Invitations to the Autopsy: Specimen no. 3

A Developmental and Line Editorial Pass on a short story by Layne Mercer

(illustration stolen from the internet and turned into a meme by myself, Emil Ottoman, Cult of the Rainbow Rat 2022?)

Welcome to the Autopsy

The boilerplate introduction I’m probably going to always use minus the Chuck story: Some preface. I’m an editor. I’m bored. I like to share my knowledge and experience. It’s winter. I hate winter. I love reading. I love good writing. I love new voices. And I love to read new work. I also have a thing for seeing things other people haven’t, but it’s just a ME thing, probably.

Every Monday I will make a post in the morning. If you want an editorial pass, notes, a looksie; send me your best, your worst, your problem child, your precious darling, your abused stepchild, at emilottoman@gmail.com.

I will accept emails once a week, on Monday, from 6am CST to 6pm CST US, at that email address. Not in comments, not in DMs, not in any of my other email addresses, but only at emilottoman@gmail.com. Include AUTOPSY (all caps) in the subject line, please. For organization’s sake.

I WILL NEVER PAYWALL THESE POSTS! I AM DOING THIS FOR SUBSTACK, FOR THE WRITERS WHO SEND ME THEIR WORK IN GOOD FAITH, AND FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME!

As such since I will do this until the end of time and wow, it’s only 11:30pm

BEHOLD THE EARLIER AUTOPSIES IN CASE YOU MISSED THEM! LINKED BELOW!

WARNING THIS WEEK I AM STILL INSANE

The situation with acquiring emergency housing or a new apartment is dire. I had a six hour panic attack today filling out a rental application. I paywalled this shit for a reason, but, yeah, still not doing great over here.

direct support is ideal.

Yes, I’m soliciting the community directly.

Venmo: at Emil-Ottoman

Ca$happ, which I loathe: $EmilxOttoman

Paypal: Emilottoman@gmail.com

I sell and design shirts. www.cultoftherainbowrat.com (or anything really.)

AND I AM TAKING EDITORIAL CLIENTS!

I AM ALWAYS TAKING EDITORIAL CLIENTS!

I’m going insane. The mold is black. Our sinus infections won’t clear. The landlords should be [redacted] Pray we get the panic attack apartment.

THE AUTOPSY

I would like to thank everyone, as always, for sending in their work. I love to read it and if I haven’t gotten any notes back to you I’m very sorry, but this is a crisis and I’m stealing time from everyone to do anything that I can.

This week’s story is from

Layne Mercer

, most of a piece called Snakelegs, coming in at five pages and 1,268 words. This was originally to be a supplemental for having put out my autopsy last week late, but it morphed into this week’s autopsy. And it is a doozy.

Thank you for the opportunity to read your work, and do a pass of it. I will be in contact via email with a Google Docs link to a copy of my working document, but everything in it is contained within this autopsy. That’s just for you.

This is a short story that is heavy on theme and heavy on the heart. It has the possibility to be great. The ending of the story isn’t there. So I cannot comment past what I have read, but I would like to say something now that I didn’t say in the actual autopsy.

In the story the pov character (the story is being recounted in first person past, a powerful narrative voice when wielded well. And this story could very well be enough to wound a person once it is polished), suffers a stroke, and then mentions how her thoughts just don’t cohere anymore. This could be an element that if you don’t want to play the narrative straight, you could play with to POWERFUL effects. Imagine a jumbled mind. Now imagine someone who doesn’t have all their thoughts in order telling you a story. Plenty of moments for wait, or was it? You can very effectively create both an authoritative and unreliable narrator, which could lead to an incredibly powerful surprise ending. Just saying, maybe play around with that idea a little. Strokes, they’re nothing to fuck with (like the Wu Tang Clan)

My personal nemesis among other things is glue words. One of the primary ones I see all the time that removing about 80-85% of them will strengthen your prose is “that” which appears 27 times in your 1,268 words. Your glue index is nearly 50%. That is HIGH. I only know this, because ProWritingAid doesn’t make me count them by hand and come up with that sort of percentage on my own anymore. Your grammar is stylistic to the voice of the character, your sentence structure is solid, you don’t use too many adverbs (thank you) or “like” simile constructs (oh thank you)

You may notice there is much more crit on your story than the last few. The more crit you get, the more I expect from you, the more I had to dig and think about the story. The more notes you get and the more specific, the more advanced you are. Congrats.

I look forward to reading the end of this in the future, and thank you for putting your story up on the slab.

And keep writing, this is already excellent, but it’s my job to interrogate it and make you think about what you missed, may not know, or may have glazed over while writing and give commentary from my experience, suggestions, technical bullshit, and be a little snarky too. And remember, writing is intentional. Interrogate everything you’re doing. This story deserves interrogation, it could be a hitter.

Everyone who would like to submit the window will be open Monday for 12 hours. Follow directions.

TAKING EDITING JOBS FOREVER.

- Emil (The Editor, apparently)

THE TEXT

Short Story

Snakelegs¹

I had stopped sponsoring men in their attempts at recovery well before Chap Nolan’s funeral.² Sometimes I’m amazed that I’ve kept myself sober for thirty-one years.³ A lot of stories don’t go that way.⁴ Most days I’d wager just about anything that I’ll never pick up again, but I’ve seen enough to know better.⁵ Chappy put together twenty-three years, seven months, and two days without a drink.⁶ Seems no amount of time is enough to protect a person from themselves.⁷

When I first met him, he wasn’t even forty. Looking back now though, it seemed like he had always been an old man.⁸ A giant of a guy, with a beard that went from pepper to salt pretty early on. Perpetual smile. He couldn’t wear red in December or kids would hop right into his lap and start reading lists. People just warmed up around Chap. Trusted him. It sure made him one hell of a salesman. By the time he died, he had built himself a little empire with three car lots here in town, and another one down in Dayton.⁹

He liked to downplay his intellect, fluid as he was in the parlance of common men, but it was always clear to me that the cutlery in Chap’s drawer was plenty sharp.¹⁰

It was last spring that he phoned me up, asking if we could meet. We hadn’t talked in quite a while, so right away I was concerned. Turned out he’d already been off the wagon for months by that point.¹¹

I was living on disability and holding the couch down full-time.¹² Two¹³ years had somehow¹⁴ gone by since the day--it was a Thursday--when I was talking to a bank teller and a black curtain slid down over my right eye.¹⁵ I went from describing my financial needs to babbling like an infant in the span of about five seconds.¹⁶ The radiologist pointed to a bright spot on my MRI. Most of the symptoms had gone away overnight, so they called it a ‘transient ischemic attack’ and sent me on home.¹⁷ Transient my ass. The eye went back to working fine, but I couldn’t keep my thoughts stuck together anymore.¹⁸ Like trying to build a castle out of dry sand.¹⁹ The doctors ran tests, but that was about all.²⁰ They just told me to sell my restaurant and retire. Find a hobby that didn’t take too much brain power.²¹

I was starting to think it might have been better if the whole thing had just done me in. Or that maybe a Johnny Walker on the rocks might help.²² That was right about the time Chappy called.²³

“I was watching Evan, my daughter’s baby,”²⁴ he told me, sitting in a booth at Rayburn’s.²⁵ It looked like he had dropped thirty pounds from when I’d last laid eyes on him and I hoped he would order some food to go with his black coffee.²⁶ “I’ve usually got the wife with me for stuff like that. Her mom was up there in Mercy hospital, so I was flying solo. It turned out that he had an ear infection, but at the time I didn’t know what the hell was wrong with him. He just wouldn’t stop crying. Not the normal kind of crying either. It was that sharp screeching that rattles your eardrums. Wound me up something awful. Ally and Tom were gone all weekend so I took him to the urgent care and they prescribed an antibiotic, but it was hard to get him to take it, you know?”²⁷

I nodded like I did.²⁸

“Even when he finally conked out, I was too wired to relax. I didn’t sleep for two nights. Once Ally got home, I explained what had been going on, tried to tell them that he was okay. That I had it covered. She was pissed that I hadn’t called. I mean, I didn’t want to ruin their trip when there wasn’t anything they could do.” He winced like something was hurting. And maybe it was. “Now she won’t answer my texts or calls.”²⁹

“Damn. I’m sorry Chap.”³⁰

He surveyed the ceiling of the place a minute, then looked back down into his mug.³¹ “I got back to my place, but I still couldn’t sleep. My mind wouldn’t shut off. All but stopped eating. I went to the store to pick up a few things and when I rolled around past the liquor section, I grabbed a bottle of whiskey off the shelf like it was nothing. I kind of told myself that it was like taking home Tylenol or Excedrin. Medicine. Just mix it with a little soda once or twice, I thought. Until the headache is gone and I catch up on rest. It took off like a rocket from there. Now I can hardly even get out the front door.”³²

He never had been one for holing up at the house and drinking alone.³³ Most folks want to hide their habit. Even when no one around them cares. They judge themselves through other people’s eyes.³⁴ Not Chap. In his heyday he was an old-fashioned, red-faced, life of the party social drinker, putting it out there for all to see.³⁵ To everyone in his life, his alcoholism wasn’t a disorder, it was just Chap.³⁶

The problem he had was that nothing pushed him toward recovery.³⁷ Some³⁸ might say he got lucky.³⁹ Never wrecked his car or passed out at work. No weekends in the drunk tank or marital ultimatums. But it was his luck that kept him sick.⁴⁰ When he finally quit, his friends poked fun at him for going to meetings and switching to ginger ale on dart nights.⁴¹

“Whatcha need AA for, Chap” a buddy once asked him. “I can drink you under the table and I ain’t got no problem needs a circle of winos in the church basement.”⁴²

I had seen him in the rooms those early days, mostly sitting in the back, listening to the parade of true tales and lies, boasts and regrets, and eventually he got around to asking if I’d sponsor him.⁴³ In the program, we were only supposed to take on one guy at a time, but a kid who I’d had under my wing for a while moved off to Nevada to chase a girl. Chappy had gotten his six-month chip that day and he knew that the honeymoon was over. Harder times were on the way.

I asked what got him sober.⁴⁴

“Nothing,” he said, a stew of shame and fear simmering on his face.⁴⁵ “I’ve had zero consequences to my drinking and I’m tired of waiting around on them to show up.”⁴⁶

Sitting across the table from me all these years later, I could see that same look of desperation.

“Eat something for Christ’s sake.” I waved the waitress over and he ordered scrambled eggs and toast.⁴⁷

“I’ll try. I know I can’t manage this on my own,” he said. “I’m all snakelegs.”⁴⁸

“The hell does that mean?” I asked.⁴⁹

“Oh,” he made a sound, closer to a cough than a laugh.⁵⁰ “That’s what the old man used to call me growing up. He’d have me clearing rocks out of the field from sunup to dark, or make me dig post holes until my hands bled. No matter how hard I went at it, he’d still say I was as useless as legs on a snake.”⁵¹ He watched out the window like he was expecting someone.⁵² “Just good for nothing.”⁵³

1. Love a good title. You hang out with enough published authors you'll get stopped every five minutes by someone saying "damn, that'd make a good title."

2. On first read I thought to myself a lot about voice and how you use it in this piece. I love the voice of the protagonist, but this is one piece where I'd suggest going all in whenever you can.

Also, dialectics, every southern accent is not the same, I'm reading a little bit of upper Ozarks with just a touch of Georgia peach. Correct me if I'm wrong.

This sentence is the sentence that propels the entirety of the story. It's a flight sentence, in minimalism. I don't know what else you could call it, but you could call it what you want, but this is the line from which the entire rest of the story naturally flows. It tells the story right there. Now I want to know why she stopped? Now I want you to look at the sentence structure.

Spend as much time as you need tweaking this sentence. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm saying it's proficient, but I'm saying you write better than this first sentence. Establish the POV as authoritative.

Do you mean for this to sound off the cuff, like we're talking in a Waffle House at 3am, or do you want this to sound like a lament? What's the why? WHY is she telling the story. WHY is this important. From there it should flow easier on another draft or in edits.

Go deep in the voice, get a feel for it more than you have is my suggestion. I love it and I'm caught, part of why I wanted to do this as a supplemental, but guess you're just this week's autopsy.

3. Cut the glue words unless they're for stylistic choice (they very rarely are in my experience, they're just expedient. I even go over my notes to see how I'm using them.) You don't need the "that"

You're speaking in a dialect. The voice and how you use it is the authority you establish aside from the concrete retelling of a story.

(Note, this doesn't connect well to the first sentence, you have a flight sentence that hits a wall.)

If I was being overly suggestive I would say you could compound this sentence, add voice, and rearrange it so the lede is her being amazed she's kept herself sober for 31 years compound it with a comma and a subordinate clause and add something like", but I'd done stopped sponsoring men in their attempts at recovery long before Chap Nolan's funeral."

4. tighten up or extrapolate. The stories that don't go that way are details I'd want here. A few.

5. Slightly confused sequence of thought here. But I have notes on that later.

6. Suggest noting that Chap is Chappy just for very early clarification. Don't underestimate your readers, don't hold their hand, but remember, she's telling this story to the audience. The reader is a stranger in that Waffle house at 3am. This works great as a one sided dialogue. So that would make sense why she would say Chap, well he went by Chappy. or other.

7. Condense back into the sentences before somewhere if you want to keep the "Seems"

If you want this to stand on its own and create immediate authority, cut the "Seems" don't hedge, if this is what the pov character believes, have them own it.

No amount of time is enough to protect you from yourself. <-- Also suggest that. This creates authority but takes it into the reader. And we ALL know what this feels like.

Great job so far.

8. Make the meeting detailed or rewrite. This is vague. More natural informal language will do this piece wonders, I promise you.

9. I like this but something about it is ordered wrong. consider the order of details about chap, how you reveal them, what are you trying to say with them? Writing is intentional.
You have all the pieces here, just move more intentionally through the piece. Interrogate all your choices. Change everything around. 3am Waffle House, we have coffee, tell me a story that will keep my cup filled all the way through.

10. I love 85% of this sentence. I see characterization in that "fluid as he was in the parlance of common men" cut the "that" Find a better way in voice to say "He liked to downplay his intellect."

Otherwise outstanding work.

11. Little backstory would be nice here, just, there's something missing in the cracks. You can either amplify it (but that's up to you to figure out) or you can fill in some of the cracks. Going from how smart he was to a phonecall last spring is jarring. How would you make this a fluid piece of story if you were telling it out loud? Give her a stronger voice. eliminate that that.

12. Lovely sentence.

13. OK, here we go.

14. surrendering authority with vague language. This is very easy to do.

15. Great, thank you for not making this a "like" simile construct, I love you forever for that.

16. More in voice. Something in the tone of this sentence, the actual speaking of it, hits flat. Suggest rewrite. Write up to where you want to be.

And I always suggest, even if you're not a minimalist, read everything you write out loud. Anywhere you stutter, trip, anywhere you hang up on a word, think about that spot, mark it on the page, that's an issue.

I DO believe that storytelling is an art, and writing is a craft, and the best writing we don't need someone to read for us on stage (Lish MADE you read, it was a nightmare. But his workshops produced more published authors than anything short of the Iowa writer's workshop. Pain bred resilience, but it also crushed the weak, and that's not fair in my opinion.) I don't think writing HAS to be a performative act for the writer, the trick is, and this is what I truly believe Lish had wrong, is that we have to write until it is our reader who can put themselves on the stage instead of us. That's what style and voice is about. That's why writers who don't like to do readings (and readings are an art, they're performance art) can still create brilliant work.

Blake Butler's novel 300,000,000 was so delirious and written in such a hysterical and pounding way that in order to fully understand it I had to read vast tracts of it out loud, at speed, to my mom as my audience. A whole page would be a paragraph without a period, and I would find myself understanding it better by reading it out loud to her because he had created something not just for the stage in my mind, in order to fully grasp it I HAD to read this madness out loud. (Also never be afraid to sound crazy and read your own work out loud. Or someone else's.)

17. A TSI, you have so much to work with here. you could go deeper on the symptoms, but a stroke is a stroke, even a transient one, it points to systemic issues usually. This is where it gets interesting for me. Good sentence, but just so, rewrite it. Always inspect what you're saying. Why, why is it there, why now, what's the end reason?

18. This is excellent. Now here's the thing, she shows no signs of this, unless you are doing a very subtle job with the mixing up of the cadence of the story, in which case you should go larger, because subtle isn't her voice, doesn't sound bombastic enough. I have a great one voice story to email you after this that I'd really like you to read, I think you'd get a lot out of it thematically.

19. cut, cliche, rewrite

20. Authority is telling or telling to the best of her remembering what the tests were. Insert that here, unless it's needed, exposition reads as blank. This sentence is dead.

21. Expand and rewrite. Quote a doctor, if I know country folk, I know they like quoting those egghead fucks. (I'm from Kentucky.) Ten points if she says it wrong (that'd be the name of my Substack, Burnt tongue, another way I've discussed to establish authority.)

22. Great sentiment, but she has interiority, this is reportage. Why was she thinking it, are there any sensory details, or other details, aside from that maybe Johnny Walker could rescue her?

23. This should be a reveal, trust me. Cut the that, new para possibly, what happens when she's at her lowest, Chappy calls? It should be a moment.

24. Definitely need a new para, maybe intro scene. Little more scene setting before this goes a long way.

25. Passive verb structure weakens this sentence.

26. It makes a compound and it could be long, but you may want to take this sentence, condense it back and mash it together with the sentence behind it, creates an entirely different effect.

27. Love the motormouth thing here, but maybe give it its own paragraph to make it seem like he's just going on and on. Remember, you control time. You know?

28. Go in voice, cut it down and tighten it up (it's up to you to figure out how to fuck that chicken) But this is the perfect break at the end of that screed.

29. Play with your punctuation here. Go nuts. He's going on like he's on fire. But the two lines before the last, change them up. They interrupt somehow. Tighten or change. Why are they there? What's hurting him? Is it emotional? Why is it like something was hurting him?

30. Perfect, but make it sadder…

31. Unless it's a conscious choice, I usually suggest getting rid of "then" but here maybe it's okay. Consider being more concise than surveyed. What are you trying to get across about how he was looking or why he was looking? Exposition has no feeling to it. You're reporting what he was doing, but it's too vague to feel like there's a reason for it other than it's something happening.

And unless you're a formal experimentalist or you REALLY know what you're doing, a short of any kind is definitely not the place to waste words or not create feels. Create my feels. Dogwalk me emotionally.

32. Suggest giving more voice to Chap. Suggest all of his text walls are their own paras. Suggest playing with voice. Pacing. Show some of his intelligence here. Give him a five dollar word or two. Hell, he's a drunk, but I've been a very eloquent drunk before. (And I grew up with an alcoholic mom shuttling from AA meeting to AA meeting after she decided to get sober in 95.)

33. Decent voice.

34. This is authority, honestly, don't ever have your pov protagonist hedge a direct big voice comment to the reader. Maybe change up some of the writing, give her more of her voice. Put her chest in it, but good authority here.

35. Good but could be better, avoid cliche. We don't realize it but we often even avoid cliche in conversation because inevitably someone calls us out on it. (I think this is baked into us from a young age and has to do with the cult of originality. But unless she's doing it for a reason, have her voice be more bold.)

36. PERFECT, but in her voice.

37. Good, cut "that" it's clutter.

38. Vague were they voles?

39. cliche to avoid.

40. I want a few more visceral sensory details here, if not from anything having to do with him, then having to do with her. She's been through the much, 31 years clean, aunty time to give a detail from a war story or a broken fucked up life, an alcoholic (criminal, drug dealer, etc.) will take it.

41. Rewrite, more detail, more concise. The ginger ale is a great touch (I say while sipping a sugar free Canada dry in the middle of the night.)

42. Break in POV. You just pulled a Moby Dick. Your protagonist is now aware of things that are going on in the story that she would otherwise have no knowledge of. Rewrite with this in mind.

43. This is too hurried, there is no buildup, tension goes here. We've gone from noticing him at meetings in the back listening to him asking her to be his sponsor. There needs to be more of a relationship here. There is an established relationship of some sort from the beginning, but this is where it fails structurally in the context of the story.

44. I like this, condense it a little but maybe give them more dialogue between each other. A few details on the kid makes him less cardboard. Any cardboard character is dead weight. You don't want dead weight in your story, you want to shotgun me in the chest.

45. Nope, you don't get away with this. Go sensory, use a metaphor that packs heat. REALLY think about this point. This is a turn. THIS is part of the core of the story, and why he eventually relapsed. Lack of consequences.

46. See, he just was like, "well, uhhh, yeah OK so before I hit bottom, and they say everyone has their own bottom, but if this is your bottom you're gonna relapse. (Relapse is part of recovery. It works if you work it so work it you're worth it, etc. Leaving out a lotta good AA lore. And god, I wonder if they still do the pot lucks. Those were what my fat kid ten year old dreams were made of, I swear.

47. This should be another body blow, but you glance off a guard. Bring it deep.

48. More great work, but still, pull out some pain on me. Get rid of the dialogue tag, give him action, it's obvious he's speaking, no worry here of getting them mixed up.

A lot of the time dialogue tags work great just as he said she said (get too fancy and fuck you, he said, she said, add an adverb and I'm coming for you, on god. You either make that adverb a thing in the text or you stick with simple dialogue tags.)

A common directorial command (Fincher loves this one) is if you're in shot, you're doing something. If you're delivering a line and it's not otherwise specified, you're doing something. If I remember correctly this is called "business." as in "Do some business, don't just stand there." "Add some business on delivery."

Cheat code, if you want to get in someone's guts but you don't want to use he said she said, especially in first person when someone is retelling a story, give them business instead of dialogue tags. I use this a lot. A lot of writers MUCH better than me use it a lot.

But like anything, don't overuse it.

Also. consider how people tell stories naturalistically. Do you recount a story verbally to someone this way? He said, she said? This is where your voice can shine. Because we rarely say he said and she said. (But don't fill your work up with the actual pause words we use when we're talking like "uhh" and "like" so many "like"s, unless like, that's like, a thing you're really like going for, it gets old quick. (In first though it's hard to get across how much we actually talk with our hands when telling a story. your hands are almost never just sitting there when you're telling a story. If you can transfer that vibe to text, you win. I don't know what, but you up your game.

49. See, business could go here and you'd still know it was her asking the question, or no business, either way the dialogue tag is technically dead weight on your narrative here.

50. Closer to a laugh than a cough is cliche, go sensory for this.

51. Lovely, I love this. Maybe compact it. Maybe draw it out. But it's lovely either way. I'd cut comma and make it something like. "He always said the same thing. I'm useless as legs on a snake. Snakelegs." Shorter sentences control flow. Draw out the emotional hit of this little bit. Snakelegs as its own sentence stands fantastic, tall and proud.

52. minor cliche, go deeper or give it some soul.

53. By give it some soul, I meant so that this lands. And give him some sad business maybe to end the scene. Because he's obviously sounding pensive, feeling like shit, and he went from motormouth to slow and low is the tempo in like, no time at all. (No slurs at all? Might mention he was a very well put together drunk. Or he ain't that deep yet. Maybe it is just coffee.)