Failure Loves Company

Jason Behrends, all around awesome Chicago literary human, captured me reading “Just Do It” at Cinco De Awesome. Bask in the awkward silence.

Burrow Press was nice enough to let me do a recap about my experience in May’s The Encyclopedia Show. You can check that out here.

The next ten days are going to be crazy busy over here.

I’ll be in three out of the four shows Emotions Dance is putting on at the Fringe Festival. The show’s called Excerpts, showcasing their best work over the last year. I’m performing “Primer” and “Would You Like To Take A Survey?” while professional dancers dance to my words (and someone else’s music). You can catch me Friday at 9:30 pm, May 26 & May 28 at 8:00 pm at the free outdoor stage. Check out more details about the 20th Orlando Fringe Festival here.

May 29, there’s this.

Prepare for the smackdown.

Four literary heavy hitters, three celebrity judges, this is going to be a night you will never, ever forget. And the presale tickets are cheap ($5!). Click on the pic to get some.

June is looking to be a good month over here. I’ve got A Patchwork of Room Furnished by Mistakes coming out through deckfight press. What I am incredibly proud of is that my 10,000 word story was accepted by HOUSEFIRE and should be out digitally in June and later as a limited edition chapbook. It’s called Bodies Made of Smoke.

I’ve written semi-long form fiction before (here’s an example) but nothing like this. I’m not known for my planning with fiction. I leap head first and and ride the wave and see what happens. My only plan of attack was to write 500 words a day, four days out of the week to knock each section out. If I wrote more that day, I did it. But the goal was 500 words a day, four days a week. I also unpacked the story around a single concept and saw how that went. There were days where I was all “fuck you story” but I slapped myself out of it and continued writing (listening to Das Racist was also a huge help on those low days). The final result was incredibly rewarding and I hope you think so too when it comes out.

We Will Celebrate Our Failures has stalled. I’m not jaded or miserable enough to write more stories that involve breaking up people and I’m not willing to do something emotionally self-destructive to make myself miserable. I may compile what I have as a chapbook and see if it can win a contest or something. What I do have though is enough meat for a short story collection version of The Internet Is A Dangerous Place To Live. Between the 10k story and some others, I can shop around my first short story collection.

I’m pissed at Bon Iver for not coming to Orlando. Seriously, if The National and LCD Soundsystem could make it down here, so can you. The fact that their new song is gorgeous makes me angrier. My theory is that our governor (referred to as Governor Skeletor) is scaring all of this awesome music away with this Skeletorness. All this great new music this year, and no one wants to come to Florida. Fuck.

See you Friday, Orlando.