After lamenting over the many boring short fiction writers getting published, I stumbled on Rebecca Beegle. Take her quiz, or read about the wonders of vegetable oil. She's also in Fence this month. Reassuring.

This is one of my more complete stories. Not that I should admit that up front, and not that it doesn't need more revision. And now I've broken my rule of prefacing my fiction rather than letting the reader take it for what it is. And this is what it is:

At twenty-nine, Dan Rabinowitz divorced his wife and got a new car, a fast one, silver, leased. He didn’t get the car right away. He waited for the divorce to settle, for his parents to stop asking so many questions (he was living with them again), for all the papers to be signed. So many papers even though there was no money to be had. The furniture had been Cammy’s, the apartment had been rented and their bank account had never been more than a kiddy pool, shallow with very slight ripples. Did he ever love Cammy? He didn’t know, but he knew it didn’t matter now. Whether he had loved her when he married her or married her without ever loving her, he was a fool either way.

Thanks to deadline, I've been writing a lot lately. Well, a lot in terms of time spent, but it seems the more time I spend, the less pages I put out. I used to find it hard to contain a story to less than 20, but lately I wonder how I'll get more than 10 pages out of an idea. I only hope this means I'm learning to do more with less and not that I've begun a steady decline in which by next summer, I'll be tortured to turn out more than a page a month.

Needless, I plan to spend from here on in until thesis end (Spring '05) on revision. Other than the constant, compulsive revisions I make during a first write, I'm a novice reviser. And to that point, I thought I'd post more of the last story, Mother's Chair, because it has been revised since last post, and because it's about the only thing of note I've done since then. It's not all that, but be warned, it's long.

Now that I'm working four days, I find little time to post to my blog, exercise, answer email. What I am doing in my spare moments is writing, so that's what I'll post. This is the beginning of a short story I've been hammering on for a few weeks, but it's been slow going. I haven't been able to hit a stride, hold onto the voice or see the story through, so mostly I wind up moving words around, changing the tense and adding little when I sit down with it. According to my deadline, it will be done by Monday. What will I ever accomplish without these deadlines? And now, the half-baked story:

Mother asks to have her chair taken down. An unnecessary demand when there are so many good chairs already on the patio, most of them bought to replace ones Mother complained about at one time or another. Still she insists on her chair, the battered chair, the heavy chair, the chair that is an eyesore among the canvas and beech sling backs, the chair that scrapes the walls on its way out of and back into the house. The cushions to mother’s chair have to be beaten. The hinges don’t like to bend, metal tears at skin and clothes. Sandy can't believe it’s taken her this long to ask.

On an unblemished day in early October, two squirrels perched on Jay Lyndberg’s fire escape. They were grayish-brown with short, thick coats. One appeared to be dead and hung limp over the top railing. The other performed a cleansing ritual on the dead one, methodically licked the body clean. It was a peaceful scene, with the intense blue of a fall sky as a backdrop and the breeze running through the leaves bobbing light all over their bodies. A thing of beauty, a pure thing, Jay Lyndberg thought. And then wondered if he’d have to remove the body later that night.

His wife called to interrupt his work. The telephone on his desk flashed to indicate an incoming call. He did not tolerate ringers, buzzers, alarms of any sort. He had muted most of the electronic devices in the apartment.

Jay did not hesitate to pick up the phone even though he knew it was his wife calling. She often accused him of ignoring her phone calls and she had known him long enough to not leave messages anymore. He talked into the corner of the room so as to not disturb the squirrels.

As part of our summer effort to keep writing, a discipline that I'm disappointed to say did not simply absorb into my being during all that classroom time this past year, a few friends and I have decided to exchange short short pieces on a weekly basis. The magic of the deadline.

We're requiring ourselves to turn in 3+ pages of anything. Political musings. What I did when I wasn't writing last week. My latest dog tricks. And if a miracle occurs, a real live short story. My short short of the week.

Even though it has become one of those over-played movies on TBS, it's still one of my favorites. I can't get enough of collective stupidity in work places, the natural by-product of managers pumped up on the importance of their work and their notion of the general good. That and I've always wanted to write an office story that didn't bore the pants off of its readers. Here's my attempt, an excerpt from the final story I handed in for the semester.

John and Carolyn were getting themselves worked up over the hot water in their building.

“I haven’t had a hot shower in two days,” John was saying. “It’s a farce!”

“Oh, yes,” said Carolyn. “Worse than that.”

“For all this rent we pay, you’d think we could get some hot water every morning. You’d never think that the owners of these kinds of buildings were so cheap.”

Carolyn was nibbling the crusts off her toast. She thought she felt a cold coming on, a tickle in the back of her throat and a lightness in her head.

Ah, the magic of deadlines. Much of what I'm paying so much money for in grad school -- to have someone give me a date when a story is due and have a classroom of people relying on that date. A piece of my latest below. The workshop that I'm handing this in for, like no other I've been in, is anything but supportive. Much of the reason I signed up. A secret wish for someone to tear apart my work, make my worst fears come true, and maybe help me actually get somewhere.

I've read Proust. I can say that now. Okay, so millions of people can say that now. What I'd rather be able to say that I've read Proust, understand Proust and can eloquently speak about Proust. (I can't.) And it's not like I read him in his native language or intend to read further in the one book of an 11-volume series that I did attempt (made it halfway by assignment not choice). And would I have made it more than 10 pages without assignment? I guess that's what grad school is all about.

My first assignment was to write like Proust. A Proustian extended metaphor, Proust style. It's convoluted and long. Does that mean I succeeded?

I'm hard at work on a story that is overdue, so I can only offer an excerpt from it, and a not very good one at that:

Maurice pulled Gail onto the boat first. She let out a little cry as the boat rocked beneath her and leaned into Maurice for support. She straightened up quickly, composed and embarrassed.

Worked on the Barbados story tonight, for less than an hour. It's not exciting me, but I'd like to focus on a single story rather than my usual fragments that go nowhere. I'm not satisfied with a bit of it, but here's an excerpt from it.

The girl checked into the hotel with her mother. They had difficulty finding it, as the hotel was poorly marked and located on a side street. They were looking for it during the mid-afternoon, when everyone was taking siesta. All the streets looked residential and like dead ends.