Another One of My Stories in the Wild

A Brief History of Writing

Everyone who daydreams of literary glory no doubt recalls telling stories as a child (or as a student or as a laborer) and someone older (or more popular or more experienced) responding with some version of, “You should be a writer!”

Most of us aspiring author types (presumably) received that response as praise.

But!

Please tell me I’m not the only one who recalls all the times I was told, “you should be a writer,” and worries that what I should have heard was not praise and promise and expectation, but instead: the older, friendlier, and much wiser person politely saying, “You talk too much.”

Doubt.

I waver between appreciating and cursing all my second guesses.

How ironically accurate. How definitionally appropriate.

But what can you do, but keep moving on?

So, the third story I wrote in the era of my writing again¹, which was the first I submitted to Crystal Lake’s monthly flash-fiction contest, inspired by the prompt of ‘True-Crime,’ and inspired by the fiction tricks of Jorges Luis Borges, (which includes writing a story in the form of a review): Anatomy of a Killer has burst forth from its online gestation to be included in the e-book/physical anthology, Hotel Macabre Vol. 1 on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, or Paperback.

I’m particularly proud of it.

It ticks all my quirks. Thoughtful? Gross? Overly alliterative? Yes, yes, and oh-yeah-I-really-leaned-into-it yes. Check it out. Write a review.

Of Borges’ influence - he wrote in his introduction to his collection, The Garden of Forking Paths:

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.

Borges’ story, The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim, inspired the form of Anatomy of a Killer. Borges wrote a fake book review. I wrote a fake movie review. (Under 1500 words!) He got mystical in his musings about how you could trace a saint’s movements through some geography by tracing the changed lives s/he left. Likewise, I leaned into the (Christian?) idea that we’re all of us our brothers’ keepers, that the good or ill one does affects everyone else in both seen and unseen ways. Also, 80s setting. Also, defying my minimalism instruction and emphatically embracing Latinate words in the voice of an enthusiastic movie reviewer. Also, a serial killer with a “collection motivation” so obvious, it should be an over-used trope already. (Is it? Do you know of other stories where the killer isn’t collecting say, only ring-fingers or only hearts, but instead wants a different body part from each victim so as to stitch all the pieces together into his own Frankensteinian quilted-trophy?)

At any rate, I hope you read it, and I hope you enjoy it. I enjoyed writing it.

Buy (or KU borrow) Hotel Macabre Vol. 1 on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, or Paperback

1. So, third wave? After the first wave of stories I wrote as an undergrad/recent undergrad (1998-2003), and after the second wave of stories I wrote when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Bulgaria (2007-2009) and discovered the (now-defunct) writer’s workshop centered around Chuck Palahniuk’s essays on the craft of literary minimalism; that began when I lived on the border of Mexico/Arizona border and stayed home to raise my kids (2021-) and Chuck Palahniuk and George Saunders both started Substacks with a craft of fiction emphasis. (Let me also recommend Junot Diaz craft-oriented Substack). History will judge, but I kind of feel I am entering my fourth wave now :) ?