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(True story)

I MISSED AN AUTOPSY!

If you don’t know what that is, here’s a link to the guide.

You send five pages, I’ll give a dev edit pass, allegedly once a week. But I missed a week and it has me very interrupted. If clicking twice is too much for you, start HERE

More snow got shit from the sky and outside it didn’t crack lucky number 13 today. At the moment it’s 7 degrees outside.

I don’t like not living up to things I say I’m going to do. It throws me into impossible shame spirals and looping negative thoughts and the deep recesses of my mind where nothing but the legion of ghosts that inhabit my closet call a Greyhound station, but they never leave.

So for half the week I was sinking into a delirious depressive episode and about to lose everything I’ve been working for around here, and the past few days I’ve been running chicken headless flapping my useless wings against the dirt of the coop trying to get ready to escape it.

We got an apartment. Now we just have to get INTO it, and I have to meet all my professional, contractual, and social obligations while boxing up the last 7-20 years of my life between now and March 21.

If you haven’t read THIS, read it, dope idea, I plan to participate, if so invited. I want to CHAMPION, all caps, good fiction on this platform.

Too much has been going on. The Tyrant has returned (that’s me)

Andrew Robert Colom

The ARChitect, and no I will not change how I write that unless threatened, has stuff boiling I’m excited about.

Just listen to THIS if you haven’t. But seriously,

Magnetic

has a print anthology coming out Friday and I’m going to get it no matter how broke I am.

The World is on Fire

(But listen to it like, six times, share it, comment on it, and interact with it.)

I’ll die in the gutter clutching literature I couldn’t afford to support people I think deserve it, and he’s one of them.

Oh, and Moby Dick got told from the perspective of The Whale in flash

Deepwish

Oh, and on Valentine’s day

M.P. Fitzgerald - Graphomania

fucked me up with this.

Love is a Snow-Lettered Word

I’ll die mad at that story.

Oh, and

Jon T

wrote this for

SUM FLUX

Jumping with Janus

(I like embeds. intertext linking isn’t loud enough for me if at all possible unless I’m easter egging, and I’m a very loud person)

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ARC plugged the fuck out of my story King of Killers the other day, along with a lot of other people and holy shit, I can’t express my thanks.

It’s a piece of the Nine Story Hotel that hasn’t even hit yet, but it garnered enough algorithmic attention in one day to move me up the boards to a place I honestly don’t think I should be.

This is significant because the last time I checked the boards for Fiction (which is separate from literature and the overlap is glaring and pisses me off but other stories.)

I was somewhere around like, 264…. Not that this is even an easy thing or place to find, (dropdown menu for home, explore, fiction tab, leaderboard) but if enough people bump someone, a story, something in a concerted EFFROT in one day or one span of time, it proves that the needle can be moved. This is an important data point. Why? I’m a scientist. Shit’s brewin’. (Exta data point, I’m still at 93. I have no idea what how little I know and I admit it. However, at least ONE stack I clicked on in the top fifty didn’t seem to exist. It just led to a page that said, fuck off, turn around, this isn’t real, which confused me and since I’m running out of Xanax immediately shot my mind off into conspiracy mode)

Why am I talking about all this shit? We’ll see in time, I’m sure. But anyway, moving on.

---

Mountains of salt

Read this right the fuck now. My commentary on it is as follows, and it is what I’d say if I was aiming to pub this as well: This piece has everything where it needs to be. There’s an emotional through line, but you don’t beat the reader over the head with it. The way that it is written on the page shows an intentional sort of formatting that is both artful and unfortunately, in the larger lit fic community, currently lacking.

Your details are sparse, but sharp. Your interiority of the narrator and authority is never in question, not once.

It is as short as it needs to be, and as long as it could possibly be. Unless I were to get very incredibly technical and very pernicious or demanding, I have no idea where I would start editing this for pub. I’d probably rubber stamp it and send it out. Maybe a little copy to argue about, but structurally, this piece has the verve and swagger of a seasoned short story writer.

The realization that he owns the bar, the slow coming to of the missed dreams, the psychological deflection and projection of remembering his mother chiding him about the salt as a stand in for structural failure of some kind, whether his own, or through other means, and the blame landing on the spiritual, demons, something totally beyond human control aside from through ritual, all reads through like I want it to. The minor critiques of modernity while sitting in a failing bar drinking Heineken don’t even come off as either disingenuous, didactic, or anything other than the character’s voice.

And I do think Zivah nailed it, this is literary Hopper in 2025, a little bit of neon in there. This is post K-Mart realism but written in a self assured and bold style, well developed, not questioning itself.

I have basically said this same shit about every story of yours that I’ve read.

Where, the, fuck, did, you, come, from.

You don’t write like you went through the MFA grinder in the past 20 years. You don’t write like you haven’t experienced a lot of life, and you don’t write like you’re not well read and haven’t spilled a lot of ink already. And for what I’m seeing lately that passes for lit fic, the voice and how you use it, in every story, is not always the same voice, it’s not always the same qualitatively, it does sound similar, but it sounds similar in just enough of a way to make every story you write sound foreign enough to the last one I read that I could pick your writing out of a lineup blind, but not in a BAD way.

This is rare. I’ve been blessed the last few years with finding some amazing new voices and being able to put them on a project founded by a seasoned cult author while watching them come into their own faster than any crop of writers I’ve seen in my LIFE. And I’ve been around the industry in some capacity for nearly 20 years or more.

I’m a formal experimentalist, I often write hysterical fast paced stories specifically with the idea of giving the reader a panic attack. I know the tricks, the manipulative little workarounds. But you don’t always have to do shit like that.

People like Andrew Robert Colom and you, some people just gotta tell damn fine stories. (BEEF Volume-1 being the MAIN thing I’m referring to here, damn fine story. But ARC is also a brash experimentalist and bold acting idea man.)”

There, the end.

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The new apartment is nice. Probably the nicest place I’ve lived in years. I picked it, I lied my ass off to get it (so much minor fraud was involved, but since we can afford the apartment once we get into it, victimless crime), now we gotta get in it. To EVERYONE who has helped my family so far

Zani D

,

Tom Schecter

,

Andrew Robert Colom

,

M.P. Fitzgerald - Graphomania

,

Nick Winney

,

S M Garratt

,

Zivah Avraham

,

Will Boucher

, and EVERYONE I can’t remember at 2:40 in the morning, FUCKING THANK YOU. Oh my god. I’d be dead without my direct support network, (

Tressa Cole

and

Edith Bow

who have given me grace while I have lost my shit for well over a month) and my extended network (a large part of which is apparently here right now? I’ll be honest, never saw that one coming.)

Any clients who see this. I am almost to the point where I can open that email address. Earlier this week when I fell into a torpor I found myself unable to face it without wanting to jump off the back deck. I checked an email chain twice. Shit’s been hectic.

New fiction planned to drop sometime this week. It was actually going to be in this post, but fuck it, so maybe prepare for a panic attack.

I want to perform an autopsy, but I’d like to get it done before near 3am. This shit is hell on my sleep schedule and I’m gonna burst into flames.

Pharmacy delivers refill on my scripts Saturday, pray the reserves last if rationed well. I can’t afford a hospital visit.

SUPPORT WRITERS AND ARTISTS YOU BELIEVE IN AND LIKE WITH MONEY.

I’m broke as fuck and I do it, what the fuck is your excuse?

Speaking of.

(if it’s not explicit enough, incoming buy me a coffee link)

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This will be coming up as soon as I’m stable enough to rip people to ribbons. I can’t wait. Already have two seats filled early on word. I’d invite anyone with chops, money, and no fear to come along. More details soon from me and

🫀body fluids🦷 - a lit mag

In the meantime there’s a

Rap Fiction

battle Saturday and I have to read this

By Sunday for Goth Book Club with

elle nash

It’s 340 pages with an Afterword and just arrived in the mail today. I’m gonna finish the motherfucker too. Aileen Wournos was right!

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So

1. What have you been doing?

2. How’s your week been?

3. What has YOU excited. If you can’t discuss it, allude to it vaguely.

4. Thanks for reading.

5. I still don’t know exactly what to do with some posts, and that’s alright.