"So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence" -- Flannery O'Connor

Nobody's going to ever accuse ME of being competent, no matter how much their name resembles a Mexican dessert.

As you've probably guessed from that picture over there, another edition of Some ____ Stories is available.

This one's theme is concrete stories, which is sort of a take-off on concrete poetry, which is a style of poetry in which the words are arranged on the page in pictures, or other symbols that help add meaning to the poem.

These are among the most original and most challenging short stories I've ever written, although "short" is something of a misnomer for the final one -- that's Staircase Elevator Rope and it's about 60 pages.

Plus there's all three sections of q+u, a love story, and great stories like Origami, or The Wary Dance, a fable about how the planets ended up the way they did.  A fable! I wrote a fable!

Click here to get it now! 

Would You Ratherday, 1

 

Sweetie and I were would-you-rathering each other this morning when we took the boys for their morning ride, and came up with so many of them we decided I could start putting some of them on my blog.

So here is the first ever Would You Rather Day:

Would you rather that for the rest of your life, you could eat anything you wanted without ever gaining any weight, but you would never be allowed to have sex again...

....or would you rather have your sex life be awesomely amazing but everytime you ate anything you would gain a half-pound?

Just to be clear, nobody in our house regularly uses the word "whordiot."

Lately, Sweetie and I've been watching Bob's Burgers, which means that Mr Bunches has been watching Bob's Burgers, as well.  That led to Mr Bunches deciding that he wanted to make a hamburger like on Bob's Burgers, so tonight, we did that: we chopped lettuce and cut tomatoes and broiled the burgers and created a perfect Bob's Burger:

Mr Bunches being Mr Bunches, he didn't eat the Bob's Burger.  He just had it sit by him while he ate his actual dinner, which was, tonight, just the berries from a bowl of Crunch Berries, plus some milk, all of which he ate while he watched his favorite episode, which is called Human Flesh.

When Mr Bunches watches shows like that, he frequently learns new words that we have to then tell him not to say.  So when he watched Archer for a while, we had to teach him not to say words like whordiot (a combination of whore and idiot), and instead to say things like "silly."

Mr Bunches tries to figure out which words he can, or can't, say from TV shows by listening to how the characters say them.  So almost any word they emphasize, he will assume is a 'bad' word.  Tonight, he asked if he could say chalk, because a character whispered that word.  We assured him he could say chalk.  Then he asked if he could say myth, because a character yells that word.  We said yes, he can say myth.

Then a character said "My crotch itches," and Mr Bunches recognized the bad word there.

"We don't say crotch," he said.

"Nope," I agreed.

"What do we say?" he asked.

"We say privates," I said.

And so for a while he walked around telling me his privates itched.  And I had to teach him that we only say that to Mommy, Daddy, or the doctor.

The burger, we put away so I can have it for breakfast tomorrow.

And I don't even know what the metaphor MEANS.

Today, I was heading up Michigan Avenue in Milwaukee, ready to get onto the freeway and head back to Madison for the day.  I stopped at a red light, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And then this truck pulled up next to me, in the lane to my right, and even before it had come to a complete stop the light turned green and this truck got to just roll on through without even being slowed, really, by the traffic light I'd been sitting at for what seemed forever.

And all I could think was Man, everytime I'm caught in a real-life metaphor, it sucks.