This is your most meditative, "spacious" piece I've encountered so far. It's also my favorite.
I wasn't aware of the Everett Interpretation, but the chapter's title did ring sci-fi to me. That word switch was a good move. "Hypothesis" feels scientific, whereas "interpretation" smacks of courtrooms or Rashomon.
Because I've read your other more relentless, driving stories, it's funny to think that to escape that headspace you had to trap your characters at the top of a ferris wheel.
I think the difference is that your Floridecay cycle centers on an overclocked drug dealer with something to prove (his survival in the face of grief and real threat of death). Whereas this chapter maybe centers on two of his customers, who at this point in their relationship have nothing to prove for each other. Even commonplace stuff about their relationship is grating on them now, to the point where she grits her teeth at the way he calls her "babe," and his one-handed flourish opening a pill bottle is more pathetic than impressive.
This story/chapter is about a standstill. It's also about dissociation, which is elegantly reinforced by Rask's story (a grim meditation inside this long pause). There are layers to the two being inauthentic (or maybe too authentic) to each other, Rask cheating on her (replacing her), her replacing him with an artificial version in the story-in-story. I love that she's not playing Candy Crush, Pokémon GO is a game that exists as an artificial extra-dimensional layer draped over our reality, which gets at the fact that these two want to be present for themselves and each other (she's trying not to nod off), they don't want full escape, there's enough about this reality to like that they simply seek to modify it—not even to improve it, per se, but to make it more tolerable? enjoyable?
I don't know, I had to let it sit a little after I read it in order to chew on this stuff, and of course some of it blurs and slips away in that time. I'd like to revisit it at some point. But I really love this piece.
I think I vibe stronger with this piece too because the overclocked drug dealer character "ain't got time to bleed" in a way that I distrust. I'm fascinated by his knowledge, personality, and milieu, but he's emotionally off-limits in a way that forces me to make connections and assumptions behind what he claims is actually going on—the strongest emotions in those stories push between the lines like hernias. I love that about those stories, and I also love an unreliable/in-denial narrator (see: my own book), but the react-on-instinct-before-you-second-guess-yourself quality leaves me wanting just a brief moment to look around and take something in. That's not a constructive criticism about the Floridecay cycle, just a subjective emotional response to the stories set side by side.
I have that sit-down in this story (chapter). You lock us in the gondola and let us sit and think—and we go places, I don't need to stay in a box, it's more about emotional exploration. I love it.
And you play with us in that closed space: Oh, you want out? Here's a horrible little escape. Oh, you mean you actually wanted out? That escape is your new reality.
The POV switch is wonderful too.
Oh, and (sorry, this is off the dome before I have to pick up my kid) I love the touch that HE'S the one who tells the story about replacement and "you'll be sorry for letting me be replaced," when a lesser writer would make her tell that story to get back at him for cheating. This (to me) implies that he may have cheated from a want to escape his norm (drugs, imagination, Pokémon GO, fucking ferris wheels?), and is very obviously scared she'd do the same to him.
Love it. This was great, thanks for pointing me to it, Emil.
I hope this was coherent and inoffensive.
1. Do you have more of the novel this was supposed to be, or is that it?
2. (don't answer this) In which fucking dimension does the rest of the book take place?!
Thank you for this absolutely thoughtful and amazingly detailed response to the story. Yes, I did change Interpretation to hypothesis on purpose. And yes, the emotional register of the Floridecay/Saint cycle are definitely built like you say. (in fact I'm pretty sure your interpretation of My Name is My Name has influenced what will be the penultimate and final pieces in the cycle. I can bury this here because nobody will see it presumably, but expect an oncoming series of tempo changes.)
1. Yes, but it's mostly in notebooks, written by hand, in the stacks. I never completed the full novel, but I know basically how it ends.
2. You assume it takes place in ONE dimension! HAH!
Ironically the weird is my bread and butter. And yeah, take you ideas where you can get 'em baby. I have like, one major emotional register (mythic) if I'm not careful it can drown out everything else with how loud it is, and if I don't let the pressure off it can be overwhelming. Sometimes I want to overwhelm the reader completely, but obviously, *gestures at story* (and I don't think anyone realizes how much I like this story. This and Our Year mean a lot to me, but hey, I'm just happy I could write them) sometimes I do NOT want you to feel like you're on Ketamine stuck in a Crystal Method video having a panic attack.
That, and a lot of my more realistic fiction, or realist fiction, is dealing with something like, crime, crime, crime, crime, working class violence, crime, being poor, crime, sadness, crime, crime, or the criminal adjacent even if the protagonist to the cycle LITERALLY ends up being Prometheus from the Salton Sea, that's something it took me from 2023 when Salton Sea was written, to like, 2 weeks ago when my brain opens up and vomits out the rest of the story while connecting everything else now that the REAL wound at the center of the story, which in this case, ironically, is not Sarah's death, but still adjacent. My brain LOVES to connect things. Like, the postman's pants that keep showing up as one of very few iterms of sartorial description, and there's a jacket the protagonist "you" wears in one of the Saint Cycle that's the same one from A Salton Eternity.
But Emil, is that forcing a framework onto something post hoc? No.
But most writers aren't going to ask that question anyway because we all know we do this shit all the time. (a novel I'm writing is a vast explosion of a short story that got too big for it's britches, Nick shows up in like, six stories I've written. The story Rack tells his girlfriend is deadass stolen place setting and future from a micro I wrote, which also includes themes and at least one "character" (don't know if you can call a biologic infected walking tank monster, think the Think Tank from the original Ghost in the Shell ova, but more Coconut Crabby, that's in love with you but trying to kill you a character) who end up in the novel that History of the World was a masturbatory worldbuilding exercise for (establishing massive scope of time.)
And I never lose interest, is half the problem.
Also, a theme throughout my writing since 2016 is that David Bowie is an alien and he reincarnated as a dog.
Line from a notebook I excavated last week "Grief is probably going to be one of the major themes for everything I write for the rest of my life, I'm guessing" circa September 2024.
This past Saturday when you've shared both this piece and "One Year/Short", I saved this one for later because "One Year" left such a huge impression on me that I felt I couldn't read another Emil story straight after that one. The funny thing is that I ended up rereading "One Year" just before this piece. I love the interplay of addiction and intimacy that is a hallmark of both these stories. It's edgy, but in a good way. It doesn't go for shock value at all, it's matter-of-fact but also visceral. The characters feel like ghosts, not shadows on a wall, but haunting presences. If this is the beginning of a novel, I am looking forward to it.
Thank you, it's in draft. Soft end of the world sci-fi but if you look it up, the Everett Hypothesis, or more accurately the Everett Interpretation, is an interpretation of quantum theory that asserts that the universal wave function never suffers wave function collapse, suggesting that every interpretation of a quantum function happens. It was first proposed in 1957 by (drumroll) physicist Hugh Everett. And yes, it was basically the first parallel non interacting many worlds theories. (It's still considered a mainstream interpretation of quantum mechanics, which just shows we know absolutely nothing about how the universe works, and I like that.)
I've been waiting YEARS for someone to read this piece and immediately call out that it has to be sci-fi based on the name alone. But the story involves a lot of hopeless quantum suicide and dimension hopping. on the part of the (thoroughly) doomed protagonists. Thank you for the compliments on the handling of addiction especially. (and I will always take "edgy in a good way. because edgy in a bad way fucking sucks.) I grew up around functional addicts of one kind or another, I came up and survived a scene and subculture ripe with them, and as someone who survived the early oughts "transgressive" fiction wave (Chuck Palahniuk and his website The Cult, as nicknamed at the time, and a slew of novels from a decade and a half getting ALL lumped together when really they shouldn't have, not really) means that whatever definition transgressive literature used to operate under has been beaten to death like a dead horse after Burroughs shot it and then sat cross legged atop its corpse cooking up a spoonful of heroin. I borrow a definition of "transgressive fiction" from Charlene Elsby (originally in the Femgore workshop last year, which was awesome, used with permission)
"Fiction that is “transgressive” pushes against something, either in form or in content. It takes what is familiar and asks us to expand on that. Literature that pushes boundaries first calls attention to boundaries, and then demands that we consider whether those boundaries were ever appropriate. Transgressive fiction can help us to recognize the world as it is, in a way that people just haven’t discussed, or it can ask us whether this is a good world -- whether it’s not just our concepts but our reality that we should move beyond." - Charlene Elsby, 2024
By this definition drugs, so mainstream that people wish there was good old fashioned heroin again because of fentanyl, is never going to be transgressive again, it's just part of the evolution of society. Trainspotting came out like, 30 years ago guys. Fight Club came out in 1998 as a movie, which is the important part of media there, move the fuck on. What was transgressive to your idols, by definition, because of time, won't be what's transgressive to you. And I feel like men ,in particular, do NOT get this, and so transgression takes on a reactionary and conservative vibe sometimes to some people, which by nature should be impossible. The only universal transgressions that will always shock are nearly present in every culture, cannibalism (NEARLY every culture) rape, incest, murder, but those are well worn tropes, which isn't always a bad thing, (fuck, tropes are everything, so that to be transgressive using any classical ideas of transgression as have been presented in the last 40 years in fiction, you'd have to subvert them, which is another subject. Alissa Nutting, Tampa is a good example. A female sexual predator. Should it be revolutionary? No. Did the novel make a huge splash because it's rare, and even more rare that it's written about and in such a tone, absolutely. Also the original cover was fuckin' freaky) Thanks to this, and with my personal history and insight, I just get to write addiction like it is. Relatively normal, sad, very human, mostly incredibly banal. (She's also addicted to her phone, hence Pokemon Go through an entire outing, but he's going along with it because he wants to share more things with her. Ya gotta layer in the themes like an onion.) I also like to casually blur the lines between psychological addiction and physical dependence. Now, one can easily lead to the other, and often does, but they are two distinct things. I am physically dependent on caffeine, nicotine, amphetamines, and alprazolam. I have such a dose tolerance to alprazolam because I've been prescribed it for over a decade that I have to supplement my script with grey market meds, and (which sucks, because until the ceiling came in I was tapering down to where my psychiatrist wanted me beautifully, and yes, I keep a daily med log, it helps to pinpoint days that are high panic or high anxiety so that I can try to close the loop on the causation. Even though there's a relatively small amount of things causing outlier days. I'd be happy to explain more but it gets easy to conflate physical dependence, over consumption from a panic disorder on steroids, and the paradox of tapering dose, with an unsteady sort of addiction. And people like to be very reductionist about these things. On the other hand my friend Sarah, the one who hanged herself, was psychologically addicted to ketamine, she was physically dependent on alcohol. Being a dual neuroscience/pharmacology PhD, the sad thing is, she knew it.)
But I mean, I also basically treat murder the same way because it's not uncommon, it happens, and it's something humans have been doing to each other and everything around them forever. (Lesson lesson, unless you're going for a vibe, or you have a point, or you can write it really well, gratuitous violence is ALSO banal and cliche.)
You're the first person to actually give feedback on these stories outside of my circles and a few workshops (My Name is My Name was not in a workshop, The Everett Hypothesis was) that's more interesting than "good story." or "not to my tastes." And the interplay of intimacy and addiction, framing the addiction as both disruptive, but sort of bland, well, thanks for noting that and appreciating what I was doing there. Sincerest thanks sir.
Much obliged! Thanks for taking the time to write all this out, it was really interesting to read. I think one reason people often don’t leave more thoughtful comments around here is that literature takes time to settle into the psyche. In a workshop setting, we come in primed to give and receive feedback. Substack is different, it’s a platform, not a room. The mood isn’t like reading a book; it’s more like scrolling through a long forum post. Personally, I have to trick myself into getting into a “story-reading” state of mind.
I didn’t categorize your work as transgressive or sci-fi because I don’t like labels. I’m an artist through and through, not a critic. I appreciate both genres, but I don’t find it useful to say, “Hey, your story is totally sci-fi,” or anything like that. I really enjoyed how you wove in the Everett interpretation. I’ve only got a surface-level familiarity with quantum theory, just enough to appreciate it through an artist’s lens.
You’re absolutely right about transgressive fiction. In my younger years, I chased shock value—both in life and in writing—because I’ve always subscribed to the “write what you know” philosophy. I thought living outrageously would translate into meaningful work. But I’ve since realized that shock alone doesn’t drive good writing—it’s just tabloid content dressed in literary paint. The best transgressive fiction is always about something deeper. The transgression is just the surface ripple; the real current runs beneath.
While I do know all the tricks of things like shock induction, and I have a soft spot for the grossness of Chuck Palahniuk, even he tried to distance himself from that label.
I noticed that about Substack, the whole forum post mentality. And while I don't think all feedback is created equal because there's a downpressure to say something in workshop even if you don't have anything to say, and that's real, I remember getting on here and reading some stuff and thinking of how much potential I saw, and how many fucking editors were needed.
That's how I came up with the autopsy idea.
One for Emil is my Editor should drop as soon as I finish it in a few hours.
(Yay, it's the end of month rush)
Genres I'm agnostic about because the only difference between a genre piece and lit is stylistic. Literary fiction is a style or concept, it is not a genre. It is all genres because really it is a way to approach the written word coming from an angle that concerns itself with language as art (high or low, literary can encompass either or both) along with narrative (or non-narrative, plot, anti-plot, plotless, etc.) and story.
But, you know this already.
Transgression as set dressing is not transgression. Elsby's definition (every day I thank her for letting me crib this constantly, because she's so much fucking smarter than me) of transgression in literature could be about almost anything, it just has to be calling attention to a social or cultural boundary, questioning whether it is or ever has been appropriate, and then inspecting and pushing at that from real life. Transgressive fiction is therefore by this definition possibly highly moralistic in character. (Transgressive in the United States could be as simple as a story about someone living in a large metropolitan area deciding they don't need a car even though they have a 40 minute commute. It confronts the American maxim of cars being necessary.) Transgression has swung from that set dressing we both agree on, to things so mundane that examples are everywhere.
And for some reason writing that last paragraph got a Chemical Brothers track stuck in my head. So I guess it's time to go wake up Edith.
Twisty knotty joy... this is what The Last of Us could have been, and that's saying something because The Last of Us is great (IMO). Emil manages to be more real and scarier than Kings The Stand while showing any Marvel Hack exactly how un-annoying (made-up word #41) a multiverse story can be when written like he hates all of the worlds he can think. Bloody loved this... Might be my Fav Emil story I've read.
Thank you, it was very interesting to write. I think this is the, fourth or fifth iteration of it. Definitely the best to date. Story just keeps getting weirder and weirder.
I've had sour mood on me all day because this is exactly the kind of stuff I crave and I am nowhere near it craft-wise. Loved every step, especially the leap.
“scattered out to the suburbs, an engulfing blue-black darkness that I hate.”
I feel this line greatly. When looking out over any night sky, it’s the patches of darkness that make me feel sad
This is your most meditative, "spacious" piece I've encountered so far. It's also my favorite.
I wasn't aware of the Everett Interpretation, but the chapter's title did ring sci-fi to me. That word switch was a good move. "Hypothesis" feels scientific, whereas "interpretation" smacks of courtrooms or Rashomon.
Because I've read your other more relentless, driving stories, it's funny to think that to escape that headspace you had to trap your characters at the top of a ferris wheel.
I think the difference is that your Floridecay cycle centers on an overclocked drug dealer with something to prove (his survival in the face of grief and real threat of death). Whereas this chapter maybe centers on two of his customers, who at this point in their relationship have nothing to prove for each other. Even commonplace stuff about their relationship is grating on them now, to the point where she grits her teeth at the way he calls her "babe," and his one-handed flourish opening a pill bottle is more pathetic than impressive.
This story/chapter is about a standstill. It's also about dissociation, which is elegantly reinforced by Rask's story (a grim meditation inside this long pause). There are layers to the two being inauthentic (or maybe too authentic) to each other, Rask cheating on her (replacing her), her replacing him with an artificial version in the story-in-story. I love that she's not playing Candy Crush, Pokémon GO is a game that exists as an artificial extra-dimensional layer draped over our reality, which gets at the fact that these two want to be present for themselves and each other (she's trying not to nod off), they don't want full escape, there's enough about this reality to like that they simply seek to modify it—not even to improve it, per se, but to make it more tolerable? enjoyable?
I don't know, I had to let it sit a little after I read it in order to chew on this stuff, and of course some of it blurs and slips away in that time. I'd like to revisit it at some point. But I really love this piece.
I think I vibe stronger with this piece too because the overclocked drug dealer character "ain't got time to bleed" in a way that I distrust. I'm fascinated by his knowledge, personality, and milieu, but he's emotionally off-limits in a way that forces me to make connections and assumptions behind what he claims is actually going on—the strongest emotions in those stories push between the lines like hernias. I love that about those stories, and I also love an unreliable/in-denial narrator (see: my own book), but the react-on-instinct-before-you-second-guess-yourself quality leaves me wanting just a brief moment to look around and take something in. That's not a constructive criticism about the Floridecay cycle, just a subjective emotional response to the stories set side by side.
I have that sit-down in this story (chapter). You lock us in the gondola and let us sit and think—and we go places, I don't need to stay in a box, it's more about emotional exploration. I love it.
And you play with us in that closed space: Oh, you want out? Here's a horrible little escape. Oh, you mean you actually wanted out? That escape is your new reality.
The POV switch is wonderful too.
Oh, and (sorry, this is off the dome before I have to pick up my kid) I love the touch that HE'S the one who tells the story about replacement and "you'll be sorry for letting me be replaced," when a lesser writer would make her tell that story to get back at him for cheating. This (to me) implies that he may have cheated from a want to escape his norm (drugs, imagination, Pokémon GO, fucking ferris wheels?), and is very obviously scared she'd do the same to him.
Love it. This was great, thanks for pointing me to it, Emil.
I hope this was coherent and inoffensive.
1. Do you have more of the novel this was supposed to be, or is that it?
2. (don't answer this) In which fucking dimension does the rest of the book take place?!
Thank you for this absolutely thoughtful and amazingly detailed response to the story. Yes, I did change Interpretation to hypothesis on purpose. And yes, the emotional register of the Floridecay/Saint cycle are definitely built like you say. (in fact I'm pretty sure your interpretation of My Name is My Name has influenced what will be the penultimate and final pieces in the cycle. I can bury this here because nobody will see it presumably, but expect an oncoming series of tempo changes.)
1. Yes, but it's mostly in notebooks, written by hand, in the stacks. I never completed the full novel, but I know basically how it ends.
2. You assume it takes place in ONE dimension! HAH!
Wow, it's wild to think I had any influence at all! I'm curious to see what that means. I'll enjoy those upcoming installments in any case!
1. Has it been long enough that you've lost interest, or is that simmering on a back burner somewhere?
2. Your realism with inter-dimensional hijinks is a peanut butter/chocolate combo I want badly.
Ironically the weird is my bread and butter. And yeah, take you ideas where you can get 'em baby. I have like, one major emotional register (mythic) if I'm not careful it can drown out everything else with how loud it is, and if I don't let the pressure off it can be overwhelming. Sometimes I want to overwhelm the reader completely, but obviously, *gestures at story* (and I don't think anyone realizes how much I like this story. This and Our Year mean a lot to me, but hey, I'm just happy I could write them) sometimes I do NOT want you to feel like you're on Ketamine stuck in a Crystal Method video having a panic attack.
That, and a lot of my more realistic fiction, or realist fiction, is dealing with something like, crime, crime, crime, crime, working class violence, crime, being poor, crime, sadness, crime, crime, or the criminal adjacent even if the protagonist to the cycle LITERALLY ends up being Prometheus from the Salton Sea, that's something it took me from 2023 when Salton Sea was written, to like, 2 weeks ago when my brain opens up and vomits out the rest of the story while connecting everything else now that the REAL wound at the center of the story, which in this case, ironically, is not Sarah's death, but still adjacent. My brain LOVES to connect things. Like, the postman's pants that keep showing up as one of very few iterms of sartorial description, and there's a jacket the protagonist "you" wears in one of the Saint Cycle that's the same one from A Salton Eternity.
But Emil, is that forcing a framework onto something post hoc? No.
But most writers aren't going to ask that question anyway because we all know we do this shit all the time. (a novel I'm writing is a vast explosion of a short story that got too big for it's britches, Nick shows up in like, six stories I've written. The story Rack tells his girlfriend is deadass stolen place setting and future from a micro I wrote, which also includes themes and at least one "character" (don't know if you can call a biologic infected walking tank monster, think the Think Tank from the original Ghost in the Shell ova, but more Coconut Crabby, that's in love with you but trying to kill you a character) who end up in the novel that History of the World was a masturbatory worldbuilding exercise for (establishing massive scope of time.)
And I never lose interest, is half the problem.
Also, a theme throughout my writing since 2016 is that David Bowie is an alien and he reincarnated as a dog.
Line from a notebook I excavated last week "Grief is probably going to be one of the major themes for everything I write for the rest of my life, I'm guessing" circa September 2024.
This past Saturday when you've shared both this piece and "One Year/Short", I saved this one for later because "One Year" left such a huge impression on me that I felt I couldn't read another Emil story straight after that one. The funny thing is that I ended up rereading "One Year" just before this piece. I love the interplay of addiction and intimacy that is a hallmark of both these stories. It's edgy, but in a good way. It doesn't go for shock value at all, it's matter-of-fact but also visceral. The characters feel like ghosts, not shadows on a wall, but haunting presences. If this is the beginning of a novel, I am looking forward to it.
Thank you, it's in draft. Soft end of the world sci-fi but if you look it up, the Everett Hypothesis, or more accurately the Everett Interpretation, is an interpretation of quantum theory that asserts that the universal wave function never suffers wave function collapse, suggesting that every interpretation of a quantum function happens. It was first proposed in 1957 by (drumroll) physicist Hugh Everett. And yes, it was basically the first parallel non interacting many worlds theories. (It's still considered a mainstream interpretation of quantum mechanics, which just shows we know absolutely nothing about how the universe works, and I like that.)
I've been waiting YEARS for someone to read this piece and immediately call out that it has to be sci-fi based on the name alone. But the story involves a lot of hopeless quantum suicide and dimension hopping. on the part of the (thoroughly) doomed protagonists. Thank you for the compliments on the handling of addiction especially. (and I will always take "edgy in a good way. because edgy in a bad way fucking sucks.) I grew up around functional addicts of one kind or another, I came up and survived a scene and subculture ripe with them, and as someone who survived the early oughts "transgressive" fiction wave (Chuck Palahniuk and his website The Cult, as nicknamed at the time, and a slew of novels from a decade and a half getting ALL lumped together when really they shouldn't have, not really) means that whatever definition transgressive literature used to operate under has been beaten to death like a dead horse after Burroughs shot it and then sat cross legged atop its corpse cooking up a spoonful of heroin. I borrow a definition of "transgressive fiction" from Charlene Elsby (originally in the Femgore workshop last year, which was awesome, used with permission)
"Fiction that is “transgressive” pushes against something, either in form or in content. It takes what is familiar and asks us to expand on that. Literature that pushes boundaries first calls attention to boundaries, and then demands that we consider whether those boundaries were ever appropriate. Transgressive fiction can help us to recognize the world as it is, in a way that people just haven’t discussed, or it can ask us whether this is a good world -- whether it’s not just our concepts but our reality that we should move beyond." - Charlene Elsby, 2024
By this definition drugs, so mainstream that people wish there was good old fashioned heroin again because of fentanyl, is never going to be transgressive again, it's just part of the evolution of society. Trainspotting came out like, 30 years ago guys. Fight Club came out in 1998 as a movie, which is the important part of media there, move the fuck on. What was transgressive to your idols, by definition, because of time, won't be what's transgressive to you. And I feel like men ,in particular, do NOT get this, and so transgression takes on a reactionary and conservative vibe sometimes to some people, which by nature should be impossible. The only universal transgressions that will always shock are nearly present in every culture, cannibalism (NEARLY every culture) rape, incest, murder, but those are well worn tropes, which isn't always a bad thing, (fuck, tropes are everything, so that to be transgressive using any classical ideas of transgression as have been presented in the last 40 years in fiction, you'd have to subvert them, which is another subject. Alissa Nutting, Tampa is a good example. A female sexual predator. Should it be revolutionary? No. Did the novel make a huge splash because it's rare, and even more rare that it's written about and in such a tone, absolutely. Also the original cover was fuckin' freaky) Thanks to this, and with my personal history and insight, I just get to write addiction like it is. Relatively normal, sad, very human, mostly incredibly banal. (She's also addicted to her phone, hence Pokemon Go through an entire outing, but he's going along with it because he wants to share more things with her. Ya gotta layer in the themes like an onion.) I also like to casually blur the lines between psychological addiction and physical dependence. Now, one can easily lead to the other, and often does, but they are two distinct things. I am physically dependent on caffeine, nicotine, amphetamines, and alprazolam. I have such a dose tolerance to alprazolam because I've been prescribed it for over a decade that I have to supplement my script with grey market meds, and (which sucks, because until the ceiling came in I was tapering down to where my psychiatrist wanted me beautifully, and yes, I keep a daily med log, it helps to pinpoint days that are high panic or high anxiety so that I can try to close the loop on the causation. Even though there's a relatively small amount of things causing outlier days. I'd be happy to explain more but it gets easy to conflate physical dependence, over consumption from a panic disorder on steroids, and the paradox of tapering dose, with an unsteady sort of addiction. And people like to be very reductionist about these things. On the other hand my friend Sarah, the one who hanged herself, was psychologically addicted to ketamine, she was physically dependent on alcohol. Being a dual neuroscience/pharmacology PhD, the sad thing is, she knew it.)
But I mean, I also basically treat murder the same way because it's not uncommon, it happens, and it's something humans have been doing to each other and everything around them forever. (Lesson lesson, unless you're going for a vibe, or you have a point, or you can write it really well, gratuitous violence is ALSO banal and cliche.)
You're the first person to actually give feedback on these stories outside of my circles and a few workshops (My Name is My Name was not in a workshop, The Everett Hypothesis was) that's more interesting than "good story." or "not to my tastes." And the interplay of intimacy and addiction, framing the addiction as both disruptive, but sort of bland, well, thanks for noting that and appreciating what I was doing there. Sincerest thanks sir.
Much obliged! Thanks for taking the time to write all this out, it was really interesting to read. I think one reason people often don’t leave more thoughtful comments around here is that literature takes time to settle into the psyche. In a workshop setting, we come in primed to give and receive feedback. Substack is different, it’s a platform, not a room. The mood isn’t like reading a book; it’s more like scrolling through a long forum post. Personally, I have to trick myself into getting into a “story-reading” state of mind.
I didn’t categorize your work as transgressive or sci-fi because I don’t like labels. I’m an artist through and through, not a critic. I appreciate both genres, but I don’t find it useful to say, “Hey, your story is totally sci-fi,” or anything like that. I really enjoyed how you wove in the Everett interpretation. I’ve only got a surface-level familiarity with quantum theory, just enough to appreciate it through an artist’s lens.
You’re absolutely right about transgressive fiction. In my younger years, I chased shock value—both in life and in writing—because I’ve always subscribed to the “write what you know” philosophy. I thought living outrageously would translate into meaningful work. But I’ve since realized that shock alone doesn’t drive good writing—it’s just tabloid content dressed in literary paint. The best transgressive fiction is always about something deeper. The transgression is just the surface ripple; the real current runs beneath.
While I do know all the tricks of things like shock induction, and I have a soft spot for the grossness of Chuck Palahniuk, even he tried to distance himself from that label.
I noticed that about Substack, the whole forum post mentality. And while I don't think all feedback is created equal because there's a downpressure to say something in workshop even if you don't have anything to say, and that's real, I remember getting on here and reading some stuff and thinking of how much potential I saw, and how many fucking editors were needed.
That's how I came up with the autopsy idea.
One for Emil is my Editor should drop as soon as I finish it in a few hours.
(Yay, it's the end of month rush)
Genres I'm agnostic about because the only difference between a genre piece and lit is stylistic. Literary fiction is a style or concept, it is not a genre. It is all genres because really it is a way to approach the written word coming from an angle that concerns itself with language as art (high or low, literary can encompass either or both) along with narrative (or non-narrative, plot, anti-plot, plotless, etc.) and story.
But, you know this already.
Transgression as set dressing is not transgression. Elsby's definition (every day I thank her for letting me crib this constantly, because she's so much fucking smarter than me) of transgression in literature could be about almost anything, it just has to be calling attention to a social or cultural boundary, questioning whether it is or ever has been appropriate, and then inspecting and pushing at that from real life. Transgressive fiction is therefore by this definition possibly highly moralistic in character. (Transgressive in the United States could be as simple as a story about someone living in a large metropolitan area deciding they don't need a car even though they have a 40 minute commute. It confronts the American maxim of cars being necessary.) Transgression has swung from that set dressing we both agree on, to things so mundane that examples are everywhere.
And for some reason writing that last paragraph got a Chemical Brothers track stuck in my head. So I guess it's time to go wake up Edith.
Need to ponder this. If I think I’ll understand it, good on you!
Twisty knotty joy... this is what The Last of Us could have been, and that's saying something because The Last of Us is great (IMO). Emil manages to be more real and scarier than Kings The Stand while showing any Marvel Hack exactly how un-annoying (made-up word #41) a multiverse story can be when written like he hates all of the worlds he can think. Bloody loved this... Might be my Fav Emil story I've read.
The great thing is the stories live on even when you’ve left them behind -
Honestly always find it a bit weird when people are like "oh, damn, an old story, shit." Yeah, this is actually the start of a novel.
Fuck that was a fun time
Thank you, it was very interesting to write. I think this is the, fourth or fifth iteration of it. Definitely the best to date. Story just keeps getting weirder and weirder.
I've had sour mood on me all day because this is exactly the kind of stuff I crave and I am nowhere near it craft-wise. Loved every step, especially the leap.
Not good with words, so I can only say this bangs so damn hard
Thanks for liking it!