This morning I posted another of my published stories, “Tahoe”, to this site. “Tahoe” is a story that was a bit of a mess when I first wrote it, about ten or fifteen years ago. I sent it around a bit and it got rejected a bit, until Christopher Chambers, the editor at New Orleans Review, contacted me about it. A computer crash has since lost me the e-mails we exchanged, but the way I remember it, Christopher told me the rest of the staff thought the story should be rejected, but he thought it contained the seed of something useful, if I was willing to work with him on it. I was and we did. His input was so crucial to the fashioning of the finished tale, I thought he and I should get credit as co-authors, though I’ve never publicly said that before now.
I posted another story this morning. This one is “Sandhills”, which was published in New York Tyrant, Volume 1, Number 1, in 2006. It’s a story I first sketched out in 1993, as part of another, longer work. It didn’t really fit in, though, so I cut it and in the next year or so I reworked it into its present form. It was accepted by The Quarterly in 1995, providing I changed the title to “The Crane Game”. I changed the title and made the other minor but necessary revisions required by Gordon Lish, who edited The Quarterly, but then his mag went bust (for the second and so far final time).
It took me another eleven years to find a publisher for it. The editor at the Tyrant (I can no longer remember her name, but it may have been Sarah) also required a few minor changes, which I accepted when she was right and I could not make a convincing case otherwise, either to her or myself. I had long since changed the title back to “Sandhills”. I never cared for “The Crane Game”, in large part because The Crying Game had come out in ’92 and broke big in ’93 and the two titles were far too close to one another acoustically and temporally.
I added a “Stories” menu to the left sidebar of this site’s present thematic apparition, and placed within said new menu a copy of a long story I call “The Antichrist.” It’s a tl;dr piece I first drafted long ago, though it wasn’t hammered into its final shape until about three or four years ago. It’s earned a few rejections since then, but I threw in the towel a week or so ago on getting it published anywhere else and decided to publish it here. I like its voice and other stuff about it–one would hope I like it, I wrote the damn thing and now I’ve published it–but I can’t see a compelling reason to ask anyone to pay me money for it, not even in the form of two contributor’s copies.
So far as I know, the only reader I have is a fellow peddling porn in Russia, so, Boris, I hope you enjoy “The Antichrist.”
Leonard Cohen has inspired me to set out in search of that elusive and ideal reader, the one who is otherwise unemployed and bored enough to read my work from the alpha through to the omega.