There are (as has often been observed) two kinds of people in this
world. What those two kinds are — well, that’s a matter of personal
interpretation. Myself, I tend to divide the population into larks and
owls.
To wit: Some of us, maybe most of us, live in the daylight — the
early risers, the good people, who live in the daylight and greet the
morning with a song. But there are some of us who burn the midnight
lamp; the night hawks, who have prowled the infomercial wasteland of the
TV graveyard shift, who know the eerie hush of 3:00 AM, who crawl the
streets sleepless in the small hours, in the liminal zone between
yesterday and tomorrow, moving through pools of lamplight when the
pavements are strange and lonely in the dark. The Night People.
For the tribes of the night, Halloween is our Mardi Gras, our
Christmas, and our Thanksgiving, all rolled into one. It’s our tourist
season, when we natives of the interzone play host to the bright-eyed
Day People giddily clutching their 12-hour passes. It’s party time, in
other words — an opportunity to share our freaky glamour with our
brothers and sisters from the sunny side. And it is an all-night affair,
for the walls between this world and the next grow thin only with the
coming of dusk.
Read the rest (and hear twelve hours of Halloween mixtapes!) at Popdose. This one was a labor of love.
the house that [jack] built
Workblog of Jack Feerick: writer, critic, raconteur.
Purveyor of fabulism for omnivores.
Roll up, roll up, come one, come all.
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Saturday, October 03, 2015
Flash Forward
In lieu of a new story here this week, I'll direct you to a brand-new piece of mine in the new issue of KYSO Flash. It's called "In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle." Nine hundred words.
Over the last couple of months I've been conspiring with K-Flash's editor Clare MacQueen on some other stuff, including this review post. Clare is the real deal, friends, and she's been a joy to work with. There may be a couple of other things on the boil, so, as always, watch this space.
Over the last couple of months I've been conspiring with K-Flash's editor Clare MacQueen on some other stuff, including this review post. Clare is the real deal, friends, and she's been a joy to work with. There may be a couple of other things on the boil, so, as always, watch this space.
Thursday, September 10, 2015
The Bradbury Project, Week 6: 争上游
Tuesday, September 08, 2015
A Fool’s Wager
Hey, kid. Why the long face?
Oh, the usual. I want to write a new story. Something quick, and
fearless, and maybe a little ridiculous.
So what’s stopping you?
I've got too much else to do! Revising and finishing something from my drafts folder means getting myself back into that specific mindset, and I just can't muster the concentration for it. If I could write something new,
something fast and short... but I can't even find the time for that now.
Are you yanking my chain right now? Look, you’re headed into
the can right now for five, ten minutes of uninterrupted privacy.
And how does that help me, exactly?
Tell you what, genius: Instead of taking a magazine in with you, just grab your little digital recorder from the pile of junk on top of the dresser there, and freestyle a dramatic monologue. Problem solved.
And how does that help me, exactly?
Tell you what, genius: Instead of taking a magazine in with you, just grab your little digital recorder from the pile of junk on top of the dresser there, and freestyle a dramatic monologue. Problem solved.
Yeah, but what's it about?
Oh, please. Aren't you a little too old for this "Where do you get your ideas" stuff? Look around you. Improvise.
What — in the can? Come on. I need something to work with.
You're overthinking this. Just pick up the recorder and then, I dunno, grab something else at random out of the pile, look it over, and start riffing.
What — in the can? Come on. I need something to work with.
You're overthinking this. Just pick up the recorder and then, I dunno, grab something else at random out of the pile, look it over, and start riffing.
…huh.
Yeah, okay. Thanks. You have some good ideas, sometimes.
Yeah, okay. Thanks. You have some good ideas, sometimes.
Yeah — when you're not busy being your own worst enemy.
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
Skip
No story this week. No big sexy reason, either, except that I've pretty well cycled through all the good stuff in this last batch, with the exception of one really good story, which I just sold! for actual money! and to which I will link when it's published.
I imagine I'll be posting new fiction again before too long — I'm still committed to the principles of the project, and I've got several that are in various stages of "nearly finished" — but I'm going to need a couple of weeks, at least, to clear the decks from a crush of other commitments.
See you soon. Thanks for reading.
I imagine I'll be posting new fiction again before too long — I'm still committed to the principles of the project, and I've got several that are in various stages of "nearly finished" — but I'm going to need a couple of weeks, at least, to clear the decks from a crush of other commitments.
See you soon. Thanks for reading.
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Playing the Blues in Twelve Bars
I don’t have much to say about this week’s story, “Baby
Grand,” except that it is probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever written, and
that I am exceedingly fond of it; that I felt the spirit of Ray Bradbury very
much at my elbow as I wrote it; that three markets have rejected it, all taking
their time to do so, as if they kind of
wanted to run it but were ultimately put off by how unabashedly dopey it is;
and that for a while it was called “Tuesday Night at the 88 Lounge,” as if a
more respectable title could save it, but that eventually I just decided to
drop the pretense and double down on the stupid. It’s about 4,000 words, and it
will go live tomorrow at noon EDT.
Tuesday, August 04, 2015
He Puts His Scary Trousers On One Leg at A Time Like Anybody Else
This week’s story is a Neil Gaiman story, essentially, and
self-consciously so.
Part of the point of this project is to expand my range a
little, and one way to break out of my own formulas is to borrow someone else’s.
Something that Neil does brilliantly is to reinterpret traditional stories and
fairy tales—things like “Snow,
Glass, Apples,” or The Sleeper and
the Spindle. That’s something that I haven’t done much at all (not in
fiction, anyway; I have written a bunch of songs that riff on folk themes), and
I thought it might be a worthwhile exercise to break down the formula and reverse-engineer
it. I’d been browsing through Gabriel’s
Palace, an anthology of Jewish mystical tales collected and retold by Howard
Schwartz, and I came across “The
Angel’s Daughter,” a folk story originally told in the Central Asian region
of Bukhara (now part of Uzbekistan), which lent itself to the treatment. That
it was deep-cut Judaica only made it more Gaimanesque, which amused me.
I’ve also been consciously trying for more gender parity in
my writing, trying to write more women characters, and to do so with more
empathy and imagination. Along with Gabriel’s
Palace, I’d been reading a lot of feminist commentary about negotiating the
impossible standards and demands that patriarchy imposes on women, and Shulem Deen’s funny, rueful
essays about living—and leaving—his Hasidic faith. As all of these things filtered
into the story, it became (I think) something more than a goof or a pastiche.
It made me angry as I wrote it, and it made me sad.
I still haven’t found a title that I’m entirely happy with,
but in this draft it’s called “Bride of Quiet.” It will be another long one, about 5,000 words, and it will run in this space at
noon EDT tomorrow.
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
Electricity
Being an introduction of sorts to this week’s story, which
will run in this space tomorrow. With introductions, as with most things, I am
of two minds: On the one hand, I firmly believe in letting the meaning of the work speak for itself; on
the other, I am a huge fiending nerd for the procedural, and I love to know and
talk about where things come from and how they come to be. So for some — though
probably not all — of these stories, I imagine I’ll be writing one of these
little forewords, the explanatory notes that would go in the collected edition
that will never be published. I promise, in any case, to never pull a Harlan
Ellison and write an introduction that’s longer than the story itself.
Two huge events happened in the summer of 1969, within weeks
of each other — both game-changers, both with seismic impact on culture and
industry: the moon shot and Woodstock. Both were first and foremost triumphs of
logistics and technology, and as such were natural subjects of speculation for
science fiction. For some reason, though, there’s been a lot of SF written
about, and for, and in some cases by rocket
scientists — but hardly any for audio engineers. The sound systems that (say) Meyer
Labs crafted for the Grateful Dead in the 1970s represented a technological
leap on a par with anything devised by NASA, but they haven’t been fodder for
imaginative extrapolation the way that spacecraft have. And that’s both a shame
and an unforgivable oversight. Innovation
fuels imagination. And there’s always innovation happening somewhere, often in unfamiliar
fields; and there are fresh stories there.
That’s the
respectable origin story for tomorrow’s piece. The truth is considerably more
stupid: I made this goofy audio mash-up on a whim and wanted to create an
in-universe rationale for its existence. So I came up with the idea of a
slipstream alt-history story about a big electric rock festival happening in
1937 or so, with a bunch of the American labor movement’s biggest figures on
the bill — all of it, an elaborate justification so I could write about Aunt
Molly Jackson singing over a Led Zeppelin riff.
And then I realized that maybe I had something here besides a bizarre conceptual gag, so I kept writing; it took a long time, because somewhere along the line the voice became an essential element of the story. When I realized I could write the riff out of the story altogether, I knew I was on the right track.
I am, as I’ve surely noted elsewhere, horrible with titles.
The story started as “Red Dog Black Dog” and stayed that for a long time; it went
through a couple of fleeting working titles before I started calling it “There
Is Power In A Union.” That’s the title under which it will run in this space,
tomorrow, at noon Eastern time. See you then.
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
The Bradbury Project, Week 2: Van Helsing’s Hound
Redacted while out for submission. It's a slight little thing, which came very quickly; I dictated it into my little digital recorder, pretty much as it ended upon the page, while taking the dog for a long walk.
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