Dime Store Riot

I’ve been writing for some time. For far longer than it would seem based on the work I have out there. It took me a while to get serious about it, to throw away all the artistic pretensions and delusions. I struggled through a lot of those misconceptions before reaching this point, before finally approaching writing as a task requiring careful and considerate work. Only at then can you ever produce anything worthy of being called art. Foolishly, I had thought I was done with the struggles. I don’t mean with money or recognition. I don’t even mean finding my voice—I’m always learning something new. The struggle is with myself. I’ve always been my harshest critic. I can never fully exorcise that voice in my head. It’ll disappear for moments only to come roaring back. It pushes through the successes, ripping doubts from my skull-space and forging them, beating them into a vicious Möbius strip of nigh self-loathing. Sure , it whispers to me, you had a story published, but that’s it—it

On Day Labor, the Crime Factory blog, Keith has been running a feature called "The Best of Whatever." Writers have been weighing in almost daily on their picks for 2010. Recently, he posted his own list of the best short stories. I'm very proud to see that "Ghostman on Third" made the cut. I think it's one of my best stories. It's nice to see that recognized, especially by Keith. My companions on the list just make it sweeter.

For a while now, I've been working on a non-fiction article. It's required a great deal of research and tested the strength of my google-fu. Rather than text books and articles, suprisingly, my main source of information has been correspondence. The letters I've found have easily cut straight through the immense amount of bullshit I've come up against, giving me a very precise portrait of the man I'm researching, and suggested avenues of exploration that I wouldn't have thought of on my own. Today, however, I realized that soon researchers won't have this for a resource. No one writes letters anymore. Not honest-to-goodness letters on paper tucked into an envelope, sealed, and then mailed. It's all e-mails and tweets and Facebook statuses. For me, an e-mail has never carried the same sort of personal weight and attachment; even with my generation probably being the last to remember what it was like to write and mail a letter, and wait for a respon

Curious about how some of us came up with our stories for Discount Noir ? Then head on over to Cullen Gallagher's Pulp Serenade and read our interviews. Pulp Serenade Interviews