Saturday, September 1, 2007

An assigment

So I got a request some months ago to write a story for an upcoming anthology. I was delighted – still am – and took it on. After all, the request was that the story be "dark." I can do dark.

Discovery: when I try to write dark, I produce self-parody. On some meta-narrative level, where I do not care to play, it’s actually kind of funny. So far I have a baby born with broken legs, mirroring the broken legs of the father, who is far far away being tormented as part of an endgame wth its roots in the 1991 Russian coup and present-day oligarchic privatization and gun-running to Chechnya. All narrated by a woman who’s taken refuge in a church basement in rural Newfoundland.

Could I be over-thinking here?

If the story were a horse, I’d shoot it.

Block. Delete. Start again.

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Spark-gap transmission / Michelle Butler Hallett

Spark-gap transmission / Michelle Butler Hallett
in progress