A Few Stories

Chekhov's Ninth

Chekhov's Ninth is based on my notes from a dream I had the night before an Astronomy exam. It's also the source of my unusual psychological reaction to the names Julia and/or Juliet. I started to write it up, and left it for over a year; eventually I finished it and submitted it a an L2 writing class. It's the only finished version, and ends up being rather dark and Poe-like, and I shall probably redo it with some subtlety sooner or later.

The Passing of Bythe

This was written for a freshman-level English class; the zeroeth revision was, as that class pointed out, drivel. This first revision is much better, I think, and they thought. I like it a lot, actually. Funny in spots, and embodied of a sort of ridiculous futility that seems, in some cynical way, highly apropriate as a splattering-spot for a fairy tale.

Irkles

Irkles is an attempt at a story that involves IRC dialogue. I've gotten mixed reports on whether it works or not. AFAIK, it stands fairly well without them. It has some autobiographical parallels, but it's entirely fictional.

Johnny's Girl

When I submitted this to a writing workshop at UCD, to say that I and it got panned would be to modestly understate the matter. I presume this to be caused by (a) the highly inhospitable narrator, whom you tend to start hating about the third paragraph, and (b) the uncomfortable storyline and subject. When I submitted the same story, unedited, to an actors' workshop in San Francisco, they spent all night with it and adored it pretty much to bits. It's still unrevised -- plenty of things in here I have in mind to change around, at least marginally.

This story also has the dubious honor of having a very high ranking on a lot of search engines as a match for such queries as "little girl spread legs," "little girl underpants" (my favorite, especially coming from a host in k12.ut.us, otherwise known as the Utah public school system), "disney panties," and so forth.

Old Glory Young Glory

Old Glory Young Glory is a motif-laden story concerning an evening spent by a son in a highrise office, and a father in a Simpson County jail. The prof for whose class it was written called it "very mature writing," which I think mostly means he liked the historical aspects, he being a fairly accomplished historical fiction author and as vulnerable to student brownnosing as any other. That said, I didn't have the prof in mind whilst writing it, particularly.