Issue 40 January 2017 Flash Fiction Online January 2017

She’s at the island with a knife. Body bent over the cutting board, like a diver taking leave of the land. In one hand, the golden bale of her hair; in the other, her santoku.

“Oh,” I say. “No.” A rush of warmth washes over me as I think of the softness of those strands in my fingers, on my breasts, my lips.

“It has to go,” she says, face flush with the wooden plank.

“Let’s talk about it.” I edge a painted toenail onto the kitchen’s polished concrete.

“I’ve got nothing left to say.” She stands upright, her locks coming loose, falling over her shoulders, about her waist, nearly to the countertop and the spread before her: potatoes peeled, legs of lamb skinned, star fruit freed of their browned flesh. In the orange glow of the hanging pendant, everything looks sour.

“You don’t want to do anything drastic.”

“I do,” she says and swipes the blade from the board.

“Not this,” I say. “It won’t undo anything.”

Two years ago she lived with a man, a video game developer who ate lots of take-out. That first night she came here, she built sashimi salmon roses, a beautiful, delicate dish I couldn’t stomach. We called for pizza instead, inhaled it at the island, and she laughed and said I reminded her of him. Then she coiled her hair like a snake and kissed me below the ear.

Now she stares at the knife, swirls it above the wooden plank, like in a magic trick. She says, “Think of it as a reduction. I’ll be a more concentrated self.”

“This isn’t some cooking metaphor,” I say. “It’s real.”

“That’s it exactly.” She raises the blade, light glinting off its fine, flat edge.

“Please,” I say.

“It’s done.” She begins to chop.

Here is what you have to know: three weeks ago she walked out of Paradiso with the pastry chef, a rail of a black woman wearing dreads, who climbed on her bike and rode away. The night swallowed the engine’s groan. She locked the back door, then lidded the garbage cans. It was late, almost one a.m., and as the sous chef, she’d closed the kitchen as usual. The wisp of a moon was tucked into a corner of the sky; the air was stiff and cool as a drink. Under a dimming streetlight she stopped walking, un-tucked her shirt, shook out her braid. Then, from behind—the way a sound comes at you—he threads his hands through her hair and twists, slips it around her neck. Holds. Like a rope. Drags her from Smallman down a side street, behind a warehouse, presses her to the hood of someone’s car. She can’t scream, can’t even breathe. And her knives, like gemstones, wrapped in cloth in the knapsack at her feet.

Empty-handed, she walked back to the soft light of the loft alone and shed her clothes in the hallway. The only mark was her own: burns in the flesh of her neck.

“It felt like a carving knife,” was all she said then. In the morning, I went back, but her bag was gone. How can you protect me? she doesn’t say now.

“I don’t know,” I confess, on my knees, pulling these pieces of her in around me, gathering them up in my fingers, chunks as thick and pale as overdone fettuccini, my face buried in their dampness, in their scent of gardenia and garlic, their softness piercing, a sharpness that flays, that peels me back layer after layer and leaves me hollow and heaving at her feet.

Previously published in A Room of Her Own Orlando, 2011, and The Los Angeles Review. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

At Mama’s funeral, the ghosts crowded around the casket, like see-through pallbearers.

“Go away,” I said. “She gone. She can’t talk to you no more.”

Miss Ruth, our neighbor, patted my arm. She thought I was talking to the mourners. “Oh honey,” she said, “I know you feel like that now. But you gonna need us. Hardest time is after the funeral.”

Miss Ruth was right, even though she was wrong about who I was talking to. After we buried Mama and the neighbors went away, the ghosts stayed, along with the doctors’ bills and the rent. When the stock market crashed two years ago, Mama and I hadn’t paid it no mind. “Seems like a problem for Rockefellers and Vanderbilts in New York, not Black folks in Evansville, Indiana.” I commented to Mama. But then the bank closed its doors with people’s money still in it, and the stores downtown started shuttering their windows, and the one doctor who’d treat you on credit moved to Indianapolis. The Depression hit Evansville like a boulder in a puddle and Mama and I were ants clinging to a leaf on the water. Now it was just me on that leaf.

I sat in the front room, where Mama and I used to play cards, and added up the numbers from the bills and Mama’s ledger. It was real quiet and I got up to turn on the radio, before I remembered that we sold it when Mama got sick. I sat down again. The ghosts just stared.

Mama used to come home and lie down on the sofa in the front room, smelling like hamburgers and bleach from closing up the restaurant. She’d look at a ladies’ magazine a customer left, it was full of pretty dresses and shoes with bows on the heels. Then Mama would lean her head back and close her eyes. She’d get ten, maybe twenty minutes of shut-eye before the ghosts and the people arrived and her second shift started.

When she was alive, people would come from all over to ask my mama to talk to their ghosts and the ghosts would drop in from all over too. Woman came to ask her brother ghost to tell where he stashed his pay after the banks went belly up. A grandaddy ghost wanted my mama to ask his granddaughter to forgive him for something so awful he wouldn’t even tell Mama. Last month, a white lady from the next county over drove up in a shiny Chevrolet, asking my Mama to check if the lady’s son was dead or just ran off.

Mama called it a gift, said women in our family was always spirit-talkers.

“Some gift,” I said, washing the coffee cups the people used. “If it’s so important, why don’t people pay you?” She just sighed.

“Some things you don’t charge for–they’re too important. You’ll understand someday, baby.”

“They could knock, at least.” I stacked the coffee cups up while she shooed the ghosts into the other room.

After her funeral, I add up the numbers three times but they never look better. I go to bed. The ghosts follow me, crowding around the bed like dogs in the kitchen–hoping you’ll get careless and drop a scrap.

“Go away,” I say, “I ain’t my mama.”

That night, I dream about her.I see my mother in the distance and run towards her, like when I was little and I thought I lost her downtown. “Mama!” I shout and bury my face in her shoulder.

“Oh.” She turns around and her eyes are so sad. “Oh baby, you got it too.” She wraps her arms around me and I smell her scent. “I thought maybe you’d just see ‘em like your Aunt Cassie, but if you’re speaking to me…” She holds me close, “I wanted so much…”

“What did you want, Mama?” She cups my jaw.

“Just wanted you be happy.”

When I wake up, Miss Ruth is in the kitchen, eating the funeral leftovers. She wipes her mouth with her hanky and starts talking when I come in. “I have a friend, he lost his daddy last month, they wasn’t speaking to each other at the end but he feels real bad now and I told him…”

One of the ghosts floats into the room, an old man ghost. He whooshes over to Miss Ruth, leans on her chair, and winks at me. I look over his shoulder. The sofa is all piled up with paper notices and envelopes with my sums all over them. Old man ghost opens his mouth but I raise my hand up, like when folks testify in church. He closes it. So does Miss Ruth.

“Tell your friend,” I start, then I stand up straighter. “Tell your friend that if he wants to talk to his daddy, I charge a dollar for every spirit I talk to.”

Miss Ruth and the old man ghost look at me like I grown two heads. “You have a gift,” she says.

“I got bills,” I says back. I go to my room and shut the door.

I hear the chair creak as Miss Ruth gets up. No one comes to the house for a while, when they come again, they’re hopping mad and shouting. When I still don’t answer the door, they start coming with pocketbooks and wallets. Folks pay with crumpled bills and mutter when they do, but they pay.

I take an envelope full of bills to the doctor. I pay the funeral parlor and the landlord. Then I buy myself a radio to keep me company and a new dress and shoes with red bows. I want to show Mama, but I’ve decided to let her rest for spell before I talk to her again.

They called my mother a saint, a holy woman, a seer.

They call me a witch.

But they knock now.

Regret is a concept we approach in different ways.

I’ve always told my children they should never do anything they think they’ll regret later and to always do things they’ll regret not doing.

My son took me up on that one summer at our local amusement park.  He’s not really a roller coaster fan.  But my daughter and I convinced him that if he didn’t ride Colossus at least once he’d regret it for the rest of his life.  Colossus is a double inverted loop coaster at Lagoon in Farmington, Utah.

Here’s video:

We all climbed into the car and chatted amiably on the way up the starting hill.  At the top, the coaster takes a turn to the right so you can see both the surrounding landscape and a very clear view of the descent falling precipitously away and toward certain doom.  It’s a sight that still makes my heart skip a few beats, even though I love the ride.  

My son reached that point, took one look, and swore.

My son doesn’t swear.

I’m fairly certain that’s the only time I’ve heard a cuss word pass his lips.

At the end of the ride, he was shaky and nauseated.  We helped him to the nearest park bench and waited for his stomach to quit flip-flopping.

Now, in 70 years or so, he can take his final gasps from his death bed without wishing he had ridden Colossus.  At the time, though, I’m fairly certain he wished he hadn’t.

I think I like Henry David Thoreau’s viewpoint best:

“Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest.  To regret deeply is to live afresh.”

This month’s original stories are each about regret in some aspect or another.  Obsessing about it, giving into it, denying it by taking that leap of faith.

First, from Edward Ashton, “Vernal Fall.”

Next up, “Women’s Work,” by Amelia Aldred.

And “A Lumberjack’s Guide to Dryad Spotting,” by Charles Payseur.

In addition, we have “A Woman’s Glory,” a reprint by Ashley Kunsa that first appeared in issue #10 of the Los Angeles Review, and won the A Room of Her Own Orlando Prize for 2011.

Enjoy!

Flash Fiction Online – January 2017

It’s spring when you arrive, or what passes for it in the Northwoods. The ground is still frozen because otherwise, you’d have to wait months for it to dry to get all the equipment in. It’s cold and your knuckles split from having to swing the axe in the dry air, but it beats Milwaukee. Beats packing meat and avoiding the mean looks and having to fight for an extra blanket at the boarding house. It’s just a skeleton crew this early, you and ten others and not even a real camp because you have to build it before the others can arrive. But it’s extra pay and you don’t mind the work or the company. You’re paired off in tents and Holstegg and you have found excellent ways of staying warm.

The first thing you need to look for is the flower. Every dryad has one that blooms year round, even in this snow-blasted place. They hide them, though, so you have to look closely, circle each tree in a slow dance of intent. Sometimes it’s only the smallest of things, a snow-white bloom where there should be only evergreen. Or a splash of fire red in a sea of oak.

Holstegg tells you of life on a farm, twelve siblings, and no neighbors for a day in any direction. You shiver and he pulls you to him, his chest broad and his blond beard tickling the back of your neck. And he tells you the stories his parents would weave of the old country, of magic and witches and talking bears. You ask if there were any blond ones and the sound of his laughter echoes through the camp.

The second thing is the slow breathing. All trees breathe, and you’ll be able to see it if you’re around them long enough, but dryad breath is different, escapes out through a single concealed mouth, and if you wait long enough you’ll see the heat of it fog the crisp air.

You bathe in a cold stream and sometimes Holstegg has to break the thin sheet of ice with a rock. Never an axe, he knows, because that would promote rust. You try to wash yourself clean but sex still tastes like pine sap and sweat. It’s the happiest you’ve ever been. The other men at camp know full well what you’re about, you and Holstegg, but most of them believe it’s just something men do out here, in the woods. That it’s some sort of skin you’ll remove when you get back to where you can buy a woman and a hot meal. And the others, the others who seem to see in your eyes the same desperation you see in theirs, they laugh right along despite the tightness in their chests.

The third thing is that dryads thirst for human blood. Take off your gloves and rub your knuckles against the bark and the dryad will shudder in delight. This is the easiest way to tell but also the most dangerous, and should only be used as a final confirmation after you have strong suspicions and have checked for the other signs. Dryads can, if pressed, uproot and move, attack when threatened. You must be careful.

True spring comes, and then summer and the rest of the jacks. The camp is full and you and Holstegg are allowed to keep your tent. With so many people there’s more danger now and your voices are not so loud when you speak, and there is fear hiding in the lilts of your laughter. Still, it is better than the city, better than anything you have known. Does it matter that it seems more fragile than a poplar, likely to fall over from a strong wind or bounding deer? Does it matter that autumn looms and beyond that winter and a return to everyone you want to escape?

A dryad heart will fetch three hundred dollars if you sell it to the right shops in Milwaukee. The wood from its body will bring in another fifty dollars a yard. It never rots so you can bury it to avoid the lumber boss’ watchful eye, can return right after the season ends, right before the cold freezes it in the ground. Dryad tears can be jarred and are worth nearly a hundred dollars a quart. If you’re busy enough you can make enough in a single year to live off for the rest of your life.

You have a dream. You and Holstegg buy a farm and live there and nothing bad ever happens. No neighbors mean no fires in the night. No scrawling messages on the sides of buildings. No sermons aimed at your hearts. You just need enough money for the land and the necessities. You just need a little help…

You stand with your bloody knuckles against the bark, listening to the soft moan of the wood beneath. The axe almost feels light in your opposite hand. You lean forward so your lips are nearly brushing where its mouth is hidden, where every so often a gust of warm air washes over your face.

“Come away with me,” you say, and you whisper your dream, of a small home ringed by tall shadows. Not safe but safer. Not perfect but beautiful. And the rest of the camp will wake one morning to find you gone, and Holstegg too, and upturned earth where certain trees once stood.

He’s only a few steps behind her on the rock bridge when it happens—creeping along, cautious, watching his footing. A yard, that’s all, maybe less, but Garrett doesn’t see the slip, doesn’t see Mara’s foot fly out and her knee buckle, doesn’t realize what’s happening until he hears her one bright cry, until he looks up to see her falling. He lunges for her then, reaches for her outstretched hand, manages to just brush her fingertips as he drops to his knees on the rocks—but he’s too late, too late, and she’s in the river, in the grip of the current, surging toward the falls. What now? What now? Before he can even complete the thought, he’s leapt after her, and the current has him as well.

The water is glacial runoff, smooth and clear and icy, and the first shock of it drives the air from his lungs—but he was a swimmer once, a champion, and the body remembers what the mind forgets. He surges to the surface and chases after her, reaches her in four quick strokes, catches her by the shoulder and pulls her into him. She wraps her arms around his neck and she’s sobbing, gasping out one word, Daddy, again and again, and she’s twenty-two years old, for God’s sake, hasn’t called him Daddy in a decade or more, and again he thinks what now?

There are watchers on the banks, other tourists, the ones sensible enough to stay off the rocks. He sees their mouths moving, knows they must be screaming or praying or calling to him, but he can’t hear them. All he can hear is that one word, Daddy, and above that, the roar of the falls, and he knows they can’t help him. It’s twenty yards to the nearest bank, and the falls are close now, close enough that even if he were nineteen years old again, strong and lithe and fearless, he wouldn’t be able to save her.  He can feel the current strengthening, can see the sharp edge where the river ends. He presses against her, brings his mouth to her ear. I’m here, Mara. I’m here. The river falls silent. The world falls away.

* * *

“Explain.”

He looks down at his hands where they rest on the table.

“She was my daughter.”

His skin is spotted and wrinkled, years older than he remembers.

“You could not help her.”

He closes his eyes, breathes in deep and lets it out.

“I couldn’t…”

He looks up. The light is blinding.

“I couldn’t let her die alone.”

* * *

And again, the slip, the lunge, that brush of fingertips, and he’s watching his daughter as she’s carried away. This time, though, he doesn’t leap. He clings frozen to the rock, his stomach knotted, his mind a howling void. Daddy! Just before Mara disappears, he reaches out to her—one arm raised, as if in farewell. She reaches back, and for just a moment, their eyes meet. Just a moment, and she’s gone.

* * *

His hands twist in his lap now. He closes his eyes.

“Your choice was correct. You could not help her.”

He drops his forehead to the table.

“Please. Help us understand.”

“Please.”

“Help us.”

* * *

He’s watching a baseball game when the call comes, half-asleep on his couch in the heat of the late afternoon. The ring snaps him awake. He fumbles for the receiver, drops it twice before he manages to bring it to his ear.

“Hello?”

There’s a hesitation on the other end of the line. His stomach clenches.

“Mr. Garrett?”

He nods, swallows, finally manages to croak out a yes.

“My name is Michael Burke, sir. I’m a ranger at Yosemite. Your daughter—there’s been an accident. You need to come out here as soon as you can.”

Garrett opens his mouth to speak—is she?—but no, of course she is. Burke would have said if she were still alive. Garret drops the phone into his lap, and Burke’s voice fades to a tinny whine. The Pirates are up by a run. Manny Ramirez steps to the plate.

Put me back.

* * *

“You could not have helped her. You were a thousand miles away.”

Garrett opens his eyes.

“Put me back.”

“Please. It serves no purpose.”

His hands curl into fists.

“Put me back.”

“Mr. Garrett…”

His fists slam down on the table. The light flickers.

“Put me back!”

The lights are gone now. He tries to strike the table again, but that’s gone as well.

“Put me back! Put me back! Put me back! Put me back!”

* * *

And he hangs suspended in mist like a fly in amber, arms around Mara, trapped half-way between earth and sky. The sun is high and bright, just over the rim of the falls. Mara’s face is pressed against his neck and her hair trails into his mouth and he knows the rocks are close now, close, and I’m here, and Daddy and he thinks this, this is enough.

The world slides into motion.

He closes his eyes.

Flash Fiction Online – January 2017

By the time you read this, I will have personally killed 2016 in a Latvian Death Match before a packed studio audience within the nomadic and fabulous Forbidden City of Wrestling. You’re welcome. No coins, please.

2016 was an awful year, just see my last post for how to punch the worst of it in the nose via writing, but some of you asked if there would be a roundup of some kind. And I was reminded of something that I’ve done that can be bad mojo for your brain.

When you accomplish something, it shines for a moment, and then it vanishes because the demands of the present are powerful and immediate. I noticed this when interviewing scientists who served in the Second World War. They’d tell you these AMAZING stories and when you asked why they never wrote anything about the time the monkeys escaped from the biological warfare testing site, they’d say “Oh, I was far more interested in what I was doing next than what I had done.” And for them the future was World War Three, so they kept busy.

The overwhelming needs of the NOW is especially true for freelancers, where we are always hunting for another gig or harassing an old one to get our check (often finding out “Heather” no longer works there so you won’t get paid unless you sue them). So, as we move forward, we forget how much we actually did, because we’re usually not tracking where we’ve been as much as where we are going, AKA: we’re too busy not getting paid where we are!

The result?

We think we didn’t do that much.

Granted, I’m a rather grumpy fellow and recovering workaholic, so I never think I’m doing enough. Ever. EVAR!

So, it can be instructive to take stock of “what the hell did you do besides work like a son of a bitch to stay away from the poor house?”

What emerges helps remind us we’re doing cool shit. We’re climbing new mountains. We’re making a dent. I recommend, as best you can, to do something like this if you feel the year was a bust. Perhaps it was, but I bet with a little elbow grease you’ll see that you accomplished far more than your short term memory and (in my case) bad psychology would have you believe.

For me, I knew I worked hard as fuck this year. But I didn’t stop to count the letters and realized I had a few BINGO moments.

STUFF GOT PUBLISHED

• FXXK WRITING continued unabated, thanks to the support of super boss Anna Yeatts and your continued eyeballs! September marked year two, and I’m doing my best to make it as good as year one.
• “Army of You”, a grim short story inspired by the rise in suicides among Canada’s Native population in the north, was published by Agnes and True. I also read the story as part of the post-election reading series at the Writing Salon, along with one of my students, the wonderful and dark Christine No, as well as Salima Hamirani and her mentor and fellow TWS teacher Elaine Beale. It was a very powerful night of stories and reflection, and I was humbled to participate.
• For the first time ever, I sold a handful of reprints to Great Jones Street, a wonderful app filled with short stories to devour while commuting, or in line at the grocery, or waiting for an Uber. It will feature some personal faves like “Rikidozan and the San Diego Swerve Job,” a tale about Japan’s greatest pro wrestler and race-hatred in the USA. It only appeared in a special-edition zine after coming in Second Place in the Judith Merrill Short Story contest, so now more than three people (myself included) can read it!

DEALS GOT MADE

• I signed a two-book deal with Nightshade Books to write THE BRIMSTONE FILES, the 1970s urban fantasy series set in LA and featuring a hero who has a hint of magic and a need to fight for the underdog no matter where they may be from . . . including the adult film industry! Thanks to Nick Mamatas for mid-wifing this adventure!
• I’ll be having an article published in Defense and Security Analysis, a fancy pants peer-reviewed journal.
• There are two pop-history projects I’m working on, one small, one big, but that’s all I can say for now. Mwah ha ha!
• There’s also a Cosmic Top Secret Fiction Project. Yes, I’m being annoying and enticing in equal measure, like a peep show that only takes tokens. Stay tuned, true believers!

STUFF GOT WRITTEN

• In June, I finished a 1000 page manuscript (known in the history trade as a “kitten crusher”) as a requirement of a fellowship project I won in 2014. So, that kept me busy.
• I finished the first novel, Hex-Rated, in the BRIMSTONE FILES series, due to blow your minds in August 2017!
• Hard at work on the next BRIMSTONE FILES novel, Black Lotus Kiss, and it is awesome.
• I wrote a fistful of short stories as part of a weekly challenge with my buddy Justin Howe riding sidecar with me, and me with him.
• Got a re-write request for a fantasy story that I hope to do next month.
• I finished the script for the first issue of a comic I’m doing with Yuki Saeki, called Glamorous Conspiracy, my punk rock riff on the Beauty and the Beast theme, set in high school. Wait until you see the art! Check out Yuki another one of our projects here!

NEW VENTURES TOOK FLIGHT

• After taking a workshop with Kevin McDonald from The Kids in the Hall, I started a sketch comedy group, The 19^th St. Irregulars. We did two shows in 2016, and both were sellout successes that challenged us and made the crowd happy.
• I performed improv with a variety of venues in San Francisco, including the awesome folks at The Unscripted Theater Company, Leela, and other indie shows that CRUSHED it!
• I became director of my improv theater’s elder troupe, and they’ve been a blast to work with.
• In fact, I ended up directing improv, then musical improv, then sketch, but managed to grab some performance time as the year winked out.

THE FAILS!

I did not track my fails as much as I should have. Call me old and lazy. But I say this knowing it can screw the data so bad, making it look like all I did was WIN. Which is pure grizzly shit. Here are some of my major fails:

• Rejected from dozens of job applications in history, across the USA and Canada
• Many stories rejected. Including some of my best work.
• Many novels rejected, some very harshly.
• Many rejections on historical projects.
• A few bad reviews of fiction, improv, and historical work.
• A few killer auditions . . .  that went nowhere.
• Barely performed improv due to other commitments.
• Ate marzipan by accident. Still an awful, awful food thing that pretends to be other food things. BARF.

LESSONS

A few lessons about work and art emerged:

• First, keep making things. Or, as Neil Gaiman said, “keep making good art.” Turn whatever state of hell or joy you’re in into a finished project and get it out the door. Make it as good as you can be. Making art or stories or novels or whatever is also a way to create opportunity. Making things improves your work and increases the probability of good stuff happening if you get it out the door. I guess I’m proving Chris Hardwick’s confidence theory is correct (to some degree; I think there’s holes in his theory, but haven’t had time to crack that nut).
• Second, looking at this list, a lot got done. A lot got done that was good. More than usual (though I’ve been having much better years since the nightmare of 2013). Professionally, it was a good year for producing work, and next year looks to be just as strong.
• Third, having a non-desperate/servile/silly attitude about publishing coincided with a series of publishing successes. I had opportunities present themselves and took them, but my life would have been awesome without them. Don’t get me wrong, I love what I’ve accomplished, but as a human being accomplishments don’t define my existence the way they used to. As Stephen King said, life is not a support system for art; art is a support system for life.
• Fourth, and related to the third, by sticking around in this business another year, I found opportunities that wouldn’t be around for someone just starting out. I have editors and writers and “industry” connections from kicking the can for sixteen years. I also have a small (and I mean small) reputation for doing good work of particular kinds. I can never be the “hip young thing,” and hated those fuckers when I was a “righteous punk rock nobody.” But I have a professional skill set that doesn’t suck, which, as Ta-Nehisi Coates noted, counts more and more in writing. Why? Because writers, if they aren’t compromised in some fashion, tend to get better with age, experience, depth of reading and capacity to improve. If you like the long game, writing is a good vocation.  And I’m in the long game until I’m in a pine box. Why is this important? These successes of 2016 did not happen “this year.” They are the sum total of busting my ass since my very first short story “sale” in 1999. You want to retire at twenty-four, awesome. The ghettos of Silicon Valley are filled with your ilk. My kind believe in Jack London’s wisdom as inspiration and epitaph:

“I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”

• Fifth, diversification, not singular focus, has been a boon. Being a historian has helped me find jobs, work, deals, and sales denied to my strictly fiction kin. It gives me a different kind of caché with publishers (non-fiction sells better). Being an improv performer and director means I’m far more social and lit-up as an extrovert (with introvert tendencies) than if I’d ONLY been writing fiction or history. That’s led to even greater joy across my life, and made me friends and colleagues I’d never catch dead at a panel on “How to be a Writer” filled with novelists who’s heyday was in the early 1980s and have no clue how current publishing works. Diversity has led to so much more joy than when I was ONLY doing fiction, believing in the myths and magical thinking of the singular value of writing as savior, lover and god. I love the life of the imagination, but I’m done convincing myself that I’m a solitary creature who only lives for “the craft” or “Story” or whatever. That was just a rational for living a fear-based life where I justified being terrified and alone by being a writer. Been there, done that. I love being alone with my brain. But thinking that’s all you are? Recipe for depression and darkness, at least for me.

But the big lesson? No day job was quit. I’m still working no-less-than three jobs while doing two more freelance things to get by. Retirement? Har. I’ve made more money this year (maybe 10K?) from writing fiction and non-fiction projects than previous years. But I make more in curriculum development and teaching.

I say this as a clarion call against dropping everything and becoming an artist. The myth of the “professional” artist, who only lives off their fiction, has no purchase in today’s economy, and was largely an anomalous condition in the past. Most writers have to do other work to survive, let alone have disposable income. They edit. They teach. They have jobs that require you get out of your PJs. Success stories in publishing do not prove the “system works,” any more than the 1% is proof of the universal benefits of capitalism. Success in publishing means some people succeed in unfair systems that create the cultural marketplace. And that’s it. Doesn’t mean their doing great work, or awful work. Doesn’t mean if you do what they do you’ll succeed like they did. Publishing is not fair. Never was. Never will be. I say this having had a good year: but that will never mean the system “works” The system remains a machine that wants when it wants when it wants it. This year, it wanted more of what I had to offer. Next year, it may want less, it may want more, it may want nothing (for how fickle and weird this world can be, see the highs and lows of David Rees). Keep that in mind, dearhearts, when things get better. Success is no more a natural law than wishful thinking is a means to success. 

2017 is going to be an ugly year. Be inspired. Do good work. But, if recent elections are any indication, remember: the system doesn’t work, and knowing that can free you from so many rotten assumptions, illusions, and, as was the case for me, lead to good things happening in awful years. Being honest, challenging lies, and thinking how to make things better in an unfair slice of the world work? It paid off more this year, but would have been no less the right thing to do if I’d sold nothing to nobody know how.

Here’s to continuing to punch against oppression, one key at a time, in 2017.

Onward.

Until then, go buy Jay’s latest novel with a brand new cover, A TRIUMPH FOR SAKURA, which award-winning writer and editor Nancy Kilpatrick called “Hunger Games, Fight Club and True Blood rolled into one bloody good novel.” BUY IT NOW, BE HAPPY FOREVER!