while at the same time hoping that when it’s done the story happens to be just that.

***

If you give up on the story and go insert tokens into the Skee-Ball machine, proceed to section 62.

If you try to finish the thing, to really capture it once and for all right here in Chucky Cheese’s, proceed to section 101.

***

62

You pour eighteen tokens into the machine, years of honing your skill at rolling balls up hills rewarded by a strip of tickets longer than you are tall. Your kids add them to their bag, excited as only girls of eight and five can be.

Trophies await them just beyond the guarded glassbound case, and they do not understand why you are so pensive, not when there are so many clearly definable prizes to pick from. They choose some things they won’t remember a week from now when their mother has snuck them all into the trash and the three of you go out into the night, the same number stamped on each of your hands in invisible ink.

THE END

***

101

Not quite satisfied with that, you decide not to get up, to keep on tugging at the thread of the tale unraveling before you. It’s leading to something graspable. But just barely.

So you never really got up, never rolled the balls. Just kept scribbling, scribbling into your upside down Dollar General notebook, smiling vacantly and nodding where you’re supposed to as the girls interject their joy into your process.

The five-year-old: “Daddy, I found tickets already on a machine!”

The eight-year-old: “I beat the Pirate Ship!”

The five-year-old: “Daddy, look how many tickets!”

Still calling yourself a Fisher King, you dig one paw into a pocket and lo, there are more tokens. Little bits of not-quite-metal made to look like coins, even minted with a date. But they are not really coins, they are not tender outside of Chucky’s border. Maybe slipstream is like that, you muse. The word just means something so long as some other rules apply. You wonder what games the slipstream coin will let you play, what prizes you can win if only you trade in enough of the right kind of paper tickets.

Number One Daughter startles you, her face so close you can see where the lady didn’t trim her bangs very evenly today. “I just won forty tickets!” she exclaims.

***
If you get up from the chair to high five her and go play at this point, you just might be able to pick this up at another time. Proceed to section 89.

***

89

You lied to yourself. You didn’t get up. You just kept writing. Someone once compared slipstream to the beautiful mortarwork between the cracks of genre. But you did not care to think of genre as so many squares of red brick, did not see how the rough glue of a million marketers and masons could be worthwhile, not to mention elevating.

“Bah,” you said. (But not out loud.) “Slipstream is simply what the pretentious and literary call work that wouldn’t otherwise sell.” And for a long time after, your ego was grounded in being correct.

You read things labeled “interstitial,” praised for their use of prose to create an experience in the reader–but not the same type of experience as magical realism would, because that’s a more easily defined genre (just barely) and so it can’t possibly be slipstream. (Or can it be, sometimes?) You try to winnow out what it is about these tales that makes them slipstream where very similar others do not earn the label.

You drive the kids home, flush with their million little victories over Chucky’s games. You wish you had maybe spent more time with them. They’re getting older so fast it scares you. You promise yourself that next time you won’t use the excuse of them being old enough finally to entertain themselves. You’ll give them your undivided attention. You really mean it. Other stories won’t be so hard, won’t swallow you up so completely. You really do mean it.

***

In the car:

“So did you finish that story, Dad?” the eight-year-old asks.

“Yes,” you say. “Just barely.” If you had stayed much longer, your wife would have sent out a search party. You picture it, a gang of khaki-clad explorers wearing monocles and jodhpurs and safari hats, crashing through Chucky Cheese’s with a train of native porters in tow, only to find their quarry in a cramped plastic booth trying to write a story about himself coming to terms with slipstream as a mode of fiction.

“So what was it about?”

You laugh.

“I still don’t know, honey.”

“What was it called again?”

“You Do Not Know What Slipstream Is.”

She wrinkles her face up behind you in the car. It doesn’t matter that it’s dark even with the streetlights flashing past, nor does it matter that you don’t actually have eyes in the back of your head (despite numerous claims to the contrary.) And it most especially doesn’t matter that you’re really still in Chucky Cheese’s writing about things that will never actually happen. You know she’ll wrinkle up her face because that’s what you’re doing right now and she’s your real imaginary daughter, so that’s what she’ll do too.

“So what is it?” the younger one pipes up. She’s just now at the great age of articulate interrogation. Life will never be so simple again.

You play dumb, hoping to buy time. “What is what?”

“Spitstream,” she says, and the older one chokes back a laugh.

“I’m not really sure, baby.”

She screams the way she’s taken to screaming out her laughter, her childish delight.

“What’s so funny?” you ask, looking back into the rear view mirror, jerking up again as she slaps another stack of tickets onto the cramped little table among the paper clutter of a long-finished Fun Saver Meal.

“You are,” she cackles. “There’s no such thing as Spitstream.”

She’s just turned five and you love to watch her laugh like that. The eight-year-old is there too, her tokens spent and now she’s anxious for her prizes. She smiles at her little sister’s flub. “It’s slip-stream,” she tells her, sounding far too much like her mom.

The little one gives her sister the look that means she knows better than to believe that. “It’s whatever I want it to be,” she insists.

And you figure this is just as good of a place to stop as anywhere else. You still don’t know what slipstream is, but it’s time to go turn in your tickets and get your prizes. Your kids hope they will have enough to get something really cool from Chucky’s stash. You just hope that whatever you get will be remembered beyond next week.

***

When you are ready, proceed to the next section.

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About the Author:

Lon Prater still doesn’t know what slipstream is, but he can sure show a skee-ball machine who’s boss. Find out more about his writing at lonprater.com. This story originally appeared in Lone Star Stories.

Paul G. Tremblay’s fiction has appeared in a great many magazines including Razor Magazine, CHIZINE, and Weird Tales. He is the author of the short speculative fiction collection Compositions for the Young and Old and the hard-boiled/dark fantasy novella City Pier: Above and Below. He served as fiction editor of CHIZINE and as co-editor of Fantasy Magazine, and was also the co-editor (with Sean Wallace) of the Fantasy and Bandersnatch anthologies. His first novel, The Little Sleep, is forthcoming (February 2009) from Henry Holt. He lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts and He is represented by Stephen Barbara of the Donald Maass agency.

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Q: You recently sold your first novel “The Little Sleep” to Henry Holt.  Tell us a little bit about the book, and how it relates to Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” if at all.

A: The protag is Mark Genevich; a Lithuanian, narcoleptic private detective eeking out an existence in South Boston. The novel’s plot and voice is very much inspired by Chandler’s The Big Sleep and many post-Chandler noir novels as well. While there is humor to be had (I hope!) in The Little Sleep, the book has fun with the usual PI conventions while poking around in the nature of reality; what’s real, what’s a construct? And I take and treat Mark’s character very seriously. He’s isn’t a joke. He’s someone who suffers a great deal.

I’m proud, excited, amazingly nervous for the book, and I hope people like it.

Q: You teach calculus for a living.   My favorite word from calculus would be scatterplot.  What is your favorite word from calculus?

 
A: I don’t have a favorite word. I have favorite symbols, like this: a double legged Z for the set of all integers. Or more obscure ones like : reversed capital E, with means “there exists (existential qualifier!) or upside down capital A, which means “for all.” One might say the knowledge and use of such symbols reaffirms my exultant standing within civilized society. Or one might not.

Q: Have you ever read Stephen King’s book Rage?  I read it while I was in high school.  If I remember correctly the calculus teacher in that book was shot and her last words were something about an equation.  What would you want your last words to be if you were a character in a Stephen King novel?

A: I did read Rage; a long time ago. I didn’t remember that a calculus teacher was shot or her last words. Now I’m depressed.

Aren’t we all characters in a Stephen King novel? I received my contract, finally, last week, and I’m supposed to do something terrible with my protractor to a local gas station attendant who doesn’t deserve it.

Okay, fine, last words: “If it matters, if you care about such things, I didn’t try to hurt anyone on purpose.”

Sort of on topic…I invite everyone to read Jim Shepard’s PROJECT X, which is a short novel about a school shooting. Short and powerful. Read any of Jim Shepard’s brilliant work for that matter.

Q: As a writer what person do you prefer?

A: I prefer myself! Hahahaha…haha…ha…um, yeah.

When writing I use first-person, present tense a majority of time. I like the immediacy of the voice and tense, the challenge of creating characters through a singular viewpoint, the inherent unreliability of a story coming from only one point of view because all stories, while certainly informed and molded by collective experience and culture, ultimately come from one point of view.

Q: Do you consider yourself a Horror writer?  What’s the most scary thing you’ve read about in the last month?  In the last week? 

A: No, I don’t consider myself a horror writer. And I do feel, at least personally, that this distinction, what I call myself, is important. I am a writer who sometimes writes horror. When I first started, I proudly wore “horror writer” as a badge. The result, I tried to shoehorn every idea, story kernel, or character into a horror story framework, and I think much of my early work suffered because of that. Now, to the best of my ability, I serve the needs of the story first and foremost and worry about what kind of story it ends up being later.

It sounds trite, but the newspaper is the most scary thing I read every day. I really don’t like to think about it, or talk about it. Fiction-wise, reading The Watchmen recently was a terrifying and exhilarating experience.

Q: Have you ever written a story that reads the same backwards as it does forwards?

A: If you mean, you can hold it up to the mirror and read it backwards, no. If you mean literally flip the order of the words, no. That nonsense aside, I would claim that my short story “The Blog at the End of the World” (due to appear at Chizine—www.chizine.com—in October) is a story than can be read backwards. It’s in blog form, with comments and posts presented in a certain order, but could be read in whatever order the reader chooses, I hope.

Q: How many words?

A: 4 G’s, baby.

“How To Write Stories About Writers” Submission Guidelines

Christopher Lasch, the author of “The Agony of the American Left,” and “The Culture of Narcissism” condemned modern and postmodern narrative techniques, especially metafictional approaches to literature. He wrote:

“Novelists and playwrights call attention to the artificiality of their own creations and discourage the reader from identifying with their characters. By means of irony and eclecticism, the writer withdraws from his subject but at the same time becomes so conscious of these distancing techniques that he finds it more and more difficult to write about anything except the difficulty of writing.” He went on to note that in a Narcissistic Culture “even the rich lose the sense of place and historical continuity, the subjective feeling of ‘entitlement’, which takes inherited advantages for granted. This gives way to what clinicians call ‘narcissistic entitlement’ — grandoise illusions, inner emptiness.”

At “How to Write Stories About Writers” we aim to take this moralist’s objections seriously even as we continue to employ ironic, subjective, and metafictional techniques in order to expose not only the literary devices that are employed in our own short stories but also those employed at work, in the family, in the shopping mall, in schools, and finally in society at large that reinforce our passivity and perpetuate what is ultimately a corrupt social order.

We are seeking stories about stories, literature about literature, and writers writing about writers. This is this the publication for your narcissism, this is the publication for your alienation, this is the publication for your skepticism, for your fiction that is self-reflexive, ironic, dissociative, and wild.

“How to Write Stories about Writers” is an online publication at dietsoap.org. We seek stories ranging between 500-4000 words. We pay a flat $5 honorarium.

“Ye’ve got to stop running, Mick.”

“Oh, I’m not a runner. Little in this world I’m afraid of, Joe.”

“Oh, I’ll admit ye’ve not got the haunted eyes, the pallid disposition. Ye’re a fighter, sure, and not glancing over your shoulder or naught. Still, though, there’s something in how you take in a place. Almost wistful-like.”

“Is there?”

“There is. So what little is it that you’re afraid of, Mick?”

“The Author.”

“Wot, you mean, like God?”

“Yeah, sort of. But limited, like. See, you and me–we don’t exist, right? Except how he makes us.”

“How’s that limited, then?”

“I suppose for us, it’s not. But he’s only as powerful as his skills, you see. That’s how I found him.”

“A glitch in the machine?”

“Yeah, sort of. He’s just learning, you see. Creates new worlds left and right, whole cloth, disposes of them when they break. But he’s not very creative, right? Keeps reusing characters, just changes ‘em a bit.”

“So you’re remembering past lives, only they’re like different dimensions.”

“That’s it. That’s how I found him. In the cracks between the spaces, all that mystical mumbo jumbo.”

“He sounds right dull, your Author. But why are you afraid of him?”

“Well, see. I figure. See–this is kind of hard. Okay. Imagine you don’t exist until he writes you, right? And when he’s writing you, you have absolutely no control. It’s all determined by how he feels a plot should work and stuff like that.”

“Go on.”

“Well, when he’s not writing you–you’re still there, in the back of his mind. Sometimes he’s more conscious of you, sometimes he’s less. But when you’re out there on the fringes, that’s where the freedom is. Between scenes, or better yet in stories not even thought of yet. Far enough out, you can start to control things yourself.”

“You can control things?”

“I can control myself. That’s a big start.”

“How can you tell if you’re being controlled? I mean, if he’s a good enough Author, wouldn’t he be making you do things that you seem like you ought?”

“Well, for one. These dreams. These alternate reality past life things. They’re all action, creepy and gory. There’s never any dialogue, so if I keep talking, if I chatter on, I think I’m safer than not.”

“Styles change.”

“They do. You have to be vigilant. You never know what might tip you off–what piece of reality is just a little too perfect, or a little too odd.”

“But you’ve never experienced something more–scientific, maybe? Some tangible thing of your Author’s presence?”

“Well, sometimes I have these fugues. I’ll be one place, and then another, only it’s like nothing’s changed.”

“How do you mean?”

“Like I’ll be exploring the tunnels under a city, and all of a sudden I won’t be able to move, like my arms’re pinned behind me, and lights will be blinding me and voices’ll come out of the walls. And then I’ll be back on the road, just roving–roving’s how I know he’s not thinking about me. Nothing plot-worthy happens on his roads.”

“And me? Are you saying you only meet people he’s written in stories?

“I hadn’t considered that. I meet a lot of people; it seems difficult to see my Author having imagined them all.”

“But maybe if I did some of this past life regression, you think maybe I could live forever, too, staying on the fringe of it all?”

“Nobody said anything about living forever. Authors die.”

“But their works live on, right?”

“But then you’re frozen in what they wrote. That’s the end. Me, I just want control over my existence while it’s mine to experience.”

“So then you live, but you might well not have existed but for what the Author wrote down.”

“But maybe what I do, what I choose to do, will affect that.”

“Like this?”

“What do you mean?”

“How do you know he’s not watching, not listening in?”

“If he doesn’t interfere, I guess I have to be happy.”

“And if he’s just tweaking a line here or there?”

“Well, people, real people, only have so much control over their destiny anyway. Right? You have to be happy somewhere.”

“Good. Good, I’m glad. Thank you for talking this through with me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want you to be happy.”

“Oh God.”

“Or whatever.”

---

Kaolin Fire is a conglomeration of ideas, side projects, and experiments. Web development is his primary occupation, but he also programs open source games, edits Greatest Uncommon Denominator Magazineand occasionally published in Tuesday Shorts, Opium Magazine, Escape Velocity, and Strange Horizons, among others.

Aristotle’s owner is a writer, of course. Jessica Reisman, writing her own bio, had this to say for herself:

Philadelphia is where I was born and spent the first 13 years of my life; since then I have lived in Florida, California, Maine, and Texas, more or less in that order and with a couple of stints back in Philadelphia interspersed. Between a lawyer father and a wandering, late-awakening child of the counter-culture mother–and a certain parental laissez-faire on the part of both–I had an alternately miserable and fascinating child- and teenagehood. I started writing fiction and poems at nine years old, and the first things I wrote partook of a fantastic, speculative spirit.

Though I have a master’s degree (in the useful field of creative writing), I actually dropped out of high school in tenth grade (to smoke grass and travel back and forth the country a lot). Between dropping out and going to college, I lived in an avocado grove with my mother and her husband, lived with a dance and theater troupe in South Pasadena, lived and worked at Rennaissance Fairs, and worked various and sundry jobs–from cleaning hotel rooms in Miami to working at an arthouse movie theater to hawking a tight rope game. Through it all I was writing, and always reading voraciously.

In graduate school I was lucky enough to get several consecutive Michener Fellowships, two in fiction and one as an assistant editor at American Short Fiction–to date, these fellowships represent the most money I’ve received for writing, with the perpetration of freelance advertorials running a close second. The college and grad school years were also occupied with working as a film projectionist, a blueberry raker, and a housepainter. Besides fiction, I wrote a couple of screen plays and collaborated on several radio plays–one of which has gone on to great success as a road show, even making it to off-Broadway. The occassional royalty checks are nice.

After grad school and post-grad fellowships, somewhat dissatisfied with what the lit’rary set had to say in workshops about the writing of short fiction–and because what I really wanted, what I’d always wanted, was to write science fiction and fantasy professionally–I went to Clarion West. This was an eye-opener. That first week, courtesy of Howard Waldrop, I got some straight dope on short story structure–something, frankly, the literary writers at grad school seemed to have a hard time getting a handle on. (Novel structure I believe I internalized very early on–novels are my reading of choice, and the writing form that feels most natural to me.)

These days I live in Austin, Texas. I am an animal lover, devoted reader, and movie aficionado. Courtesy of my BA in English and master’s in creative writing, I currently work as an editor (and not the fun, exciting, fiction kind) to keep myself and my cats in loft, kibble, tequila, umbrellas, books, and other oddities.

My website is storyrain.com.

Recent/upcoming anthology publications:

“When the Ice Goes Out” in Otherworldly Maine, edited by Noreen Doyle, from Downeast Books.
“Nights at the Crimea” in Passing for Human, edited by Steven Utley and Michael Bishop, from PS Publishing.

Published Works

THE Z RADIANT, Five Star Speculative Fiction, June 2004
“Uncle Lal and the Bowl of Life” in Aoife’s Kiss #26, September 2008
“Flowertongue” in Farrago’s Wainscot, Issue #6, April 2008
“The Blue Parallel” in Hub Magazine, issue #11, June 2007
“Brilliance” on RevolutionSF, February 2007
“Two Hearts in Zamora,” Cross Plains Universe: Texans Celebrate Robert E. Howard, November 2006

“Boy Twelve,” Interzone #201, October 2005
“Threads,” Scifiction on SciFi.com, October 2003
“The Girl Who Ate Garbage,” Scifiction on SciFi.com, with A.M. Dellamonica, November 2001
“The Arcana of Maps,” The Third Alternative, #23, 2000
“Raney’s Hounds,” Realms of Fantasy, October 1999
“Rain Brujah,” 365 SCARY STORIES, September 1998

Other Works
“Song of Evil,” episodic radio play, Salvage Vanguard Theater, May 1997
“The Intergalactic Nemesis,” episodic radio play, Salvage Vanguard Theater, 1996-2008 (and still going)

---

What follows is my attempt at an intervention

Q: Mr. Aristotle, how do you like having a literary name and being a prop for the human you live with?

A: [Looks bland. Turns away and starts licking the back of his neck.]

Q: Did you know she considers you her pet?

A: [Licks paws, rubs paws on ears.]

Q: She considers you her plaything.

A: [looks around for a place to jump down]

Q: How sharp are your claws? How tough is her skin? Have you considered it?

A: [...]

Q: You don’t really need her. You don’t.

A: [...]

Q: She’s using you.

A: [leaves room]

Q: [looks toward the door where the cat left, scratches ear, uses pinkie to pick out earwax] Stupid cat.

An Interview with John Klima and Tom Thrush.

John Klima is the editor of Electric Velocipede, a blogger for Tor Books at Tor.com and a fiction writer.

Q: When you sent me this story you sent it under the name of Tom Thrush. Thrush is a word with many meanings, but as a father of four the word immediately conjures the image of a breast fed infant and a woman in pain. What sent you toward the word Thrush, were you thinking of a bird or a yeast?

A: Neither. I had recently fought a bout of the sore throat, and was self-diagnosing instead of seeking medical help. Now, the only medical texts I have around the house are a series of hand-bound Scandinavian texts from the 18th century. By employing a Swedish to Spanish dictionary, a Spanish to German dictionary, and finally a German to English dictionary, I was able to translate what I needed out of the books.

Of course, I used the drawings to determine which sections to translate, otherwise the whole endeavor would have been just too time-consuming. I was several hours into my translations when I discovered that text was written in Norwegian, but I think I had the gist of it.
It was clear I had the disease: thrush. What else could I interpret out of “Clearly, both in the integrity of the devil or another illegal document since Thursday, is full of drink, with size with the mouth, throat and nose”?

While I was beset with this affliction, I had decided to write while I could do little else. The word thrush sounded so smooth and poetic compared to the raging fire and irritation that was in my throat. I thought this contradiction in thoughts perfect as a pseudonym with which to unleash my writing on the world.

I sipped honey tea while I translated and planned devious machinations for becoming one of the literary elite. Much to my surprise, my sickness was nothing more than having slept with the window open and a little lubrication sorted out the problems straight away.
I decided to keep the name regardless.

Q: Before I had ever been published I had a series of dreams that involved meeting up with various editors of small press magazines in the parking lot of the medical building where my father practiced in Colorado Springs. The editors had found a story I’d written in a pile marked 1987 and now wanted to publish the work. These dreams must have occurred in the late nineties, perhaps a full decade after the indicated year. I did not remember having written the stories the editors found. Respond.

A: I’ve been waiting for you to bring this up. I am a fan of “You Can’t Keep Infinity in Your Pocket,” “Butterside Up,” and “It’s Snowing Down in Memphis” while Gavin Grant has shown a preference for “Polyamory and the Five-Fingered Sea of Jealousy” with Patrick Swenson wanted to acquire “One Gun, Two Fingers of Whiskey.”

We’ve been patient awaiting your decision on whether these stories are available. Please let us know as soon as possible.

Q: In Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death he writes:
“The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it.” Becker concludes, however, that the artist is doomed to a partial and ultimately neurotic type of success. Why do you think this type of heroic project is dysfunctional, or do you disagree?

A: I have to agree. For me, reading Denial of Death was akin to suffering from nyctophobia and moving to Barrow, Alaska during the Winter. But you never get stronger if you don’t eventually face up to your fears. That said, it is extraordinarily difficult to look at the world differently from those around, but want to be accepted by them, i.e., to find readers among the masses.

The conundrum is to find a way in which the creative types’ world view reads both unique and familiar. People like to ingest stories filled with things that remind them of their own life. However, if they are already living their own life, and therefore do not need or want to read a book or see a movie that mirrors their own.

So the artist is forced to take normal everyday situations and make them seem fantastic or unreal. This can lead to a stringing together of unlikely circumstances that has no point of reference for your average reader, and by proxy, your average editor. The artist has then failed in getting their message out to the people. The work of the artist is rejected by the editor or by the public since it’s not seen as reflecting reality.

If the artist has success, on the other hand, and creates enough parallels to the reality of the masses to have the work be palatable for intellectual consumption, it’s not known, since the artist’s perception of reality is not the same as the general public, if this was truly through hitting on the pulse of the people, or through some random set of circumstances that can’t be repeated.

The artist is unfortunately left to a frustrating, unfulfilled existence.

Q: My wife points out that I ought to ask you a question about the story you wrote and that we’ve published here at “How to Write Stories About Writers.” Here goes: Why did you choose to submit this story under an assumed name, and why did you pose as a fledgling writer when the story itself was about the struggle of a fledgling writer? Did you want to convince me of the story’s authenticity? Please show your work in your answer.

A: I feel that nothing worthy can be accomplished except through hard work. Therefore, I try to set as many obstacles in my way as possible. In my estimation, the more obstacles, the harder you have to work, the more worthy the final outcome it.

I could have parlayed my ‘fame’ as a World Fantasy Award-nominated editor into my writing, but I wanted the writing to stand on its own. My story then, is about me. About wanting to be a writer, but not being sure how to go about in a way that I’d find fulfilling. Of wanting the writing to be accepted on its own merit, but wanting wild success at the same time.

I thought that using my real name would give me an unfair advantage over other unpublished writers who may be more deserving than me in getting published. I also didn’t want other editors/writers to be put in the potentially awkward position of rejecting my work.

But, since I’ve rejected my fair share of editorial authors, I finally decided that I should use my real name. If it gives me an advantage, that’s the editor’s decision, not mine. And besides, why put so much effort into making my magazine if it doesn’t benefit me in some ways?

Q: Thank you, John.

I step into the café. My glance settles upon the display case of fabulously unhealthy cookies and treats sitting beneath the neon sign that reads ‘COFFEE INSIDE,’ like it’s an imperative, telling the coffee where to go.

Jason Smith, small-press publisher, chats with his girl of the moment, Adriana. I am late. Adriana will not be joining us for coffee; she is getting a new tattoo and has already stayed longer than she should. Jay, as I am prone to call him, wants to speak to me about a story I submitted to him.

My family sits further back in the café. Brother, sister, mother, father, all crammed around one tiny café table. My father keeps jostling my mother’s cup and sending coffee splatters onto her new tafetta coat while he listlessly stirs his cappuccino. I can tell from his face it’s not what he expected.

Jay must not have good news for me; we’re not getting a table. Jay wants to talk in the doorway of the café. I wish we would sit down. If we did, I could order a cookie. And, then he would have to discuss the story with me, not just give an answer and jet.

Of course, that’s the point.

The table nearest us is populated with almost a half-dozen Victoria’s Secret models. They are dressed in their catalog lingerie, eating cigarettes and smoking biscotti. Now, I could be wrong, but I thought smoking had been banned in restaurants. They get up one by one and plant a kiss on a smirking Jay’s cheek and return to their table, doing their catwalk strut both ways.

Even though cappuccino is not what he expected, my father is unexpectedly pleased with this new show of thrusting hips and stroking legs. My mother dabs meekly at the darkening stains on her tafetta.

The thing is, I’m trying to listen to what Jay has to say. Even without a table, there certainly is a lot of discussion coming out of his mouth. But there’s this toffee cookie that’s been shaped into a butterfly that has my attention in an unhealthy manner. They’re $10 a piece, but I just know they’re worth it.

Jay makes some affirmative noises and chucks me on the shoulder. He walks out, leaving me to wonder what his decision was. Laughter erupts from the model’s table and my mother stalks out in disgust because my father has spilled her coffee, again.

##

I step into the café. My eye is drawn to the empty display case sitting beneath a dead neon sign that reads ‘COFFEE INSIDE,’ like it’s an imperative, telling the coffee where to go. I’m sure there are treats to be had at this café; they must be restocking exactly at the same moment I’m hungry.

Jason Smith, independent publisher, is discussing cover stock with his business partner, Alessandra. Smith, as he likes to be called, has an office around the corner from the café. He often holds informal business meetings here since it’s larger–and therefore more comfortable–than his office. Alessandra has an axe to grind about the new prices their paper supplier is quoting them. She has paper samples from all over the country, each marked with a price, each price cheaper than what they currently pay.

Alessandra leaves, bolstered by Smith’s confidence in her, and angered by the injustice done to their customer loyalty. Her igloo eyes freeze people out of her way as she disappears around the corner, her voice sure to stream razor blades at the delicate throat of an unsuspecting paper supplier customer service worker once she arrives at the office.

Smith wants to talk about my novel proposal. My odd story, after many edits, put his small press on the map, and allowed him to burgeon into a touted independent publisher. I’ve expanded the story’s concept into a novel, although at this moment it seems unreal to me that I wrote either.

My family sits further back in the café. Brother, sister, mother, and father are clustered around a tiny table, picking up cookie crumbs one at a time with their index fingers. My father is fastest and gets the most crumbs. His gloating smile irks my sister, which then flusters her to the point where she cannot get any crumbs.

Smith doesn’t want to sit; he thinks better on his feet. He is telling me something. Certainly, it has to do with how my novel will fail, or succeed, that it’s some sort of literary egg that will hatch numerous writers who expand and improve on my theme, as well as those who do nothing more than just copy me and gorge themselves from my success. Or perhaps it’s like the egg that’s sat on a sunny counter for too long and now you’re afraid to touch it, doing so will get its indefinable stink on you, and that’s a stink you can never truly be rid of.

The table nearest us is populated with almost a half-dozen Victoria’s Secret models, dressed in filthy potato sacks, and eating a raw chicken. They get up one at a time and head towards the bathroom looking nervous and nauseous. They always appear satiated and relieved when they return.

I learn from a nearby conversation that the maker died recently with the secret of their creation locked in his bitter heart and someone has eaten all the remaining toffee butterfly cookies. The cookies are, once again, all I can think of while Smith chatters in my ear. The fact that I never got to try one is a burden. I tilt towards Smith and nod my head vigorously so he feels like I’m listening.

But I’m really somewhere else.

My sister storms into the café’s kitchen to demand more cookie crumbs because my father has eaten them all, but there is no one there to help her. Every baker who comes in to replace the dead, butterfly-cookie maker has been chased away violently by desperate, loyal customers longing for their lost treat. The café places a small, hand-written sign on the counter that it regrets no longer being able to sell baked goods and that people are now welcome to bring their own.

##

I step into the café. My eye is drawn to the display case of intergalactic cookies and treats sitting beneath the holographic neon sign that reads ‘COFFEE INSIDE,’ in English and more than a dozen non-human languages like it was an imperative, telling the coffee where to go, no matter its planet of origin.

Jason Smith, publishing tycoon, is yelling at Gisele, his current assistant. She has forgotten to polish the rooks in Mr. Smith’s ivory chess set. There’s a rumor that the pieces are not made of ivory, but rather from the femurs of previous assistants. Mr. Smith, as he demands to be addressed, was so angry that he followed Gisele on her daily duty to get his coffee so he didn’t have to stop berating her. I followed them in here and I’ve been waiting here for an hour. I’m unsure how long it will be before Mr. Smith sees me.

Gisele is fired, and Mr. Smith takes her only pen to use as a swizzle stick to blend absinthe into his coffee. He confides to no one in particular that it’s the only way he makes it through his days.

When Gisele arrives at unemployment, they tell her she is ineligible for benefits because she has no pen to fill out the paperwork. They take her information to ensure that she will receive no benefits even if she comes back with a pen and wearing a disguise.

Mr. Smith motions me to him and I tremble like a leech.

My family sits further back in the café. Brother, sister, mother, and father are clustered around a tiny table, reading pamphlets about other worlds to visit. They all look much older than I think they should. My father doesn’t appear well at all, but it’s because he wants to go to Pennsylvania and everyone else wants to go to the moon.

Mr. Smith wants to talk to me about my publishing imprint. It’s apparently doing quite well, but he might have to let me go. Or maybe he’s giving me his job since I would be better at it. His voice is loud and cleaves through my saturnine-coffee throbbing brain like a Viking’s axe. I have nothing but this conversation to focus on, but Mr. Smith is so loud I couldn’t hope to hear him anyway.

The table nearest us is populated with almost a half-dozen Victoria’s Secret models. They are naked, perhaps, and definitely not Earth born. They are eating newspapers—actual paper newspapers—that must cost $250,000 apiece. They are all nearly seven feet tall, and literally rail thin. No human has been able to wear Victoria’s Secret lingerie for ten years now. They get up one by one and lick the side of my face. Most men I know would give their left ventricle to be licked by a lingerie model; it just makes me feel sticky.

There is talk from Mr. Smith of a need for aliens to be on the publishing house staff since the Earth’s population is now more than three-quarters alien. I can’t remember if I saw this fact on a piece of newspaper sliding into the gullet of a Victoria’s Secret model, or if Mr. Smith shouted it at me. It could refer to the café or to my imprint. My imprint is read by 95% of humanity and 0% of the aliens, but in the end, aliens are where it’s at. It’s clear there is no longer a need for my imprint and I’m out of a job.

But that could just be a bad dream I’m going to have.

It is at this moment in Mr. Smith’s conversation to me that I note the toffee butterfly cookies are back. At least something that looks like a toffee cookie and also like a butterfly. Its delicate wings flap languorously under the glass. I suspect it might be an alien artifact of some sort or perhaps an alien creature. The café became acclimated to alien clientele quicker than other nearby businesses. I feel in my pocket to see if I have enough change for the $1850 treat.

I’m not going to miss out this time.

My father rushes toward the front of the café in his wheelchair, angry that he cannot travel to Pennsylvania, and refuses to go to the moon, no matter how good the hunting and fishing might be there.

At last, I find a stray $2000 Bushie coin in my pocket and walk to the counter, leaving Mr. Smith in my wake. These might not be quite the toffee cookies I wanted so many decades ago, but I don’t have the decades left to wait for them to come back should they disappear again.

Mr. Smith walks out, pushing people out of his way and knocking my father out of his wheelchair. He is confident I got whatever message he had to tell. He’s always been that way, and I’ve yet to get it.

Not that it matters; I finally have my cookie, cradled in my hands.

The lingerie models motion me over to their table.

We laugh a lot.

I eat my cookie.

It is wonderful.

end