"...know that stars are small, forgetful prayers."
Doug Ramspeck, "Night Man", Lake Effect Vol. 20
This quote from flash fiction guru Mark Budman, founder of Vestal Review and publisher of many flashy things, wound up in my notebook, absent the source.
"....a writer is a professional exhibitionist. The reader is the voyeur he hopes to lure."
I wrote his words on my wrist in black ink today. To serve as shield against the surge of second-guesses, self-debasements, insecurities, regrets, and jitteriness that follow a fiction publication.
Maybe it gets better with time. But I don't see that happening.
I don't see a day when publishing a story feels less vulnerable and sensitive.
Reading the publication, I see the words and how much they are missing.
Or how overloaded the syntax.
I see a million things I would fix. Ten thousand alternatives to what was said.
I did not dance at the club when all my friends were dancing and dancing was all the rage.
I did not stop dancing on the bleachers at the ball game when my friend begged me to stop.
I'm frozen and fascinated by the things I see (and want to write) but clueless when it comes to pulling off the appropriate part.
These are my misgivings. The fear that readers will misunderstand me. The worry that tone will be taken for consent. The strangeness of suddenly discovering a series of stories published around the same time, written from the same vein, coalesce into fictional critiques of how we perform sex.
And then my partner:
"Alina, you should finish that novel. Get an agent. Do that publishing thing. I bet you could at least place in the Literary Review's Bad Sex Prize".
Ooomph. Horror followed by a familiar rebellious feeling, the rush of blood to my head, the embarrassment-- and then the challenge behind every humiliation.
"Is that a dare?"
I did not grow out of this part.
I did not grow out of the need to know "why" X is X.
And what happens if X gets in accident and loses an angle? Can we talk about what X becomes if he's no longer legible as X?
A writer I love and admire, Ron Carlson, pens advice to flash fiction writers in which he urges us not to ruin a story with the cliche of sunset:
"You can still use dawn. Be careful with daybreak, dawn's early light and the crack of dawn. I'm serious in all of this. Show inside the fortress, the citizens there listening an unafraid."
No sunset. Why? Okay, it's a cliche. But.....
And then what happens? Can I have a character who speaks in "sunset"? Can I take this bad trope and dance with it?
Is that a dare? Is undermining the literary value of a story what any sane person would consider Daring? Is it still a dare if no one but me is playing? Do we need two people for this game?
Writing is a game one plays alone. Reading, likewise. I play every hand because I want to see what happens. I want to know how it ends.
For a few months earlier this year, I played with sunsets and billboards. Sunsets and billboards in America are a fast easy segue into sex. That's just what happens when you're waiting in traffic.
This writer writes and writes and loathes herself a little for the games she plays alone. But equations emerge-- a combination numbers and patterns divided by an equal sign-- and the writer wonders if prevalent, unexotic everyday roadkill receives proper attribution for the way it primes our synapses to expect something. An easy solution. A surgical fix-it. A perfectly plastic face.
I am excited, surprised, thrilled, and honored to share "A Sport We Use to Pass the Time", which appears in the current issue of a genre-bending, fantastic journal, namely, Shadowgraph Quarterly. An excerpt:
At first, he protests because a beer has been ordered and the waitress— no, look, you are outta there. You are a chair pushed back from the table. You are walking full tilt back to the car and he will follow. Ralph or Trent or whatever his name will follow you to the car to avoid a scene.
And then you will tell him you want a hotel. You want a bed and a bath and a glass of water and what you want most is him. Now. Credit cards and dark chocolate solving all the world’s problems. Back it up with a line from William Blake: "Sooner murder an infant in its crib than nurse unwanted desires." That's where this is going.
Read the rest in Shadowgraph. The title speaks to James Salters' incredible novel, A Sport and a Pasttime.
As you read, if you read, know that one girl is humbled, excited, grateful to Lindsay/Shadowgraph staff, and yes and yes and yes-- apprehensive as hell.