Having arrived at the Loews Theater at 34th and Broadway, I couldn’t resist taking a long look at the looping trailer for the film “Stranger than Fiction,” playing on a wall-mounted television set. The featured scenes played out with a haunting familiarity: a flesh-and-blood person one day realizes he’s a character in a novel, and, despairing of his fate, tries to contact his author and persuade her to rewrite his story. These scenes played out with a “haunting familiarity,” not necessarily because I myself have had the suspicion that I may be someone’s fictional construct, but rather because I am intimately familiar with this particular story.  After all, I should be familiar with it.  I wrote it.

Here are the facts: two years earlier, in a burst of inspiration, I sat down and attempted, for the first time, to write a screenplay. The basic premise had been germinating in my mind for years: “Can a human being rebel against Fate? If an all-powerful, all-knowing God exists, could a person rebel against It/Him/Her? If so, what form would such a protest take?” In order to explore this particular question, I recast it in this form: “What if a character in a book, despising himself and his life, went on strike against his author and refused to say the words, or perform the acts, dictated by his author? How would this play out?”

Though I had only a rough outline, the script took shape with bewildering speed–after two weeks I had what I hoped was a lively and amusing script called “Stranger than Fiction.” I gave it to my wife to read, and then to a friend. When both of them came back with positive reports, I decided to send the script to my agent. Perhaps—I thought, I hoped—a near miracle had taken place. It’s rare enough that I write something of any length that really holds together, but it is even rarer that I come up with something that may have some commercial appeal—and as I popped the script in the mailbox, I glanced up, as though to thank a generous God.

My agent usually takes a month to read my stuff, so in the meantime I decided to test the script out on a few more trusted readers. One afternoon, as I began explaining to my friend Brian the basic premise of the story, he came to a full stop (we had been walking up Lafayette on the way to a copy shop) and turned to me with a strange expression.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “What did you say the name of your script was?”

“Stranger than Fiction.”

“That’s weird,” he said. “I just talked to Mike and—.”

Mike is Brian’s friend who works at the talent agency CAA.

“And what?” I asked.

“I just spoke to him. Just this afternoon,” Brian said, with the same queer expression. “And he was going on and on about this script he had just read. He said he reads hundreds of scripts a year but he said this was the best one he had read all year. And I think—I could have sworn he said it was called ‘Stranger than Fiction.’ Could he have possibly gotten your script?”

“I don’t see how that could be possible,” I replied. “My agent is at William Morris and they wouldn’t… Are you sure it was called ‘Stranger than Fiction?'”

“I’m positive.”

Brian and I were standing still on the sidewalk. It seemed pointless to continue our walk to the copy shop until we had resolved this vital matter.

“And not only that,” Brian said, “Not only that, but I could have sworn—I could have sworn that the script he read was about someone who realizes he’s a character in someone’s book.”

Brian’s initial comment—that the script he had just heard of bore the same title as my script—dealt a substantial blow. But, after all, I figured, a title is just a title, and any number of altogether different scripts floating around Hollywood may bear the same title. But this second revelation, that this other “Stranger than Fiction” script shared precisely the same unusual theme—was staggering.

“It can’t be true,” I said, as I felt my universe in-folding like a collapsing sun. “It just can’t be.”

“I hope not,” Brian said. “Anyhow, I mean, even if it is—you know Hollywood, this other script probably won’t get made, it’ll probably just disappear like most scripts. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

I tried not to worry about it. I really did. To quell my anxieties I considered the possibility that Brian had for some admittedly bizarre reason invented the whole story about the other script. Certainly this was more probable than the other script—a script for all intents and purposes identical to mine—actually existing. But why would Brian do such a thing? Or perhaps Brian had misinterpreted or misrepresented the plot of the other script; after all, he’d just heard about it over a brief phone conversation. But, again, this struck me as more wishful thinking. Or perhaps, as Brian had assured me, this other script would just sort of vanish. In fact, this offered the most reason for hope (maybe the Black Hole of Hollywood would just suck up and render obsolete my script’s doppelganger). But then I remembered Mike’s declaration that this was the “best script he’d read all year.”

Yet the biggest obstacle to my peace of mind—the biggest bugbear of all—was a familiar dreadful sensation that had always lurked in the background of my creative undertakings, an eerie sense that the universe was somehow rigged against me—or, at least, against my loftiest and most vainglorious ambitions. Indeed, the sensation may be familiar to many who have tried to mount the magic carpet of the arts and entertainment industry, only to find that it suddenly disintegrates beneath them and sends them crashing to cold, solid earth beneath.

Still clinging to a thread of hope, however, I called my agent. She told me she had read and loved the script and was going to “send it out.” Happy with the news, I didn’t want to mention the other “Stranger than Fiction” script, but I couldn’t resist.

“By the way, it’s probably nothing, but…”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Of course I’ve read it. We represent the writer.”

Was the script identical to mine?

“Similar—but different,” she said. “I’m really not worried about it. But you’ll have to change the title.

I changed the title to “Third Person,” and my agent did in fact send the script out to a number of producers, directors and actors. I tried to remain hopeful, but I knew in my gut it was a wasted effort. The coincidence was just too great—the bolt of lightning couldn’t miss its target. And, indeed, the screenplay was roundly compared to its identical twin and rejected across the board. The fate of my script “Stranger than Fiction,” itself could not have been any stranger than fiction; but in my story, I had no recourse against my diabolical author.

* * *

But I’m not writing just to bemoan my lousy luck. I’m writing to consider a problem that arose from it—actually two related problems: one concerning the notion of originality and one concerning writer’s block.

Since I first learned how to write, words have poured out with a shameless profusion—novels, short stories, essays, poetry, etc. Much of the work has been unsuccessful or incomplete, or otherwise unpresentable. But the question of its originality had never concerned me.
Yet the nightmarish revelation of my script having for all intents and purposes been written by someone else some months before I had written it—gripped me with a chilling paranoia. What if this was to be no isolated incident? What if everything I had written or were ever to write had already been written, or would be written (with more clarity and style), by someone else?  As I fretted over this question, I could suddenly understand the travails of would-be writers I know—highly intelligent and well-read people—who really want to write but are immobilized by similar self-conscious fears: “Is this good?” “Will anyone understand this?” “Is this what I really think?” “What makes me think my thoughts are important?” “Isn’t all writing narcissistic?” “Why bother?”

I wondered: would my current worry about originality condemn me to a similar creative paralysis? If not, how could I overcome it? How, in short, does one break free from this boa constrictor of self-defeating concerns to unselfconsciously surrender to the creative impulse?
Flannery O’Connor, one of my favorite authors, sheds some helpful light on this problem. In a letter to her friend A. describing her own creative process, she writes: “Perhaps you are able to see things in these stories that I can’t see because if I did see them I would be too frightened to write them. I have always insisted that there is a fine grain of stupidity required in the fiction writer” (Letter to A. March 24, 1956).

A “fine grain of stupidity.” What could O’Connor possibly mean here?  On one hand, O’Connor may mean that if she were to be fully conscious of the (often quite violent) subject matter of her stories, she would be emotionally incapable of writing such stories; in this case, the “fine grain of stupidity” would refer to an emotional blindness to the subject matter of her stories. Yet there is another reading of O’Connor’s remark that may speak to the question of creative paralysis I raised above.  For when a writer writes, every creative choice may prompt a series of reconsiderations; and each one of these reconsiderations may, in turn, prompt another series of reconsiderations, and so on, such that an author will never arrive at a resolute choice. For any progress to take place, there will need to be a break, a short-circuit in this second guessing—a critical blind spot, or, as O’Connor put it, a “fine grain of stupidity.” This “fine grain of stupidity” will allow the writer to settle stupidly (but not too stupidly, hence the fine grain) for one possibility, and thereby permit him to move on.

In other words, O’Connor’s advice to a writer immobilized by critical self-concerns might be read as: “Write more stupidly.”
Such advice may seem counterintuitive.  After all, haven’t we been taught that the success or originality of our work depends on the degree of intelligent understanding and control we bring to it? Haven’t we been taught that an author should be able to explain and justify his creative choices? Isn’t this the most “intelligent” or “responsible” approach to the “craft”?

But perhaps O’Connor’s remark tells a different story. For consider: under what other circumstances in our day-to-day lives can we explain or justify our behavior? Can we explain and justify, for example, why we like certain music? Can we explain and justify why we care about certain people? Can we explain and justify why certain experiences move us to tears or laughter? Can we really set such responses or experiences at a distance and regard them with such detached, critical objectivity?  We certainly can, to some extent, in retrospect.  But, on an on-going basis, we generally don’t do this.  Rather, we just engage—engage whole-heartedly, without critical detachment, without self-consciousness—with an element of “stupidity”. Indeed, doesn’t much of the depth and richness of our experience derive from the extent to which we are wholly and non-reflectively engaged?

If this is the case, why should creative work constitute an exception? Rather, shouldn’t the writing of a story or the painting of a painting or the composition of a piece of music engage us on this primary, non-reflective, level, consuming our entire attention, such that we lose ourselves in the creative act, and thus stand a chance of discovering something in the process? Beyond the desire to produce something “good” or “original,” isn’t this, really, our primary motivation for doing the work?

“But how—,” someone may persist, “how can I just relinquish control? I mean, how does one just surrender to an unconscious process?” But how do we do it every day and all the time—every time we offer an uncontrived, uncontrolled response to the demands of the moment? Every time we burst into tears or laughter; every time we burn with rage or blush with embarrassment. The answer is we don’t “do” it; it just happens. Our behavior spontaneously arises, independent of our critical faculties, just as a creative impulse may arise on its own, dictating its own form and content. As the poet Rilke has written: “Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition.” (Letters on Cezanne Oct 21, 1907)

Such, in any case, describes my process. Indeed, three months after the “Stranger than Fiction” episode I was happy to discover that my reflective faculties had gone on holiday and my congenital stupidity (fine-grained or not) had kicked in again. Oblivious of my previous worries, I found myself dwelling on a new cast of characters, a new set of problems, and, before I knew it, originality-be-damned, I was back at work.

“This was his first memory, he said. He said he was watching TV, at home, with his mother and I don’t remember the way he told it exactly, but he was sitting on her lap and his Dad was angry about something, you know, I think it was cooking, but I don’t honestly remember. I think it was that he wanted her to cook and she wasn’t cooking or wouldn’t cook what he wanted, but I can’t remember exactly. And his father was an explosive guy and went into the other room, got a gun, and told her to put him down. But she wouldn’t because she realized he was going to shoot her, so she kept him between the two of them, holding him to her, and he said his father stepped forward and shot, hitting her in the shoulder and he broke away and ran into the other room and his father shot again and this time killed her. Then his father came into the room with the gun and he realized his father was going to shoot him next, so he jumped out of a window and ran. That was the story he wrote. Except it was so much better than this, you know, than what I’m saying. It had misspellings and I loved it. It was raw. This prisoner who was just writing the worst fluff, the worst, just empty stuff. He wasn’t telling the truth and then I tell him to write what his greatest fear was and this comes out. Telling him he can’t use the word ‘fear,’ but had to show fear. I just thought it was really effective, frightening. I felt like I understood him better as a person and that‘s what good writing does, don‘t you think?”

“I don’t believe it,” he says. He’s got a beard, white guy, maybe fifty, looks like a woodsman. He’s not entertained by the story. “You believe that?” he asks me.

“Yeah, I do” I say.

“It doesn’t matter,” the woman next to him says. There’s three of them, all white. They’re from Minnesota. They don’t have Minnesota accents. They have no accent. They talk like news reporters. They have jobs. I don’t. They’re going to decide if I get a job. “It could be fiction.”

“But he told them to write about their lives, non-fiction.”

“Yes, but the point is to get them writing.”

“I believe it though,” I say, “These are prisoners. Doing double-life, triple-life, quadruple-life. They’ve had hard lives. One guy‘s entire head was completely done in tattoos. A dragon across the top of his head, all orange and black. His face covered in tats.”

He really doesn’t believe it now. His skin looks like it’s seen a lot of winters. He’s always lived in Minnesota, started as an adjunct, taught at the college for years, then got in as a professor, got tenure, and now is in a fancy expensive barren hotel room, its few chairs drawn up.

He’s judging the prisoner’s story, from the hotel room chair, touching his beard. And he’s judging my story of the prisoner’s story, to see if it showcases my ability to break through to a student and get them to write the truth. And out there somewhere is a murdered woman. Or maybe she doesn’t exist. Somewhere there is a father in prison. Or maybe he doesn’t exist. But Tony exists. Tony is in prison. I’ve met Tony. I worked with Tony. For a full semester. His Denzel Washington grin. His Napoleon Dynamite shyness. The pocket on his shirt ripped on purpose, so that it was useless, to “represent the struggle.” Or maybe now he’s becoming fiction even though I’m trying to keep him non-fiction. But I’m non-fiction, the author, me. I exist. And so does my averaging $7,000 a year for my entire adult life. My fear of more poverty is non-fiction. Not able to afford heat is non-fiction. Baking a potato for warmth, sleeping with the laundry piled on the bed, alone at 40. How do people find girlfriends who are poor? It’s like magic. Sometimes I feel like I don’t exist. But the judge does. The warden does. The creative writing hiring faculty does. The editor, you exist. It’s a new story now, convoluted, removed, desperate in its own way. The editor reads it, wondering, what does this accomplish? It’s a flash of lives, but what is that worth? The writer hopes to get out of poverty. The prisoner hopes to have his story continue on. He’s been heard. He’s haunted somebody with words, somebody who has more power than him, is able to use a computer, is able to submit to magazines, but is also on the edge of a future being in prison or being on a campus. It’s razor sharp, the edge, the way things unravel, the way stories unravel. The Minnesota creative writing professors take me out that night and recommend the pecan crusted halibut. $17.99. I order water. I’m used to ordering water, have a rule that I’m not allowed to order anything to drink except water, am used to eating appetizers as full meals. I’m skinny. Tony isn’t though. He’s muscular. It’s like magic. How does he eat the prison food? There’s a way you eat when you have ten more years to go. There’s a way you eat when you have a long-term job. There’s a way you write when you have a full-time job. There’s a way you think when you have a full-time job. There’s a struggle to learn how to write when you are in prison. There’s a survival to writing when you have the dream of teaching but your reality is finding the cheapest apartment in the city, even if that means gunshots that wake you up at night, and they will wake you. And when it gets really bad the humiliation of moving in with your parents. And this is after the Navy years. After the Air Force years. The back failing. Hoping for the creative writing position where I have to look into my biggest fears to survive, tap the horrors of my past, and they keep continuing as long as I don’t have a job, but it’s not the sexiness of the alcohol addiction, it’s the nights with nothing, the inability to go out and do the simplest of things. If your stories are good enough, you can be loved I sometimes think. I see the creative writing professor with his wife, with his kids. If your stories are good enough, you can convince a judge. If a story is good enough you can convince a creative writing hiring team. You can convince an editor. You can convince yourself. Tony is real. The gun to him is real. The gun to me is real. Tony’s desperate. I’m desperate. Some stories commit suicide. Some are murdered.



Ron Riekki’s writing includes the novel U.P. (Ghost Road Press), the poetry chapbooks Leave Me Alone I’m Bleeding and I Wish I Could Date a Girl Who’s a Rage Against the Machine Fan (Gypsy Daughter Poetry Chapbooks), and the plays All Saints’ Day (Ruckus Theater) and Carol (Stageworks/Hudson). He organized THE U.P. BOOK TOUR 2011, including more than sixty writers, http://rariekki.webs.com/apps/blog/.

The Greek verb –sis expresses an activity, a movement, a carousel in perpetual motion, though the movement is divided by its non-potential to do so.

The Greek verb –sis is an exhaustion of the carousel in movement, while it rests on its own potential to remain exhausted.

The Teddy Ruxpin doll was designed and assembled in a toy designer’s garage in a suburb of 1980s Los Angeles. Originally a puppet for the theater, Teddy Ruxpin’s identity consolidated into a furry bear with a mechanical talking mouth—a distant relative of ventriloquy (ventre meaning belly, loqui meaning speak) and it’s known that voices of the non-living took up residence in the stomach.

In Kindergarten my older brother shoved an MC Hammer tape into my Teddy Ruxpin. I cried. I think he asked if he could do it but my reaction was to cry. His insistence to play MC Hammer in Teddy Ruxpin made me feel powerless. I felt dominated. Perhaps I identified too closely with Teddy. Perhaps I didn’t want a foreigner in his furry body, wanted to keep him pure for a reason I knew not. I cried and then stopped crying once I heard him rap “Turn This Mutha Out” from the Let’s Get It Started album.  It was still the Teddy I knew, except he sounded like a black rap artist. At that age I knew what a black rapper was. But I didn’t want MC Hammer to be inside Teddy for too long.

It was hard to fall asleep next to him while he rapped and rapped. I might’ve not known how to replace the tape so that’s why I left it in. That’s when I heard about cities like Oakland, Miami, New York, etc. and people working hard. The voice sounded like it was on a mission.

I wasn’t sure what it really meant to ‘turn this mutha out’. I might’ve not even understood that that’s what it said. The sentence only sounded like a circle. I’m not sure how, but that’s what it felt like; a real loud circle that grew and emerged from a dark place, a damp street maybe. I’m not sure what the wetness implied or why it was there.

By then I must have been masturbating. I was masturbating to an MC Hammer song blaring from my Teddy Ruxpin. I had to fall asleep somehow. I had to wake up the next morning to go to Catholic school.

Feliz Lucia Molina is originally from Los Angeles, CA., but currently resides in the state of New York. She has published in ELO Vol.2, continent., Dark Sky Magazine, Titular Journal, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a few book projects and likes to letterpress things. She received an MFA in Poetry from Brown University and is writer-in-residence at The MacDowell Colony in 2011. You can find her blog Notes From the Undercastle Radio at 818bebe.blogspot.com and drawing blog The Museum Of Expensive Things at houseofdrawings.tumblr.com.

My ex-boyfriend is most famous for his death.

On Yom Kippur in 2010, Mitchell Heisman put on a white tuxedo, walked to Memorial Church in Harvard Square, and shot himself. He left behind a “suicide note” of nearly 2000 pages comprised of the manuscripts he was working on. He had an automated program email the note to his loved ones and publish it on a website.

My ex-boyfriend is most famous for his death.  I didn’t know he had died for months. I had moved away, and the note came to an email address I no longer used regularly. I logged in one night and saw his name and the subject line “suicide note.”

My hands started shaking. I reached for my bottle of rum.

I read the email. I still haven’t been able to bring myself to read the note.

I Googled him right away. I found many articles about his death. There was one that had photos of the church. In one there was a white sheet. I can’t even think about that one without crying. In the other one, there was a rose someone had left on the stairs. I wondered who had left it there.

My ex-boyfriend is most famous for his death. In a coffee shop in Virginia, I overhear a man I know make a joke: “It’s kind of like that guy up at Harvard that killed himself. You kind of wish he was still around so he could tell us all the reasons for not living anymore.”

I interrupt him.  “That was my boyfriend.” I say pointedly. And start crying.

But the man doesn’t understand. He doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t even backpedal. He tells me he read every word of the note and Mitch (except he doesn’t even remember his name) is a hero, no, an antihero.

He’s not a fucking hero.

Mitch and I met on Craigslist of all places, in what must have been the spring of 2009. I placed a personal ad for a man in which I stated I liked men with a dry sense of humor. He responded with a picture that actually turned out to look nothing like him in real life. He said my ad was alluring and that he wanted to meet. Then he told me he was a writer and was working on a book about the Norman invasion.

When I read that he was a writer, I followed my first instinct to Google him. I found nothing.

Now, if you Google him, you find plenty of stories about his death. Some of them feature the same picture he sent me.

I didn’t find anything on Google and thought that maybe he wasn’t that serious of a writer. Little did I know, he was a writer with the most fervent work ethic of anyone I’ve met.

Mitch sent me another picture of himself, this one shirtless, with a brief note that it was taken back when he was working out. I was puzzled by this. Was this guy vain? A meathead? Insecure?

Our first meeting was equally strange. We met at my favorite coffee shop in Somerville, Massachusetts. The first thing Mitch did after he showed up was pick up my half-full glass of water and drink it.

I thought he was nervous because I noticed this strange habit–I still don’t know if he did this with everyone–of starting about five sentences at the same time and then finally settling on one. His humor was, as promised, dry. Within twenty minutes, he had taken my hand. All I remember about this first conversation is him telling me that he was Jewish and that he liked ant farms.

None of the newspaper stories mention the ant farms.

Here, I wish I could remember everything we talked about. I wish I could lie and say I remembered it all.

I was still a little unsure about Mitch the second time I went out with him. We went to my favorite place in Porter Square. I had brought my Murphy’s Law First Date Bag, which provided for everything that could happen on a first date. Motion sickness, sex, bad breath, anxiety, it was all there. When Mitch said his food was upsetting his stomach, I offered him antacid. He asked me what antacids did. Nobody had ever asked me that before. We went to his apartment and he kissed me in the stairwell like he couldn’t wait to get inside.

We kept kissing on his bed beside his enormous book collection. When I had driven us there, he said he hated cars because he felt like he couldn’t be free. Having books, he said, that’s what makes me feel free. He had so many books and more piles of them besides his computer.  The only title I remember (aside from the Kama Sutra) was a book called something like Two Jews, One Opinion. I joked that it was disturbing that two Jews only had one opinion between them. Mitch kissed me some more. He said my curves turned him on. Nobody had ever told me that.

We didn’t have sex. I didn’t even take off any clothes. We just listened to Bach. Mitch was always listening to Bach.

I just realized I was wearing the same dress as I’m wearing right now, typing this.

I wasn’t terribly surprised when, a couple days later, I got an email from Mitch. I’d get many emails from him like this. It said something about his inability to be in a relationship. I guess I’m too much of a loner is the only line I remember. I could look it up, but I can’t imagine going back through our emails.

I went on with my life. I even–God, I hate to admit this now–made fun of his “meathead” picture with my friends.  I know. You’re looking at me like that, but that’s only because you know how this story ends.

The next time I saw Mitch was a while later. Maybe a month. I don’t remember. I remember that he suddenly emailed with the subject line Thinking about you. He said he’d kept thinking of me and how he let me go and how he had made a mistake.

Nobody had ever said that to me before.

I called him right away. He sounded so happy to hear from me, and he was so eager to invite me over for dinner.  I wore my black and neon-green Day of the Dead dress. When Mitch answered the door, his whole face lit up at seeing me, and he couldn’t stop touching me. We went upstairs to eat. I’ll never forget the way he came into his room with two TV trays full of spaghetti and store-bought salad mix. The whole time we ate, he was concerned. Was the pasta hot enough? Was the sauce too spicy?

Mostly, as Jared said, Mitch was sweet.

I hadn’t thought to use that word to describe that night.

That night, I told Mitch that all the light bulbs in my bedroom were burned out. Even on a chair, I can’t reach them, I said. He immediately offered to come help. He’d never seen my apartment because I kept it so messy, but I wanted to see him again.

I tried to call him to come over and help, but I got a strange error message when I dialed his number.

My ex-boyfriend is most famous for his death.

Can I call him my boyfriend? When did he become that? I don’t want to be that obnoxious guy in the coffee shop who didn’t even remember his name. I just want to be that girl that turned Mitch on, the girl that Mitch was thinking about. I sensed you were a poet, he wrote to me once. This was when, I think, I had posted a different Craigslist ad, one seeking fans of the composer Erik Satie. Not recognizing me, he sent me a message that began Dear music lover

He said he was responding to my alluring message. I wrote back If I’m so alluring, why do I keep scaring you away?

I didn’t understand then. If I even understand now.

We went back and forth for quite some time. At one point, he jokingly threatened to call the police on me if I kept “seducing him with [my] words.”

None of the newspaper articles mention that.

I didn’t see Mitch much that fall.

In October, I went to my favorite bar–the same place Mitch and I had first had dinner–and had two Shirley Temple Blacks. I came home and washed down over a thousand milligrams of trazodone with half a bottle of vodka.

The only note I sent was an email to my former thesis advisor. It was a request for her to publish my first manuscript.

My ex-boyfriend is most famous for his death.

My advisor found a way to track me down via a grad school friend who called 911 in her town and had them call 911 in mine. I was half-asleep. I was thinking that the pills hadn’t worked. I heard voices in the stairwell.

I remember that one police officer had me convinced I’d be home by morning. I didn’t even bother to refill my cat’s food dish. All I did was put on a pair of underwear. The police officer politely turned his head.

My first twelve hours in the hospital, while they were trying to save my life (it turned out I’d taken what would have been a fatal dose), I swore to remember every detail and write a story called “Take Care.” It was the last thing one of the paramedics had said to me.

But I wasn’t home by morning. I was in the mental hospital for five days. I kept asking who would feed my cat. They gaze me more benzodiazepenes.

I wore the same clothes for five days.

I forgot the story I wanted to write.

I didn’t think about Mitch.

Later, once I was sure I was moving out of state, I wrote him, asking if he wanted to get together one last time. I’ve never seen your apartment but it’s important that I say goodbye to it, he wrote, with an offer to bring chocolate.

And so he showed up at the door to my shitty hovel with a box of chocolate. It was this bizarre chocolate Trivial Pursuit game made from cheap Christmas chocolate. “This tastes like this-time-of-year chocolate,” Mitch said after apologizing that the set he was bringing me might have “lost” some pieces along the way. In a moment I now recognize as irony, I told him of my attempt, my rescue, and the hospital. Mitch gave me chocolate and wine and held my hand. He said he wanted to see me again the next Wednesday.

Wednesday there was a terrible snowstorm. I expected nothing since Mitch walked everywhere, but at 8:00 PM sharp, my doorbell rang. Mitch, covered in snow, bundled up, and wearing the same MP3 player he wore for running, was at my door. We spent the night together. For the first and only time, I got to see him be completely silly. He started talking about how different animals might get high. The whale just puts his weed in his blowhole and sets it on fire.

My ex-boyfriend is most famous for his death.

Now, when I think of him, I try to picture his face as it was when I answered the door that night.

Now, when I think of him, sometimes I listen to Tori Amos’s “Digital Ghost”–the you I knew is fading away.

Now, when I think of him, sometimes the picture fades.

Now, when I think of him, sometimes I get jealous. I hear his surviving friends met with other women Mitch had dated. Oh really? I think but don’t entirely mean. Mostly I am preoccupied with wondering if I was his last.

None of the newspaper articles made this any easier.

About two years before I met Mitch, a good friend of mine who had taught writing in France died from heart disease. I had a terrible time with it.

Many months later, I entered a big spiritual phase. All I could feel was guilt that I hadn’t talked to Jeremy’s spirit, told him what was happening to him now and how I would never forget him. In a moment I can only describe as the greatest spiritual gift I’ve gotten, Jeremy came to visit me. I apologized for not having been there for him when he died. That must has been so weird, I said. Yeah, it was, but so was France, he said. That joke was, somehow, how I knew I was really talking to Jeremy.

It sounds silly now. I know. But after Mitch died, this time I knew I owed it to him, Mitch–to tell him what was happening to himself, as best as I knew. I did not light a candle and say a prayer. Mostly I drank and went to therapy. I bought a ticket to a Deerhunter concert in Washington, D.C. and arranged to stay with a guy I barely knew.

All through the concert I tried to focus on the music but Mitch kept coming back to me. I kept refilling my cup. Finally, I decided I would, there and then, talk to Mitch’s spirit. I would tell him what happened, as much as I knew it. I would tell him I loved him. I would tell him I wish I could have done something to keep him here.

I felt like a hypocrite. I try to off myself and then get pissed when my maybe- boyfriend succeeded. I could weakly argue it wasn’t like that, but isn’t it?

Fall, 2010. I decided I needed to have a night to remember Mitch. I write to his sister to ask her what he liked that I didn’t know about. Pink Floyd and Thai food were on the list. I texted a good friend. I said, Can we go to the Thai place Sunday and do you have any Pink Floyd?

Over Thai food, we talked about Mitch. I worried I had ordered his least favorite dish. I worried I would like his least favorite Pink Floyd song.

I kept going back to the same Pink Floyd song, “If”:

If I were alone, I would cry.
And if I were with you, I’d be home and dry.
And if I go insane,
And they lock me away,
Will you still let me join in the game?

If I were a swan, I’d be gone.
If I were a train, I’d be late again.
If I were a good man, I’d talk with you
More often than I do.

When I tried to call Mitch, I got a strange error message.

Erin Lyndal Martin is a poet, music journalist, and fiction writer currently based in Madison, WI. She invites anyone who knew Mitch to
email her at erinlyndalmartin at gmail.com. His writings can be found at http://www.suicidenote.info.

People often meet their future spouses at grad school, but when I moved to Boston for a master’s program I had the express goal of avoiding any serious relationship. I was there for a degree in fiction, I told myself. To get better at writing stories, and nothing else. Which is why it seems fitting that when, after two months, I did get into a relationship, with a woman named Mallory — the relationship I’m still in, four years later — it was my callow obsession with story writing that almost killed it.

The trouble began years before I even met Mallory, actually, during my only adult break-up. Alison and I had started dating a few weeks before my first semester of college, and called it quits again a few more before my last. That pleasing symmetry was lost on me at the time, though, and mostly I drank and cried my way through the gloomy, Montreal winter that year feeling utterly miserable.

What saved me, as graduation approached, was a magazine piece about a school of psychotherapy that asks patients to write about traumatic events in a positive light. The theory, backed up by some promising studies, was that people are basically a reflection of the stories they tell about themselves — that our lives are shaped not by our actual experiences, but by the significance we ascribe those experiences in our larger, imaginary biographies. If you cast a messy break-up as the moment where your life went wrong, said the article, you’ll likely plunge into depression. But if you tell yourself it was a valuable turning point, one that allowed you to grow emotionally, you’ll come out of it largely unscathed.

In practice, of course, deciding not to view a messy break-up as a failure is easier said than done, but in theory the idea that every person is just the sum of his or her tales was one I found very comforting. It seemed to imply I had more power over my life than I’d previously thought.

As an aspiring fiction writer, too, I found the idea compelling. After all, writers spend hours agonizing over pacing, and narrative arcs, and defining moments — and that these things were apparently as important to real life as they are to a good fictional one provided some solace during those dark nights at the keyboard.

But if consciously shaping your life’s narrative really does have the power to cure or to curse, then putting that power in the hands of a fiction writer, someone who obsessively drafts and re-drafts plots all day, is to court disaster. Even the idea that the right events, orchestrated precisely, could make the difference between a happy life and a miserable one — a bestseller or a flop — eventually came to rule my life to the point of stupidity. And that’s what happened with Mallory.

After Alison, and graduation, I felt totally lost. Stripped of my carefully plotted future with her — my fevered adolescent fantasies of our wedding, and the cramped, bohemian apartment where we would live afterwards, and candlelight dinners with our unborn child kicking in her womb — I had no idea how to even start getting my life back on track. (It’s a novelist’s worst nightmare, too: writing an entire draft only to be told in an editor’s memo — the Dear Johns of the fiction world — that the last two hundred pages need to be completely rewritten.)

So on a whim I decided to move to London. My break-up would no longer be a disaster, I told myself; it would be a transition, launching me towards better things. All I had to do was insert a white space, or an asterisk, or any of those other pernicious tools that let writers avoid difficult passages, and suddenly I would reappear in a cosmopolitan new setting, surrounded by new characters and, most importantly, a new love interest to fill Alison’s shoes.

I can see now, though, that I was still suffering from a bad habit all successful writers eventually must kick: a lingering attachment to the “old” story. Many an intermediate draft is ruined in fiction by an author trying to shoehorn new material into structures that weren’t designed for it. Imagine trying to change the killer in a good whodunit. You can’t just ascribe killerdom to a new character. You have to reimagine whole elements of the story.

All of which is to say: my initial attempts at writing beyond that white space were abysmal. Not because I wasn’t meeting plenty of women, but because I was helplessly trying to insert them into the narrative I’d written for someone else. From that first kiss, I had to be able to imagine them in my make-believe bohemian apartment. Otherwise what was the point?

So I tore through date (too boring) after date (too self-obsessed), writing off perfectly lovely human beings after cursory first impressions, simply because they weren’t enough like my original heroine. Even worse were the women who I really could imagine ending up with: the women with the same fiery, feminist convictions Alison had, and the same sense of humor, and that soft-focus smile that left my palms sweaty and my stomach in a knot. With them I would become such a pathetic puppy-dog I was lucky to get a second date. Sometimes I didn’t even get a first.

Gradually, though, my outlook began to change. Because wasn’t I still having a lot of fun going on all these dates? And hadn’t I missed out on the single life being in a relationship all through college? Eventually, I did what I’d been unwittingly avoiding, and settled on a new story — one in which I’d be a swinging bachelor for “a while,” before settling down “somewhere,” with “someone,” to “at some point” start a family.

Later, in my grad school writing workshops, my classmates would have pounced upon such vagueness, scribbling lengthy marginalia about the loss in narrative energy it caused. But internal stories, sadly, aren’t subject to such close scrutiny by your peers, and though I was peripherally aware of the problems I was creating for myself, all those wishy-washy platitudes meant the prospect (if not, ultimately, the occurrence) of a lot of casual sex. So I let them slide.

That, finally, was how I ended up within a breath of leaving Mallory. When I’d moved to Boston it had been with my hazy new story in mind, with visions of becoming a hip, single writer, and of embarking on a rapturous cavalcade of literature-fuelled orgies — not, as I said, of settling down. So when, after two years, Mallory and I still seemed to be in a stable, mature, adult relationship, I was suddenly panicking about having to reject yet another carefully planned story. It wasn’t really time to settle down, was it? Surely this wasn’t “someone,” already? Surely we weren’t “at some point”?

Understand that, even as I thought all this, I knew Mallory was a perfect foil. She shared my cornball sense of humor. She indulged my neuroses with good nature and a keen sense of when to stop. She just seemed to get me, really, in a way no one had for a long time. But she wasn’t hordes of supermodel nymphomaniacs — an unfair standard to hold her to, I admit — and worse, to my narrative-obsessed mind, she didn’t make for a particularly dramatic alternative. There was no grand plot arc here, no exciting climax, not even a formulaic Hollywood sense of destiny. We just met, and got on great, and it all seemed too ordinary — even if it was wonderful — to possibly make for good reading.

Thankfully, alone one night after a few self-enforced days without speaking to her, I came to my senses. I supplicated myself on her doorstep. I allowed her roommate to empty a drink over me. I made things right.

It wasn’t because I’d given up entirely on that magazine article, and I still believe writing about life events positively can be a valuable therapeutic tool — it certainly helped me get over that first break-up. But there’s an important distinction that I hadn’t understood until that near miss with Mallory: rewriting past events is one thing, but if you’re serious about growing emotionally from them, that also means not outlining future ones too strenuously. In that respect, a break-up really is like the white space at the end of a chapter. It can let you bring one section to a sensible close, but it doesn’t do anything for the next — and shouldn’t — except give you room to start it.

So Alison was a first love, and London was a youthful release, and Mallory? I wouldn’t presume to say. The pleasure in life, I tend to think these days, is not in guessing at the ending from the first 20 pages, but in yielding, without firm expectation, to whatever happens next. Perhaps that means my fiction will suffer — or perhaps, with a real story finally unfolding before me, I’ll actually start to get it right.

The sirens go off on the first Wednesday of every month at noon.  Do not be alarmed—they are simply a test, to make sure that they work.  You need to know this.  You need to know this so you are not alarmed when you hear them cutting through the humidity.  Do not take shelter.  Do not stay close to the ground.  Continue working.  Enjoy your bowl of soup.  Kiss the girl on the forehead because you wish to—for no reason at all besides love.  Do not do this is out of terror.  Do not do this out of uncertainty.  Do not be alarmed.

x

The bathtub is not the safest place in my house.  My home, a wood-paneled tribute to the 1960s, a lakehouse with no lake, a place where I have tried to find a dead animal’s head to mount on its walls to complete the ambiance, to continue the illusion that I do not live in West Alabama; that I live some place with ski-lifts or paddle boats, and not amongst long leaf pines and cockroaches that mysteriously appear in kitchen cabinets, bellies up, legs folded in on themselves.  The safest place is in the hallway outside of the bathroom, towards the center of the house—the bathroom shares a wall with the outside; the bathtub, new in comparison to the rest of the house, had been fixed to a wall with windows:  the light pours in from two rectangles on top of each other, a piece of modern art, horizon and sea—the shower always glows.

x

I had things to do. My students are late.  My students arrive late, tired-eyed, holding a cup of coffee.  Sorry, they say.  How is the paper going, I ask, and everything is okay.  Their days are okay.  They don’t have any questions.  The assignment was to pick a local issue and come up with a proposal as to how to fix it.  They can’t think of anything wrong.  Can we do global warming, they ask?  It is off-limits.

x

Lionel Messi has just scored to put Barcelona ahead 2-0 in the first leg of the Champions League Semi-Final against Real Madrid.  My great aunts and uncles will speak only in Catalan—they refuse to speak Castellan.  One evening, while staying at their house in Barcelona, after eating sugar-coated jellies and learning my saint’s day, I needed a key but did not know the word:  cle? clave? I walked to the door and pointed at the handle.  I pretended I had a key in my hand and pushed it into the lock, twisting my wrist back and forth.  Clau they said, and placed it in my hand.  Clau, they repeat, again.

x

At the gas station, we buy everything.  Abbas buys a Styrofoam cooler.  Barry buys three bags of chips.  I buy a turkey sandwich cut into triangles, and a sleeve of peanuts.  I never eat peanuts—they get stuck in between my teeth and my gums causing the tissue to swell up like a red grape.  We all buy beer.

x

At Annie and Kevin’s house there is everyone.  Everyone who is not there is on their way.  There isn’t anyone caught under anything.  Everyone’s hair looks wonderful.  There is no glass caught between the strands.  Everyone hasn’t lost their homes.  Everyone hasn’t lost their cars, their arms, their selves.  Everyone is okay.  Everyone is okay, yes?  Everyone is okay, right?

x

The last time the Boston Celtics lost a play-off game, I got too drunk to move.  Our cable comes back on in the morning.  They lose tonight by nine points and I am not watching—I am at the same bar but I stand in a different room.  When I order a drink, I do not look up at the screen, instead staring at the rings left by bottles, peeled labels.

x

The tornado was predictable.  We knew it was coming the day before; we were told to watch out.  The wind was certain in its path—a straight diagonal through town, starting from the southwest.  When I saw the map of the path, I thought there was an error—the line did not deviate; it was perfectly drawn in a thick red line.  I could never draw a line this perfect—my hands would shake.

x

The goal was beautiful:  a give and go with Xavi, who left the ball perfectly still for an instant before Messi gathered it with his foot, keeping the sphere close to his body for the first three touches, until kicking it further in front of him, his small frame catching up the ball faster than the Madrid defenders, before softly driving the ball into the lower-left corner from the right side of the keeper’s box on his seventh touch.  As the ball sliced into the back of the net on the replay, the feed cut to black, a tinny-voice telling me that there is a tornado on the ground on a road that I recognize.  When the game comes back on, the players are frozen—the signal from there to here severed.

x

When Kayla Fanaei was found murdered in the back of her car on the University of Alabama-Birmingham campus, I received a phone call.  No, that is not here.  Yes, I am fine.  When Amy Bishop went on a shooting spree at the University of Alabama-Huntsville campus, I received a phone call.  No, that is not here.  Yes, I am fine.  When an EF-4 tornado blew past the University of Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa, everyone called but you.

x

I have burned the rice.  Everyone is coming over, and I have burned the rice.  Everyone is working:  sunburned and exhausted, smelling of smoke and sap, their throats dry from answering phones, and I have spent the day in bed talking with my mother, and I have burned the rice.

x

I am watching the box score from the Celtics game refresh itself every 30 seconds.  I am at home, but the television remains off.  My grandfather came to the United States and fell in love with basketball:  the angles, the arcs, the passing lanes.  Wow, look at that he would say.

x

Instead of watching soccer, instead of watching basketball, instead of a lot of things, we watch professional wrestling.  We watch it because it is easy to predict:  we know the moves that are going to happen before they happen.  We expect false falls, the escape from being finished.  Rey Mysterio, a luchalibre wrestler has a move called the “619”—an overly complex ritual in which it is necessary for Mysterio’s opponent to be draped over the second rope facing outward before Mysterio jumps through the second and top rope while holding on to the ropes, and uses the momentum to swing back around into the ring, kicking his opponent in the face.  The situation never arises in any other match—the helplessness of a muscle-bound superstar falling halfway out of the ring and getting caught on the ropes is rare and frankly unbelievable—and so there is inevitably an absurd sequence that allows Mysterio’s opponent to be in this predicament.  The audience notices it immediately:  this matter of circumstance that surely of which Mysterio will capitalize.  We are promised something is coming.

X

Finals have been canceled:  the students are asked to go home, to leave Tuscaloosa as soon as they can.  For seniors, there is no denouement—no “this will be the last time we”, none of that.  My younger students are happy I am safe, but unhappy about their grades.  They want to meet with me to discuss things.  My first thought is not discuss what, but discuss where?

x

Like a bomb went off.  Like a tidal wave.  Like a third-world country.  Like the whole town has been hit by a bus.  Like that one movie.

x

The siren test for Wednesday has been canceled:  they claim that the sirens were damaged in the storm, but we know that we cannot hear that whirling yelp just yet—the same way we cannot hear thunder, the clattering of wind chimes.

x

I have thrown up every day since the storm hit:  my stomach filled with glass.  To tell you this would be inconsiderate.  To ask for help would be absurd.  Dinner is at six.

x

Austin comes over to watch the second leg of the Barcelona-Madrid match.  We are watching wrestling instead.  If Real Madrid wins 3-0, we lose.  If Real Madrid wins 3-1, we lose.  If Real Madrid wins 6-0, we lose.  If this, we lose.

x

Yes, that is here.  No, I am not fine.

x

Rajon Rondo, the point-guard for the Celtics has dislocated his elbow—his arm bent backwards at an unnatural angle.  Everyone is convinced it is broken and he is not coming back.  I see a still image:  his arm like a child’s drawing.  Minutes after being shuffled off the court, he returns, left arm dead at his side to lead the Celtics to victory.  I read about it later that evening:  the injury report reads “expected to return”.  This is not a metaphor for anything.

x

Osama bin Laden has been killed. There are still people missing in Alberta.  If you need to see a body, come to Tuscaloosa.

x

As a child, wrestling shocked me:  each twist was an actual twist that I never saw coming.  The super kick through the window, the clothesline after the arm raise, the leg drop on the wrong guy.  Now, the outcomes are predictable:  this guy needs to win the title because the Monday night show can’t have two champions, this match is just a set up for a later match, the real one.  If we are wrong in our predictions, we are pleased.

x

Chris and I are playing a soccer video game.  He asks me what buttons do what.  I can’t tell him—I have to do it myself and then show him.  All of our games end in draws, yet we choose to keep playing to determine a winner.  We prefer “golden goal”, meaning the first person to score wins and the game is over.  We do not use the term “sudden death”.  During our game, Adam, my roommate from college calls—I let it go to voicemail.  After Chris leaves, I call Adam.  He tells me that Tim is dead.  There were warnings, certainly:  the time our sophomore year he had a stroke on the way to the Inner Harbor, the multiple brain surgeries.  Adam tells me that Tim was in Manhattan and got hit by a bus.  He says don’t read the article—don’t watch the news clip.

x

My mother tells me I could have been killed.  She wants to know why I don’t have a basement.  I could tell her that the soil here is too malleable—it’s why they build on cement blocks, it’s why the trees lean, it’s why the town is sliding into the river.  I tell her I will do better next time.

x

I turn on the Celtics game for less than a minute:  enough to see Paul Pierce miss a game-winning shot.  The buzzer sounds, and the game is heading into overtime.  I turn off the television and throw the remote across the room.

x

The final match of the night is a cage match.  Colin, Elizabeth, Barry and I know how it ends:  John Cena wins the championship and makes an announcement that “Osama bin Laden has been compromised”.  We watch to see how it is won:  if the match was worked well, or if Cena bulldozed his competition, as he is wont to do.  The winner of the match must either pin his opponent or be the first to escape the cage.  The wrestlers pummel each other, attempt to knock each other out with specialty maneuvers, and try to climb up the sides of the cage to escape.  Yet there is another way out:  the cage has a door.

x

Elizabeth and Robin come over with food from Farren and Jessica.  Elizabeth put some yellow flowers in a coffee cup.  We watch “Hoosiers”, a movie I have memorized.  Strap’s father drives the bus because God told him to.  The fields of Hickory look like the corner of 15^th and the road to the hospital:  burnt out buildings and scraggly trees stripped of everything.  I can’t eat a thing.  But Jimmy says he’ll make it, and he does.

x

I saw the image of the tornado before my power went out.  As the cloud got closer, I started to back away from the television:  first bringing my laptop to the kitchen, and then finally into the hallway, where I shut all of the doors.  I knew nothing of tornadoes, just that they sounded like trains.  I sat in the dark for longer than I meant to, not knowing what was next, not knowing if it was finally okay to resurface.

Brian Oliu lives in Tuscaloosa and teaches at the University of Alabama. You can find him online here.

1. Don’t chew with your mouth open.

2. Straw sipping from an empty cup, especially an empty cup that is clear, is not allowed. The first time you do it, I will try to understand, and I will assume that you don’t realize that there isn’t anything left to drink in the cup, unless the cup is clear, then I will assume you want to piss me off. When you do it 5 times in 30 minutes (yes, I am counting) I will take your cup and hit you over the head with it.

3. Don’t ask me what I am eating. You can look at my plate and clearly see what I’m eating. If you are asking because you want some, I am sure there is more somewhere in the kitchen. If you are asking because you are trying to bring my attention to what I am eating, I am already fully aware of what I am eating. Yes, I know that my salad doesn’t have any salad dressing (I actually like it this way). Yes, I am ashamed everything on my plate that can be considered a carb. Yes, I am disgusted with myself for eating cake, but it’s already been one of those “bad” food days and I might as well say “fuck it all now.”

4. If you know that I am on “a diet,” don’t ask me if I want to go out to eat. I’m starving; of course I want to go out to eat! So please don’t tempt me with this question. If you want company, you can tell me that you are hungry and you are going to go out to eat. I might invite myself to join you because I have a twisted obsession with feeding people and watching them eat. You may ask me only once (on the way to the restaurant) if I want something to eat. If I want something, I will get a Diet Coke, and you will pay.

5. If I tell you that you are not full yet, you are not full yet and you are expected to eat more. Because I am not good at moderating my own hunger and satiation, I reserve the right to moderate yours. If you don’t eat all the food on your plate and I tell you to eat the rest, you need to make a real attempt to eat the rest. And when I say real attempt, I don’t mean eating one more fry and telling me that you’ve tried and you’re sorry, but you are way too full. We can sit here all night until the food is gone; I have nowhere else to be.

6. Never take me to Olive Garden, but if you do accidently take me there and you find me contemplating the Zeppoli, loudly whisper, “do you really think you need that?” This will embarrass the hell out of me and set me straight.

7. You certainly do not want to share the chocolate melt down cake with me. The answer is always, “No. You are fat; you do not need dessert.” You will order dessert, you will enjoy it in front of me, and you are not allowed to let me have a bite, even if I pout and give you puppy dog eyes.

8. Yes, I do need to go to the bathroom, brush my teeth or shower after every meal.

9. Don’t ask me why I left the toilet seat up. You already know the answer: I left the toilet seat up because I made an effort to return it to your preferred position. No insidious business going on here.

10. I am the (im)perfect woman.

Yinka Rose Reed-Nolan is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area. She recently relocated to Fresno where she is a MFA student at California State University Fresno and works as an Editorial Assistant for The Normal School. In her free time she publishes the zine Rawton Cherry with her best friend.

After graduating with my MFA in fiction this past June, after working two years on the management staff of Willow Springs, I figured I had a bright future ahead of me. I applied for jobs at presses and literary journals, but nothing stuck. Four months later, with my bank account nearly empty and my student loan payments looming, I found myself accepting a job writing and editing reading passages for standardized tests in the State of Michigan. At the interview, they asked if I’d ever written for children before and I said, “No, but I’d like to some day.” They nodded and I was hired. I soon found out that wanting to write for children has very little in common with writing passages for standardized tests, though they keep swearing to me that it does. Here is the process I go through while writing each new passage for students in grades 3 through 9. You be the judge.

Step 1: Select a topic.

If you are feeling lazy, you can take this topic from the pre-approved list given to you when you first started writing passages. If not, use the random article search option on Wikipedia until piques your curiosity. If you’re feeling extra adventurous, you can come up with your own topic, but this is dangerous, and often leads to topics that fall under the umbrella of Stuff Adults Think Kids Find Interesting. If you thought up an idea in under five minutes, chances are that kids have read it a hundred times before.

Step 2: Get the topic approved.

Even if you took the topic from the pre-approved list, double check to make sure it is still okay. Sometimes they forget to take things off the list, or they’ve changed their minds. If the topic was not on the list, you need to make sure no part of your selected topic is, in any way, shape, form, or stretch of the imagination, on the taboo topics list.

Note: Taboo topics include the obvious (abortion, death, guns) and the not-so-obvious (dollhouses, skiing, camping, pork, cheeseburgers). Some topics are okay in some circumstances but not in others (stories set in wartime, which feature the good guys, can have guns, if no one fires them; actually, probably even picking them up is bad).

Step 3: Write your story or informational passage.

This is the fun part because you’ve already got the restrictions. Here you just get to write. A word of warning however: If you are, say, writing a novel for grownups in your non-work hours, you may have to be extra vigilant in making sure that there is no leakage from your more mature project into this one or difficulties may arise in the next step.

Step 4: Run the word count and Flesch-Kincaid grade-level check.

Both of these options are available in Microsoft Word, though the grade level check may not be on by default. Enter the information at the bottom of your passage for reference. If you were writing with a specific grade-level goal in mind, see how both the word count and grade level match up. If you didn’t have a grade level in mind, now is a good time to select one.

Note: This almost never works out on the first draft. Without fail you will have to cut from your piece and/or lower the grade level. Or maybe that’s just me.

Step 5: Revise the piece to make everything match up.

Or, rather, revise the piece to try to make everything match up. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t get that grade level to drop below 6^th because it hurts your writerly sensibility to dumb down those sentences any more.

Note: The grade-level indicator built in to Microsoft Word hardly seems the most scientific. Try fooling it by adding or subtracting syllables from character names, or by running it once without quotation marks around dialogue. I’ll let you discover the other ways of manipulating your results.

Step 6: Get the final piece approved by the content specialist.

The content specialist is the reading know-it-all, but don’t be afraid to say, “No. Your proposed edits hurt me inside.” Of course, the know-it-all will still get any edit he or she wants, but at least you will have stood your ground, and when your teacher friends make any complaint about the test, ever, you can assume it is about THIS and say, quite honestly, that it isn’t your fault.

Kathryn Houghton holds an MFA in fiction from Eastern Washington University. She writes book reviews for The Collagist and blogs weekly at the Willow Springs blog, Bark.

the first is a series of investigations of costs and considerations

for the indie author

INTRODUCTION

I just saw it again, a particular comment about reasons not to set up through POD channels—it is an argument I have seen more than any:

“If you set up that way, the bulk of your profits are going to the POD while you are left with your measly bit.  Sorry, I’d rather not give away my work—I’ll go through a real printer so I am in control.”

There are about ten million iterations of this, of course, and as I have always come down on the complete opposite side of the coin, I thought I would take a moment to put some ideas out there, see if there is a hole somewhere in my thinking or if someone knows something I don’t know (this will not just be a response to this particular statement, but an investigation based on personal data and investigations made by me over the course of several years).

But, we will begin with the comment, as the germ is in there.

First, the idea of what a POD is needs some clarity, I don’t think it is what it was even five years ago—a POD functions no different than an offset printer other than it is digital or, to put it maybe a tick more correctly, can function as a printer, solely, but with the options of “POD Publishing/Facilitating” atop it.  The POD option, today, means simply this: the book does not have to physically exist until it is ordered, a run does not have to be printed in anticipation of filling orders.  Full stop.  Storefronts do not have to be set up through PODs, the books do not need to be made available through the services, they do not need to be made available publically, at all, and IT IS NOT necessary to cite the POD as your publisher.  One could print up a run and then sell them on their own, handling everything about shipping, etc. in effect just using a POD as a printer.

(A key difference: with a POD a book can be printed in far smaller quantities for far less money than through a printer—one at a time, in fact, though shipping per item that way slightly moots the point—no need to ship it yourself, one at a time, and then reship it, this would be silly)

INVESTIGATION

So, let’s run a scenario:  (Create Space is the only POD service I toss my hat in with, so POD will be altered to CS throughout)

We use the following spec example for this scenario:

The book: 190 pages, trade paperback, 5×8: natural (not white) paper stock, full colour cover (gloss—alas, the one thing I have not found in a POD is matte covers)

Cost per unit (based on CS Pro Plan pricing): $3.13

NOTE: for the sake of this exploration, we’ll assume the prices are the same for CS and short run, when in reality CS would be less expensive than a short run printer for sets smaller than 500 copies—Just to have it out there as this goes on, I have not come across a short run printer that hits CS Pro Plan pricing nearly, most short runs for the above 190 page spec example charge at least $5 per unit, the equivalent to CS Non-Pro Plan pricing.

POINT ONE: What are the parameters of the investigation?

1. Person A Short Run prints a set of 50 copies through a printer to sell by himself (handling fulfillment, shipping, etc.)

1. Person B sets up a POD title, no copies produced until sold.

At this point:

Person A has invested: $156.50 to print the 50 copies (we’re allowing no initial set up fee for the sake of balance and because of the wildly differing policies on this printer-to-printer) and $20 to ship them.

Person B has invested: $39 to set up with Pro Plan and $6.74 to get the required proof copy produced and shipped.

NOTE: I will add another $10 to Person B, because they have purchased an ISBN from Bowker via CS that is assigned to their Personal Publisher name, not to the POD (the publisher is listed, for example, as Ajax House and not Create Space)—I will add this same $10 to Person A, though to individually purchase an ISBN tends to cost somewhat more–$35-80 unless bought in sets)

Person A Invested: $186

Person B Invested: $55.74

In red I am going to break down what Person A would be spending if set at average Non-CS Pro Plan pricing:  $5 per unit for 50 units plus $20 shipping plus $10 ISBN: Person A Invested: $280

Point Two:  Both individuals set their price point at $10.  So, how do profits break down?

1. 1. Person A: When an order comes in for a book, Person A fulfills it personally.  This requires the following general costs:

1. 1. shipping envelope (there are ways to minimize this, such as just shipping in multiple sheets of paper or buying shipping envelopes in bulk, so to simplify, we are going to call this cost at $0.50)
2. 2. postage (for a book the weight and size of the one we are working with, a shipping fee of $2.57 is possible, so we will go with this).

Additionally, and this must be pointed out, this individual must invest the time to package up and ship these items, personally—we will not put a dollar amount on this, but it is a factor to mention.

Also additionally, Person A has to set up a method of receiving customer payment, which in this example we will say is Paypal, (but to minimize this out, we will say that they have set the shipping cost option on Paypal to compensate for the slight percentage per order Paypal takes)

So an order comes in: client paying $10 plus shipping ($13.25—to cover shipping and Paypal deduction) and so, really, only the cost of the book needs to be subtracted from the $10 remaining—a profit of $6.87 per unit.

(Non-CS Pro Plan price subtract $5 from the $10 remaining–$5 profit per unit)

NOTE: It of course needs to be pointed out, again, that when an order comes in for Person A, it is up to them to find time to fulfill it—this varies person-to-person, but depending on the time of day an order is placed and the circumstances of this individual’s life, it cannot be absolutely set when an order will ship—this is not the focus of my breakdown, so we will estimate shipments go out within 48 hours and take 3-5 days to arrive to the customer.

1. 2. Person B: When an order comes in for Person B, it is simply a matter of CS fulfilling it, nothing physically needs to be done by this individual to fulfill the order or to collect the profit.  So, we move on to the financial breakdown.  For an order placed on a $10 book (orders ship in 24 hours; for 3-5 day shipping the cost through CS to a customer is USPS standard $3.61—this sent with sales receipt in sturdy cardboard sealed packaging) Person B would receive $4.95 per unit.

NOTE: Again, it has to be pointed out that this process is automatic—orders arriving anytime are processed and shipped, Person B does not even need to access their account, accumulated profits are deposited each month directly to their bank account—if profits are below the $20 mark, a check has to be requested)

At this point:

Person A Profit: $6.87 per unit

Person B Profit: $4.95 per unit

So, Person A comes out $1.92 ahead per unit!  Very nice.  Both Persons do alright, but a 2 buck lead is considerable.

Non-CS Pro Plan Person A comes out $0.05 ahead per unit

But…

POINT THREE:  How long does it take to earn back investment?

1. 1. Person A was invested $186 at set up.  At $6.87 per unit he will break even at 27 Books Sold.

(Non-CS Pro Plan Pricing: at $5 per unit from a $270 initial investment, Person A will not break even)

Projecting a sold out run of 50 copies, Person A would clear a profit of $158.

(Non-CS Pro Plan: Person A is under by $30–$250 earned but $280 invested)

1. 2. Person B was invested $55.74 at set up.  At $4.95 per unit they will break even at 12 Books sold (actually, they will be a few bucks ahead, but it’s silly to say they will break even at 11.26 books sold).

Projecting that they also sell 50 copies, Person B will clear a profit of $188.10

At this point

Person B, at the 50 mark, all things being equal, comes out $30 ahead of Person A.

(Non-CS Pro Plan Person B comes out $218.10 ahead of Person A)

NOTE: It must be pointed out, of course, that if Person A stalled out at 15 or 17 or 20 books sold (CS pricing), they would still be in the hole, while Person B would already be making clean profits.

POINT FIVE: Let’s follow this through one more cycle, though, because it continues to be interesting.

1. 1. Person A (up $158) purchases another set of 50 for $156 and $20 to ship: this means their profits from the first run go toward the new set, leaving them at a starting point of investing $18.

(Non-CS Pro Plan, Person A (down $30) pays in another $250 plus $20 shipping, leaving them at a starting point of investing $300)

1. 2. Person B has no new investment and needs to pay no new set up fees etc.  He continues to profit at $4.95 per unit, beginning this second set Up $188.10

At this point

Person A Invested: $18

(Non-CS Pro Plan: invested $300)

Person B Invested: $0 (Up $188.10)

1. 3. Person A again sells out the run of 50 at a profit per unit of $6.87, earning at total profit of $325.50 ($343.50 minus $18 invested)

(Non-CS Pro Plan pricing they sell out a run of 50 at profit per unit of $5, earning a total profit of $0 ($250 minus $300 invested–$50 under)

1. 4. Person B: Projecting Sales of 50 at a profit of $4.95 per unit, earning a profit of $247.50 for a total profit of $435.60 (247.50 plus Up 188.10)

At this point

So, at like-rates, after two rounds Person B is up $110.10 over Person A.

(Non-CS Pro Plan pricing Person B is up $485.60 over Person A)

And so on through as many rounds as you want to go.

NOTE: Again it needs to be pointed out that at the purchase of the 2^nd set of 50, Person A has to sell at least 3 books to reach zero loss (earn back the $18 investment) while if Person B sells 0 books they remain Up $188.10.  Therefore, in the 2^nd round, for Person A to reach even with person B they have to sell 30 copies (188.10 plus 18)—in other words, by this point Person A has to sell 80 copies to Person b’s 50 to be on even profit ground.

CONCLUSIONS**

Based on this scenario, in my way of thinking the POD (CS) method is clearly the way to go to maximize control and profits while minimizing hassle.  However, there may be some method I have overlooked—I do my best, in all investigations, to work with data and prices with no preference in mind, to base my preferences on the conclusions of investigations: if there are other basic methods of set up I have overlooked, I would be indebted to anyone taking a moment to point them out.  Likewise, if someone sees a way this method might be tweaked for the better (for either method investigated) I would love to know these thoughts.

**Alternative Method for Person B (CS):

Not wanting to interrupt the flow of the above investigation with too many lines of thought going at once, I include this following alternative method for Person B, here.

If Person B opts to fulfill orders personally, this can be done through CS without having to print a set in anticipation of orders.  If Person B were to collect customer monies through a Paypal account, they could then use their CS Personal account to purchase copies at their AT-COST rate, which would play out in the following way.

Still working from the $10 per book charge with shipping added in by Payapl, a customer would place and order, paying $13.25 (to keep with the above examples for Person A).  We will reduce this to $12.75, factoring in, perhaps excessively, the Paypal deduction per purchase.

Person B would then utilize CS to place an order, shipping directly from the printer to the customer.  In this case, they are paying, per book, only the exact cost of production ($3.13) and the exact cost of shipping ($3.61) for a total of $6.74 (the order still ships 24 hours from when Person B places it, still takes 3-5 days to arrive, still with receipt and in sturdy packaging).

So, per unit, Person B would be profiting $6.01 instead of $4.95.

In this case, from their initial investment of $55.74 they would break even after 9 books are sold (that is, once the 10^th book is sold, they are ahead $4.36—technically they would have to sell 9.26 books to break even, but this is an impossibility, of course)

The profits at 50 copies sold then become $240 and at 100 copies become $540.

Pablo D’Stair is a novelist and founder of Brown Paper Publishing and its forthcoming offshoot Brown Paper Side B.  He is a regular contributing essayist to Montage: Cultural Paradigm, the literary supplement to the Sunday Observer, Sri Lanka’s largest English newspaper.