Cigarettes Into Me: A Theoretical Communique from the Invisible Nature of the Subjective Realm

So

(Notes: This is the story that let me know I could write a book. It was written at the end of my first period of story-writing; I began writing it while I was still in Tokyo, late summer ‘09, and finished it sometime later that fall, back in the good ‘ol US of A. From a technical perspective, it was the longest story I’d…

The Swans in the Fountain

I was tired. We’d been driving for two days; I hadn’t slept well the night before, and the long highways and cheap quick meals had filled my body with fatigue. But we had arrived, and arriving at a hotel for an extended stay means that rest is close at hand. You park, you pick up…

Blue

(Notes: This was written for a contest, some literary magazine/journal, I don’t remember which one. The theme was “the color blue”, not-surprisingly. The one and only time, I think, that I built a story for a contest like that (and no, I didn’t win, I know so sad, boo-hoo). I don’t remember when exactly I wrote it…

Last Night

(Notes: Written in Tokyo, summer of ‘09, during my first period of story-writing. To me, the most obviously “experimental” story that I’ve ever written. Not as in avant-garde, but as a verb, like: Okay, what if I stick Jesus and Hitler in a bar with an unnamed third character, let’s try that and see what…

Don’t Tell

(Notes: Not sure when this was written. Guessing late ‘09, early ‘10. I have no idea what the specific inspiration might have been. There’s an obvious Raymond Carver-ey influence in it, and the first time I ever read any Carver was around the same time period, within the same span of a year or two. I found…

Carry

(Notes: This is the first story I ever wrote. Winter/spring of ‘09, living in Tokyo at the time. There were two seeds. One was this sense of aimlessness, as life in Japan hadn’t gone according to plan, and as such I had a need to attach myself to something, some kind of work. The other was “train-suicides”, at one…