Heads Up, Y'all

Hi everyone, A few weeks ago, I started talking about gathering some of my stories into an ebook collection. Well, I'm just about to pull the trigger on that. I now have a 16-story collection called Dream Escapes that will be available through Amazon for purchase for your Kindle. The down side of this is that I've had to remove those sixteen from being posted for free here. As reluctant as I was to do that, I realize that it's the next step in my evolution, so I hope you'll take your righteous anger and take it out on me by going to the Kindle store and purchasing a copy that you may keep with you until the end of time (please, take it out on me!). It's reasonably priced at $3.99 (which comes to just under 25 cents a story), or unreasonably priced at $203.98 if you don't happen to have a Kindle and need to buy one. I will continue to post new fiction and non-fiction here, of course, and I hope you'll continue to join me in both formats. Thanks for reading! -Aaron

FAST FICTION #2: THE ADMISSION

I'm going to tell him. Right now. He's sitting across from me, eating his lunch, and when the second hand of the clock on the wall behind him sweeps back around to the twelve, my mouth is going to open and I'm going to tell him. Doesn't matter if he's in the middle of talking about this backyard-deck project that he can't seem to stop going on and on about, or if he's taken so big a bite that I'm sure he's going to choke on it when he hears what I have to say. The time will come, and I will speak the truth. Finally.

So where's the truth? The second hand's back to the one, the two... and yet I just let him yammer on as if his life's not about to change any second now. Why even wait for the twelve to come around again? He must be able to see the sheen of sweat on my forehead. I know it's sitting there, making me light up like a neon sign in the ugly track lighting that this restaurant insists on using to light every single corner. Didn't dining establishments used to have moody lighting, shadows and all that? Now they're just trying to light up every plate on every table, because the chef is the star now, every one of them is jockeying to be the Next Food Network Star. Each dish that goes out is some sort of audition, and they'll be damned if you don't notice that they're artists.

God, he's still talking. I think he's moved on to the elaborate set of criteria he used when choosing what kind of wood he bought for this deck that he's probably not going to bother building when I finally open my damn mouth and say what I came here to say. No reason to build a deck on a house you don't even live in anymore, right? And even if he keeps the house, I know he's building this with some idyllic suburban fantasy in his head, some four-color dream of backyard barbecues with the family, friends and relatives basking in the sun... I'm about to drive a stake through the heart of all that. Doesn't he deserve that, though? Shouldn't he know that there's this whole other world going on right under his nose?

I've known him for a dozen years, and I've never really been further from behind his friend than I am right now. Because I know what his wife has been doing. I honestly wish I didn't, but I do. And frankly, I don't know how he doesn't know. It's not like it's been subtle, or unclear. Maybe that will make it easier. Maybe he does know, and just doesn't care. I can't imagine that he's so clueless that he hasn't noticed the signs. The way she lights up when the other man comes in the room, regardless of whether her husband is there or not, the way she's been riding around town with her convertible top down, her hair whipping around wildly, even on that day last week when it was almost cold enough to snow. She's riding high on new love, and he's got his head buried so far in his deck blueprints that he can't see it.

There goes another twelve. I'm still not saying anything. Maybe he really is that clueless. After all, he hasn't noticed that I haven't said anything, and have let him rattle on for the last ten minutes. I haven't even taken a bite of this bacon cheeseburger that I don't have the stomach for, and he's plowed through almost all of that salad while expounding the virtues of various wood sealants. She's waiting for me to call when it's done.

I'm assuming that I'll be in some kind of condition to speak after I've told him. Would he beat me down, right here in this immaculately well-lit restaurant? I'm betting not. He's not that kind of a guy. He'll probably even finish his meal before getting up, driving back to the office, and never speaking to me on a non-professional level again. He'll leave me with the check, which will be as aggressive as he'll get. That's why I brought him here to eat in the first place, isn't it? For that extra layer of insurance against my face being permanently rearranged. But even if I hadn't, he wouldn't do that to me.

He doesn't deserve this. He deserves to be happy, to live in a world where decks can be planned, bought, and assembled to completion without the nagging worry in the back of his mind that his wife is being unfaithful. But what was it that my dad said, right before he left for good? "The heart wants what it wants." Yeah, and most of the time the heart is a selfish asshole. That's what the brain is for, to give the heart a good throttling every time it gets out of line. How is what I'm doing to him any different than what my dad did to me?

Because I'm not ceding responsibility like he did, that's why. All that crap about what the heart wants is just passing the buck, pointing at some internal organ and saying, "I had nothing to do with this, really. It's all his fault." Then you can move in with your girlfriend and her kid (who was actually older than I was!) and start over. Reset button.

So am I really going to do this? We've fallen into some sort of uncomfortable silence. I think he's realized that I'm not eating, talking or listening. And I haven't been. So now would be the perfect time. Look, if it wasn't me, his wife would be cheating on him with some other idiot, someone who he didn't even know. She was looking for a way out, and I couldn't help the fact that I'd always wanted her from afar. It was just a mutually advantageous situation. It could be worse... she could have broken my heart too, by picking some random other guy. And I think she and I really have a shot, to have the happiness that she was never going to find with him. That's what I should tell him, that it's actually better for me to be the one to do this to him than some unknown quantity that he can never understand.

The twelve came and went, and I actually started talking right after the five. I wasn't even aware that I had started until the words were coming out of my mouth. I did it right; I didn't sugar-coat it, didn't appeal to his higher nature to "chin up, old boy" and all that. And it wasn't as bad as I thought. Clearly he'd been thinking that something was up for a while now, and this just solidified something that had been wobbling uneasily in his mind. That it was me was the only thing that he seemed truly surprised about.

What I didn't count on was how good I felt once I started telling him. As I started telling him how it all started, it really felt like I was weaving the beginning of a great love story, not just hacking through the ending of one. What she and I have is something greater, something that he could never be a part of, and if he really loves her, he'll come to see that holding her back from that love would only end up hurting himself in the end.

Speaking of hurting, once the adrenaline burns off I'm going to need to be in the close company of several doctors. But now, lying curled up on the floor of this restaurant while blood from my nose soaks into my hair and I can feel my ribs loose and shifting inside my shirt, I actually feel happy.

FAST FICTION #1: PIGGY

He stared at the pig for a very long time. He felt almost as if he couldn’t move until he made a decision, as if the pig would know his intention, and would bolt out of his bedroom if his thoughts were unclear in any way. It stared right back at him, seeming to mock him with its beady but kind black eyes.

The pig was spotted and blue, and had been given to him on his fourth birthday, two years before the day that he now sat on his bed across from the dresser where it had stood, smiling at him day at night, for all the intervening seasons. That smile was what kept him affixed to his bed, made him unable to cross the room and pick it up. The pig knew, somehow. *The pig knew*.

It knew that he was just a small moral decision away from picking it up and smashing it to bits. Its little ceramic life was about to be snuffed out, and still it smiled at him. Why couldn’t his parents have bought him one with a removable bottom? Why did he have to destroy it in order to get at the money inside? After a long time, after the parallelogram of sun had swung a perceivable amount across his bedroom wall, he realized that it was probably his parents’ way of getting him to make this very decision. To determine whether the thing he wanted the money for was really worth annihilating his benign little pig friend.

And was it, really? Was the amount needed even in there? It had been so long since he had started tossing his grandpa’s spare change into the bank that he had no idea how much it contained. It had been heavy on the rare occasions he had picked it up, cupping it like a dinosaur egg in his palm. It was so loaded down it felt solid, like a hand grenade – or at least what he imagined a hand grenade would feel like. Would it explode like a hand grenade when he dropped it?

He supposed he should think about how he was going to do it, if he was going to do it at all. It seemed unfair to drop it, like a betrayal to the little pig that had shared his room with him for so long. He supposed he should use a hammer. He at least owed it the dignity of looking into the little painted dots of its eyes as he dealt the final blow...

He almost laughed at himself. Final blow? Dignity? Was he really thinking that he owed this unfeeling little hollow rock anything, that it would actually expect some sort of compassion from him? After all, even it wasn’t an inanimate object, it had been *made* this way, with only one possible ending in place. The only way to get out what you put in was to smash it. That was its purpose.

So why was he still sitting on his bed? What was stopping him? The pig wasn’t going to answer.

Pen's Envy

I recently took a creative writing workshop via my local Rec & Ed department, and since it ended, I've been thinking a lot about where I want my writing to go in the near future. As you may have noticed, I've started promoting my writing in social media (Facebook and Twitter, basically), which is something I never did before. It's not part of my nature, actually, to want to call attention to myself, but in talking with my teacher, I started to wonder whether that tendency was becoming detrimental to getting my writing out there. So here I am, announcing to my friends and family every time I have something new. It's strange for me.

I suppose my freshest round of reluctance goes back to my time at Borders. I worked on the .com part of the business, and I was the go-to guy when a self-publishing author wanted to know how to get their book listed on our site. Some of them were legit, but I fielded enough calls from people who were either deluded in -- or oblivious to -- their obvious lack of talent that they were clearly banking on their ability to cram it down everybody's throat. One fellow who was having trouble with the process all but accused me of being part of a conspiracy to keep his book off the shelves. I all but told him it was merely that his book sucked.

At the last session of the writing workshop, I was the only student that showed up (I guess that's the danger of holding this kind of class in the early summer), but it gave me and my instructor the chance to sit and just talk about writing for two hours. She's a published author, and has been in the game for a while, so she had a lot of good advice to give. I took the class as a way to kick myself in the ass, to remind myself that I actually have a legitimate talent for writing, and in that sense it was a total success. I found myself voicing insights about my fellow classmates' writing -- and my own -- that showed me that I really do think in terms of storytelling and focus and detail and actually seem to know what I'm talking about. I even wrote some spontaneous pieces in class that I'm proud enough of that I'm going to post some of them here soon. Like I told my instructor, it's sometimes too easy to feel like I'm a writer only in my head, to make it just another one of the stories that I tell myself to amuse my own mind from time to time, and it's another thing entirely to drag it out into the real world and acknowledge that it's part of my waking life.

Another aspect I've been thinking about is that I have friends from high school that are successfully making a living at writing. I'm sandwiched right in between them year-wise, one graduating before and one after me. One has been a successful TV and comic-book writer in LA for over ten years, and the other is a well-reviewed author of a short-story collection and a large historical novel. (And outside that circle, there was another alumnus of my high school who now is a Hollywood writer so big that they use his name in trailers. Trailers!) I keep looking to them, and reminding myself that there is still opportunity out there. Before that last brainstorming session with my instructor, I was almost convinced that the prospects for an unproven author were dwindling, but now I'm realizing that they've actually expanded, just in unconventional ways.

The thing that bothers me about the proliferation of outlets for writing is the signal-to-noise ratio. When every thought that anyone writes down is equally available to everyone, how will a worthwhile author cut through all the clutter? Of course, when I worked for the book industry, I placed my faith in the publishers... they put their money where their mouth was and spent money printing and promoting only the stuff that people would actually want to spend money for, and some of the time that was something other than the legal-thriller/romance of the week. But now that publishers have had to downsize and restructure like everyone else, I'm starting to think that maybe the court of public opinion isn't as bad a proving ground as I once thought it was.

I’m not immune to chasing that elusive audience, either… I even tried to change my style to be more “marketable” once. When I started seeing all these paranormal romances come out (culminating in hits like Sookie Stackhouse and the Twilight novels), I made a conscious effort to write one, but what I ended up with is “Nadir”, a novel-in-progress which is essentially a love story between a demon and a human working their way through the different levels of Hell. It’s far from the dashed-off pulp masterpiece I was hoping for, but I wouldn’t trade it for one now. I like the idea too much, and the thought that I’m actually going to find out how it all ends is exciting.

Of course, there's always going to be Fifty Shades of Something that everyone is going to be grabbing at wildly, and may or may not stand the test of time, but what this sea change in book publishing has really done is to level the playing field for everyone, to lower whatever stigma still exists around any particular genre and really show our tastes as a society for what they really are. And isn’t that the ideal? To be free of the constraints of what we *should* be reading and figure out what it is that we *want* to read? How many more people would become readers if that were the case?

All this is my way of talking myself into publishing my own e-book. Years ago, Borders ran an internal contest, and employees could submit entries that would be considered for printing and promoting by the company. I submitted a short story collection. I took the process very seriously, the selection of my best stories as well as the order they should appear in. The file is still sitting on my computer, ready to launch. My writing instructor said that I definitely should pull the trigger and send it out into the world with a price point of my choosing. Who knows? I see dozens of interesting titles that I would never have heard of in while scrolling through the Kindle bookstore, and sometimes a dollar or two sounds like a fair price to try something sight unseen...

In the end, I guess I just have to allow my writing find its own way. I can accept that I’m never going to bully it into making money for me. Let the notice of others come as it will (and I have to stress that the only reason I would want to make money off my work is so that I’d be able to spend more time writing). First and foremost, I have to follow my muse. I think that’s my primary responsibility here. As it should be for everyone.