Caws Radio

Harlequins in the Night, Story Failure Pistol Light

Tonight I have been taking video footage in the nighttime fog. I think the highlight of the evening was a shot of some football players having a game next to the tennis courts, in the fog, lit from above by the tall court lights. Tiny moisture particles make everything look so....aah, you know.

This morning at 3:10AM I started printing the 19 class copies of my (incomplete) short story. It was around 4:00 when I fell asleep to the bzzz-wzz bzzz-wzz chick-klack of my printer. My alarms went off at 6:45AM, and I woke to find that the printer was out of paper. I refilled it and printed the last few copies, then went to the library to staple each story together. I was only 34 minutes late to fiction writing class, which I hate with a divine burning passion.

My story sucks. Well, not really. I just lost control of it. Normally I would salvage the good ideas and start anew, but this story is for a CLASS, which means I am married to it till death do us part. What the "instructor" wants is more clarification in the story. He wants it to make sense. It can't make sense; it is about random objects talking to a young confused man. Sure, I could throw something into the ending like "it turns out a chemical spill had brought the inanimate objects to life," but that would be stupid, and make the story even worse than it already is. Why can no one just accept the absurd? It was my vision; a toaster speaks to its owner and makes him question his own life. But nooo, that leaves the reader confused. Remember "The Cat In The Hat"? That story would have made no sense at all if there hadn't been those few pages at the end explaining that the cat was actually the result of a genetic experiment conducted in Russia that went terribly wrong sometime in the 60s.

So, anyway, I have given up on the artistic element of the story. To me, it is dead, an idea that can live freely in the afterlife and not have to make any sense. But I still have to finish it somehow. Tuesday I will go into class and listen to the students one by one say a variation of the words "I don' git it." Then I will give my two cents about how some things I wanted to do I couldn't do, like scrap the damn thing, and I will ask the class for suggestions on how to make this corpse look handsome. Herr Instructor Lawler will tell me everything he hates about the story, to which I will politely nod, and then he will pause awkwardly and look around the room like a retarded bird before saying "Okay, let's move on to the next story..."

Anyway, I am trying to be in good spirits. I unwittingly scared the living bejesus-shit out of some of my friends earlier tonight, and I'm not very proud of myself for it, but at least I got some nice fog footage. AND I wrote a nice lengthy entry on my website. Everything's coming up 'Brett'!