mid-January week of reading
Stuber, Chung, Shattuck + some more "show your work" novel drafting...
First full week of the semester. Starting strong and I’m excited for my classes. I did a pretty good job making time and making a habit of reading a short story (almost) every morning last year, even amidst the chaos of classes and life and everything else… but it’s def already a little trickier to keep up with this log. I like how it keeps me even a little more accountable for my daily story though, and I also have already spent a lot of time in my classes preaching that writing leads to and is thinking, and I like how jotting a few notes down here makes me think about what I’m reading a little more than normal. That said, a lot of these thought might get even more and more minimal as the semester and the year and life progresses.
Anyway. Here’s some of what I read and wrote this week…
the stories I read this week:
Sat. 1/11: 5 x Amy Stuber — “The Game,” “Wizards of the Coast,” “Edward Abbey Walks Into a Bar,” “Corvids and Their Allies,” & “Dick Cheney Is Not My Father”
Up until now, I’d been reading one story from this collection every week or so. Savoring it. Over the weekend, I read the whole second half, a different kind of savoring. In part because I wanted to finish it by Thursday’s “The Was Awesome” short story club, in part just because it felt like a treat of a way to spend my weekend.
Of these, my fave was “Dick Cheney Is Not My Father,” but they’re all great…
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Sun. 1/12: 3 x Amy Stuber — “Ghosts,” “Our Female Geniuses,” & “The Last Summer” (completed Sad Grownups)
I’ve already raved about the collection a bunch, and I’m not sure I have too much more to say. It’s going on my bookshelf of fave/all-timer story collections, right next to Andrew Porter’s The Disappeared, one of my fave books from a couple of years ago. I already know I am going to be revisiting and recommending this book a lot. I really can’t recommend it highly enough.
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Mon. 1/13: “Mantis” by Gina Chung
Tues. 1/14: “The Sound of Water” by Gina Chung
I’ve only read half or so of the stories in Chung’s collection, Green Frog, but each only makes me feel a little more and more like they just aren’t for me. So it goes somtimes. I’m going to count it as “read” and move on.
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Wed. 1/15: N/A
I didn’t read my daily story this morning, the first day of the year I’ve missed. I did read a bunch though!
I taught Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” & Amy Stuber’s “Hills Like Tan Lions” in my Intermediate Fiction class, and a couple “Modern Love” essays — Kyleigh Leddy’s “Years Ago, My Sister Vanished. I See Her Whenever I Want” & Ricardo Jaramillo’s “Why Can’t Men Say ‘I Love You’ to Each Other?” — in my Art of the Essay class. I also read a handful of Short Story, Long submissions, including one by Sheldon Birnie that I accepted and am incredibly excited to get to publish and share, probably in March or April.
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Thur. 1/16: “Edwin Chase of Nantucket” by Ben Shattuck
The second paragraph tells us this is set in 1796, and I’m not proud of this, but I’ll confess right away to having a bias against historical fiction.
And even before that, the first paragraph is the narrator telling us how his father taught him to count months on your knuckles to know how many days are in each. Which feels a kinda “basic” observation or lesson or idea or whatever.
But it’s also recognizable. And I’m not sure I can unpack why exactly, but there is something about it… Simple, straightforward. But immediately pulls me into the story, and lets me know I’m in strong, confident, steady storytelling hands. It is just incredibly well-written.
And, indeed, it didn’t take long before the story had me totally swept up into it.
What a treat to have finished Stuber’s Sad Grownups this week, a new fave story collection, and to already be so swept up in this one. (I read the collection’s title story, “The History of Sound,” last week.) I have a hardcover checked out from the library; as soon as it is released in paperback, I am going to pick it up and add it to that fave/all-timer story collection shelf. (I love a hardcover, and am happy to spend money on them, but really love a paperback for books I want to revisit and reread often.)
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Fri. 1/17: N/A
I haven’t read a story yet today. Probably maybe might by the end of the day, but as of thus far, I’ve been writing up this little recap, I formatted the next Short Story, Long story for publication on Tuesday, and before all that, I went to my fave coffeeshop in town and wrote for a few hours.
Which, speaking of…
Here’s something I wrote/revised this week:
Last Friday, I went to the coffeeshop and longhand wrote a short third chapter for a new novel. I mentioned this in the last couple of these logs, and will stop repeating myself at some point, but it’s a “new” novel which I started and wrote a handful of chapters of… seven or eight years ago now? These first few chapters then, at least, are updates of what I wrote a forever ago. Rewriting this chapter last week, I feel like I kept the real basic idea, maybe 10-20% of what I had previously, but the rest was new. Trying to make the writing strong, but also make it all a little tighter, more active, hopefully more engaging and propulsive.
The first three or four of those paragraphs I wrote last week:
Everything hurt. But good. But also it all felt like nothing.
Sawyer pumped his arms like they were doing the work. Like they were powering him.
Something like an hour ago, a sideache had nagged at him for a mile or two, and first his left ankle then his right knee had stung and pinched and panged at him a couple miles before that, but he’d run through all that into this. He’d outrun the pain or the dopamine and adrenaline had anesthetized it or he’d just run himself into that blissful state of nothingness. Maybe those were all the same thing.
In his earbuds, a death metal cover of an early Nirvana song shuffled into play, and that deep throaty growl got inside him. Like fuel on a fire, fuel in an engine. Fuel, fuel, fuel, Sawyer thought to himself, the small pocket of his brain left over from the rest powering down in to that perfect, beautiful nothingness cycled through like a mantra.
One of the things that I so love about writing first drafts longhand is I don’t really get hung up on getting everything just right. I can’t copy/paste and move stuff around, and I don’t really want to just keep writing variations of the same thing over and over. It almost forces a forward moment, while just getting ideas down. I let things be repetitive, or cliche, or just generally… not quite right.
Then, when I type it up, I can start moving stuff around, deleting lazy or repeated phrasings. I can start trying to work the sentences a little, at least trying to get them closer and closer to… good/unique/right.
So, today I typed up the whole chapter, rewriting and revising and deleting and adding as I went. The new first few paragraphs look like this:
In his earbuds, a death metal cover of an early Nirvana song shuffled into place, and that deep throaty growl got inside him. Fuel on a fire, fuel in an engine. Fuel, fuel, fuel, Sawyer’s brain grabbed hold of and kept cycling through, earwormed mantra. The singer found an even deeper register and Sawyer’s bones sparkled, lit up in neon. Fuel, fuel, fuelfuel, fuelfuelfuelfuelfuel.
The blue sky shone a brighter blue, the river alongside the trail a crisper shimmer, the trees and flowers and grass all glowed a supernatural sense of nature. The stretch of gray path blurred into an abstract wash pulling him forward.
It felt like a dream. Like heaven. Like absolutely, brilliantly, beautifully nothing at all. It was perfect.
Sawyer pumped his arms. Leaned forward. Stretched his stride even longer. Found something in his reserves he didn’t know was there. A gear he didn’t know he had access to.
I moved the death metal song up. It felt a little bit more active. That “Everything hurt. But good. But also it all felt like nothing.” is still in the chapter but later. Opening with it felt a little too passive. Or something. I don’t know.
“Sawyer thought to himself, the small pocket of his brain left over from the rest powering down in to that perfect, beautiful nothingness cycled through like a mantra.” became “Sawyer’s brain grabbed hold of and kept cycling through, earwormed mantra.”
I’m trying, in general, to be more active. More confident in the prose. Thus “thought to himself” becoming “brain grabbed hold of.” I like the phrasing of his brain “powering down” but it ultimately felt unnecessary and too much. More complicated than what I’m trying to get at.
Which is the other big thing I’m working on. The novel I finished last year, The Last Lock-In, is all long, windy, run-on sentences. With lots of digressions, lists, alternates and options. I’m trying to pare back as much of that as possible. So I lose “He’d outrun the pain or the dopamine and adrenaline had anesthetized it or he’d just run himself into that blissful state of nothingness. Maybe those were all the same thing.” That “or… or… or…,” the “maybe.” I like the sentences, but they’re not the voice I want here. I want to say the thing and move on.
There’s other tweaks too. I’m happy with it right now. Is it better? I don’t know. It feels like it, to me, but I also wrote it like three hours ago and so it still has that feeling of being fresh and exciting. Maybe it will all change drastically again. Maybe it’ll be deleted. Maybe nothing will ever come of the book. We’ll see!
Final little “inside baseball” note — in my mind, the “death metal cover of an early Nirvana song” is Thou. Their compilation of Nirvana covers was released in 2020. The novel is set in 2008. I’m not going to change it, at least not right now. Because, a) whatever, it’s fun. I like it. It doesn’t matter. But also, b) in my mind it’s Thou, but it doesn’t have to be. I bet one metal band or another had a cover of a Nirvana song in 2008 that Sawyer might listen to.
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That was my week! In reading and writing, at least. Thanks!
—Aaron