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.

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.

Now It Can Be Told

Little Wonder is an expanded extract from a book I was working on a couple of years ago called Seven Souls. This was my rock ‘n’ roll novel, a big, sprawling, shaggy beast of a thing, and it drew from a lot of influences. The main narrative through-line had its source in my time kicking around the fringes of the Boston music scene — especially the joy and eventual disappointment I found during my brief tenure playing in the folk-rock band We Saw The Wolf — and in an abortive flash-fiction project organized by erstwhile Internet pal Ben Haggar, the whole thing cut with generous dashes of Egyptian mythology by way of William Burroughs, of Gene Wolfe’s bizarre and wondrous short story “Melting,” and of Alvin Schwartz’s deeply weird “metaphysical memoir” An Unlikely Prophet, with a sprinkling of Virginia Woolf.

It was a little bit ungainly, is what I’m saying. I’d call it “kaleidoscopic,” were I feeling charitable (“digressive” if not), with a big ensemble cast all pulling the narrative in different directions, all jockeying to tell their stories. And in a spectacularly ill-advised bit of framing, I created a device whereby they could do just that — a long journey overland through three states, where the characters would pass the time and shorten the road by telling stories. Their own stories. Each story in a different genre, told in a different voice, a different style.

I had envisioned a lean, swaggering thing along the lines of Spider Kiss — then found I had thrust into its middle a contrivance that fell somewhere between The Canterbury Tales and Ulysses. But the idea would not be denied. I finished Rikki’s story (which bore the working title “Harvest Home”), sketched out several of the others, skipped and bobbed and weaved as best I could — then put the whole book aside, in despair of ever sewing the whole thing together, and moved on to something else.

But even as Seven Souls lay fallow and other projects came and went, I always remembered D, God bless her, looking over those chapters and saying, “These are pretty good. You ought to do something with this part.”

She’s a wise woman. Somebody ought to dedicate a book to her, or something.