You Solicited Me at a Very Strange Time in My Life

Homie hit me up with a project, I commit. Commit to the bit. Here’s what he had to say about the project and instructions if you want to join in. (Is it a one day event? When will this happen again? Does this mean I’m a real boy) Wait, rewind.

This piece is part of “Day of the ___ Writer,” an open collab on the daily experiences behind our writing. Post on your pub about your day, and check out our growing mosaic of many lives.

Day of the Writer

“Welcome, dear writer, to a project to share a day in the life.

Our work is shaped by our daily experiences: what we do, who we interact with, how we observe our surroundings, how we structure our routines. It may be mundane. It may be drudgery. But it’s also beautiful!

Despite everything beyond our control, we make thousands of tiny choices to daydream, read, observe, connect, reflect, write, refine, and publish. Our days are the gears and guts of our work. It’s the stuff our readers don’t always see.

For those of us who do write more directly on daily experience, what’s a part of our daily self that we haven’t shared on Substack? We necessarily present a persona of who we are. It may be an honest part of us, but it’s not all of us. What is another honest part of us that we haven’t presented?

All our lives are different. This project is about opening little windows into our personal worlds and glimpsing those of our fellows.

As spring approaches, our posts will be snapshots of us as writers at a point in time, likely shifting with the seasons and years to come.”

Write

• Short 200-500-word post in any style - example post

• Titled “Day of the ___ Writer” with a word to describe your writer self - for example “Day of the World’s Best Writer” or “Day of the Writer Popular with All Audiences”

• What’s unique about your experience as a writer and human

• Interesting observations in your day-to-day

• Doesn’t have to be your everyday - it can be a composite or exemplar of “daily” experience.

• How, where, and when you write (or what gets in the way)

• Tension or seamless integration between your internal creative world and external day-to-day

• Screw your guidelines! I do my own thing! (I’m like, half in this category. - Emil)

Include

• Project blurb, top of post: This piece is part of “Day of the ___ Writer,” an open collab on the daily experiences behind our writing. Post on your pub about your day, and check out our growing mosaic of many lives.

• End of post: Link to a favorite piece of yours to give new folks a taste of your writing

Publish

• Tuesday, March 3, a post on your own publication

• Tag 3 other writers on Notes whose lives you’re curious about. Example (feel free to customize):
  We’re sharing glimpses into our daily lives as writers, as part of a collab called “Day of the ___ Writer.” I’m curious about your day! Want to join by writing a post on your pub? (link to your writer day or this post)

• Send Trevor a link to your post, and he’ll add you to a mosaic post about our days

About the organizer

I write speculative fiction about finding the fantastic in the mundane (Tredecko), and organize in-person writing meet-ups that harness collective creativity (Spill Your Dreams).

Then you give away the proposition.

This sounded interesting, so I’m sort of excited for it. But, it couldn’t have come at a weirder time. So, without any more pulling back of curtains.

Day of the Panic Writer

Wake late. 60oz coffee, 100mg Wellbutrin, 20mg Dextroamphetamine, 2mg Xanax ER, four 1mg Xanax IR, two 4mg Percolex tabs of nicotine gum, one Cosmic Brownie flavored protein bar (190kcals, 20g protein) and one green smoothie. Who said what overnight on Substack? How many notifications? How many emails? Work email is empty. Task initiation paralysis. Avoid the news. When was the last time you wrote a sentence you loved? Executive Functioning Workbook for Adults. Organization for Creatives with ADHD. Thriving with ADHD. Thriving with Adult ADHD. The Autism Burnout Workbook. My desk faces a wall I’d decorated, now barren besides a madman’s field of command strips. What’s left to pack besides the cats? How late do I work? Late enough my fiancée is a living saint for putting up with it.

One deliverable slipped because it’s impossible to concentrate on long form work during upheaval. An average day is too sedentary, too much coffee.

Wanna be a writer? Never make your living as an editor; it kills slow. You’re only doing something like what you want, never able to snag time for The Work.

“Write your book,” but you’ve got 15 clients. More in line. The work is cognitively exhausting, then you have to write.

Elsby drops soon: Edited by Emil Ottoman.

You have workshops to prepare.

Art as maladaptive coping mechanism. 800 studies in six months. Procreate saves you.

Addicted terminally to bubbly water to contrast the physical dependence on benzodiazepines. A pen and stationery fetish. Six short tons of books that you’re not packing for this move.

But this is just a day for now.

Soon even if they face a brick wall, windows will flank the desk in your office. Light. Things are looking up. Except at night when you can’t unwind. Like now. You’re alone with your thoughts and that aphorism: never trust anything your brain tells you after 9pm. A novella to write, a house to pack, credit debt to zero, and most of your friends are dead.

Your coffee cup? It’s the last mug one of your best friends drank her coffee out of the day she blew her brains all over the upholstery of her car.

Sarah hanged herself, guaranteeing her sainthood.

KC Chris overdosed or died of COVID, Tomfoolery died in a car accident two miles from his house in Florida. The circle tightened. Floridecayed. She read it but it in prepub but it didn’t come out until she’d taken a trust fall into space. Hope she landed in the tent of universal consciousness.

You’ll get back to your desk with some window light. Hang the wall art elsewhere, rearrange the library, get a new place to sit, make a little reading nook. See your living friends, not just your dead ones. Pry back some time for The Work. The voices are always whispering. You’re never not writing, really, you’re just composing in your head. It’s getting the voices out at the desk.

Time blindness.

You’ll choose life, like you always do, because you’re the archivist as well. “You have to tell the stories.”

And it’ll all be OK. It always is. Family motto.

“If you love something, set it free… or kill it,” Moms says.

There is always the work.

The part you don’t say out loud, the rest of the coda: “And the work is never finished.”

This is a panic attack.

OH SHIT, I WRITE TOO I GUESS

But, the first thing that people paid attention to was the Autopsies.

(Opening digital collage, me. limited Photo curation by the multitalented Any bad collage work on his photography by me, any other horrors perpetrated herein, also me.)

The Saint Cycle

A Salton Eternity

Floridecay

Fico/Endo/Landlord/Crescendo

All Power Demands Sacrifice

My Name is My Name

Sacrifice Denies All Power

Intermezzo/Vezivna Tkiva

You speak in narrative collapse between the walls closing in. The fractal fractalizing. The tesseract tesseracting. The terror terrorizing. The liminal fracture between the myth and the reality that created the myth and the reality but only in looking back at the cracks in the myth, and the reality becomes both the myth and the reality.

Intermezzo/Vezivna Tkiva

She was sitting on the side of the runway, full lotus, nude, covered in frost, breath steaming hot white clouds six times a minute. Her one thought, am I dead now?

The shattering came from all sides.

The sun rose cold copper and slow over the neighborhood singing a fine mist off Halloween decorations set out on yard after yard. In the brass light of morning they all looked more fake and uncanny. Dew wet plastic skeletons and zombies. Soggy fake spider webs like cotton shreds hanging from trees. A new kind of fear settles in as morning brightens. His stomach morphine cramps and doubles him in half at the fear of the reality of life ahead.

And in a circular room, glass walls and an infinity of holograms competing for space refracted on your shadow. All that light overlaying itself how physics ends in math creates one perfect image of you moving through the world.

“My favorite thing about having a car” he said and let the bait hang between them. Is? The chemist asked. “I can just disappear, poof, gone, and no one would be able to find me.” Unlikely, the chemist says. There is never any real inflection in her voice, not unless her emotions flare; sudden, violent, always in a pyroclasm of passions. Never mind if they made any sense. “Was that a dare or a challenge?” he asks. Unlikely, she said, I think it’s a statement of fact. That night when she was asleep he got up from the daybed, walked outside, and proved her wrong. The chemist was crawling her bedroom floor, combing the carpet looking for specks of crack she had cooked after dinner that may have fallen in the shag when she went to smoke it. She didn’t notice he had gone until six AM the morning after next.

This works for so long.

I tap my coffee mug “Rolling your car can be a religious experience.” She tells me it sounds like a really expensive way to get in touch with your higher power.

When it starts to break, the first time a movement is out of sync, one ghost twitch of an arm, or your image in the bathroom mirror left in linger of its own life after you turn to walk away.

They all walk single file through the end of their own lives, surrounded on all sides by set piece stage plays of their final moments played by masked actors, ahead of them a black hole in the path marks a dead end with everyone walking straight off the cliff and tumbling down into the abyss. A pink neon sign flickering above it: “this is not an exit”

You don’t notice.

The day you wake up alone, not alone like no one in your bed, more like alone like no one else on the planet. The first thing you do is you walk out your front door to go find a pistol to suck on like a cold hard cock.

You walk off from yourself, one of you goes to the kitchen, another the sink, another answers your phone vibrating on the counter, you just want a pineapple.

The first time an insect crawls out of a hole in your skin, on your arm, a red swollen spot you thought was a spider bite until the scratching and pain came from inside. That first time a wet bloody beetle crawled out of you, you screamed. The hundredth time it happens, a horned beetle burrowing out a bloody hole in your side, from under your ribcage, and you bleed like Jesus on the cross when they took a spear to him, you just say hello, take the big shiny beetle outside, and set him down on a log in your garden.

You’re breaking into pieces of yourself before you notice it. A burning palm tree above you. Bloody hands are clean hands. A perfect blue Florida sky is opening to a clear black void. Ten thousand of you walking around south Florida.

I know this house has a demon in it. She whispers in my ear. He keeps me from going to sleep, and when I do I wake up in a pool of night sweat with sore kidneys and a panic attack crawling up my throat. I drink to escape him until it stops working and I'm just an alcoholic. I'm the most beautiful girl in the world, so I know the demon is a man. I have only ever known men to be this cruel.

Muscovy Ducks raping each other.

All those homeless people talking nonsense, it took me too long to figure out they weren’t terribly mentally ill. That’s just a story our society tells us so we can feel better about leaving them out to rot. Every single one of them is speaking with the dead. It took me so long to figure it out because I ended up one of them.

The house is full of corpses and full of life. Bloody hands and clean hands. You make rice for Lazarus and you make potstickers for Lazarus.

None of the other people on this bus would look at me. I was sweating through my clothes, blood dripped from my nose. My vision was strobing from black to the bus and back again and again. A child stopped in the aisle as he passed and asked if I wanted a piece of candy. Had that “hey mister” innocence in his kiddy voice. My voice came out a hoarse rasp when I said sure, please and thank you. The kid handed me a palm full of Perc 30s and went to the back of the bus.

The Judge is going to New York and the judge is going on a cruise.

She hadn’t felt right since she left work, and for some reason she wasn’t alarmed when she spat up a wine bottle’s worth of blood in her kitchen sink while doing the dishes. She wasn’t alarmed when her knees went and she started to slide down the sink and cabinets below to the cold tacky tile floor of her apartment kitchen she’d always hated. She wasn’t alarmed when her vision blurred and she felt the hot wet spread at her crotch as she pissed herself uncontrollably. But, when she heard “and now ladies and gentlemen, Tom Jones!” she panicked. The start of Love Light Live in Las Vegas boomed in her ears, and she wept for her future.

You’re only one place at once, lying on the bed in the guest room attached to Lazarus’ room, on the bed, lying on those shit red gingham sheets picking a bar of Mexican Xanax out of the bottle and, everywhere else at once. You’re a flickering LED light bulb.

Waking up in the middle of the woods being confused that you’re still alive is great for five minutes of confused laughter until you remember, oh yeah, you’re being hunted for sport.

You wake up, and were you dreaming or are you out there in Humboldt kicking down a door?

“Never eat the brain,” she told me, “that’s how you get Kuru.” She stopped and looked me in the eyes, her serious authoritative face painted on. “Mad people disease, you know, like mad cow disease. You’ll go insane. It will kill you.”
The only thing left of her is cooking on rusty sheet metal over an open flame. It’s her brain. I’m sitting here and hey, could be worse.

When you left to come to Florida did you write Love you mom, I’ll be back soon, and a huge heart, or did you write “we’ll be back soon.”

Halloween was fun until your best friend killed herself in may and then October 13^th you start to see her all over the city. Flash glimpses of her black hair in crowds. The glass front door of the apartment, because she had a key, unlocking and swinging open only for you to go down the stairs and the door is open but no one is there. Then you don’t go to a Halloween rave and people tell you the next day that she was there and so were you. Halloween was fun until the 31^st when the door unlocks and does the spooky swing open thing again, and you sigh again, and go downstairs to close it again, but your dead best friend is sitting there on your porch, legs crossed, cloudy eyes, eating a Honeycrisp apple the size of a toddler’s head.

To be a saint.

People don’t realize how simple life really is until you introduce a pistol into a normal situation with the casual air of pulling out your wallet to get the check at a restaurant.

First you have to be made a martyr.

It took her all night and into the misty predawn to sew his bound, drugged, fetal curled figure into the hollowed out carcass of the dead elk. Hearing his muffled screams was a perfect way to start the day.

Congenital tinnitus runs in your family, a gift from your momses’ mom. Silence has always been a violence to you all on its own. Lying in bed you’ve clicked your teeth an impossible number of times to make sure you could head above the neversilence.

When the dam burst it did flooded the valley where my family lived. The concrete thick wall of green polluted water dismantling to only constituent parts house, home, possessions, history, mother, father, and three siblings. I had did never asked to live there on the mud flats in shadow of the crumbling infrastructure holding back nature’s conquered horror. Now did never want abuse heaped on me as oldest daughter. So yes, I did blow the dam. Lucky luck on me, no corporate entities cared interest for the dam, nor the mud flats then now sunk and filed with by count I made at least a score’s thousand dancing water mummies. This now is how I will celebrate the new year, by grabbing my pack for to get on.

The walls of the hologram reality you’re inside of have been stressing the walls of the hologram reality you’re inside of have been stressing for so long before you lie down the last time you’ll ever lie down to bed for so long before you lie down the last time you’ll ever lie down to bed.

Never go back to your childhood home. OK, there’s a caveat to this. Don’t go back if you grew up young till Grandma died in a house on ten acres in West Kentucky ten miles off the Cumberland. OK so on more caveat here, don’t go back if grandma’s house was damn fool sold soon after she passed on. But, if you do go back, be sure that you’re both stupid and brave, be dumb as a shiny polished ball of mud. See your childhood home, white clapboard, depression era small, white siding, but with trees sprouting 30 years tall out of it. Branches coming out mortar wound size holes, grown over on all sides. The forest coming back from the edge of the back nine acres making claim to your personal history, and be sure to be so dumb and angry that this is the one house on the long unpaved gravel circle drive gone to real and absolute shit. Next lot over Dennis’ old trailer is alive and well and brimming with the detritus of the new rural poor, complete with an All American made in China Trump flag hung off the porch like a banner. Now walk around the entire perimeter of your childhood wreckage and feel like a war orphan for some reason you can’t put a finger on. Forget completely though nominally a Presbyterian grandma was county wide whispered to confer with forest spirits. After all, she was twice widowed and she cursed in Gaelic. Have a beer or two, take pictures of the whole house on your space age phone, and on beer three decide your life just will not be complete without seeing the wrecked insides of the house that will look like neither your memories of it nor any of the backdrops to your baby pictures. Ignore the deer in the field out there watching you because when you grew up deer were everywhere out here and certainly hadn’t been hunted to skittishness in 30 gone years. Cut your way into the house, ignore the pale red glow you are pushing towards.

And you thrash. 180dB is the death zone for sonic pressure levels. A trope they use as a weapon in stupid movies. Not something you’re hearing in your head while you try to sleep.

Waking up with blood drying on your hands only comes as a shock to people who go their entire lives without a real sense of purpose. A monolith they may be, but the rest of us, one day we will, I promise you child, wake up with innocent blood drying to rust brown on our hands. Some of us bloody palmed, a lucky few, coated thick and sticky up to their fucking elbows.

The laminated and tempered three inch thick holographic glass reality is made of can withstand 70MegaPascals. The 33 foot radius room of all reality has a resonant radial frequency of 145Hz.

She took a slow drag from her cigarette, let the smoke back out her nostrils slow and curling. Said the reason hadn’t mattered when she made the decision and it wouldn’t matter after the act. She was frozen concrete, sinew and wet hair, a voice rasping in a storm. “Sometimes people just do things.”

How do you measure the sound of tinnitus? 145 decibels is a low bass hum with a pulse, turn the volume up enough and it drones, but by the time it reached 180 decibels it is no longer sound. It is a physical force you feel and then it kills you. Still, you wake up in the morning remembering the drone. Valentine’s Day 2009, Santa Cruz, Bassnecter, your insides melting in front of the bass bins. That’s the drone.

Her pervasive glowing nihilism drove her to commit atrocities with a smile on her face.

But the room that reality exists inside, the 20MegaPascals from the tinnitus is a resonating oscillatory pressure and doesn’t give a fuck that the walls of reality can withstand 70MegaPascals, in theory. Inside your head theory meets application.

He live streamed beheading his whole family on Twitch. When they ran him down they went live on Facebook and 600 people got to see 30 seconds of his face being peeled off like the skin of a ripe mango. When the police found them later, still bloody with his face sitting an empty wrinkled Halloween mask on the back seat, they turned off their body cameras.

Always the overlaid images of you in the middle of the room, on the bed, thrashing, the walls shimmer and water ripple because a rock has been thrown into reality by this sound in your head.

I’d always told her to take everything you can from everyone you can, and when I woke up in the Motel 6 with the door open and the room tossed and cleaned out down to stealing all my ways to prove I was myself in the legal sense, I will admit, I was perversely proud that she was going to be OK.

The glass walls of reality breathe with a pulse, rippling, and a frosted fractal pattern of microcracks spirals from 77 geometrically aligned places in the cylinder, where vertices humans can not see overlap.

When you don’t learn, they kill you. Do learn? They kill you. Comply? Kill you. Refuse? Kill you. So why do you keep coming back.

The flower of reality blooms in reverse, a high speed camera slowed down to a crawl, the glass of reality vacuums in and explodes out, wave collapse becomes explosive decompression. The glass showers the inside of the room in overlapping arcs of one and two millimeter shards of twinkle, outside of reality it flies forever voidlong with no friction to stop it.

The floor caved in and her worst fear came true. She fell, but she never landed.

Reality is a 33 foot circle you don’t want to break out of, the curtains to go up. She walked right through the wall and off the edge. Frictionless.

I stalk the streets in the rain. Dressed so normal I fade from a passer’s memory as soon as I’m out of their line of sight. Carry the white cup, the one with the green logo. Besides that, unbranded. Always follow. Never look like it. A hunt is all about patience. Even in the zoo, if a keeper turns their back on the friendly tiger they’ve taken care of for years, the tiger hunches down. That prey drive never dies, and if the keeper doesn’t turn back around fast enough he’s just so much lunchmeat wrapped in poly cotton blend. When you’re behind everyone the whole of humanity is prey. 30% of gunshot wound are lethal, in the United States, but over 70% of knife attacks are lethal. The average number of wounds in a shooting, smoothed out and averaged, is one. The average number of wounds in a knife attack is 37. Police don’t know what to make of it when someone turns up a corpse with only two knife wounds. For fun go look up what the Syke’s ad Fairbairn fighting knife is. Google “silent sentry removal tool.” With a blade pushed through your lung and heart you can’t scream, you can barely gasp a gargle. I toss my coffee in a storm drain. I only hunt in the rain. I am very patient. Then the phone goes off. “Oh, that’s today,” turn around “No, I didn’t forget the PTA meeting, I’m stuck on the highway. What? Oh, my window is open. Just go ahead, I’ll be there as soon as. Yeah, thanks, uhuh, bye, OK, OK, bye.” It’s a mile back to the car, a long stupid walk in the rain.

In the morning the vibes are off. You cook eggs, while you shit, while you vomit, while you shave, while you bang your head into the guest bathroom mirror.

She was obsessed with maps. She saw everything as a map waiting to be drawn. She had file boxes of notebooks mapping her life. But she could not map the trajectory of where the love had burnt out, and it hurt.

Coherence or decoherence? Coherence or decoherence?

Once he realized that every time he hit the terminal point, the place where he had made a wrong turn or gone too far, and he would see the sky darken and open up, then a blink of nonexistence. One perfect second in which there was no noise and then the reset. His ears ring, fingers tingle when he opens his fresh eyes and sees pinwheels of color fading. Once he realized he could fuck up eternal in that same stretch of months he felt like a God. He’d found some cosmic cheat code for reality. Until small things started to change. His shirt would be different. Blink and he would be clean shaven. Blink again and his car was a different model. Blink again and he wakes up with a gun in his hand. Blink, come to in a Motel 6. Blink. In a different state. Maybe it gets to be time to take reality a little bit more seriously is his thought before he loses himself and his original real story and bio forever. Before he forgets the end of the story or what he prayed for the day he woke up and life had turned into a waking nightmare.

Every one of your countless millions makes the call except for him. He watches. He’s wearing postal worker’s pants with a black stripe down their slate blue sides. He’s lighting a cigarette and sitting on the bed you’re not supposed to ever sit on because it’s delicate and inflates and deflates and it’s a wound bed and makes a droning noise you can only sleep through from constant exposure. He’s wearing a cheap rayon t-shirt from Temu with a huge cartoonish classic styled Japanese Tiger on it, fighting a skeleton, surrounded by flames and smoke and chrysanthemums.

I always told her she would make a great cult leader, but she never agreed with me until I came up with a fitting story. Until I came up with a narrative unlike any other. But the truth is she had been waiting her whole life to be made into a living God.

The call back. It’s the worst thing ever. The phone launches as thousands of you throw it across the room in every possible direction, and all make the same sound Lazarus says later he never heard a human make before and never wants to hear a human make again. The watcher, he leans forward and watches the fist you drop your glasses and cry.

Wake up feeling violent and crawl out into a rainstorm know god sent me to drown the world, then curse the motherfucker when his high and mighty deluge soaks all my smokes.

She wanted to be a saint.

He tells me my body burned up in the fire beyond even harvesting, but my insurance only covers discount husks.

But Saints are martyrs. You cannot be alive and be a Saint. No matter what anyone says.

Nails bit to the quick, blood dripping from one nostril, hair full of glass and concrete dust. She stands in the alley market, only one shoe on her left foot, her mind a smooth pane of frosted glass. And she turns the pomegranate over and around in her hand, inspecting it, but not perceiving it. Smoke rises above the buildings behind her, blocks and blocks away from the alley market. Who would have thought a car bomb could be so gentle. So calm. The fruit stall owner is yelling at her. She turns and spins the small red fruit in her hands like it was a Rubik’s Cube. So calm.

Decoherence is impossible to explain outside a fugue, a trance, a drug trip. The fracture of one mind into a million isn’t explicable. If you say you walked out of the room while you were sitting on the couch, you’d get put on the ward. But not the one you visited the Saint on, after The Saint hangs herself, they close it.

They all walked single file. No one knew if the line they were in had a beginning or an end. It was only known that they were all neither the head of the line, nor the end. Everyone, walk until you starve.

And the watcher is the only constant. If you sit he’s next to you. If you walk he’s half inside of you, a film overlay no one can see.

Some days waking up is just a place holder for the act of waiting for a bomb to fall on you.

The watcher doesn’t go into the viewing.

“I wish I could do my whole life over,” she sniffed back a dribble of snot. “I’d fuck up everything so much better with another chance.” Talking like this in the middle of a drug overdose is so gauche it makes me want to scream. “You know?” She asks, struggling to keep her ten ton eyelids open, fighting off the I’m about to stop breathing feeling of one last nod. So I day I think you’re a fucking cliché and you definitely did too much. Whatever she was about to say next dies rattling in her throat.

Solomon slaps a black carbon fiber and metal spirit on your desk, thunk, and says it’s riot season. The Watcher smiles.

The homeless man tells me he never fell in love with the right person. He says he has a college degree. He says we are all so much closer to being him than our brains can admit to us. And finally, he says I’m a demon.

You see yourself sometimes and it gives you vertigo so bad you collapse, spiraling down in whichever direction you were moving, the most graceless ballerina. So you go outside less.

The tent loomed larger than a football stadium over the termite crowds surrounding it. A circus of giants could have come around, set this thing out on the dry grass wastes at the edge of town, and it would have made just as much sense. The tent went up overnight, in silence, and for the whole of the next day it existed. People woke up and took sight of it. Over the course of that first day it was inspected and found to have no entrance. It was impossible for man or forklift to pry any edge from the ground. The four peaked tend measured eight stories high. The lines staking it down, close as anyone could figure, were marine cable, like to anchor a war ship. By 3pm the scene was taped off by police, and this did not stop the whole of the town from inspecting it. By the time the Gold medal sunset settled in the sky, the crowds had all gone home for supper and gossip. Teenagers smoking weed and going back and forth about the tent were the only ones to see a murder of crows thousands strong to be flying in from the northward to land on top of the tent. A final straw to spook off the final observers. The delinquent teens packed up at the sight and headed for the park at the far end of town, all convinced they were in a remake of Killer Klowns From Outer Space.
And the town grew quiet as people ate, laid down to bed, fell all of them to a baby in a crib into uniformly dreamless sleep.
At midnight the goliath awakened. Lights cracked on and the classic red and white tent, big as actual geography, just as solid, as hard to explain as a mountain, came alive. No circus music. No big tent revival churchy music, just a low bass hum.
Everyone in town woke up soaked from night sweats. The hum droned, and a voice over it, “come and see.” Come.

One of you is on the platform, aware of his own existence inside of the illusion of reality, and he is gathering together millimeter long shards of glass and piecing them back together.

She told me she only had one hobby, and it was to go out late at night and cause car crashes in the country. I said she can’t be serious. She ran her fingers around the lip of her teacup and said “yeah, I dress up like a ghoul or a ghost or whatever and go out on a little rural road somewhere and, you know, pick a good spot. And, well, no one want to run over a ghost, or hit a bloody girl crying, running out from the brush on the side of the road.” She said if the people survived, no one ever believed them. She said in all the time she’d been doing this, she’d only once ever been clipped by a car.

Only issue is there’s no map for the territory, it’s terra incognita, and while by the end of the year he’s put together a jagged edged round of three inch thick glass, it’s not in the impossibly precise arrangement it was originally. Reality has no guide.

Once he was dead he had a wide angle bird’s eye view lens on the world. He regretted having done it. And he was forced by time to watch his greatest fear come true as time never stopped moving, and in the end, the real one this time, when the very last person forgot him, once he was consigned past gone but also forgotten in total, he heard a gong noise, followed by clapping, and then darkness.

Your moods become more erratic and you’re confused easy by simple questions. Some of your shadows come walking back but burn up before they can get to you. The Watcher is your divine jealousy.

The house burned down and they moved to a motel. The GoFundMe failed and they moved in with an aunt. No jobs came and the aunt tossed them out. They moved into a more rundown motel. The second GoFundMe failed and a sheriff escorted them out of the more rundown motel. So they lived in their car. They got kicked out of a Wal-Mart parking lot they were trying to overnight in. No matter what, when you asked how he was doing, the husband, the new father, his answer was the same. “Living the dream.” But his eyes were empty, colorless. The painted on eyes of a cheap plastic doll.

The watcher is you as Titan.

Funny how when you get sober people think you gotta go to meetings. I just started picking fights with strangers.

Where the watcher was you was so estranged from where you are now you couldn’t imagine. But you wake up after dreaming of the Salton sea in California and Google to see if it’s still there.

After the event, which he called an enlightening, but the veracity of whether or not this is or is not a misnomer being now in question as only an aside in this recounting of events, of which the “event” hereafter to be applied with quotations to set it aside from any other event, as suicide, grocery shopping, a package arriving, et al., the man in question ordered a 30 foot roll of dumpster to be delivered in front of his house the next day. That night he had saltines and one cup of coffee for dinner and did not sleep, the being from the “event” until present both his every meal and his now regular nonsleep schedule, the morning after which he watched the 30 foot long grunge and graffiti covered rolloff dumpster complete delivery, as was “instructed,” his words used here as instructed in quotations as by the “event” he began the “GRAND PROJECT,” his words, and him insisting they are both written and spoken in “bold, all caps,” his words again, of deconstructing his life. It is of note to now mention that the precursor to the “event” is thought to be the disappearance of his wife, of whom he will not speak and insists he never had, and more presciently who is still missing, and more peculiarly for any psychiatric event of this magnitude and duration, he was investigated for the disappearance of and cleared of any culpability or blame for the disappearance of the wife he insists he never had on no less than six separate occasions, from the third day after the “event” when he was interrupted in the midst of his “GRAND PROJECT” by the authorities, who at the time noted his calm and pleasant demeanor as “odd” for a man found standing at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac in front of a roll of dumpster piled with the entire contents of his house, doused with several cans of kerosene, and burning bright as a star fallen to earth from heaven.

When you wake up and you see the Watcher in the mirror the first time, that’s when you know the only real peace you’d ever known, every shared peak experience, the one who was too close and too smart, martyred herself. Now the Saint is just a pile of shit in her old room in your house.

A pattern will get you killed. I never forget. The one day he went to the same Starbucks twice in a row, he got shot in the face holding a latte. A pattern makes you visible. The secret to staying upright and doing what we do is being invisible. Never do the same thing the same way twice. My tradecraft is to lack so much rhythm and reason I vibrate out of the visible realm. Soon I will take an apprentice. After I slip, and I am meticulous. I am detail oriented. I take notes. Keep records. But the other thing he told me was that everyone slips eventually. So after I slip, she will be the next in our lineage to sit down and write a note reading “A pattern will get you killed,” and I will be dead.

Grief only grows hotter. Burns more. You let yourself go. Gain 40 pounds. Eat the cookies. Don’t work out. Cry at car commercials.

He sat on the shore weeping. Yelling over and over again, “the ship burned. The ship burned.” Between sobs and wails he would blubber, “I was supposed to burn too.”

You lie down next to Bird, and Jewel Claw Rook flashes in your head, and you black out.

Her argument was that since god was all powerful and everything else under the sun, then surely he had the capacity to kill himself, and she made a schizoid if convincingly sober argument for him having done so in the year 2009.

After you’re in bed the Watcher lies down on top of you. Sinks inside of you. The only two you left. The only one of you left. And in the morning you wake up and it’s after the holidays and the roof is leaking under 50,000 lbs of melting snow pack and the Oracle is yelling it’s the apocalypse, but you can’t tell her that already happened a while back and everything was fucked anyway, but you follow into the kitchen. Water is pouring through the ceiling, gallons, she’s in a panic. You can’t think like this. There’s nothing you can do so you go into the bathroom and vomit before getting a cup of coffee poured with shaking hands because the only thing she saved from under the water so far was the Bunn. We’ll be back, you say and go back to the bedroom. You don’t recognize yourself as yourself or the Watcher in the bedroom mirror. You eat three 2mg Pharmapram and drink coffee and check your email, but your mind is on fire. Conflicting memories. You look at Bird and she’s got feathers, blink and they’re gone. Baby, she asks, are you ok? Just fine. Just, this wasn’t expected at all. Just this is fucked.

Snow was covered in enough blood you’d think a giant had been exsanguinated as it were dragged to the treeline. So now imagine all of my perfect shock wherein those woods all I find is a little waif, tatterdemalion, feral youth, cannot be more than 23, wandering around disoriented terminally ,but otherwise outwardly completely fine aside her bleeding from the nose and mouth both unnatural and unceasing. “Help” she gargled to me.

You go back to the kitchen after your coffee and swear she’s standing in her doorway as you pass. You turn, door closed, nothing. And then in the kitchen start to bail water and move essentials, get things you think you all care about out of danger. The Oracle is in a panic, and when you ask her, moving things into the hallways where it’s not pouring water from the ceiling, “what’s my name?” She says that’s not helpful, about to cry. “But what’s my name?” She stares you down, half foreign eyes in those sockets, and cocks her head side on, leans forward, right in your snarky little fucking face, her eyes glazed wet and grey blue, holding it all back. she says Your Name is Your Name. Voice colder than the winter storm brought this melting tragedy upon us. Now could you please help?

By the time you read this, maybe.

Share

I posted the messy sprawl in an Autoclave. This is the clean version leaking out of me from a knife wound bleeding for six months already.

Today is Monday, Feb 9. We find out about the apartment today.

The fracture in a crisis like this isn’t the big two or three week push where everything is so beautiful and everyone cares so much, or the long middle where you feel like you’re dying doing the work. The fracture happens later. You’ve already taken on debt for the move, kept the lights on, the bills paid, credit score optics cleaning out the coffers, and more itchy cat scratch emergencies, the shower of razorblades, but then you finally reach the part where you’re supposed to win.

You get the apartment. (Or you don’t. By the time you read this, maybe you’ll know.)

And you hit the wall.

Because good news costs money when it happens same as bad news: deposits, first and last, app fees that float away, little red fifty dollar balloons. Full service movers because my family physically cannot do this twice in 12 months. The estimator may already be gone by the time you read this. Estimate on the table. It won’t mean anything unless we get the apartment. A hundred little normal life purchases, like food and shit paper, don’t feel like luxuries until you check your balance and realize stability is a subscription you apparently never agreed to.

How the cycle renews itself for another year. This system waits until you’re about to escape, then charges you for the privilege. How your relationships strain, your health takes a back seat, the autopsies and your consistency flickers. People forget your fucking name. You forget your own calendar. You roast money on credit optics. The score barely moves. The utilization finally dips under 85%, and now we need that breathing room for daily life, because otherwise like the last twelve months you’re fighting APRs on cards you rotate in a Byzantine puzzle to help keep the household from drowning. Stress kills emotions. You forget your partner.

Either we get the keys today, or we’re in the weeds. We keep bleeding money on applications, and time we don’t have, pull a hard pivot we have no plan for while we’re shaking, nervous, sick to our stomachs thinking about it. Doesn’t matter, the clock doesn’t stop.

We still have to move in 38 days.

We still have to pay here while we pay there if we even get there; and if we don’t get there we don’t know what the fuck we’re going to do. The gap is where the household drowns.

And I have to say this:

I have ADHD. Severe time blindness. Under this stress load, time turns into 2 a.m. and you can’t remember what the day even was. Task initiation becomes malignant coping until the question is answered. My body treats “write the thing that saves you” like “touch the stove.” I will reorganize the eschaton to avoid one sentence:

We need help.

This is urgent. This is the inflection point. Where the cracks really form because you’re invested. You know where the furniture goes. You’re taking things off your walls already. This is the part where good news or bad news, the bottom falls out fast.

So here’s the clean call to action:

Zero friction. What’s your excuse?

If you’ve been reading Burnt Tongue and thinking I’ll throw something in when things settle. They don’t settle first. You stabilize them while they’re shaking.

Paid isn’t “access.” I give access away constantly. The work is public because fiction is culture and craft is infrastructure.

Paid is patronage. It’s coal in the furnace. It’s buying me time and focus in the exact window where time and focus are the first things to die.

Monthly: $1.15
Annual: $6.90

See those prices? Hit Annual if you can. It’s the most efficient way to support, and if enough people hit it, it actually moves the needle.

Zero friction. What’s your excuse?

If you’re a paying subscriber, feel free to unsubscribe and lock in the new forever price, otherwise, it’s the new default for anyone who hits the subscribe screen:

Saints&Martyrs

Same price next month. Same price next year. Choose your own adventure.

If you’re serious serious about your writing. You want leverage, not vibes:

Editor’s Circle: Lifetime paid access + 4 private editorial consults/year (10 pages or 2.5 hours each) — $1,000/year value at my normal rates.

Do it now.

If you can’t pay: share this, restack it, forward it to one person who reads. Reply with one sentence (comments are open) so I’m not talking to an empty room. Proof of life counts too.

Bonus Round

Someone bought all the novella cards, it paid the electric bill. I collect greeting cards (strange, I know). I’ve been collecting Trader Joe’s greeting cards for near fifteen years.

If you want to participate in the BONUS ROUND, and make the novella longer, or get a card, click the button below.

BONUS ROUND

Services

I’m taking short story edits. Five right now. If it rolls, one a day.

$250 standard—low and slow, that is the tempo
$350 rushed—right now a turn and burn is a fuck you pay me.

If you’ve got a story you can’t see to read anymore, this is the cleanest way to buy my eyes, get your work handled, and keep this machine running through the move. And, if you’re a current client worried about something, you already know the drill. Email me and we’ll triage.

Retainer and MS inquiries ALWAYS WELCOME, but—low and slow, that is the tempo right now.

EDITORIAL INQUIRY

The $150 Secret Book (this is a bop)

$150 — I’ll send you the only copy (I never even wanted to begin with) I have of the worst editing job I ever dealt with: the book, annotated and marginalia’d to shit, plus the story of the nightmare client who came along with it.

But you’re sworn to secrecy. This almost stopped me before I was doing anything I cared about.

This is… this is a bop. Trust me. People do not know they want it, only one of you can get it. Email: emilottoman@gmail.com
Subject: SECRET BOOK

Workshop: Knife Fight Ballet (pay early if you want)

If you signed up for the workshop and you want to pay early: please do. Any early money matters right now in the exact dumb practical ways you already understand.

KNIFE FIGHT BALLET is a 10-week, one-time deep dive into violence in fiction—physical, psychological, emotional, social, all the violence—as structure, system, and narrative physics: tension → choice → impact → aftermath.

Let the violence speak. Describe the decision, not the choreography.

Sign up

This workshop runs once. Then I burn it.

Wanna join a party?

The Television Sky Discord Server is the hub.

Join Us

What’s coming next

Burnt Tongue is going to run in eight-week seasons through the move and into the summer.

Invitation to the Autopsy will be the spine.
Autoclave is taking your pulse/ox.

Autopsies returning soon.
Remixed short stories from the archive.
Me being loud.

By the time you read this, maybe we already know the verdict.

Either way: this is the fracture point. Yes costs money immediately. No costs money indefinitely. One of those outcomes ends at a curb in 38 days. Help me keep the work alive so we don’t repeat a cycle we can’t afford.

Did we get the apartment?

Where You Want to Be

Even on my worst day. I provide more value than this. I can not post, and provide more value than this. I punch so far above my weight on the platform if they were to exist, GOD knows my name.

Don’t let the 1.2k fool you, I’m on like, 6 stacks as either owner founder, or admin.

But Burnt Tongue?

690

Monthly is seventy-five cents. (hit the button)

You choose the expansion rate

Yearly is seven fucking dollars. (Hit the button if you’re smarter than the ones who hit the other button)

And you get a deal

But if you’re serious about what you do, you don’t want access. I give anyone access. Access isn’t why I’m the editor and you’re here reading this in the first place. You want leverage. You want an autopsy, time, attention, entertainment, trauma, or I guess sometimes people say I’m funny? I dunno, I blame for that rumor. (WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO OUR CHESS GAME MP!?)

But the point here is

Founding is pay-once, you get lifetime paid access + a private editorial consult every quarter

Your choice: 10 pages or 2.5 hours. You get me on a schedule. Permanent.

Founders are capped at 15. There are six seats left.

The other numbers up there? 690 subs. Reach a thousand by my birthday (Tax day, 4/15) get a prize. Checkmark? Even better. Why? Because it’s cheap and those offers will always be there. $7 a year, $.75 a month.

I’m convinced this house is cursed, haunted by the spirits of the damned. Given my drothers I’d burn it to the ground and plant a tree where this motherfucker is.

I’ve been trying to write this post for days.

So I did a soft logo rebrand. Decided to rework my intake pipeline for editorial clients. That realization that everything you put up thinkin’ it was gonna be there for the next 3-5 years in a safe space you called your home and now you’re chips are all in on one property currently and you’re thinking about how much money you wasted in command strips to put your shit on the walls and you’re going to leave every single fucking one there. How you have to sort and trash—the guy doing our full service moving estimate is coming out Monday at 10am, so I guess I’ll be awake for that—and decide what goes where and in what order. Time blindness. Distraction. Clean your fucking fountain pens. Anything in the world to keep from saying, yeah, uhh, so those cards, still haven’t been able to write the first page yet? Why? ADHD task paralysis, anxiety, panic, who the fuck knows.

The spirits aren’t in the spirits.

GROUND CONTROL TO ANY CLIENTS OUTSTANDING

I know I owe at least two people short story edits that I will be honest, I lost track of in a panic move and depressive fugue. So, if I owe you any work and you see this, email me. For the love of God.

This is the single dustiest house I’ve ever fucking lived in. Giving consideration to the housing stock being usually over 100 years old in this part of the city and the fact that these people don’t give a fuck about the house itself, it’s impressive.

THE CARDS SOLD OUT?!

Someone came in and swooped the last 27 all in one go, and they have my thanks.

So, now I’ve got, 13 cards go to the 13 workshop participants (The Workshop, that’s later.) that leaves 14 cards/pages/opportunities to own the ultimate Television Sky Bootleg (and my first novella, short novel, whatever you want to call it.)

Throw me a few bucks or tell me why you deserve it. There will be a comment thread. 14 cards to play with.

BONUS ROUND?/

I collect greeting cards (strange, I know) But I’ve been collecting Trader Joe’s greeting cards for 15 years.

If you want to participate in the BONUS ROUND click the button below/

BONUS ROUND

(It occurs to me that this is getting fucking old. I’m a Carny barker, yeah, but the constant ask, this song and dance, a list of future promises and deliveries, is getting old. The truth is it’s hard to work when you’re in crisis and trying to get out of a bad situation as fast as possible under less than ideal circumstances, and this is the second time we’ve had to do it in 12 months. My regular editorial contracts are getting impatient, and I don’t blame them. Fast turnaround work that’s paid for should be cursing my name, but they’ve so far been very understanding, and they should also email me. But, without support, without the constant ask, the bottom can fall out quick. Bills still have to get paid, rent still has to be paid here, deposit first and last, etc. all has to be paid at a new spot, which we may have, but if we don’t then that’s more money on rental apps, more hits to our credit, and in the end moving has to be done, repacking and reorganization has to be done. More flaming crap has to be cut down and out of our lives. I have a panic disorder, PTSD, and Generalized anxiety disorder on top of AuDHD. Ok, now multiply my neuroses by task paralysis, time blindness worse than I ever thought it was, task initiation paralysis, insomnia, and ONE THOUGHT THAT OBLITERATES ALL OTHERS. Yeah, this may be getting old, but every day I wake up and it’s a fresh new hell with the bottom and the money falling out constantly while everyone’s nerves are frayed and everyone is depressed and everyone is twitchy and about to snap. I snap a little all the time, so I’m constantly apologizing and working to fix that too. The environment has long been toxic. And having a landlord as your opps is not the business in this situation. And if you focus on one place at a time because you quite literally cannot afford not to, and the family gets invested, if you don’t get the spot, not only does it reduce your chances at the next application, it feels like a personal slight, you’ve been stabbed in the side, and if you ask why, the answers are either not answers, or boilerplate. “Another candidate was more whatever.” And you were invested, so now where are you? Spiraling into depression for at least a few days you can’t afford, because in 41 days, you have to be out of the spot you’re in. So fuck you if you’re tired of this shit, on with the show, the unsubscribe button is right the fuck there. Come back when we’re stable and housed and THEN pretend like you’re not a shitbird.)

SO, CONTINUING ON IN THE SAME VEIN

• $150 - I’ll send you the only copy (I never even wanted to begin with) I have of the worst editing job I ever dealt with, the book, annotated and marginalia’d to shit, along with the story of the nightmare client who came along with it. But, you’re sworn to secrecy.

• $250 - Backed up and I’m still taking short story edits. LIMIT OF 5. $350 IF YOU NEED IT RUSHED. LOOK I HAVE A FORM FOR THIS NOW!

• That call up there to subscribe for cheap as fuck? It’s because I’m shutting the chat and comments down for paying members only. Blame the PeePeePooPoo Writer Dog. I don’t have time for that. What does this mean? Well, I’ll be more active in those spots if there are people there, but also, you won’t fucking know because if I post a deal or something in one of those places, you won’t see it, you fucking cheapskate.

• $300 - THERE ARE SIX SPOTS LEFT IN MY FOUNDERS TIER. AFTER THAT THE LIFETIME 4x A YEAR SHORT STORY OR 2.5-3 HOURS OF MY CONSULTATION ADVICE OR ATTENTION IS SOLD THE FUCK OUT.

• There are three spots for personalized merch. Hit me up if you want something no one else will sell you, like a shirt or a notebook or an apron or any of five thousand other products that says Burn Down a Whole Foods on it, Or Taco Bell, complete with logo, and their famous slogan, DIE MAD, right on the front. (Can’t sell them in any online storefronts, but I can order the designs for myself… Seems a little counterintuitive.)

• …. Man, I need stickers. (This is just an aside.)

• OR JUST GIVE US MONEY UNTIL YOU STOP SEEING THIS SHIT and it’s replaced by a fucking apartment tour, I don’t know.

But if you want to see what’s on offer currently here’s a link to the store

WANNA JOIN A PARTY?

The Television Sky Discord Server is a hub. Join us.

IS IT TRUE, IS EMIL OTTOMAN THROWING A WRITING WORKSHOP?

Yes

13 seats + 2 scholarships | 10 weeks | $415 | 5 flex pay plans on offer | Comes with a Television Sky Card and option to buy the Bootleg ghost novella.

There is also an audit cohort that will run at the same time, Lord of the Flies style.

27 seats | 10 weeks | $187 no deals | no peer crit unless self organized | Weekly Q&A thread

KNIFE FIGHT BALLET is a 10 week, one-time deep dive into the theory and craft of violence in fiction: physical, psychological, and emotional. We treat the subject as a system of narrative physics: tension → choice → impact → aftermath, and study the difference between a weapon as a tool and a weapon as a symbol.

You’ll learn to write violent scenes that stay clean, legible, and readable without move-by-move choreography, fast without leaning on “fast,” and brutal without drifting into spectacle or gratuitous gore. The win state is simple: you leave with one new or rebuilt scene and a targeted one-on-one consultation on the violence problem you can’t solve alone (or any craft issue the workshop drags into daylight).

Let the violence speak. Describe the decision, not the choreography.

THIS WORKSHOP WILL ONLY RUN ONCE.

AT THE END I’M DELETING IT WHOLESALE.

and since this is the worst month of the year, the workshop doesn’t start until April first, but early payment is always encouraged. There are 9 sections in the registration. Link above and below.

Register Here

SEND ME MORE WRITERS TO READ

No, seriously, DM me about it or whatever. Tag me in a note. Where’s all this talent everyone is talking about? My feed is gutterfucked.

Rap Fiction

Forever, Magical

They drive to Richmond in a teal truck, a 1950s Chevy…

Read more

2 months ago · 33 likes · 31 comments · Andrew Robert Colom and robert colterra

has done it again, and even if I’m a character in this piece, god, every time I read it I’m screaming at myself to shut the fuck up.

I wrote this last year on the 5th. It’s still a heater. One from the archives for ya.

Involuntary

The Velvet Numbers Station

I must be dead for there is nothing but blue snow and the furious silence of a gunshot. Two birds crash blindly against the glass surface of a lake…

Read more

2 months ago · 19 likes · 3 comments · will christopher baer

is reading his cult classic Kiss Me Judas a chapter at a time. Go listen. He knows how to read and has a great voice for it. And if you want to live, call 911.

Unrelated. I said I’d made a playlist in 2017 called Songs for the End Times.

I found it today!

It’s 21 hours long.

AUTOPSIES RETURNING SOON

REMIXED SHORT STORIES

ME BEING LOUD

All coming, you know, before, during, and after this whole trauma fucked moving business.

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS CONTEXT COLLAPSE

Back hunting for houses in January isn’t any way you want to be two years in a row, twelve months apart, thirteen points on a bolt, no points, no press, severe duress, magged up manic and stressed, and grizzled Bob Weir, the only half decent fuck in the Grateful they’re Dead has Died. Hail to the king baby.

If I didn’t say I was more terrified than last time I’d be lying so I’m going to just drop the bullshit act and say it.

I’m more terrified than last time.

Today though, hope showed up on a pale horse pestilence and shot hopium into my veins. Owner landlord, perfect spot, back up to Humphrey but across the Grand to the east and past Arkansas. Take that shit in two hot seconds.

Still not at the floor to move but the floor moves when you’re standing on shaky ground and the only thing keeping you from losing your shit is little purple pills. What’s a blue football to a purple easter egg? one milli is one milli right?

I spent the day in a paralytic hyperfocus panic attack interrogating the universe about whether or not to even both we book a look at this spot on Saturday. My work is interrupted, my mind has gone off the rails.

Survival now is down to a little help from my friends, 65/128/36 do the mathematics like Mos Def. We haven’t sold all the cards.

Buy a card win a prize

15$ - card/new years letter/pg from a novella, option to buy once printed if goal is reached

35$ - That and a bubble mailer filled with demons

50$+ - Nix the bubble mailer, you get a gift box. The more you give the more esoteric you get.

Bought one card?

Buy another, or just donate

No one wants my moms on the streets with me mobile and hostile, hungry, and determined to eat.

LAST YEAR ON J13 I DROPPED 30/13

Bigger numbers are not always better. Shrinking ones can be worse though.

Ok so we can call this a sequel but I’m not try’na make it annual, this isn’t Summertime Butch, this is the Winter of the Ottomans.

THIS ISN’T A HUNT FOR AN APARTMENT IT’S A WAR OF ATTRITION THAT KILLS HOPE

Zillow Insomnia has me looking at ghosts and after this shit checking city records. Who owns you, who are you, when was the last time you had a permit pulled. Hard limits hard dicks and hard feelings. Everywhere I feel like I look it’s a concrete ceiling dripping blood on my family. This threat isn’t abstract, it’s real, it’s existential. If we can hook one we can. If we can. If.

Stress causes health problems.

CRAIG CLEVENGER’S THIRD COHORT

There are two is one seats left.

Click here. FILL THEM.

“There is only one promise I give students who take my workshops and it is, you will come out of this class a better writer than you were when you came in.” - Craig Clevenger

I’ll vouch. Ask around. After this full cohort is over, there will be a significant break.

The Workshop

• 6 weeks: 5 weeks of active class, one gap week for vibing and recovery.

• 8 students? 6 students twice then a final 4? Sign up and find out in your acceptance email.

• $375

This will be a workshop focusing on improving your writing and storytelling, taught by a master, with one on one instruction including a review, personal crit, and shop talk for each student at the end of the class. Clev is a generous and amazing teacher. He’s helped people make careers. He’s mysterious. He’s been working on this workshop since before you were born.

For posterity, some plaudits:

Novelist Rob Hart (author of The Warehouse, Paradox Hotel, Assassins Anonymous, and the soon to be released The Medusa Protocol) — “I was lucky to take a couple of workshops with Clevenger along the way, and his thumbprints are all over my work.”

Richard Thomas (award-winning horror author and editor) – “I took some classes, including one with Craig Clevenger, and he encouraged me to submit a story from class, ‘Stillness,’ saying he thought it was very good, something special.”

Click the pic and subscribe, the color of the Television Sky is officially too big for me. All big news truths, untruths, and woohoos will be going on there, and on the Discord server. (If you’re lucky you’ll get an invite.) What’s going on? Fuck you, go look. I’ve got enough shit on my plate.

IT IS 404 MY FIANCEE IS ASLEEP AND I WILL FINISH THIS WHEN I WAKE UP IN 4 HOURS

Ether Dreams

Scorpio pt. 1

This prompt lived rent free in my head for a week. It ended up being a two parter in the end because I loved writing the dialogue even if it’s not my strongest suit…

Read more

3 months ago · 22 likes · 20 comments · Edith Bow and Nick Winney

Ether Dreams

Scorpio pt 2

[‘Carte Blanche’ Iris Van Herpen, Haute Couture, SS23…

Read more

3 months ago · 13 likes · 13 comments · Edith Bow and Nick Winney

READTHEMINORDERGOODNIGHTGOODMOANIN

113

“Hi xxxxx, my name is Emil. I saw 34xx Humphrey #B on HotPads. I’m planning to attend your showing Saturday and prefer the 10–11am window if you're scheduling (but I can do 3–4pm if needed).
We meet the income requirement and can verify income with bank statements + invoices/payment processor records (self-employed). Deposit ready upon approval. We’re a quiet household looking for a stable long-term home.”

It took me an hour to write that and an hour to send it.

Hi, this is HotPads. Thanks for inquiring about renting at 3452 Humphrey St #B. We need a little more info to pass you over.
What's your full name?

Emil Ottoman.

What’s your email address?

Emilottoman@gmail.com

Thanks! Your message was sent to 34xx Humphrey St #B and you'll hear back via phone or email soon!

If a tiny purple pill can’t solve it, nothing will solve it. And the workmen outside have started to give me panic attacks. The violent kind where you’re listening to Mission To Burma thinking that’s when I reach for my—

I cannot do this 20 more fucking times.

• Between now and when we hit the pavement roughly 40-60 units that meet our criteria will become available

• Out of those 40-60 units because of credit scores, we will filter out of 30%

• The Landlord is not accommodating my ADA accommodation requests. Causing more panic and less productivity.

  I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t all affecting my ability to work.

• —Revolver

I’m your editor already anyway, you just don’t know it yet

BEFORE IT HITS THE TELEVISION SKY

I was on the Wayback Machine, no not , the actual website, like I do. Whole archivist and whatnot, on a mission to find something old, something new, something borrowed and something, what the fuck am I looking at?

From the old Litreactor site, which is what part of Television Sky is filling as a hole (it seems like?). But what in the name of Earl Simmons am I looking at here?

The Choreography of Violence: Write Ass-Kicking Action Scenes with John Skipp. Want to write great fights, chases, deaths, and escapes—it continues.

PRESENTS EMIL OTTOMAN’S FIRST CLASS

You want violence? Go to the source. Who’s the source? Ask the fuck around…

10 weeks | 25 students | $200

Theory, lectures, crit, readings, assignments, from an argument to body disposal, when to keep it off the page and why so many people do, and when you go full kinetic. Time control. Spatial control. Psychological theories of escalation. When is a firearm a firearm and not a talisman? When is a kitchen knife just a kitchen knife? Why I’m here to tell you that your conception of violence unless you have perpetrated it, contrary to what the media would tell you, has been sanitized to the point where people thought Charlie Kirk took a .300 Win Mag to the carotid and lived more than 20 more seconds (or less.)

Pre-register starts soon. Class will schedule as soon as we are housed. Any early tuition will go directly to moving us the fuck out of decaying fire trap.

The muzzle velocity of a 7.62x39mm round fired from any AK variant rifle is between 1300-1400 fps and effective to around 600 meters.

THOTS FOR THE DAY/

1. There are monkeys on the loose in St. Louis, four of them. And a goat. One of the monkeys was hit by a car.

2. your take earlier today was very dark and very pessimistic, are you OK?

3. So this is something I used to do on Facebook. Thoughts for the day. Condensed neuroses. I never really GOT the fact that people outside of my immediate circle READ them, but every time they would stop, I’d get a pile of messages from people I’d met at a rave seven years before asking where their evening entertainment had gone and if I was OK.

4. I was not OK

5. Finally started reading ’s Tyrant: The Autobiography of a Dictator. Go read it, now.

6. It’s not a revolution if you just want to replace the old fucks at the top with you as the fucks at the top doing the same shit. (One thing I definitely agree with good Mr. Bosworth on)

7. Fuck New York.

8. My work has slowed to a crawl, as a bleeding animal trying to escape a trap in the snow. To any clients affected, it goes as fast as it can sometimes, I didn’t expect to be living in a rolling nightmare of a panic attack.

9. Yes, I could be doing your work right now as well. No, I do not sleep anymore.

10. Go buy a shirt or go buy a shirt with a train on it!

11. , it is still your move in our game of chess, unless something has happened.

12. My relationship with food right now is deeply disturbing. I will not elaborate.

13. Television sky has a DISCORD server now, so you know it’s a real entity and not just me hallucinating while I bleed to death on the bathroom floor.

14. ’s last piece was good. Dial your head two inches out of your own ass though. You can only get away with some of what you’re doing until you’re around 25, then they’ll call you on it. Sincerely, your friendly neighborhood old head.

15. I miss doing the autopsies, but most of my time right now is consumed with panic and, well, panic.

16. The largest mass lynching in the United States was in New Orleans, and it was of Irishmen. (I know, confused the fuck outta me, but you can look it up. If not, the Atlantic has a fact checking problem and my media literacy skills have evaporated to the point where I give you permission to execute me.)

17. The New Years Card Project and attenuated novella, so you all know, and thank you for your generosity, will take most of the year to fulfill.

18. Having said that, click this LINK and buy the last 23 or something cards, for the love of god.

19. 

    ask me how you can get one of the few of these pins available to civilians (they are primarily for founding members of Television Sky)

20. has been doing some spots of work on the TELEVISION SKY website. Everyone should have hired her. If you didn’t, what the fuck is wrong with you?

21. My writing has been against a wall for months. Why not let some other people know?:

    Share Burnt Tongue

    ---

    

    The next spot has a place I can blast music or I quit.

FUCK! I’M DONE WITH NUMBERS!

I can’t even write a decent psychotic rant lately.

Be kinder to yourself than I am to me.

COMING SOONISH - SUBMISSIONS FOR

Click the Picture, give it a browse, and maybe we Won’t end up Sleeping in truck stops with your help.

It’s 3:27AM CST. The room is lit by warm 5,000 kelvin yellow light from cheap LED bulbs with cheaper remote controls to make them change colors. The desk the body is draped over is a vintage teacher’s desk a dead friend gave to me twenty years ago. The last desk I will ever own.
Draped on the desk is 2025’s corpse

You know what happened because you lived it.
But then you know living through something isn’t the same as understanding it.
Living through it is not dying so you can write this dumb shit.

With the real autopsies on hold for the real terror of real gunbarrel homelessness for your family, why not autopsy the annum?
Stop telling stories about the year for canon.

Bet you thought this would be funny or some shit?

The paperwork is the worst part of the job.

1. Postmortem Examination

Case #: 2025-13A
Decedent: 2025
Secondary Identification: My belief adrenaline could carry and nothing was falling apart.
Notes: Project creep is a motherfucker.

Incident Onset: Jan 7, 2025 (approx. 8:25 AM CST)
Pronounced: Dec 31, 2025 (11:59 PM CST)
Location: St. Louis, Misery / kitchen / decedent’s apartment
Jurisdiction: Personal relationships / overextension / executive function
Examiner: Emil Ottoman / The Editor

Manner of Death: BLUNT FORCE OPTIMISM / EXSANGUINATION OF HOPE
Cause of Death (Preliminary): Complications of overextension with relational neglect.
Contributing Conditions: instability, isolation, degraded intimacy, chronic triage
Remarks: “Momentum and progress are rarely the same fucking thing.”

2. Cause of Death

2025 died of weaponized triage

The year started in a panic and crisis. Never let up. You keep choosing the next urgent thing, the next external crisis and everywhere else in the apartment love, self care, rest, and attention fought sepsis. You can’t dig your way out of a pit. More projects are steroid shots, they keep you moving until something you need ruptures. Momentum and progress aren’t the same thing. End the year with a well earned emotional bill coming due and another crisis. 2025 was DOA. Stillborn.

Contributing factors:

1. The first emergency move and how it affected my household in ways I don’t know if we all notice.

2. Mission creep and a workload leading me to the least happy most disgusted with myself I’ve been since 2007.

3. The slow deterioration of my personal relationships until I feel like a ghost living in the dark, never able to wake up on time.

4. The second emergency move and the guilt because my angry neuroses set the fire that led to the new house burning down around us.

Find a fucking church if you want a confession.
This is a report.

3. Eternal Examination

The body presents with the following measurable indicators:

• Posts published: 65

  • Autopsies: 13

  • Autoclave: 8

  • Craft Pathology: 4

  • Fiction: It’s all fiction

• Subscribers / followers: 298/328 → 1,232/683

• Revenue: $480USD → $2,767

• Edits delivered: I’m not doing this math at 3:57 AM, a LOT

• Workshops / events: 4

• Projects launched: Two, both to save us from the fucking street. (One on hold because of)

• Projects killed: Many

• Most read post: Invitation to the Autopsy/Published January 4, 2025 at 5:30 PM/1,332 views

• Most read post contrast: Television Sky New Year Letters (Emergency Edition)/Published December 7, 2025 at 7:35 PM/1,189 views

• Most important post: ALL POWER DEMANDS SACRIFICE/Published February 5, 2025 at 7:32 AM/572 views

Preliminary interpretation: The exterior suggests I kept the lights on and turned my life into a triage unit: output up, money up, connection down, closeness flatlined, intimacy on fire.
The interior will confirm it.

4. Toxicology Report

Substance detected: Adrenaline (continuous drip, mitigated by Xanax)
Concentration: LETHAL
Observed effects: With the kind of ADHD I suffer from it turned me into a machine moving through the days from crisis to crisis. All hyperfocus, hypervigilance, no time, no love, no quality, no time to think aside from dead of night when it got to be the worst, speed without memory. Solving as many problems as fast as I can, missing the person three feet away from me, getting defensive about it.
Notes: The issues was not adrenal. Decedent was often adrenally exhausted by the end of any given day. The problem was calling it momentum. Calling it anything but neglect.

Substance detected: Crisis conditions / emergency living
Concentration: ELEVATED
Observed effects: Nervous system rewires itself. Quiet is a threat. Anything not on fire becomes optional. Optional becomes “never.” Choose urgency. It gives your brain permission to ignore everything else.
Notes: Emergencies were a persisting problem. The problem behind it was building a life around functioning during emergencies perpetually and not realizing it’s unsustainable

Substance detected: New projects / new commitments
Concentration: LETHAL
Observed effects: A steroid shot dopamine flood, new money while old money is still in process. A lightning strike of purpose. The crash: irritability, resentment, chronically behind. Life turns into an inbox full of unanswered emails to find any reason not to look at. The projects don’t fix the pit. They just coat more layers of paint while stuck, the strata of paint built up on an apartment wall painted over every twelve months.
Notes: The problem is not ambition. The problem is using projects as anesthesia and extreme executive dysfunction.

Substance detected: Money Panic
Concentration: LETHAL
Observed effects: Every decision is a transaction, every relationship; a time cost. Brain starts to work in glitching spreadsheet mode. Love is a luxury item measured in billable hours. The “stability” of this constant panic hollows out your ability to be present, and paradoxically, your ability to plan.
Notes: Wanting to recover financial stability is not the problem. Fear being the driving force of it is.

Substance detected: Isolation (as workflow)
Concentration: ELEVATED
Observed effects: Get efficient at maladaptive coping mechanisms. Become productive at irrational times for no reason. Ne unreachable. The work improves in the short term. Humanity degrades in the background. Stop being witnessed. Stop witnessing back.
Notes: Solitude is not a valid comorbidity for safety.

Substance detected: Guilt
Concentration: ELEVATED
Observed effects: Self flagelate. Overwork to atone for the sin of inconsistent output. Ignore that it’s three hours past when bed was supposed to happen. New harm: new atonement. The loop of fear of failure and connection. It keeps you useful and miserable.
Notes: The problem was the loop.

4) Evidence Log (EXHIBITS A–H)

Exhibit A: “Invitation to the Autopsy”

What it looked like at the time: Give away your work to get more.
Margin note: Massive success.
What it actually was: Making my name on the platform.
What it proves about the cause of death: Often put off until last minute and finished hours before posting.
Trace finding: A consistent schedule and a plan is better than whatever the fuck that was.

Exhibit B: “Television Sky New Year Letters (Emergency Edition)”

What it looked like at the time: A novel idea to keep from running into the fundraising wall of GoFundMe
Margin note: Fast start, slow implementation because of hell
What it actually was: An excuse to publish a book and help us stay housed.
What it proves: People care until Card#123
Trace finding: The project will take most of the year to deliver in full and this terrifies me.

Exhibit C: “Dm (technically 2024 but fuck y’all)”

Statement: “its amazing how much you support everyone tbh”
Context: Blatant
Interpretation: Literal
What it proves: Subjective to the sender

Exhibit D: “WELCOME TO THE 9 STORY HOTEL PROJECT”

What it looked like: Trying to resurrect a passion project
Margin note: Complete lack of follow through
Finding: There was no further push.
What it proves: Historicity and context is nothing without action backing it up.

Exhibit E: The moment I almost quit “SACRIFICE DENIES ALL POWER”

Date/Time: May 30, 2025/9:31 AM → Right fucking now
Symptoms: Grief
Finding: Paralysis
What it proves: Some things refuse simple containment.

Exhibit F: The Quiet Win “Groundbreaker Saga: A Special Craft Pathology Report”

What it looked like: A group of us coming together to promote a friend’s book
Margin note: A rising tide lifts all ships. Create your community.
What it proves: Connection is the golden path.

5) INTERNAL EXAMINATION (THREE CUTS)

Cut 1: JAN–APR : INITIAL TRAUMA

• January 7: The kitchen ceiling starts to come down.
  Margin note: This was going to ruin the fragile ecosystem of the house

• January 7: First post about the ceiling emergency.
  Margin note: Begin the theater of cruelty
  Finding: The pattern begins as desperation and overcommitment combined with ambient irritability and a general recession into my own thoughts and fears for the future.

TOXICOLOGY SHORT #2

Substance detected: Community support, praise.
Observed effects: Overwhelming myself with the hope of saving the family.
Notes: You cannot do this alone.

Cut 2: MAY–SEP — COMPLICATIONS / INFECTION

• July 5: Initial ceiling leak
  Margin note: The ceiling will not cave in

• July 24: The ceiling collapses outside our bedroom
  Margin note: PTSD, Panic, all driven into overdrive
  Finding: Attempted coping mechanism: Get anything in writing from my landlord.

TOXICOLOGY SHORT #3

Substance detected: Constantly hustling for new clients to keep the house floating on credit cards maxed out from the last move
Concentration: Lethal
Observed effects: Panic and a further separation of myself from those I loved combined with issues writing, but not editing, feelings of inadequacy driven by circumstances beyond my control.
Notes: New clients do not obviate your responsibilities to contractual obligations and loved ones, even if you have to nearly kill yourself to keep up.

Cut 3: OCT–DEC : TERMINAL SPIRAL

• October ?: Call City Safety Codes on landlord
  Margin note: In process hopefully

• Early December (approx): Come up with a plan to both raise funds and avoid a Kickstarter I know I won’t win.
  Margin note: In process hopefully, currently stuck
  Finding: The year resolves into the work we have to do to repair the damage and the damage that was done over the course of several years.

6) FINDINGS

• When I make my loved ones priorities, the work is easier.

• The posts that “performed” were the most painful and tragic; the posts that mattered were the ones writers praised but no one read.

• My real audience is emergent and vibrant, not just writers.

• I cannot work to build Television Sky while fighting housing instability.

• This year did not punish me. It only proved that all things being equal, nothing really is.

• I nearly burned down the most important relationship in my life.

• When I’m not sinking in crisis mode, the work to repair the damage is much easier to do.

Official conclusion: Cause of death confirmed as complications of overextension with relational neglect, with contributing factors of financial instability, ADHD, and severely impaired executive fuctions.

7) PREVENTABILITY

Preventable: Creative consistency, Emotional availability, living in “crisis mode” in perpetuity
Not preventable: Needing money, having to move again, the abstract feeling of desperation in the quiet moments.
The thing I refuse to learn until it nearly kills me: Even the most love you will ever feel is more delicate than you realize when you’re stuck in a maladaptive pattern.

This is not a redemption arc.

8) Disposition/The Estate

What I’m keeping:

• The Autoclave / The Autopsies / My promises

• In process

• Exploring tools to make my life easier. Friction and ADHD don’t mix

What I’m burying:

• Reactivity (toxic)

• irregular posting pattern/long absences

• Reading the fucking news

What inherits the estate:

• Television Sky

• Planning to incorporate this year

9) 2026 Protocol

Operating Rules:

1. find or try one tool a week

2. try until I find a workflow that works for me

3. Repair the damage

Boundaries:

1. Keep a schedule to avoid this shit (526AM CST)

2. My health

3. My relationship

Commitments:

1. Fix my heart or fucking DIE

2. Organize my client list

3. Punishing myself does none of us any good

Time of report completion: 0528AM CST
Signed: Emil Otttoman/The Editor

(Image credit: RR, meme by me, 2020)

WRITING ABOUT WRITING AND THE EDITOR’S ECONOMY

I will be referencing this essay (which has some good advice, just served up much more polite than I’m going to, so give it a read.)

Diana Urban: Author Tips & Tea

43 Words You Should Cut From Your Writing Immediately

When revising any piece of writing — a novel, a news article, a blog post, marketing copy, etc. — there are certain words I delete to make the text stronger and cut my word count. When I’m writing a novel, one of my last drafts focuses on cutting these “filler” words. Removing them helps speed up the pacing of both action and dialogue. In my business wr…

Read more

2 years ago · 1211 likes · 4 comments · Diana Urban

I restacked her list because there is real utility in it. It’s not a bad article. It’s just internet craft writing has a bad habit of turning preferences into commandments, and beginners up to the middle tier treat commandments like law. Their prose ends up sounding pressure-washed by a productivity app.

Then this comment chain happened

So, thanks for the thought (And go check out Malachas too why not), but I’d like to point out a few things in the first comment.

1. A lot of this advice is decidedly not aimed at an author writing in fourth person in a free indirect style using a fractured narrative running in two directions. This isn’t a craft essay about transdimensional chess. It’s nuts and bolts.

2. The second sentence in the first comment is a vast overstatement about most good authors. And I don’t mean sellers, I’m still talking about your writer’s writers. It’s an absurd sweeping generalization.

3. No, trust me, they can’t do whatever the fuck they want. I mean, surely, they can, and plenty have, this doesn’t mean it will be something worth reading. As an editor, I’ve seen some really ugly drafts from some very amazing authors you’d think were incomprehensible gibberish written in a dead language. Then once it’s pubbed in one way or another you’re shaking your head asking what the fuck happened between those drafts.

I responded, like ya do, saying it wasn’t an essay aimed at the professional.

Then came the question, and it’s legitimate: so is this a grift or is this a legitimate way to work?

OF HERETICS, HUSTLERS, & GRIFTERS

Fiction on Substack is gaining minor traction. 2025 was a good year for it. Me? I’m an author but my literal dayjob is being whatever the fuck feral psycho I am on here and a freelance editor. I’m also a hustler. Openly. I sell labor. I sell attention. I sell experience. If you want to call that a grift, you can, but you’d be wrong. I’m pretty out in the open with it, shady criminal past, reformed (or am I, the constant question to keep ‘em guessin’) and now cutting open stories for money and sharing what a lifetime writing has taught ME and how I approach it.

It’s not supposed to be everyone’s cup of tea. But is it a grift? No.

Here’s the difference, Ethical editors will tell you when you’re not ready and send you back to the keys.

Heretics (I define these eels more precisely below) will bleed you, selling the illusion of progress until your wallet is a husk and your manuscript is “done” because you ran out of money to keep living in Screamland.

When I showed up on Substack the fiction tab wasn’t very good. At least not the end I landed in. This isn’t harsh, I just understand why it wasn’t really getting much play at the time. It wasn’t because people were stupid, it was because a lot of it was early stage work wearing a final draft mask. It started to pick up in quality considerably after a third of a year, but it wasn’t pretty them first few months.

I came to Substack because I lost a client list in November of ‘24. (Fuck you New York)

Immediately one thing stuck out to me from having been in the industry.

Every editor/coach/consultant/someoneI’dneverheardofwithtenthousandsubs, had polished sparkly optimized pages and you can access this content if you subscribe paywalls for shit you could pay less money for and get more information density and use out of without the weird (and I mean like, service industry suck your client’s genitals weird) pep and pastels. These, are grifters and heretics.

The writing about writing industry is alive and well and they have masterclasses and conferences and “manifestation” pep talks dressed up as craft. They’ll praise you into bankruptcy. They’re damn near a cult of “You can do it if you just believe in yourself” publishing positivity.

As above: They’ll also suck you dry for every fucking dime you have.

I decided it was my personal mission to call the bullshit out. So I started offering my work for free. Send me a short story, I’ll autopsy it. 2500 words, five or so pages, I’ll put it on a slab and show you what an editor does.

(Yes, the name of the series is a play on Nabokov. I’m that sort of nerd.)

People liked it. So, I kept doing it.

Now, the series is pretty popular. When I post a new one, people want to see it. When I ask for submissions, people actively throw writing at me, when they haven’t forgotten my name.

I also used the series as a teaching tool. It is and was a very convenient format. People even say it helped them. Fuck, mission achieved.

As for it getting people to interact with my fiction, which you just had to scroll back to see? Hah, yeah, no.

However, after a bit and with a little help from a lotta friends (Fiction is Culture) people started inquiring about editing services. I got inquiries, clients, regulars.

So my answer is, the grifters are pretty easy to spot, but I call them heretics. And no, this doesn’t generally get more people to interact with your actual fiction if you’re an author/editor. Or, am I an editor/author? I don’t know anymore. I don’t fuckin’ care.

A lot of writers are editors. Some of the best authors I know are also the best editors I know, they just spend more time writing novels and editing freelance didn’t end up their day job. And I have a list of them I’d suggest to someone in a heartbeat, if they’re taking clients at the moment. Because, see, they’re getting the pubs.

To reiterate:

The difference between an ethical editor and a heretic is if you come to me with a shitpile of an MS and you’re not ready for pub, you need more time in the oven or at the keys, holding the pencil, doesn’t matter. I’m not taking your fucking money. Plenty of other people will and I have better ways to waste both our time.

The Heretic WILL BLEED YOU DRY. They’ll take your money, sell you their courses, suck you dry drip by drip like you’re dying of thirst, and then send you out once you’ve got nothing but lint in your pockets. Suddenly your MS is finished. You’re a genius. Next KDP best seller. Now go, go see how much money you’ve wasted.

Heard?

NOW ABOUT THOSE WORDS YOU SHOULD DELETE

In this sense, I don’t think this was a bad essay/article, whatever. It’s not written in my style, but I’m the feral official unofficial editor of the fiction tab (hey, someone else said it, I just lean into it.

The tone borders on cult of positivity at times, but it’s solid if you’re a hobbyist, starting out, late to the game, amateur, or somewhere in the middle. I’d say for strivers (which is a lot of people writing fiction on Substack) it’s excellent.

She telegraphs that her examples may be cheesy (they’re not) but they do get the point across.

“Always remember, though, that there is no one correct way to write. Writing is art, and it’s always subjective. If you want to include these words in whatever context (e.g. to make dialogue sound more natural) that’s 100% your call! This is just my personal list of words I try to limit my usage of as much as possible, and I’ve shared it here in case it’s helpful to anyone else.”

Her personal list is pretty well, a lot of them are standard. The ONLY thing I take umbrage with is the sensationalism of the headline (engagement bait) and the heading Words you should delete. Why? Because it directly contradicts the previous para and moves into internet craft writing absolutism, which I absolutely despise. The headline: “Words you should cut immediately.” It fits that framing, and absolutism is how writers learn to fear their own voice.

THE GLUE WORD PARADOX

In the industry, we call them glue words, and they’re the small, high frequency function words and soft modifiers what hold sentences together and make them feel spoken/effortless like articles (a/the), prepositions (of/to/in), conjunctions (and/but/so), pronouns, auxiliary verbs (was/is/were), and a whole fucking horde of adverbs/hedges (really, just, kind of, basically, actually, then, that).

They’re called glue because they connect meaning more than they carry meaning. And when you overuse them, it bloats your prose, your information density becomes low compared to word count, and any editor is going to give you a headache over it, unless you’re the editor and no one ever told you about this shit. Then you’ll just send it. (I have on more than one occasion replaced all of an overused connector with the word “NO” just so the author could see why I had a throbbing cortex.) The biggest problem is, they’re easy to pile up because of how we’re taught to write.

Now Come The paradoxen:

• You need glue words for readability and rhythm. They’re part of the nervous system of the English language. Strip too many and you get telegram prose: efficient, but stiff or performatively writerly.

• But glue words are ALSO where “default mode drafting” hides. You’re unsure, you’re not quite confident in your prose style so you reach for softeners, sequencing words, and intensifiers. It’s how prose gets puffy: Your sentence still functions technically, but it’s almost always less vivid. You lose precision by hedging. You end up using cultural filler that you’ve taken in culturally to hide what you’re trying to say but not saying in the way you want.

The real goal is not the eradication of all glue. The goal is: make sure every glue word you keep is earning its rent in the sentence: clarity, emphasis, voice, timing, or texture. If it doesn’t sparkle or meet criteria, you can lose it.

THAT LIST OF 43 WORDS

She uses adequate examples, cool. But here’s the wetwork from The Editor.

Glue Words: the ones you prune vs the ones you gut

I’m going to clarify one thing right now so no one gets confused by it for any reason: not everything on her “delete list” is a glue word. Some of it is actual grammatical glue. Most of it is meaning words that get used like glue when you’re drafting scared.

True function glue (actual structural words)

These are the only ones on her list that are essentially pure structure. They don’t paint, they connect.

• that (clause joiner / relative marker)

• then (sequence marker; not strictly “function,” but it behaves like structural glue)

That’s it. You don’t “ban” them outright. You prune them for clarity and rhythm.

Glue-ish words (real words you turn into padding when you’re a greenhorn)

These are meaning words that turn into verbal packing peanuts (I think I used a packing peanut analogy in my last piece, moving is on my mind): they fill space, soften the blow, but most importantly, they keep you from committing to the sentence.

Intensifiers / emphasis glue (volume knobs that go to five)

These are fake muscle. Gym muscle. Great pump, but they gas fast. They don’t make the image stronger; they just turn up the stereo on a weak song, like Trenbolone or Dianobol.

• really, very

• totally, completely, absolutely, literally

Hedges / stance glue (certainty this softness is not social cushioning)

These are “don’t hit me” words. They keep you technically safe and emotionally vague, like your shitty ex. But in a fight on the page they’re the equivalent of always keeping your guard up 80-95% of the time.

• definitely, certainly, probably

• actually, basically, virtually

• rather, quite, somewhat, somehow

Aspect / onset glue (what the fuck is a verb?)

This is wasted runway. You narrate the beginning because you don’t want to choose an actual verb that lands. When you do this it kills the sentence and you create distance between everyone involved. The narrator, the reader, your authority as an author, and the action taking place. They also create pile on redundancies (another essay entirely). If you use them, please be able to justify their existence to someone as much of an asshole as me. I know editors who would knife fight people over this shit.

• start, begin, began, begun

Spatial-direction glue (mostly redundant, occasionally clarifying)

Sometimes useful. Usually it’s just narrating physics like the reader hasn’t lived on Earth.

• down, up

Filter / cognition glue (take us away Calgon)

This is your narrator clearing their throat between the reader and the moment. It’s external mediation. It creates the sort of distance that you’re usually trying to avoid. It’s you backing away from intimacy, and they’re fucking ponderous, and they turn into easy crutches, then they pile up faster than you’re thinking. (Do you need a hug?)

• wonder, ponder, think, thought

• feel, felt

• understand, realize

Micro-action “stage direction” glue (choreography from the Sims)

Puppet verbs. Body moves; Scene doesn’t.

• shrug, nod, reach

Physiological reaction glue (bullshit cliché-emotion shorthand goddammit)

You’re trying to show reaction, but you’re defaulting to the most generic fuccboi physiological shorthand for emotion in the entire toolbox.

• breath, breathe, inhale, exhale

(Bonus round) Attribution scaffolding

Not glue words, but connective tissue. Structural. Functional. Often invisible when used right. The issue here is not using them, the issue is if you go to a workshop they’ll workshop these tags onto every fucking piece of DX. It’s Iowa Praxis. And while when used well they REALLY ARE SUBVOCALIZED, when you see the he said she said tango down the page with no hides, business, whatever, you can go back and pick up ANY book on writing, please. I also will hate you for using too many unusual DX tags, because they are also shortcuts and bypasses.

• said, replied, asked (and other dialogue tags)

GENERAL HEURISTIC

• Function glue (that / then): you prune. If removing it improves flow and doesn’t cause a misread, cut it. If it prevents confusion or controls a beat, keep it.

• Glue-ish content words (everything else above): FUCK IT WITH A KNIFE. Every time one shows up, ask: Is this doing actual work (precision, voice, timing, tone, texture, detail) or am I using it as padding because I didn’t pick the sharper sentence and no one told me WordHippo exists? (No, seriously, I swear by it.)

There, that’s the game in a nutshell. It’s not cut these, it’s a list of conscious decisions you make as an author. If you want to be mids as fuck, keep all of them right where they are. I’ll high five you for it and send you on your way.

But when I come to this sort of bypassing (or a bad cliche, dead idiom, oh god, we have so much culturally accumulated narrative backwash absorbed from our lives clogging our brains) with a client, I say, “imagine I have a Glock to the back of your head. Imagine I’m behind you. You unfuck that sentence, word, metaphor, shit simile, passive verb construct, whatever you’re hedging around, and you say it like YOU say it. Not like you’ve heard it said your whole life.” Which is the issue. We communicate via narrative. It’s how we organize our lives, tell people how our day was, it’s how we functionally organize TIME ITSELF. Now, say it how you would say it without all the built up plaque in your creative brain or else I’m going to empty your brains all over your laptop and the walls in this vision, and it won’t, fucking, matter.

It’s a decent motivator.

-The Editor

And if you want a personal editor, for ONE payment of $300 you get 10 pages of editing or equivalent a quarter (that’s every 3 months, every year) UNTIL I DIE.

five people have taken this offer.

I just arbitrarily decided to cap it at 13 because I do have a life/dayjob, and this is basically me fucking myself over!

13 x 4 x 250 (my rate for a ten page short story) = $13k in lost revenue.

This is me and the Oracle ( ) Ignore me, focus on her, I already look homeless. Do you want this cute little woman to be homeless? If you do… Well if you do, fuck you. If you don’t, we have a project going to help fund our 2nd emergency move in 12 months! And keep the demons in my head from escaping.

Wanna help her not be homeless (I will find you… if you don’t, I swear.) We’re doing crazy things about it. And if you click the button below you get the shortest version of the story.

WE'RE MAKIN A BOOK

$15 gets a holiday card, a holiday letter, probably confetti, and an option to buy the book when it’s printed later this year.

$35 and I send you a little bubble mailer full of weird shit and you also get the card/letter/book

$50+ and you get a GIFT BOX filled with SECRETS and arcane knowledge. A rare book. An ARC. Pokemon Card? A cursed stuffed animal. Candy? You’ll never know, but the more you give, the better the gift box will be.

We have sold 114 of a base 150 cards. But if we run over, I’ll dig into my personal stash of cards and the novella gets longer, because fuck, I don’t want to be homeless again.

The Book you will get from this is an art artifact. It will never be printed again. Only people who help keep my family HOUSED even have the option of owning it.

AND AFTER THIS BULLSHIT MANUFACTURED CRISIS WE CAN MOVE ON TO THE TELEVISION SKY PROPERLY

Bonus: Actual table image from a Television Sky Founding Monthly.

XMAS EVE / MY SWEET CRACKED NUT
84 82? days

I can’t remember a winter holiday didn’t end up tasting like a mouth fulla blood. The metal taste that gets described in so much prose as tasting “like pennies”? No, it’s the iron content. When the blood hits your mouth the hemoglobin with high iron starts to oxidize faster because of lipids (fat) in your saliva. So it’s the day after the day after Xmas and my household feels like it’s collectively choking on a mouthful of pennies. Which if I remember are just copper candy coating on somewhere like 98% zinc since the early ‘80s1.

That’s where we are.

84 82 days until March 19.
There’s a countdown I update religiously on the white board in the kitchen. That’s the date we make it or we don’t. Can you build a new floor out of paper, postage, and community?

YES

Yeah, there’s only really one option here.

It’s now liminal time between Xmas and NYE where no one knows what’s going on, a true inbetween. You’re drunk from the holiday, trying to forget it, or you worked through it, but in five minutes Valentine’s Day candy will be out, and I’m here screaming about how my family does not deserve to spend 2026 relearning what the underside of the system tastes like. Again. We already know. We’re too old for it.

THE SHORTEST POSSIBLE RECAP (for anyone new)

This is our second emergency move in twelve months. Last time it was snow caving in the ceiling. This time it’s slow polite procedural violence: non renewal of lease after we involved the City about safety/code issues. (I’m here to remind you, protected actions are never as protected as you wanna think.)

On March 19, 2026, if I don’t bring in more money than I’m currently confident I can, our tiny multigenerational household is staring down literal homelessness. Call it “unhoused” if you need to sanitize it with a political epithet. The reality don’t change.

I have a panic disorder, AuDHD, the fun stuff, but to keep the demons from grabbing my idle hands and to keep the despair2 away I decided to try to avoid the goddamn GoFundMe and try turning all this panic into print.

WHERE WE’RE AT RIGHT NOW (THE NUMBERS)

• Cards sold so far: 110 / 150 (Yes, we’ve sold 110, and I’m wrecked with gratitude.)

• Cards remaining: 40+

• Target: sell through by Feb 28 (so some of the relocation money isn’t arriving after the building is already burning down in total. I’m not pretending this is the only thing that will do the job.3)

And because I refuse to run a fundraiser with vibes only math but numbers are hard:

This money goes to: application fees, deposits, movers (because at this point full service isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity), boxes, mailers, tape, storage if we have to, utility hookups, polite society’s ten thousand little toll booths that show up when you’re forced to restart your life on a timer4.

WHAT YOU’RE ACTUALLY BUYING

A hand-numbered, personally-inscribed letter/card/package that doubles as an art object + a living fragment of a longer story.

A holiday card inscribed with unhinged whatever the fuck I want, possibly filled with confetti and more stickers. A terribly depressing and awful “holiday letter” so you know what the year has been like (or maybe it’s lies, maybe it’s a cypher, maybe it’s part of the story. Realistically, I haven’t even been able to write it yet)
It’s me building a little bridge out of paper and my flaming crap stuffed in mailing boxes and trying to walk our family across it.

THE STRUCTURE OF GENEROSITY

There is no menu. There’s just scale.

• If you send $15, you get the core package: card + letter + story artifact5. That helps. Low barrier to entry. Still makes enough money towards the move I can justify it to myself, and people are generally far more generous than given credit for, to the point of heartbreak I’m finding.

• If you send $35, you’re funding the little survival margins. Bills get paid. Rent (still), food, meds, margin costs. $35 bucks can keep anyone in this household from overdrafting because of shit math on any given day. And some extra weirdness in a bubble mailer shipping envelope.

• If you send $50+, you’re literally buying time and stability. So we can cover the deposit/fees/movers without eating our own organs.6 And yes, you’ll get a real care package: books/prints/objects/ephemera. The kind of mail that lands like a weather event. Donate enough, you’ll get something I cannot replace. If you want my copy of Pearl Death. (They only made 163? 164? copies total. People do not sell this.)

• Hard cap / scarcity: if we sell past 150, I’ll keep going until I run out of my personal stash of greeting cards (yes, that’s a thing) realistically ~200 max if we’re lucky and people are generous. This includes cards I’ve had for 15 years because I’m a fucking weirdo and I hoard Trader Joe’s cards like a raccoon with a paper fetish.

• Shipping is the first little wave goes out Dec 2628–29, fatigue permitting. Then I’ll be shipping in small waves. Because I’m doing this by hand, with care, and because we’re still dealing with the system and our landlord and it’s been spirituallyemotionallypsychologicallyandyessometimeswearedoingverybadandateachothersthroats exhausting.

It’s hard to get on task right now, any task, so I’m going to go as fast as I can and as slow and smooth as I have to so I can make it part stress relief, not ANOTHER STRESSOR.

HELP WITH OVERHEAD

(I’m shocked at how many care packages I’m going to have to send, for the record.)

If you contribute, I will get you your mail. I’m just doing it like a person in crisis, not fucking Amazon.

HOW TO GET ONE THE DOPAMINE HIT AND HELP (DO THIS NOW, NOT LATER)

Fill out the form at this link and I’ll email you

HOUSING FUND FORM

Alternately:

Email: EmilOttoman@gmail.com
Subject line: NEW YEARS LETTER (Housing Help, whatever’s obvious)

Include:

your name - mailing address - what you want to send - and whether you’re okay with receiving human cremains smuggled in a gift box.7

I’ll reply with payment options & assign your card/letter/page number.

IF YOU CAN’T BUY A CARD (BUT YOU WANT TO HELP)

• Share this post. Or this one. Or this one. Or the piece I wrote for HERE. One share is an invitation to someone else’s generosity. (in theory)

• If you’ve got a manuscript and you want a real editor: FUCKING HIRE ME. I’m taking serious projects for long term work that won’t be too taxing during the crisis, and short stories (10 pages or less) I can turn and burn in a few hours.

If you contributed, I will get you your package. I’m just doing it like a person in the middle of a life and family crisis, not Amazon.

(There’s a nonzero chance that as this novella keeps forming in my head, it doesn’t stay a total standalone. It either leads into or runs alongside the Rule 35 Guidebook to the Damned in some way, minor or not, like a companion piece, like a burning introduction to where we live, like the “how did we get here” trail of blood turning into its own book. In my head, the story is growing teeth, and it maybe knows where it wants to go.)

To everyone who’s bought boxes and packing materials: THANK YOU. That stuff is not glamorous, it’s not “fun,” but it’s the difference between things arriving intact vs. arriving like an exploded bomb.

And yeah I’m probably still going to get the yellow boxes. Honestly, they’re kind of a needed size for odd shaped stuff and flats, and I’d rather ship clean than play Tetris with cardboard and regret. (I’ve seen Chuck Palahniuk play Tetris with cardboard and NEAR regret.)

The living room is set up like Santa’s Amazon Warehouse in an outer ring of Dante’s Purgatorio, stacks of boxes, rolls of tape, packing paper everywhere, the whole house twangs with postage anxiety. It’s disgusting, an eyesore, you can see a bit of it above, but fuck if It’s the only way this gets done on that side.

After this year, believe it or not, the hardest thing so far has actually been writing a goddamn holiday letter. Not the moving math. (Maybe the Landlord shit.) But since I threw this idea out: the fucking letter.

So quick advice: remember “inspiration” isn’t worth shit without execution. You can have lightning in a bottle all day long8. If you don’t sit down and do the work, it’s just weather.

THE BOOK NOW HAS SPECS!

The book has no name yet, but it has specs.

• Format: pocketbook (approximate ) / novella object

• Trim size: 5 × 7³⁄₈ (duodecimo) 5³⁄₈ × 8 (Crown octavo) 6 × 9 (octavo, which is like, 90% of indie trades already) This is quote dependent.

• Length: ~150 pages (give or take; the story decides, the object stays the object)

• Binding: perfect bound (ideally PUR so it doesn’t crack-spine like a cheap confession)

• Cover: matte red (warning label, not candy wrapper)

• Cover ink: black

• Interior paper: red stock, all the way through no white breaks

• Interior ink: black only

• Edges: Sprayed red, it stays RED so the whole thing reads like a single little red hole in the world when it’s closed

• Typography: built for legibility on colored stock (a touch larger, more leading, margins that breathe)

• Final printing/pricing promise: printing + shipping (landed to your door) + $1. Not “retail.” Not a gouge. Just enough to get the book out.

What “landed to your door + $1” probably looks like (ballpark)

This depends on printer, paper opacity, (white paper with color flood, actual red stock?) and how brutal postage gets, but the general universe for a black-ink paperback is a few bucks a book. Tack on a bit for everything else. Tack on some for a print run under 250.

For the all-red interior, I’d expect the all-in math to land roughly here:

• Lean scenario (BEST CASE): printing and freight ~$5–$7 a unit + shipping ~$4–$5 (Media Mail territory if it stays light) + packaging ≈ ~$0.50 → ~$10–$12 landed → $11 - $13 final.

• Chunkier / faster scenario (Not ideal but neither is fucking moving): printing ~$6–$9 + shipping ~$6–$8 (Ground Advantage/zone pain) + packaging ≈ ~$0.50 → ~$13–$17 landed → $14–$18 price.

And yes: shipping rates are slated to change again Jan 18, 2026, so I’m building the vow around whatever the actual label costs that week.

• Non-negotiable production note: we will be making a physical perfect proof because “red” is a fucking liar and I’m not guessing on contrast/opacity.

If I change any of these, I’ll say it out loud because the whole point is: this isn’t “a book someday.” This is an object with a body.

THE REAL BOSS FIGHT

Everyone gets ONE page from the novella. This creates INSTANT constraints. It has to be a novella with zero “connective tissue” pages. No hallways. No weather reports. No “and then we drove.” Every page has to earn its oxygen or suffocate.

Here’s how you COULD do it without writing a 40,000+ word panic attack.

Define “worth reading” like it’s a contract with the Devil

“Worth reading” can’t be a vibe. Vibe is how we lie to ourselves.

A page earns its oxygen if it does at least one of these:

• Pressure rises. Stakes tighten. Time compresses. The throat narrows.

• New information hits the table. A reveal, a contradiction, a detail that makes the last ten pages look different.

• A turn happens. Emotional turn counts. Moral turn counts. The narrator’s stance shifts and now everything costs more. They take a wrong turn on the fucking highway, doesn’t matter.

• A clean hit lands. An image, a sentence, a joke, a bruise, something that hurts or fucks.

• A consequence drops. Someone pays. Something breaks. The world answers back and the world is loud as fuck.

If a page does NONE, and I mean NONE of these, which always impresses me but people do it all the time, it’s not a page it’s fucking packing peanuts.

Every scene has to do two jobs. Minimum.

This is the part where people can get mad at me because it’s not “gentle.”

In a novella, one-job scenes are a luxury you don’t fucking have. They belong in longer books where you can afford to drift and still arrive.

So every scene has to do two of these, bare minimum:

1. advance plot

2. deepen character

3. sharpen theme

4. escalate stakes

5. set up/pay off motif

6. deliver a “holy shit” object/detail that changes the room

If your scene only does one thing: “it shows their relationship is complicated,” “it establishes the setting,” “it’s background” either compress it, splice it into a scene that already moves, or kill it.

Novella math is cruel and unforgiving, but not as unforgiving as short stories can be. You still have to stick all your landings or you’re a corpse.

Write in “BUT/SO chains, not “AND THEN”

Dead pages are usually “and then” pages.

• “We argued and then we left and then we drove…” = sludge, unless you have some chops you probably don’t, this isn’t moving a story, it’s a fucking grocery list. (See also, when I say “list writing” in any crit. Yeah)

• “We argued but the thing we said can’t be unsaid. So we leave. But leaving triggers the next problem…” = propulsion. If you want to keep a beat like Benny Benassi did back in the day (or Crystal Method, or you know, I’ll stop) this is how you MOVE THE STORY.

If you can’t put but/so between beats, you’re writing filler. Filler in a novella like I’ve tasked myself to write is just standing there bleeding.

“And then” is the enemy. “But/so” is the engine.

Dead pages are usually built out of “and then.”

• We argue and then we leave and then we drive and then we arrive…
  That’s sludge unless you have some chops you probably don’t, this isn’t moving a story, it’s a fucking grocery list. See also: when I say “list writing” in any crit. This is you narrating time because time is happening. This is fiction, it’s magical, you don’t have to fucking do that.

Instead:

• We argue but something gets said that can’t be unsaid.

• So we leave.

• But leaving triggers the next problem.

• So the next decision gets forced.

That chain: BUT/SO, is propulsion. It’s cause and consequence, not an itinerary. It’s the difference between Kenny G and the Crystal Method doing a boilerroom set (can’t suggest this enough, fuckin’ good times)

If you can’t put “but” or “so” between beats, you’re probably writing filler. Filler in a novella like I’ve tasked myself to write is just standing there bleeding..

Page turns aren’t optional. They’re a bodily function.

You don’t need cliffhangers. You need forward lean.

End pages with:

• a new rule

• a new wound

• an object introduced like a fuckin curse

• a line that reframes what we’re experiencing

• a tiny dread that makes the reader turn the page just to relieve pressure even if they gotta be up in like, 3 hours for work.

Make the reader flip pages like it’s 401 involuntary. Like they need that next hit.

Arrive late. Leave early. Be rude about it.

Start scenes at the moment they become inevitable. Sounds like Zen Koan bullshit? Great, it is, but you’ll know it when you do it. Leave as soon as the consequence is in motion. There, that’s a little less word shaman.

The reader doesn’t need you to show them the drive, the parking, the “we went inside,” the coffee order, the seat belt click, unless the seat belt click is the moment the knife goes in.

A novella loves jump cuts. It loves you for cutting. It respects you when you don’t overexplain. Anything else is you walking the reader to the door and chatting on the porch while you piss on their shoes.

Revision is where you commit the murders

Here’s a revision tool I like to use:

On every page: What changes because this page exists?

If the answer is “nothing,” cut it.
If the answer is “tone,” okay: but only if it’s a tone only you can do, and the tone is doing work (pressure, turn, consequence).
If the answer is “it connects two scenes,” that’s not a reason to keep it. That’s a reason to cut harder and jump-clean.

I’ll be doing this a few sentences and probably ten pages at a time for the whole project once I start rolling. When you send the page, you send the final. I will not revise this before print. land every hit or look like a fool. simple binary. (This is an ADHD thing I actually like.)

Here’s the thing about novellas: they don’t forgive you.

A novel will let you wander off into a side room and stare at the wallpaper for three pages if the wallpaper’s interesting enough and you can pull it off. Hell, you may even get a National Book Award for it. A novella looks at that and says, cool, die bleeding. Because you don’t have room. You don’t have the acreage. You’re not building a suburb, you’re building a knife.

And the biggest challenge is exactly what I’m aiming for, to write a novella where every page something worth reading happens. No dead air. No “connective tissue.” No luxury apartment complexes where the reader is just walking between rooms and you’re like, it’s important, it’s atmosphere. Atmosphere is fine. I love atmosphere. But in a novella, atmosphere wants to be a weapon.

So yeah. The craft challenge is real: every page has to be worth reading. Every page has to punch, reveal, turn, or bleed.

And with all that said?

I’m going to write a 150-page panic attack anyway.

A novella is not a short novel. That’s the first lie you have to kill.

A novella is its own beast entirely. Not a novelette, not a novel, now more popularly in the indies just a “short novel” This is where you take all the places a novel would normally breathe and you replace them with demand.

Which is why the biggest challenge is what I said out loud and what you probably already know in your gut: write a novella where every page something worth reading happens. Not “nice.” Not “competent.” Not “serviceable.” Worth reading. Every page has to justify the paper it’s printed on.

So here’s the craft lesson, gen ed, in the language I know: fire and knives and repetition, the mother of all knowledge.

A NOVELLA IS NOT A SHORT NOVEL

A novella isn’t “a novel but shorter.” That’s a comforting lie people tell themselves so they can wander.

A novella is a full container with a tight lid. It wants unity. It wants pressure. It wants the feeling that one hand has been on your throat since page one and it never really lets go.

WHAT A NOVELLA ACTUALLY WANTS

A novella more often than not lives on:

• one obsession

• one wound

• one engine

• one arc of pressure

Not “one line of story,” necessarily. One gravitational field. One big emotional truth everything keeps orbiting. If you keep trying to add new subplots and fresh casts and shiny side-quests, you’re either writing a novel or you’re dodging the hard part.

PICK ONE MAIN THING TO BREAK

Not the theme. Not the pitch. The BREAK.

What changes?

• a belief collapses

• a relationship flips polarity

• a person becomes unrecognizable

• a system shows its teeth

• a secret becomes a weapon

Name the break and you can keep the whole thing taut. Don’t name it and you’ll write “interesting scenes.” These won’t add up to anything except length you can’t afford.

STRUCTURE: PICK A SPINE, NOT A RELIGION

Most novellas are one of these shapes:

• Descent (worse, worse, worse, drop)

• Spiral (same problem, tighter loop, higher cost)

• Fuse (normal-ish until the bomb time)

• Hunt (want → refusal → escalation)

Pick a shape. Not because structure is god. Because structure is a rail. It keeps you from calling aimless wandering “depth”, and that’s what makes you look like you don’t know what you’re doing.

SCENES: TWO JOBS, NO EXCEPTIONS

One job scenes are a luxury. In a novella they’re dead weight.

Every scene has to do at least two:

• advance plot

• deepen character

• sharpen theme

• escalate stakes

• set up/pay off motif

• drop an object/detail that changes the room

If it only does one thing, compress it, graft it, or kill it.

BEATS: BUT / SO, NOT AND THEN

AND THEN is itinerary. Time passing. You narrating motion because you don’t want to commit to the turn.

BUT is resistance. SO is consequence. That chain is story.

ARRIVE LATE. LEAVE EARLY. BE RUDE.

Start where it’s inevitable. Leave when consequence is in motion.
If you’re writing arrivals, departures, travelogue, “we talked for a while,” you better have a reason sharper than “it felt real.” Real is cheap. (Ask me about my housing crisis) Pressure is expensive.

VOICE DOES NOT GET YOU OUT OF MATH

Yes, voice can carry a reader through a dead paragraph. It cannot carry them through a dead middle.

In a novella, voice has to be DOING WOEK: pressure, turn, consequence, revelation, violence. Otherwise it’s you being clever in a mirror while the reader wanders off.

REVISION: THE PAGE TAX

Ask: What changes because this page exists?
If the answer is “nothing,” cut it.
If the answer is “it connects two scenes,” jump harder.
If the answer is “tone,” fine—if the tone is advancing meaning and pressure, not just showing off. (I have issues with this)

FINAL NOTE: THE NOVELLA IS AN OBJECT

A novella is an object with a purpose. It should feel like it has a temperature. A weight. A single-mindedness. (Scroll up again if you missed it the first time)

It’s not a container for everything you know. It’s a container for the one thing you can’t stop thinking about, compressed until it becomes dangerous.

And yes, I know there’s an entire other religion of what a novella is

The antithesis. The opps: The “novella as vibe jar” philosophy.

This is the lot of nerds that treats a novella like a long poem you can walk around inside. A “portrait.” “mood piece.” “word painting.” “the novel Stoner” A container where you’re allowed, nay encouraged even, to meander, to drift, to luxuriate, to stack atmosphere like incense cones and trust the reader will just float along with you because language. Because texture. Because art. Because eat my shit and hair. I’m bored and you’re boring.

The novella as a slow pan across wallpaper. The novella as a candle you light and let run for three hours, the one they sell at Anthropologie, you know. The novella as tracking shot in a Wes Anderson movie with twee fucking music playing. (And I like Wes Anderson, so, you know, fuck you.)

Look. Sometimes that’s real, a deliberate craft choice. Sometimes it’s genuinely hypnotic and the author earns every quiet page with a level of sentence-level command I would crawl over broken glass to call my own.

But let’s be honest: most of the time it’s a permission slip.

“I didn’t want to make decisions” dressed up as sophistication. “I don’t know what changes” disguised as “meditative.” It’s connective tissue with a grad-degree accent. It’s avoidance-as-aesthetic. It’s probably cover out at Barnes & Noble next month. It’s close enough to the MFA branded cattle that it’s following the Judas cow up the slaughterhouse ramp right now.

And I don’t give a fuck about it for a few reasons:

1. I’m not trying to sedate you. I’m trying to possess you. I want the page to hurt you somehow. I want the paragraph to leave a mark. Dead air is not holy. Dead air is dead.

2. My life is not built for drift right now. I’m writing inside an emergency. There’s a clock, a landlord and whole system still chewing on us. Spiritually exhausting is a baseline. I don’t have twelve spare pages to admire the fucking wallpaper unless the wallpaper is actively trying to kill me9.

3. “It’s allowed to be slow” is usually an excuse. Slowness can be an intention, sure. But most people reach for slowness when they’re avoiding escalation, avoiding consequences, avoiding the moment where the story has to actually turn, and yes, on Substack some people are doing it oh so very pretty it makes you jealous of their voice. Call back later.

4. Constraint makes me sharper. The pressure cooker is where my best work crawls out or explodes (I’m not including instructions on how to turn a pressure cooker into a bomb here though) Comfort makes me sloppy and I damn well know it. I’m not here to be comfortable. I’m here to raise ’s blood pressure. xoxo

5. My atmosphere is made of consequence. I don’t do “lingering” unless lingering is a threat. My images aren’t postcards, they’re stills from a snuff film. My quiet moment is when the blade slides into your favorite character.

So no, I’m not building a scented candle. I’m building a knife. And if that means my novella reads like a chain of pressure points and bright, ugly little revelations. Good. That’s the job.

And here’s the other truth I’m not pretending isn’t true:

If the 150 don’t sell (yes, even though at this point it’s nearly a statistical improbability) I’m still finishing the book.

And then I’m burning it.

Not because I’m punishing anyone or having a tantrum. Because this project came with stakes and strings attached. Its execution matters. I’m not writing a forever-draft that lives in a folder like a polite little ghost. This was conceived and meant for one printing to help my family stay housed. If it can’t do that job, it can burn.

This isn’t just about the book. The book and everything surrounding it is the artifact is the shape I’m giving the panic. The point is I’m trying to get my household moved in an emergency, for the second time in twelve months, without resorting to a GoFundMe and without begging as my full-time job to the point that I breakdown like I did THIS SPRING, HOLY SHIT IT IS STILL 2025. I’m trying to sell you something real and worth keeping, so the money does what it needs to do: deposits, fees, movers, survival margins. So we don’t get shoved off the edge of the calendar.

And it is fucking tiring. Spiritually. Physically. Psychically. It’s exhausting to keep fighting the system and the landlord and still sit down and make art like you’re not in a slow motion car crash filmed at 10k fps being played back at regular sped. It’s exhausting to ask for help in public and keep a fucking SHRED of your dignity intact.

So if it doesn’t cross into the world, it doesn’t get to sit on my shelf and “maybe someday” me to death. I’ll write it. I’ll complete it. I’ll let it be whole. And then I’ll turn it into smoke and move forward like I meant it.

HOUSEKEEPING / THE NON-DOOM SECTION / THIS WILL BE SHORT

If you’re here for Substack news and not the Theater of Cruelty: hey. This is the part where I act like a normal creator/writer/what are we this week? with a normal website and not a person live-blogging a slow-moving housing crisis.

What’s up on Substack lately for me:

• Bought three nutcrackers from , they arrived today, they’re dope, only Christmas decorations that will stay out all year.

• I helped body David Fuccboi Wallace and today posted my insane rant about how fuck Christmas.

• Next I’m going to help ream NYC. (I finally bought the NeoDecadent Manifesto, as per promise. And the only copy of Neo Decadent Evangelion for sale in the US. Give and you get. God, I hope..)

TINY NICE THINGS

A few small, real things that didn’t suck this week: We’re working on it. But they happened.

People have been generous and it makes me cry.

Televisions Sky visit next week!

Oh, If you’ve been circling for a while and want to get on my calendar, again, now’s the time, but I’m going to be honest about what I’m building.

I’m scheduling out because the stretch between New Year’s and my birthday is going to be an exhausting four or so months no matter what I do. So I’m not stacking myself with work that drains me to the point where I can’t finish everything else I MUST do.

What I am taking: long-term projects, coaching, mentoring, steady sustained editorial relationships. Long work that’s real and deep but doesn’t turn my brain into a smoking crater. Developmental arcs. Line work with oxygen. Ongoing packages where we build momentum instead of burning down the house every week. And short stories (10 pages or less) I can turn and burn on without flaying my mind or polluting my own work.

I’m not doing “vibes-only” notes. I’m doing real work: structure, line, clarity, pressure, rhythm, sentences that don’t lie. I think my reputation precedes me by now, even if it’s the begging editor. And if that’s what it is, go to hell.

Stopgaps, maybe. Light remixing and re-releases of my oldest, most overlooked fiction on Substack: hopefully. Not a full resurrection campaign. More like: pull a few bodies out of the river, towel them off, stitch up what I can and let them walk back into the room like they were always supposed to be here.

548AM CST

Fade

(It took me five minutes to make this, I regret nothing. Isn’t Moms adorable!)

FUCK CHRISTMAS

Seriously I can’t remember a Christmas in years hasn’t been some sort of fucked up. I keep the holiday cheer up, the roof caves in. I try to not live in a fucking tinderbox and hold people to account for things they are SUPPOSED TO DO BY LAW? My whole family is on the sidewalk by the time first tulips are coming up.

Hell, if everything goes wrong, maybe by the time the tiger lilies are blooming in front of our previous apartment, we’ll be squatting in the house two doors down, I don’t fucking know.

I used to love Xmas, just for, you know, some reasons get to be mine. I’ll share later. But you know, now, fuck it.

But I do remember being like, 14 or some shit, and me, mom, and my friend Adam were having Xmas eve dinner on the back of our beater ass ‘96 LeSabre Buick at the time, eating KFC. What a time to be alive. AND WE WERE HAPPY!

HOW TO HELP IN 30 SECONDS

• Buy a New Year Letter ($15 and up).

• $35 for a gift bag in a bubble mailer. $50+ gets the gift box / weirder stuff.

• We’re at 95/150 toward the Ghost Book.

• Want to help with supplies? There’s an Amazon Wishlist.

HOW DID THIS START?

Here’s the original post, but long story very short:

• Tenant protections in this town suck and landlords gonna landlord.

• Oh, also, don’t be like, what, most of this gutted country, a debt load pregnant with triplets and paycheck to paycheck while eggs become a fucking luxury item? Yeah.

• And, don’t code check your landlord for safety inspections with the city unless you have a fucking warchest.

• Also, you know, have better credit than we do collectively.

• And don’t let this happen twice in 12 months.

• Preferably wait until you are fully recovered and unpacked from the last move until you get non-renewed via tonally “fuck do you think you are you little shit?” email (soft retaliation on its face, call that a loophole you could drive an Airbus A380 through)

• And try not to need this help twice in one year.

I got a holiday letter. I didn’t even know they were a thing. But they are a whole historical genre. They’re where people with more money than you recall fondly how awesome their year was while you’re knee deep in tenant law on four hours of sleep at your laptop.

Ok, so, what’s the opposite of that? If that’s social performance to show how AMAZING things are.1

That’s right, write the most unhinged “Holiday Letter” you can. Put it inside a New Years Card, because I missed Christmas and fuck that holiday anyway.

And then offer prizes if people donate for your family’s survival.

Because you don’t want to compete with the last wretched GoFundMe you ran, when you’ve ran 6 to full or overfilled, but the last one was for The Saint’s mother. And it filled. And you’re terrified your living family will lose against your breathtaking but very hanged and burned best friend.2

Yes, it filled, no, I don’t want to compete with that.

YOU SAID THERE WERE PRIZES THO?

Yes. Behold.

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE

$15: You claim a numbered New Year Letter + card + a page from a novella (hand-signed/inscribed; single printing)

$35: THE PREVIOUS + a bubble mailer of weird ephemera.

$50+ = THE AFOREMENTIONED + gift box (more/rarer/stranger stuff).

DONATE MORE THAN $50, YOU GET COOLER WEIRDER SHIT.

The Ghost Book goal: 150 letters

If we sell 150 (or more you guys!)

I print the full novella as a one off, no reprint, bootleg, absolutely objet d’art for a good cause edition:

- hand-signed + numbered, scribbled in, painted on, WHO KNOWS

- only available to card-holders

- NO EBOOK / NO POD / NO ISBN / NO UPC

And if we don’t sell through?

Well you all have one page of a novella I will finish writing, lock in a metal box, and no one but me will ever read the whole fucking thing. No one will get a boring page. I promise you that. But no one will have any clue what the fuck is going on unless it gets printed.

To claim yours and help keep my family off the fucking streets because my 74 year old moms and fiancée don’t deserve this (me, maybe, them, NEVER. I’d rather be in bed with her sleeping than working on this fucking post)

FILL THE BOXES AT THIS LINK

Click up there, and put yourself on the list.

Or DM me. Email me. I don’t give a fuck at this point, OK?

WE NEED SUPPLIES!

Someone somewhere had a brilliant idea though. Cut down on overhead, because yes, shipping exists. And so do supplies. So I made a short Amazon list.

Do with it as you will. We’re going to need at least sixty gift boxes it’s looking like and it would REALLY be a good idea if they’re not ALL the same size. One size is good for International, one size doesn’t hold enough for big money, one size is yellow and not that thick but the AESTHETIC, and will hold interesting flats, one size will hold big fuckin’ money.

There’s also some bubble mailers on there but honestly, and gratefully, people have been generous. We need like, one pack of those I think, tops.

And tape. Just, tape.

Kill Some OverHead Buy Boxes

The list in case you can’t be assed to click the button:

• shipping box, 10"L x 8"W x 2.8"H (yellow)

• small care package mailing box, 9"L x 6"W x 4"H (Small, good for international or base $50, but most aren’t base $50)

• medium care package mailing box, 10"L x 7"W x 5"H (Medium, holds more shit, probably doesn’t go overseas)

• big fuck off care pack box: 12"L x 9"W x 4"H (Big spenders get a buncha cool shit.) BOUGHT THANK YOU!!!!

• tape. Just, six rolls of Amazon basics tape.

• and 8.5x12” bubble mailers in either pink (cheap, works) or fancy orange yellow fade (more expensive, but more likely to be defaced with art or a Pilot Zebra fat tip misdemeanor marker) (Trust me, I’ve used smaller mailers for shit for years, they’re not worth a shit, and I’ll be glad when my remaining five or six are GONE.)

If you want to lighten the load. Which is already going to be a magnificent time sink. But will keep me from losing my shit. By all means. Whoever buys something, hey, you get to choose the packaging for a buncha other people!

EMIL YOU SOUND EXTRA SALTY, Y THO?

This is psychologically taxing and emotionally exhausting.

Oh, and we’ve sold 95/150, 63% of the cards.

Which means, all the conventional New years cards are spoken for, we’re into the Chinese New Year, and then they go to blank colors and probably feral scribblings in all the the glory of ROYGBIV.

I’ve hawked 95 fucking cards, and now I’m starting to have ideas and an itch in the back of my head for the novella. It’s starting to form. And I want to hold it in my hands. And I want to be in an apartment that isn’t a fucking fire hazard with like, six short tons of books.

I’m out of ways to further incentivize people buying cards that I can think of, but I’m committed to the bit. I have to do it no matter what the outcome.

So when ideas started to twinkle in my head, of course, I got sad about all this shit.

Because the money TO move is just one hurdle. After that is finding a spot and actually moving. And we are fucking SPENT. We are drained, card maxed, the walking wounded, just started to feel like home last week ready to stay a few years and happy for it and now. And now I’m selling Greeting Cards and Gift Boxes on the Substack Mutual Support Shopping Network.

PLEASE CONSIDER BUYING A CARD/GIFT BAG/CARE PACKAGE/BOOTLEG NOVELLA

You can do it right here.

Or CLICK THE PICTURE EVEN

SHAMELESS PLUGS FOR MY PARTNER DOING HER PART!

Read this because that’s part one, and it’s fantastic, then go read this

Because it’s fucking insane.

OH WAIT. SHE’S DOING SOMETHING HELLA COOL TOO, SO WE DON’T END UP UNHOUSED ON THE FUCKING STREET, Darling:

“From December 6, 2025 → March 19, 2026, I am writing personalized, stream-of-consciousness, zero-draft stories to anyone who wants to support my relocation fund or just wants to middle finger the patriarchy.

When you donate, you give me a three word prompt:[ 1 noun, 1 verb, 1 adjective]

• I will have to incorporate all 3 into the story somehow, stream of consciousness, zero draft; just how I’ve always done it and how you see it here on this publication (besides very specific niche stories que in The Diary Entries)

• You have 2 options here: Be tagged with your publication as a personal anecdote, and I will write whatever it made me feel at the time, that will be completely public.

• If you decide to keep it private, I will email you a personalized note on how it made me feel, the post will still go public with your name as [REDACTED] and you will have an email link that connects to the title.

• All posts go public, all posts will be free to read.

• None of the posts will support bigotry, provide harmful phobics, and be anti anything I ethically stand for; if you give me money and expect me to write hateful diatribe, thanks for the free money, no returns for bigots! If it’s especially Nazi propaganda, my WW2 grandfather’s ghost is standing over you with a rifle to the head and my bloody knuckles aren’t bloody enough.

Tier Options:

• $20 → 400 words

• $30 → 600 words

• $50 → 1,000 words

• $75 → 1,500 words

• $100 → 2,000 words

• $100+ → No word limit + ultra-personal extras

• Any number you want where you have issues with systemic oppression and want to middle finger corruption is up to your discretion. The writing project is purely optional.

P.S. I might write over the cap limit no matter what you give me, if I absolutely love the prompt. These limits are for me personally to restrain myself, but I have no guarantees this can turn into a series in the future with just three words. If it becomes a book, you get the book for free with my signature, a note and acknowledgement if you allow me.”

So far these pieces of writing have been AMAZING. She only has a few prompts left. If you want one. (She will probably get caught up and overrun the word limit anyway, she’s like that. She gets ideas and goes places you don’t know you wanna go. She’s a fucking nightmare weaver.)

CONTACT HER. THEY ARE SEPARATE FROM THE TELEVISION SKY NEW YEARS CARD CLUSTERFUCK!

But they’re more immediate, and personalized, and out-fucking-standing.

(The dialogue in the two parter I linked above is particularly great.)

Hey, what’s the worst that could happen, you get a good story?

MORE SHIT ABOUT YOU AND EDITING AND WHATEVER?

Yeah, I forgot.

I have a Founder’s Tier that you pay for ONCE, then get to abuse in perpetuity, once a quarter, until I succumb to consumption. Some people have noticed.

Ok, so, pay ONCE

AND YOU DON’T PAY AGAIN

You get the equivalent of ONE 10pg short story edit a QUARTER.

These five founders represent the equivalent work I would put into 20 short stories. (If they take advantage of it, you don’t get rollover miles people, I have limits.)

THAT’S $5,000.00 WORTH OF EDITING A YEAR.

I lowered everything else to rock bottom. This stays expensive because it’s actually WORTH SOMETHING.

Maybe if you want an editor in your back pocket, consider it.

But enough barking.

FICTION IS CULTURE: BUY CHILDREN’S BOOKS!

THE SHIELDBREAKER SAGA

FiC: Introducing Mike's Food Fund

We the Undersigned, having spent a bunch of time this year asking you to help prop up your fellows in this specific community, are going to mix it up a little bit for this holiday season…

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4 months ago · 45 likes · 16 comments · Tom Schecter, Emil Ottoman, Nick Winney, M.P. Fitzgerald, Zivah, Andrew Robert Colom, James Worth, Vinny Reads, Haly, the Moonlight Bard ✒️, Slater Henatay, Zani D, Dylan Bosworth, Zachary Dillon, Brent Robbins, Pablo Báez, Judith Ashcraft, and Keith Long

My Dad is a better person than me, he feeds people and gives poor kids books now I guess. (Read the above, it’s short.)

I thought there was a deadline. This is probably why my nickname from dear old da is “shithead”

The effort is ongoing. Feel free, continue sending children’s books should you desire.

C/O FIC or Fiction is Culture or your name and both, sent to:

MIKE’S BIKES

21310 Great Mills Rd.

Lexington Park MD 20653

Thriftbooks, et al. Kids books are cheap. The books go to actual families where they are, trust me, I know the area, desperately needed. Let us raise some readers!

Courtesy of and the undersigned who I’m too tired to tag.

IN HOPING THAT IF YOU GIVE YOU WILL RECEIVE

And because I love Nutcrackers, art, and is a hometown hero from STL and dope as hell, I picked up these three Nutcrackers from her and I can’t wait to see them in person.

Alex offered me a discount. I paid extra. Why? PAY YOUR FRIENDS WHAT THEY ARE WORTH! Pay them more. That “hey fam can I get a discount shit” is for buying eighths off your dope dealer. (Universe, I’m throwing out vibes here however I can)

There are two left. Y’all should go buy them.

MORE SHIT? YES, MORE SHIT.

Thanks to the crew who are now safe from being hunted for sport, for letting me go off like a deranged bomb about David Foster Sweaty Fucking Wallace

☆Neo-Passéism☆

David Foster Wallace

“David Foster Wallace’s reputation is a precarious house of cards that his early death did much to keep standing. For a self-described serious tennis player, he wasn’t very good; for an analytical thinker, he didn’t understand math to an extent that any mathematician would consider competent (Rudy Rucker’s…

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4 months ago · 40 likes · 34 comments · Neo-Passéism

And thanks for giving my psychotic screed second billing. Whenever you wanna body NYC, guys, wow, just count me the fuck in, OK?

I started a long distance chess game with , but he’s missing a piece, so he’s got RoboCop.

And he took the initiative.

Where we stand with my Queens out of place at the end of day one (I haven’t played in years, I’m not great, I just like to play, it was one of very few things to do for 7 months in county jail in 2011)

Anyone else down? I have one more set of pieces and one more rollup.

FINAL NOTES:

I may have something in soon, who knows.

I spent part of tonight making a soundtrack for a novella.

Oh, my meds came in, I’m mostly functional now.

I’m behind on my reading, writing, and, well.

Fuck.

There’s more. But I’m tired boss.

Sometimes all it takes to set off the spark, is a bit of imagery.

Novella preview?

You wake up from the thousand year nightmare of your life and you’re still in your own bed, everyone is still a ghost, and time for you ran out before it ever began.

But. You’re not in your own bed.

You’re in the Mojave at a reststop in December on top of a concrete picnic table freezing to death and the first thing you see when you sit up is a green sign with a white border and clipart of a rattlesnake says to watch out for rattlesnakes off the sidewalk. You don’t know that this sign is meant for when you’re not freezing to death and there’s snow on the ground in the desert.

Past the buzzing headache lights of the reststop outerspace dark. The kind you stare too long you start seeing things never there.

Four hours from now, it’s just going to be winter mourn in the frozen high desert.

Breathe. 4 in through the nose, hold for 7, out for 8 through the mouth,

3 times. Blood pressure would lower if it wasn’t turning to ice in your veins.

Move or you will freeze and die and some fuckhead on their way to Bakersfield from Needles will find you and finger your cold dead pussy.

Bolt from the picnic table for the image and fuck how’s you ever get here.

Walk through the galley between the men and women’s bathrooms rubbing some heat to your face, cupping not hot enough breath to frigid blued skin around your mouth, lips so bloodless they’ve gone white.

None of the cars, being less than zero, being nil, are yours.

Good there are no cars because if there were and you didn’t recognize one.

Oh, what a beautiful panic attack.

The hand dryer in the bathrooms may keep you alive until sunup, as long as you keep pressing the button again, and again, and again, and don’t frozen frozen all fall down, or ‘til the coldest moments of the voidsky flicker out after dawn breaks pale in the east. And all you can manage to think is fuck California. But why? Aside from this near death, no pin lands on your map.

You mouth it, a whisper, realize you haven’t even looked at one of the scratched up gang claimed metal public bathroom mirrors; anterograde amnesia. Not knowing how you know what it is but it came out of your mouth while the hand dryer defrosts your face and hands and if you could cry, you would.

TERROR/MISERY/TRAUMA CIRCUS UPDATE!

I just realized that there is NO transparency in this fundraising project to keep my family housed, and it made my HAIR stand on end. Also, I’ve repeated, “I’m a fuckin’ crook” enough times that you MAY think this is how we’re paying for Crimbus1. It is not.

I am not the Midnight Vault II. We have no fancy graphs or whatever.

If you want to help us, cash helps:

If you want to help make a book and help us, hit the button below:

NEAT THINGS INSIDE

Yes, there is a timer I update religiously. We have 95 days until this place is over and we’re either moving, or fucked.

THE SHORTEST POSSIBLE RECAP

We’re staring down homelessness on March 19, 2026 because our lease wasn’t renewed after we involved the City over safety/code issues in our apartment, which is a supposedly protected activity. The next day our landlord “soft” retaliated by stating he was not renewing our lease. This is legal in Missouri for some reason.

This is our family’s second emergency move from housing instability issues in 12 months. We are tapped and exhausted and don’t know if we can even find a new place.

Last time was a ceiling collapse; this time is landlord retaliation by any other name (and in many other states it is, but not here.)

Attorneys won’t touch us. We can’t even get help from where all the attorneys who wouldn’t touch us told us to go, Legal Services of Eastern Missouri. They said come back with an eviction. That eviction is never going to come.

And I’m going to say this a bunch, by March 19, if we don’t bring in more money than I’m currently confident we can, our little multigenerational household is staring down homelessness2. Call it “unhoused” (This word should not exist) to sanitize it. I’ll be over here bleeding from my mouth.

I’m trying to close the gap without a GoFundMe because the idea of writing a seventh and it being the one that doesn’t fill terrifies me. (You can’t compete with the beautiful dead girl)

This is to keep the hands busy, the mind occupied, the terror at bay, and was a spur of the moment idea to turn this icy shitrain into a limited-run artifact people can actually hold and read.

The concept was easy. The execution is going to take a second.

WHY THIS?

This year I found out what a Christmas Letter is and why I fucking hate it. It’s soft-focus class warfare glazed in white wine and Valium.

“We had a wonderful year.” “Wonderful getaway.” “Amazing restaurants!” “So blessed!” Like it’s a quarterly earnings call for the soul and how great your life is, performative social bookkeeping, upper middle class to wealthy people give them out with holiday cards. A little one page report card to prove the senders are healthy, upward, winning, happy, living their best lives, and doing better than you.

Then there’s those of us refreshing city inspection portals and googling “can my landlord retaliate for code complaints” at 3 a.m. on a fucking Tuesday.

So the concept was easy. Invert the format.

I came up with a header, I bought 40 New Years cards on Amazon. As you can see, this is a concept with lerem ipsum I came up with tonight because I’ve been too busy with the admin and carney barking to actually write the fucking thing.

WHY HELP? (What have you done for me lately?)

THE GHOST BOOK (Television Sky New Year Letters).

If this experiment sells through 150 New Years Cards (or more, fuck it, I don’t care)/Letters/Pages FROM THE NOVELLA, I will print the novella in full that everyone who donates will have a page from.

PLAN:

• 150 copies hand signed, numbered, inscribed, doodled inside, who knows.

• Only available to card-holders. (I have a list, if you’ve donated, you have a page number)

• Priced at print + landing cost + $1. (I’m not making money on the book. The point is survival + proof.)

• No reprints. Ever.

• No ebook. No POD. No second edition. No “later.” No ISBN. No UPC.

If you miss it, you miss it. That’s the whole point: a real artifact, a real deadline, a real line in the sand. Help to help, help to get something that will only exist once, help to get a gift box or gift bag, or go about your life knowing you’re a miserable fuck of an example of humanity.

So if you want in—if you want your name on the inside cover as someone who helped drag Television Sky across the finish line: buy a New Year Letter now and claim a number.

Reply to this post click the button up there, click the link to the original post or DM me with:

1. “I want a New Year Letter/card”

2. your mailing address

3. 35$ gets you a bubble mailer of trinkets (Currently 17 people have chosen a bubble mailer of trinkets and ephemera). $50 and up gets you a gift box. (31 have chosen a gift box.)

4. The more you GIVE = the stranger, more obscure, more archival, the more rare, the more interesting YOU GET.

This is the cleanest way to back the press, get a tangible artifact, and lock yourself into the only printing this book will ever get.

NUMBERS!

Like I just said, 31 people have opted for care packages in the form of boxes. 17 have opted for bubble mailers.

Substack has donated roughly $4,400 dollars to this project so far, +/- a few hundred.

(I’m bad at math. But I didn’t count my editorial retainers, I did put back in expenses, because for those 95 days, we still have to live.)

HALF OF THE CARDS HAVE SOLD IN LESS THAN 7 DAYS.

This is amazing.

CAN WE PLEASE SELL THE OTHER 75? (or more, I have more cards than 150 in the mail.)

I’m going to have to buy at least one if not two packs of care package boxes (29-40 depending on how many. I’m guessing two packs of 36 of them) and at least one good sized bundle of bubble mailers (Which will be ever so slightly larger than the one in the final picture). They will be a nice size, but smaller than the one pictured below for reference purposes.

Is this overhead and postage eating into the donations? Yes. But it’s also true that I have a lotta weird and interesting shit and we’re probably going to need to downsize this move. Stamps though? I think we have enough stamps available to us to wallpaper the apartment.

The point isn’t JUST the money. The point is this staves off the dread. This helps focus. This gives a goal that is not simply asking for money or (I shudder thinking about it) lowering my prices as an editor. I did that last year and it almost ruined me.

WHATS IN THE BOX!?

Your letter and card, most likely stuffed with confetti and madness, not just my impeccable cursive.

A sampling of possibilities. Obscure stationery, books, trinkets, pill bottles, fortune pills, a toy Glock 26, BenFrostIsDead stickers, Obvious Plant Toys, cursed relics, Advanced Reader Copies of books, Pens, small plastic cats, bootleg legos, more stickers than you probably want to think about. Confetti. The pink thing there is the current bubble mailer I have. I’m running out of both those and the boxes in this picture. This is for visual example of possible contents ONLY. You could get a copy of American Psycho in Spanish, or a copy of Faust from the 1800’s in German. Who the fuck knows.

You could get a tarot card.

You could get a shitty painting.

You could get original art.

An old short story drafted by hand that you’d recognize if you’ve read anything on this substack.

Gift boxes and Bags will be filled on a case by case basis.

THAT’S IT

I’m also taking editorial clients for quick shorts and long game MS work with the understanding that unless you need a turn and burn on a short story, now isn’t the time to rush things.

If you have a FULL OR NEARLY FINISHED MANUSCRIPT email me: Emilottoman@gmail.com

Subject line: Editorial Inquiry.

my amazing wife and partner for life is writing prompt fiction for cash (and so far every one is getting better and better.)

Ether Dreams

Revisit Death

For the second time in two years, I’m living in a home where the ceiling has collapsed. Who the fuck hexed me? Call it a coincidence or fate. If my witch powers allowed me to see more than the dead, …

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4 months ago · 43 likes · 15 comments · Edith Bow

What she is doing is not this. She is involved in the Television Sky Card Project, but I am NOT involved in her story for cash prompt fundraising. Contact HER about that. NOT ME. That’s a HER THING, and she started it before I had this idea.

Special thanks (Forever and always) to Fiction Is Culture and , and the undersigned, , , , , , , , , , , , . & to start. Unfortunately, I cannot name you all, but I can name some of my closest and also some of the biggest signal boosts by sheer volume.

Television Sky New Year Letters

(How Not to Be “Unhoused” in March)

This year I finally figured out what a Christmas Letter really is! I’ve only ever gotten two of them, but they’re just soft-focus class warfare.

The Valium gloss recap. Casually mentioned vacations. “We enjoyed a wonderful year.” “wonderful getaway” “amazing restaurants!” “highly recommended” “So blessed!” “It was a whirlwind trip, but fun.” “That was a blast!”. It’s social accounting. PERFORMATIVE SOCIAL BOOKKEEPING. The letter’s job is:

1. To confirm the senders are active, healthy, happy, engaged, doing better than you.

2. To reaffirm ties by name dropping relatives, events, opportunities, how just, amazing everything is.

3. To perform gratitude and cheer by talking about everything they were blessed to experience in the year.

I got one last year and didn’t think much about it. Maybe it was the difference in the situation. A natural disaster versus a human one. But this year it read as tone deaf.

We’re about to be homeless. You’re working on your memoir.

The cap was wishing me calmness this holiday season.

No mention of what hurt this year, what was frightening, where the fault lines in the family are. Story has been replaced by report, while the rest of us are refreshing city inspection portals and googling “can my landlord retaliate for code complaints” at 3 a.m.

So I’m bending the light around it. 110. The flat circle is never not feast or famine.

Instead of a cheery “we’re so blessed” Christmas letter, Television Sky is sending out underground New Year Letters: limited, hand-numbered, story-bearing cards that double as art object and lifeline.

Because here’s the situation as pain as I can put it:

• This is our second emergency move in twelve months.

• Our landlord has chosen not to renew our lease after we involved inspectors and the City about safety and code issues.

• On March 19, if I haven’t brought in more money than I am currently confident I can, my multigenerational household is staring down literal homelessness. (We will be “unhoused” if you want to sanitize it.)

I don’t want to write a GoFundMe. Motherfucker I’m good at it, but I hate GoFundMes. I’ve written 6 and they all filled. The last was for my dead best friend.

I do not want to weigh taking care of her cunt mom after she’s dead against my family having a place to live, to find out what comes at the end of that popularity contest.

But unless someone has a better idea and this experiment (Among others) doesn’t just do well but very well, there is probably going to be a GoFundMe in our future too. It would run in February. You get 30 days to run a GoFundMe. 13.9% of GoFundMes hit goal. If you reach 20-30% of goal in two days, your chance of filling to completion jumps by 85-90%+. It’s not just a popularity contest, a grief parade, it’s social engineering and bullshit.

This is me trying everything I can before I get there.

What the FUCK is a Television Sky New Year Letter?

Short version:

40 hand-numbered New Year cards to start.
Each one is personally inscribed, comes with a New Year “letter” that actually tells a story instead of lying about how great everything is, and includes one unique page from that story.

We sell through 125 in time, I’ll print a one-time-only novella: 125 copies, priced one dollar above what they cost to land at your door, one for each card-holder. No reprints. Ever.

Longer version:

Phase 1: The first 40 (right now; I just got the pack of cards)

• 40 New Year cards in the opening salvo

Each card is:

• Hand numbered

• hand inscribed by me (who knows, maybe someone else too)

Each envelope includes:

• A New Year letter that functions as a story map or an actual rundown of 2025, not a social flex

• One page from a story: Each card gets a different page, so you’re literally holding a fragment of the longer work. It’s part of a 125 page novella, don’t worry, there won’t be any filler.

• Some small, strange extras, depending on your generosity

This first run of 40 is the cheapest, roughest, most bootleg this project will ever be. This is the zine version.

Phase 2: THE LONG ARC GOAL 125 TOTAL

If the first 40 sell, I’ll do three more small waves through the the Chinese Lunar New Year in February (Year of the Horse) until we cap at:

• 40 / 25 / 20/ 48 → 133 cards total1

That’s it. 133 cards. 133 letters. 133 people in the experiment.

Phase 3: The ghost book

If we hit that full 133:

I will print a novella, the long-form version of this story, and sell it to card-holders for one dollar above print + landing cost.

There will be exactly 133 copies.

No reprints. No second edition. No ebook. No POD. Nothing.

That means the first “book” from Television Sky will be mine, bootleg as hell, before we’re fully incorporated or fancy or ready, on the brink of being fucking homeless, rabid, probably psychotic. Sorta on the nose as far as on message goes right?

You’re not just buying a card. You’re buying into a one-time-only press run that will never exist again.

SIGN UP HERE

Why THIS? Why NOW?

Because this is what it looks like when you live close enough to the edge that one landlord’s decision can kick the floor out from under you.

Last January, the emergency was a roof full of snow and a kitchen ceiling collapsing into our lives, months of crumpled up bills for Doordash because we couldn’t use the space, mold, everything damp and sad all the time, me parading my trauma, dancing for coins, discounting editing I shouldn’t have. We were literally doing snow-load math on a hundred-year-old flat roof while dirty meltwater rained on the stove and my coffee maker.

I wrote about it in a piece called “Homeless in January”. That was Move #1.

A few choice lines from that for context:

“Because the last few years have been hard for everyone, we live on the razor’s edge of existing in modern America. As debt laden or above as your average citizen, with less savings to match…”

“The melt was raining down into our kitchen. The roof of this building is severely compromised. We rent.”

“Sometime tomorrow the ceiling is going to cave in.
We will have to evacuate.”

“It is painful and in the United States shameful to admit that you need help of this kind. The greater portion of the population sees it as bad planning or a moral failure…”

“It pains me beyond words that even though it’s not the best apartment in the world, I’m about to be forced to abandon the last place I will ever remember seeing my best friend and sister in my house and in my room.”

We survived that, but barely. With a lot of help ( and and , and BR Yeager and , and and and a special shout to . I couldn’t tag everyone who helped, donated, or became a client because it was overwhelming and I’m not crying at 6:21pm on a Sunday) a lot of panic, a lot of mopping, a lot of debt, overrun costs, PTSD, stress.

Now the disaster isn’t gravity and snowpack. It’s retaliation by any other name, slow-walked maintenance, quietly weaponized non-renewal. Same city with a different rental failure mode. Different ceiling, same feeling, but somehow it’s much more personal. We planned to stay here. It’s fairly tolerable. Whole apartment fulla find out though.

If you want to see how bad it got last time from the start, and how I talk when I’m not trying to sell you anything, you can read the full prequel here then just go in chronological order until I sound less outside my fuckin’ mind:

This New Year Letter initiative is the sequel: I want to turn panic into print.

The Structure of Generosity

$15 – New Year Letter & Card (also, the best international option)

• One Television Sky New Year card

• Hand-numbered

• Personally inscribed with your name and some Emil static

• New Year letter that’s actually a story, not social theater bullshit

• One unique page from the long-form story tucked inside

This is the “keep us housed” base. Every one of these matters. And there IS a baked in cost. The first 40 cards are $.35 a pop + $.78 base postage +toner and time.

This is also good if you’re overseas. Because postage has turned into a luxury.

The option for getting the bootleg first book from Television Sky, my first pub, something that BR Yeager’s legendary Pearl Death novella in cards will be classed with.

$35 – Bubble Mailer of Goodies

You get everything above, plus:

• A padded mailer stuffed with small, strange, occultly/curated items from my shelves and trinket box:

  • mini-zines, stickers, weird little prints

  • oddities that should not go into storage

  • ephemera that feels like it fell out of another life

I have a lot of obscure shit. You might as well get some of it before I have to pay movers to haul it one more time, because I’m not boxing everything up. And I’m always downsizing. Who knows, you may get something worth a lot more than the package it came in.

Proof below, this ain’t my first fuckin’ rodeo:

(Rainbow Rat Patreon tier rewards, 2020)

(It was Halloween. Think less Target stuff and candy, because that costs more overhead, and more personal shit from my archives)

(Oh, and do watch for confetti…)

$50+ Full Care Package

You get the card + story letter + unique page, and:

• A bigger, heavier, weirder package

• The more you give, the more I will dig:

  • strange, rare, or out-of-print books

  • limited-run objects

  • odd relics that have lived with me through multiple eras + why they’re important

  • genuinely valuable, but extremely “what the fuck is this” artifacts

This is “Emil raids his own archive for you” tier. The more you give, the more you get. Give me fifty bucks and I may give you a hatpin I wore while I made a milli on tour, give $500 and you may get a Ghostface Killah Adidas track jacket or the only unsigned copy of Fight Club I own (movie cover, I know it’s the original because it’s unsigned) a short story cut from a notebook. You’re a whale with more money than god? I’ll put PEARL DEATH on the block. (go try to find it for sale, or find a price for one of the original run. People who have this do not sell it.)

How to get one

If you want in on the first 40:

Email: EmilOttoman@gmail.com

Use one of these subject lines so I can keep track:

• NEW YEAR LETTER – for the $15 tier

  then GIFT BAG – for the $35 tier

  or GIFT BOX – for $50+ care package (ADD +$10 for a card from my personal collection of greeting cards. yes, it’s a thing. This is in service of. Well, read the one footnote, OK)

In your email, include:

• Your name

• Your mailing address

• Which tier you want

• Whether you’re okay with getting something TRULY weird / obscene / obscure in your package

I’ll respond with payment details (PayPal / Venmo / Cash App / Wise, etc.), confirm you’re in, and assign your card number.

First 40 cards just hit from Amazon.

I have two toner cartridges, a horror-movie landlord arc, a boiling white hot rage in my center, and a laser printer that hasn’t betrayed me yet. I’ll be writing the letter, printing letters, writing and printing pages, hand-numbering and inscribing cards, and packing and mailing envelopes as fast as my broke ass body and executive dysfunctions allow.

Happy Holidays from Television Sky.

About the GoFundMe (because I’m not going to pretend it’s not hovering)

I’ve been resisting the GoFundMe route for years because it feels like competing in the Misery Olympics. I know other people have needs bad or worse than me, and I know the stats for the platform (they’re bad). I know how quickly a feed full of medical and housing emergencies starts to feel like static. I’m worried THIS turns into compassion and giving fatigue at the holidays already.

But I’m also not going to lie: if this card initiative and a very aggressive editing schedule don’t close enough of the gap, I’m probably going to have to write one.

Unless someone has a better idea, (please, someone have a better idea even if GoFundMe is the cultural default) that’s the next card in the deck.

If I end up doing it, I’ll say it explicitly, link it openly, and still keep making the work I know is actually useful to people (the Autopsies, the craft posts, the fiction). I’m not going to paywall the one net-good thing I’ve brought into the world because my landlord decided my insistence on not living in a potential tinderbox of code violations was worth all this.

But before I press “publish” on a GoFundMe, I wanted to try this:

• Make something real

• Make it limited

• Make it haunted

• Let people help in a way that gives them an object, a story fragment, a future book, not just a receipt and a happy feeling.

How you can help

If you’ve read this far, thank you. Here’s the practical part:

• Buy a card if you can.
  $15 gets you a hand-numbered New Year letter, an inscription, and a page of the story.

• Go weird with a gift bag or gift box if you’re able.
  $35 or $50+ helps us cover deposits, movers, and all the non-insured costs of getting out. I promise you the mail you get back will be worth opening.

• If money is tight but you give a shit:

  • Share this post.

  • Point people here who would love strange limited-run ephemera.

  • Hire me for editorial work if you’re sitting on a story or a book and want someone a lot of people in the fiction tab are calling “The Editor of Substack” to tear into it at a competitive starting rate. (specifically I’m looking for full manuscripts ready for a long haul editorial, short stories, and novellas. emilottoman@gmail.com subject line EDITORIAL INQUIRIES, serious inquiries ONLY at this time.)

This is me trying to handle it in-house with family and community before I resort to the full GoFundMe siren.

I hate my family being here again. I hate “Christmas letter” in our world translating to “notice to vacate.” But if we’re going to go through it, I’d rather make something sharp and beautiful with you while we fight.

Good luck and Godspeed.

Fade twice, stand up twice.

— Emil

ANOTHER OPTION! FROM EDITH BOW!

(Me and my fiancee/wife/PIC/Love of my Life, , god we’re cute, just do not FUCK WITH US)

Edith Bow is doing personalized, stream-of-consciousness, zero draft stories for anyone with money and a prompt. INFO BELOW. Her first one was already a mind blower, read it below.

EDITH BOW'S EVICTION WAR POST

If you’ve read Edith’s prose, you know there’s nothing out there like her. She is one of one.

She’s as good an editor as I am after ten years apprenticeship with me as her biggest fan, and I thank GOD every day she’s going to be a psychologist and not an editor, because fuck, she’s good.

Ether Dreams

1997

I will not be putting in the prompt; so y’all just have to figure it out. Winner gets a prompt half off…

Read more

4 months ago · 14 likes · 7 comments · Edith Bow and Edward.Marlo.Ruiz

From December 6, 2025 → March 19, 2026, I am writing personalized, stream-of-consciousness, zero-draft stories to anyone who wants to support my relocation fund or just wants to middle finger the patriarchy.

When you donate, you give me a three word prompt:[ 1 noun, 1 verb, 1 adjective]

• I will have to incorporate all 3 into the story somehow, stream of consciousness, zero draft; just how I’ve always done it and how you see it here on this publication (besides very specific niche stories que in The Diary Entries)

• You have 2 options here: Be tagged with your publication as a personal anecdote, and I will write whatever it made me feel at the time, that will be completely public.

• If you decide to keep it private, I will email you a personalized note on how it made me feel, the post will still go public with your name as [REDACTED] and you will have an email link that connects to the title.

• All posts go public, all posts will be free to read.

• None of the posts will support bigotry, provide harmful phobics, and be anti anything I ethically stand for; if you give me money and expect me to write hateful diatribe, thanks for the free money, no returns for bigots! If it’s especially Nazi propaganda, my WW2 grandfather’s ghost is standing over you with a rifle to the head and my bloody knuckles aren’t bloody enough.

Tier Options:

• $20 → 400 words

• $30 → 600 words

• $50 → 1,000 words

• $75 → 1,500 words

• $100 → 2,000 words

• $100+ → No word limit + ultra-personal extras

• Any number you want where you have issues with systemic oppression and want to middle finger corruption is up to your discretion. The writing project is purely optional.

P.S. I might write over the cap limit no matter what you give me, if I absolutely love the prompt. These limits are for me personally to restrain myself, but I have no guarantees this can turn into a series in the future with just three words. If it becomes a book, you get the book for free with my signature, a note and acknowledgement if you allow me.

She signed the whole post off with this and it did not make me cry.

One day, we will return to some sense of normalcy in this chaos, you and I, my co-pilot in life, in eons, untold by time: Emil Ottoman, “The Unofficial Editor of Substack”, “The Editor”, my fiancée. It’s no coincidence we unintentionally used Ichi the Killer in both of our posts. We share distinct similarities and that’s what makes us powerful. I will support you in any adventure we undertake because our world isn’t conquered yet. Thank you for being patient with me as I attempted to decipher our next steps.

No darling, thank you.

Last but never least:

Woo, she gon’ hate me, but this is my mom. Your mom. The universal mom. Moms. Tressa Brown. The Oracle. BA in English Lit. Retiring (we’re trying) dog and cat groomer. She is 74 years old and she does not DESERVE ANY OF THIS SHIT. Before my fiancee and my moms end up on the street I will commit atrocities.

Plus, she’s fucking adorable.

(Song is for mom, fuck the rest of you.)

(Sarah Sottile, 2019, Even the Mona Lisa’s Falling Apart, by Emil Ottoman)

THIS MONKEY’S GOING TO HELL

I mostly post editing and writing content (so you can hire me and become the best you can be; I hope), fiction (some of y’all don’t even remember I write), psychotic (psychedelic) rants, and mental breakdowns in notes.

I compartmentalize my longer rants, psychoses, recommendations, and carny shilling here in the Autoclave. While my instruments from an autopsy are being burnt clean, I can sit at the little metal desk here, sip, and spill tea on my bloodied scrubs.

This one, may be a little long. There’s a lotta ground to cover. So here’s an index for the post I’m probably going to fuck up!

- Fiction Is Culture - Kids Need Books

- The Midnight Vault II (You’re All My Children Now)

- is having a WORSHOP hosted by Television Sky (Details tomorrow)

- There Is No Love In Your Violence

- Renting and Quiet Eviction / OR / Ringo Never Read The Bible

- Break the Anvil

- KILL WRITER’S BLOCK/PUBLISH BEFORE YOU FINISH/THE SAINT CYCLE 8 (UNDONE)

Another Emergency Move!?

AUTOCLAVE INDEX: ONE | TWO | THREE | FOUR (The Fiction Is Culture Rant) | FIVE | SIX

Fiction Is Culture - Kids Need Books

, , , & Anyone who has been wondering why this initiative didn’t launch on Monday. The Undersigned? Something something.

I’m a bastard but local philanthropy, community organizing, mutual aid, shit starting, and violence run through my veins.

For 45 years my father, Mike Schwartz, of Mike’s Bikes in Lexington Park, Maryland, has been running a Christmas Dinner Donation Drive.

Ironically, the first year he gave out, I think, one Christmas Dinner, and it was to my aunt, mom, and company at a shack lovingly referred to as the Refugee Camp.

My father is a better man than me in many, many ways.

There have been years where the Christmas dinner drive provided Xmas dinners for 2500-3000 families. Well over those under the poverty line in St. Mary’s County (where he lives) and several nearby. So when I saw a Facebook post saying he was closing up shop. “45 years is enough” I think it said. It crushed something inside of me.

A few weeks later my crushed faith in humanity was restored.

Mike’s Food Fund (details below) will go on, with his name, but he can’t run it all himself anymore. And he earned that. He broke his neck in January at Nationals riding BMX (in the business we call it an internal decapitation) So, lifting 50 lb sacks of potatoes and 1,500 turkeys in a day is out. He earned that.

Every year Mike’s Food Fund (under new management but I’ll never call it anything but what it is) gives out 2,000+ full Christmas dinners in their community. All anyone has to do is sign up and ask.

There, Proof I’m not full of shit.

(He’s where I get my lovely scowl from)

He’s less involved this year.

He earned that.

He’s one of the only people I know with a library larger than me.

Here’s the ask:

They’re probably not going to hit 1,500+ donated books.

IS Fiction Culture?

Kids books are cheap. Go on Thriftbooks, any discount book website, pick something cheap you cared about growing up.

You have until the 14th to get a book to the shop, the meals go out on the 17th

Prove Fiction is Culture.

Send a book C/O FIC of Fiction is Culture to

Mike’s Bikes

21310 Great Mills Rd,

Lexington Park, MD

20653

Is this a personal initiative? Yes. Does it hopefully help create a new generation of little readers who will grow up and maybe read a book once they get out of school? We can hope.

, feel free to run it.

The Midnight Vault II (You’re All My Children Now)

98 Stories submitted? I edited or gave notes on more than 20 of them. I’d like to thank for asking me to be one of the three editors suggested for the project.

Look! They put out a Gift Guide (click the pic for the link. Hint, it’s books. But you can hire any of the editors too ya know.)

But what I found sexy, was the By The Numbers! (Again, click the pic for the link)

What I could have told you as an editor from personal experience: Horror was going to come in last minute and sci-fi were early birds.

What I found most fascinating: They found NO correlation between length of story and open or click rates. (Whether the story was finished or not, well, another story, but still fascinating.)

My fiancee is blowing through the entire Vault faster than I’ve ever seen. I’m picking my way through it because of.. Well, we’ll get to that. But the point is this was a huge success, and I’m honored to have been a part of it, if only on the backside. I’m proud of my clients and also everyone else who submitted.

Thanks to , , and (anyone else I’m sorry I’m bad with names and need to get this post written._

Here’s to next year.

In the meantime, and until next year…

Why not browse the whole Vault

is having a WORSHOP hosted by Television Sky (Details RIGHT NOW)

and Television Sky present ANOTHER DEBUT WORKSHOP!

CLICK THE PIC TO SIGN UP NOW, CLASS STARTS SECOND WEEK OF JANUARY

($50 OFF for anyone who registers in the first 24 hours)

$400 • 6 Weeks • 10 Seats

Haly, the Moonlight Bard, is bringing her sell-out GenCon worldbuilding workshop (the one you’d otherwise have to physically be there for) exclusively to Television Sky.

This is the remastered, expanded version. And you don’t even have to leave your chair.

WHO IS HALY!?

WHO IS HALY?!

Haly, the Moonlight Bard, is a professional worldbuilding consultant, author, and game designer.

• Five-time WorldAnvil community judge

• 2024’s “Most Helpful Camper” and “Eternal Sage”

• Fiction featured in Substack’s Top in Fiction (August 2025)

She’s been dreaming up new worlds since 1983 when she first learned Dungeons & Dragons.

She specializes in contemporary worldbuilding, but has deep experience in fantasy, sci-fi, and historical settings—the kind of worlds that grab you by the face, kiss you hard, mug you, and leave you in a damp alley of your own making.

WHY YOU’RE SIGNING UP:

You want to unlock the secrets and write stories people want to live in, not just read.

Worldbuilding is how you do that.

It’s also one of the most misunderstood parts of craft: often denigrated, treated as an optional add-on, or shoved into fantasy/sci-fi only. In reality, worldbuilding is a critical step in any kind of storytelling, and in a whole lot of communication that pretends it isn’t storytelling at all.

In this workshop, you’ll learn:

• What worldbuilding actually is

• What it is not (If you’re dumping walls of text, something’s gone wrong)

• Why every genre from epic fantasy to litfic to “I swear this is just a work email” depends on it

This workshop is perfect for:

• Authors in ANY genre

• Non-fiction writers (yes, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, grindset assholes: looking at you)

• Game designers, TTRPG folks, and anyone else who builds worlds for other brains to inhabit

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN & MAKE

Over six weeks, you will:

• Gain a thorough understanding of worldbuilding and its importance to narrative, regardless of genre

• Develop and practice new creative-thinking skills that apply to all forms of storytelling

• Learn a five-point creative-thinking framework to build a “world” from the ground up

• Develop a “world” overflowing with conflict, drama, and story potential

• Draft an original short story set in your new “world”

By the end, you won’t just have ideas. You’ll have a functioning narrative ecosystem and a draft that proves it.

WHAT’S INCLUDED

This is not “six Zoom calls and vibes.” You get:

• Weekly video lectures and text lessons

• Downloadable PDF materials

• Unlimited questions and discussion in the class space hosted on Wet.ink

• Weekly “office hours” with Haly for fast, direct replies

• A group project and collaboration opportunities

• Feedback from classmates and your instructor

• A private community space for discussion, questions, feedback, and resource-sharing

You keep everything: assignments, feedback, discussions, PDFs, the whole pile.

LOGISTICS

• Duration: 6 weeks

• Price: $400 (with $50 off for anyone who signs up in the first 24 hours)

• Seats: 10 (when it’s full, it’s full)

CLIC THE PIC AND SIGN UP

Come build a world people actually want to live in. Then set it on fire, with love in your heart.

There Is No Love In Your Violence

I’m not explaining shit except to : I’m not one for brevity. (Still hunting you guys for sport, can’t wait to talk about my love hate relationship to DFW.)

Renting and Quiet Eviction / OR / Ringo Never Read The Bible

Remember how we met? If you’ve known me on this platform long enough, it’s within reason that I could say “hey, remember that time the ceiling of my family’s apartment came down in January and Substack helped us get enough money to move and saved our asses and then everything proceeded to today?” Yeah, fun times.

I was the first beneficiary of what would eventually under the organization of turn into Fiction is Culture. An amazing community support network that saved my ass, has helped pay bills, rent, buy groceries, paid for kitten heart meds. Yeah, it’s a self organizing net win for everyone.

I learned one thing this year for certain.

Don’t do things the right way.

I’ve been more absent lately than I’d like because we’re about to be housing insecure again, only this time it’s going to be because I did what my lease asked of me.

We were lucky to get this spot. It’s got a kitchen that’s cramped and the front is too open: it felt like a good thing at the time. But there’s a groovy accent wall and I’ve got an office. We’re across from my favorite park in the city. It’s in budget. It’s in OUR neighborhood.

It took us most of the year after moving in to unpack. I threw away all the moving boxes. Yeah, got shit just about tolerable.

But then the back steps, they aren’t up to code, and my lease says to report any issues with the building to maintenance through a portal. So I do.

A week later when I send screenshots from the portal request to our only contact for our management company in a text, well, the next day they send people out.

This same basic story also happened with the basement door, which didn’t lock, you could just pull it open.

Now, I may be carrying a DX of ADHD and Panic Disorder, but if in July the ceiling in the middle of the apartment starts to leak, I might start to have a little PTSD. But, I reported it to the portal.

Ten or so days passed. Nothing.

I reasonably ask for documentation in writing as to when we can expect someone to come out and look at the ceiling. And I text our one contact again. The next day, out they come to look at it. The maintenance man says it’s still wet, and yeah, it would be, you took ten days to come out and even look at it, water had been pooling up there that entire time from an HVAC condenser coil freezing over and then melting off straight down onto the ceiling. Maintenance man even said he knew what it was, and it wasn’t the first time it had happened.

Shoulda rung some alarm bells right there, right? Hey, I never said I was smart.

Maintenance man has one of his crew try a quick fix, and screw the ceiling up so they can come back and mud over it, I’m pretty sure. So about twenty screws and 16 hours later the ceiling collapses outside my bedroom. Mom wakes me up because she’s got a fucked up sense of humor and lets me walk out onto this pile of wet ceiling dried on the floor hard as rocks, stepping on goddamn Legos. Dance off it with her laughing. Send pictures of the ceiling collapse and oh, they’re out the next day.

It’s not the best job and it leaves a fine layer of dust coating everything we own, but at the end of the day, there is a ceiling.

At this point the rate of my psychosis is exceeding the rate of my family unit’s ability to tolerate it, but I’ve seen a pattern and you know, OK, I won’t put in any more service requests.

Then in October water starts to leak out the ceiling fixture, the electrical one, with the light, out of the middle of it, the screw holding the glass of the fixture in place, for sixteen hours. Enough so that overnight it leaves a small lake on the honestly pretty decent not hardwood but better than average fake hardwood floors. It’s the thick stuff, not the thin grey imitation wood flooring you find in flipper houses that peels all over the place and as a rule, never, ever levels.

“Emil, this doesn’t sound that bad, it was just a drip out a light fixture.”

Someone reading this MIGHT be saying that, so allow me to educate you.

If water is coming OUT YOUR FUCKING LIGHT FIXTURE, YOUR ELECTICAL IS NOT COMPARTMENTALIZED FROM WATER INTRUSION, WHICH IS A PRETTY BIG DEAL IF YOU DON’T LIKE HOUSES YOU LIVE IN BURNING THE FUCK DOWN.

I make a portal request for a check of the electrical under building code, a plan, and a timeline. For the record, none of this is out of bounds.

In 2018 St. Louis city adopted standardized IMPCC Building Codes. NEC is National Electrical Code. They’re pretty clear on what is and isn’t code.

NEC 110.3(B): Equipment must be installed and used per manufacturer’s instructions.

NEC 110.12: Workmanship must be neat; equipment kept free of corrosion or contamination.

NEC 408.4(A): Every circuit and modification shall be legibly identified on the panel directory. Labeling is mandatory, not optional.

NEC 110.26 & 240.24: Panels and circuits must have safe access and clearance.

IPMC 604.1 & 604.3: Electrical facilities must be maintained in safe, approved condition and free from hazards due to deterioration or moisture.

They came out and replaced the light fixture.

OK, so first off, all they did was replace the fixture, and when I looked up and saw the junction box, I knew there were about to be issues.

Because that junction box is not the sort of corroded that happens in one year. It has chronic, and iconic corrosion.

This, in its entirety, was their response to my request for an electrical check. A good enough fix. A coverup. Soothe the tenant, who should be happy they have an apartment in the first place.

This might have pushed me over some imaginary breaking point. Some panic line filled with PTSD from the previous winter, but I sent them portal requests. Nothing. This drove my panic. I said I would be forced to escalate to code enforcement if they didn’t respond. Which they didn’t. Which I expected by that point.

Now, if you live in an apartment, or you’ve ever been housing insecure in a state with almost no tenant rights, you should know once you invoke code enforcement, it doesn’t matter how corrupt your city or how stacked everything is against you. You’ve crossed the motherfucking Rubicon. You don’t get to turn back. You either do it, or you don’t get anything but a place to live for the entire rest of your tenancy. You’re a problem. I’d done what my lease demanded, and in doing so, already become a problem. After you get them to build a new porch on your unit for safety hazards, whether they needed to five years ago or not, you’re probably not getting your lease renewed anyway because you cost money and they can raise the rent. New back porch.

I’ve often said my hubris would be my eventual downfall, but this wasn’t hubris. For once it was trying to do the right thing. The silence from all fronts in management overpowered my tinnitus though. I don’t know if they thought I was bluffing, or just didn’t care, but the next day I reported them and called down for a full safety code inspection on the building. You don’t have to, but I let them know I had done what I said I was going to do. There, that’s probably the hubris, but it was also in good faith.

Next morning I get my first email from my landlord ever.

He seemed a little reactive and insulted.

His last of three emails that day started off “The building is and always has been up to code.”

Anyway, after a clean inspection structural cited code violations on both internal and external.

Electric, is another story. I’m pretty sure he thinks I want to sue him. I don’t. I want to live in a safe code compliant rental unit, as close to the American Dream as I could think to get in 2025. First electrical inspection wasn’t carried out because this is a one party state and I was filming them. Failure to carry out the inspection is process obstruction, a misdemeanor. File an ethics complaint. The Chief Electrical Inspector gets involved and tries to predicate the inspection on my agreeing not to film. Yeah, no, this is a one party consent state and I have that right. He says if I don’t agree to terms, he won’t show up for the inspection, which makes it a landlord walkthrough, not a city inspection, for the record.

Nov 3 I get an email giving 24hr notice of inspection. Panic and prepare. The next morning I get an email saying my landlord canceled the inspection to consult counsel. There’s an important point here and it’s easy to miss, landlords cannot set nor can they cancel official city inspections, which means he either got permission from the Chief Electrical Inspector, or this was intimidation. The 5th I get another 24hr notice of inspection.

Figuring by now after all the getting everyone but the press involved these people may hold a little animosity towards me, my fiancee is there to do the talking, and I’m there to do the filming. Convenient because soon as I open the door and try to talk, my landlord, the electrical inspector, and the maintenance crew all come close to walking through me, ignoring most or all of what I’m saying. I’m 6’3” and 265lbs, so this is impressive by itself.

I follow to film what happens. The electrical inspector pretends he doesn’t speak the same language as me, and they corner me in the bathroom doorway. Between being ignored wholesale and treated very poorly in my own home, I have a panic reaction. I push the inspector and head maintenance man back slow until I’ve reached the doorway to the living room. This is when the head maintenance man starts to yell at me. My fiancee notices, thank god, and tells the landlord to control his man. By all that’s holy and the grace of a higher power, he did, sending him out of the unit and leaving me shaking.

My fiancee helps calm me down while she talks to the chief electrical inspector, my ears are ringing, I don’t consent to anything, but the official service request record says I do, and they all leave.

A few days ago they replaced the junction box and put up a light so blinding bright daylight white it will give my fiancee ocular migraines.

I’d call it institutional lighting, but it would be an insult to institutions and how they’re lit.

They make some other shoddy minor repairs and leave.

I’ve lost days, time, money, energy, and mental health to this entire endeavor.

So since I have an invisible disability, I ask for some reasonable accommodations from my landlord. He asks for proof. I send proof. He asks for better proof. I have an emergency $250 telemed visit tomorrow, I think. No, Yeah, tomorrow. Thursday.

Time to take the L.

What’s the L?

I didn’t say the quiet part out loud but the soft retaliation in my landlord’s second email to me ever was declaring that he would not renew our lease. Now, on the face of it, this is straight retaliation. He’s supposedly not allowed to do that for a tenant having called in a safety complaint to DPS. The loophole is, it looks like he’s going to get away with it.

Even the free service, Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, who handles this sort of thing, said come back with an eviction.

I’m an archivist. It’s one of my fucking nicknames. To say I have an evidentiary log archiving every single thing that’s happened about this situation would be a vast understatement. However we’re nuclear waste to attorneys, because no one was hurt so it’s a low value case, it’s complex at this point because I keep receipts, so it would cost an estimated 30-90k billable hours to litigate for what would end up being at most a mid five figure payout in total.

If the stars aligned and the universe were in any way fair, the return at court tops out at a quarter mil.

… That was a good NYE. I wish I still drank sometimes.

Anyway.

We’re less prepared and more scarred than last time. We didn’t want to move. Hell we liked it well enough here. March 21, 2026, our lease is up, and barring act of god or that blind bitch lady justice, we gonna have to be gone.

In the middle of incorporating a publishing enterprise.

At the holidays.

And while I’m never too proud to beg, you can only lean on your support network so much without compassion or giving fatigue taking hold. Then you’re that motherfucker always needin’ something. Asking for charity, a handout, motherfucker, can you spare a dime? And people get numb to it.

So with all credit cards in the house and then some still maxed from the first move, which though impossible without the Substack community, especially & organizing promises I made and folded under in the end, , to list a few of the most vocal who come immediately to mind, and with inflation at record highs for consumer goods and services, during a rolling mental health crisis I created, hurt more than one relationship with people in my own house, by trying to do the right thing, make my absent father proud, stand up to the system, the bullies, whatever. Doesn’t matter, it’s just shit and it happens.

What I have done, is I’ve, and I’m choking down bile while I type this; I have written GoFundMe’s that collectively have raised nearly $200,000.00, all of them filled or overfilled, including the one for my dead best friend’s cunt narcissist mother. So, I’ll write a GoFundMe.

The least fun part of this is going to finding out which is worth more, my dead best friend and the continued care of her mother who hates everyone her daughter called a best friend, or our living but desperate three person family unit.

The contingencies here are vast. This will be harder and more expensive than last time. It’s the holidays. Closed Mouths don’t get fed.

I’m not lowering my prices.

I’m not going to dance and beg for money.

There may be some really fucking hilarious and neurotic posts coming back though.

I’m not offering holiday “deals” for editing.

I’m not going to promise hard deadlines unless I absolutely have to or you have a LOT of money and are VERY serious about your MS.

The only thing I’m doing is lowering the cost of my Substack.

$5 a month

$30 a year

(Substack will NEVER pay your fucking bills, that’s the joke everyone isn’t in on.)

$300 Founder’s tier will remain the same, because it’s worth MUCH more than $300 a year: (LIFETIME PAID ACCESS, Private consult for editorial advice 4 times a year, & a custom thank you gift (a postcard, a short story, a lil’ care package, a blood pact)

Yeah, for $300 off the rip your dumbass could be getting a 10 page short story edit or limited scope but pretty deep dev or line consult EVERY QUARTER IN PERPETUITY, but you’re broke or can’t do math. Do you want one cookie now, or do you want a cookie every three months until I quit editing and disappear (which given my footprint at this point would take some fucking work.)

Break the Anvil

I haven’t written anything of any real use or feeling since June. I don’t believe in writer’s block, but I do know I have perfectionist and completionist tendencies, and I get caught up in my own concepts.

My suggestion is to just get something out there. Don’t think, just do. The same thing I said to , stop getting in your own fucking way.

Now he’s on the rip.

Orwell wrote, complaining of dying metaphors:

“In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about.”

For me the anvil in question since June has been not writing.

Luckily, I’m a writer, I control what happens here. I’m the hammer, and now I’m going to break the anvil.

If any of the following offends you.

I meant it.

KILL WRITER’S BLOCK/PUBLISH BEFORE YOU FINISH/THE SAINT CYCLE 8 (UNDONE)

The Saint Cycle

A Preface for What Wasn’t/

(Last year Jillian Luft gifted us with the novel, and the concept, of Scumbag Summer. This year, I’ve declared Scumbag Summer 2. When proposing it, my fiancee and creative constant companion said “We need hard dicks and violence for Scumbag Summer!” Her enthusiasm was the perfect vibe. Instant it was out of her mouth, asked if I could use it as a title, and made a meme of it with her quote at the bottom. At the time I didn’t know the title would be a part in the Saint Cycle. has saved my life, and very likely oh so many others, every day since my best friend hanged herself in 2023. Edith immediately got on a plane, the next day, and moved here. Without her impossible act, it’s past even odds I’d be dead now. Violent delights do have violent ends and all. Sarah Sottile would have been 39 today. I will take solace on her retired birthday how I can, by being thankful for the love of my life and the lengths she went to when the worst thing ever happened, in my mother who completes our small family unit, and by holding court with Sarah’s other closest friends, those of us that survive. They are very few, and most of them are not on Substack. If you’re reading this and you do not fit the descriptors above, you will be offered no shelter in these words. No one but those who know shall be forgiven.)

(video chosen for offensive content, but it’s set to a song Sarah really liked and a mutual friend of ours suggested it)

HARD DICKS AND VIOLENCE

The Saint has spoken.

You have spoken.

Fakesgiving-

Let the violence speak.

Her mother makes her dinner and she mistakes water chestnuts for potatoes somehow. Imagine being so impaired. New bags. And she texted downstairs the last words her mother deserved, This is how you show your love?! Dipped in acid. The black Moleskine has a sticker of the tarot card for the three of swords center front. Heartbreak. Grief. Betrayal. Sorrow. Painful truth. It’s one of the most unmistakable emotionally intense cards, never mind it. You’re coming up through the basement into the bottom unit of the apartment, untouched by the violence upstairs, all the sweet rot and mold and never paying back goddamn Doordash detritus stuffed in contractor bags.

Everyone should have a near-death experience at least once, every week, maybe even today. Could you imagine the clarity that people would have if they were brought to the edge and flung back into life violently on a regular basis?

The Glock 30 is screwed up with a Dead Air Mojave suppressor, running .45 ACP Hornady Custom 230gr XTP Subsonic shells. Gucci loadout, they’re the only boutique brand of ammunition blooms at subsonic. People don’t look up. If they did they would have noticed you watching from your bedroom window, silhouetted by the blinking star lights and yellow lights for Nytheris, Nyx, The Jewel Claw Rook, your fiancee? Integratedisintegration? The myth is more true than the truth could ever because no one can believe the truth, but a myth, a myth sounds right. If they looked up they would have seen you in the window and maybe realized they got clocked with those bags, and when the boys packed up late into their SUVs and left you slept more sound than a corpse in a cardboard box. They let criminals kill each other. Her name is Nytheris, she who reaps in the night. You are Prometheus, or you’re you, or you’re about to jimmy the lock on the downstairs unit’s door from the stairs to the basement and it’s unlocked. So be it. The thing, everyone is replaceable, toy soldiers. So many useless things would be made obsolete, and beauty could again be found in the word priority. I’ve had people tell me, “Tomorrow isn’t promised to you.” And if you are thinking that you are waking up tomorrow, know that that is an assumption.

Choose your own fucking adventure.

Open the door. Lights on in the kitchen to the left. Open concept, only one bedroom door downstairs, no kill funnel hallway, the nightmare you wake up in every day. Rounds from the Glock so muffled they’re half a shoe stomping and a slide racking back, a brass tinkle, jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the. Xmas has been taken down upstairs. Winter is over. Two people on the couch watching muted television at 1:30. Shoes fall, tangoes down (1, 2), brains frozen on the floor by morning. Sweep left, 9o’clock, muscle memory and six milligrams of my friend, my friend. Through the earplugs you hear commotion from the kitchen, back door. Cut the pie wide across the big open room fast is slow, smooth is fast, without all the furniture should be there. Lights on in the kitchen harsh fluorescent so everyone is dead already. Drunk young buck always fucking up his beater Honda with a Jansport backpack and a duffel reaching for the back doorknob. Nope, nope in the back, nope opens his head, Agua de Sandía. Dropped (3), slumped and sliding shit slow down the door. Kitchen Island, his old lady ugly, and the Abuela, bloated and shriveled like a wet raisin left in a puddle under the sun for days, offgassing CO₂ and host to microbial rot already. If they’re yelping you can’t hear it but as soon as a mouth opens on his old lady she catches a round carving her skull open, flapping, eyes roll, she’ll twitch. Outside the T zone. Abuela. Close on Abuela. Bitch scowls. Hear her yelling upstairs sometimes. When they party on the weekends and Nyx can’t study, gets a headache from it. “Tú vienes a robar, matar y destruir—¡pero Cristo vino para dar vida, y vida en abundancia! Y eso, ni tú, ni el diablo, me lo pueden quitar.” Her muffled swan song punctuated by a triple tap (4). Fucked around.

You walk around the kitchen island. Man’s woman is crumpled and twitching, gargling, one eye blinking wild. There’s always more blood. Smelly nickels. Never forget it, there’s always more blood. No prayers for the players, one right between the eyes. Back of her head opens against the cabinets and splatters the floor, more blood. Whole kitchen full of found out. (5) Slide locks back, one mag down. You eye the bags.

I told him it needed your name, and we waited for him to write it.

The kids.

There's little film left in my visual memory but watching his hand shake with that pen in his hand. Drop the mag. Watching him take a firm breath to quiet his nerves and still his fingers. Pocket it and take out the second. watching him perform his impeccable cursive invoking your name on paper. Seat the mag. Watching him throw the pen down and turn away. Hot weapon.

Three, in the bedroom, asleep. The one night they’re not at the sister’s house, of course. You know, because no one busts in on a stash holdover and kills a house full of women, men, and children.

Saturn Devouring his Son. Goya’s Black Walls. There is only the Work. You open the door slow.

Three, Six, Nine
Goose drank wine
Monkey got run over on the streetcar line
The line broke, the monkey dead flat
And they all went to heaven on a little goat’s back

She called the doctor and the doctor said:
Let’s get the rhythm of the head — ding-dong!
We waited for him to write it. Pull the slide back when you thumb the release so it doesn’t metal slacrack chambering that first round, wakin’ them kids before ashes, ashes they all stay down.

And he prodded open the door of the kiddy room. 4, 6, maybe 12, even number ages sleepin’ on sheets and reclaimed alley mattresses stained by previous owner’s pains then propped against a dumpster with kiddy colored sheets painted in threadbare cartoons covering from youngest on up, the boy you’ve never seen not face shook scared, the girl who ran back and forth down the alley after the rain splashing puddle water everywhere in sandals, and the chubby almost tween who stole Sarah’s clothes when they moved in that first night with all the adults on the other side in the other apartment in the other house and ransacked the basement storage, stole your childhood. Another story. Saint used to say Choose your own adventure, said you’ve always existed, said you’ll exist forever, said you’ll outlive the fucking universe, said a lot of things before the rope went tight. And before them kids were sleeping on dirty mattresses under sunbleached Minions, when the bottom unit here wasn’t open yet last summer they were in a tent pitched behind the unit west of the house, where the sister to the sister who rents this abattoir lives. The sister to the sister with her head leaking onto the kitchen floor cooling.

Watching him take a firm breath to quiet his nerves and still his fingers / there’s no choice but to finish / watching him perform his impeccable cursive invoking your name on paper / business is business and a sleeping witness is still a liability / watching him throw the pen down and turn away.

You always meant to be kind, walking around the dark little room with those mattresses against the walls. Nothin’ but time froze in this space. The boy is shirtless on his back, sheets thrown knotted up around him, sweaty in a cold room, chest rising and falling. She called the doctor and the doctor said:
Let’s get the rhythm of the head — ding-dong! (6) Glock 30 runs .45 ACP. Naturally subsonic round because it’s a fat slow bitch, but buy the Gucci load Subsonic designer Hornady Ball Hollows and at the range you’re dinging them the bullet retains nearly all its pent up kinetic energy. .45ACP is about 11.5mm across the center line. On penetrating the skull of a sleeping raw boned little Mexican boy by design the bullet expands soon as it finds a place to live, doubling in diameter to 23mm across centerline and transferring 890 fps of kinetic energy into soft and hard tissue. Children have soft bones. The entry wound is stellate from gas expansion under the skin tearing it outwards in a ripple and the skull fractures bloom ice cracking radial and concentric, blowing out shards through paper bag kidskin where intense cranial pressure exceeds bone integrity. On its way to the terminus the bullet causes catastrophic cranial laceration and permanent cavitation, disrupting a wide path wound channel expanding with the fat bitch bullet, spreading blood on brain in an instant harmonic subarachnoid, intracerebral, and epidural hemorrhage. Blood kills brain tissue. Peace is the knowing of the first round down angled into the T zone turned his brainstem to evaporated constituent biological particulate matter. The physics of the egg rolling off the table. It can’t roll back up onto the table all back together again. The egg won’t have a fifth birthday. The first round exits just as the second marks its path with more hydrostatic shock full cranial vault collapse and bone displacement, like the kid’s head shudders slow and shimmying left right across his cheeks, and then half his entire head pops, splattering the wall with his dreams, lower jaw intact, cheekmeat and part of his nose blowing back against the dirty pillow, and one blank glassed over wide open blood splattered eye pointed straight up asking god why the fuck this happened? A four year old with a quarter of a head, the rest peels out and blows up onto the wall, mists into the air, splatters on his pillow exists everywhere it shouldn’t. He was so broken, barely existing on this plane, distracted by looking for the spaces you occupied.

The idea is to ring around the rosy and land all six shots before the youngest son shitpisses himself and it smells.

She called the doctor and the doctor said:
Let’s get the rhythm of the head — ding-dong! (7) The little girl, the polite shy middle kid, was curled fetal, thumb in mouth, permanently six years old. Not as blown out as her little brother but a Hollywood VFX team couldn’t make her a fraction to human again, closed casket material, and at least family probably got some cute pictures of her tucked away.

I don’t even think I did anything wrong. That’s the wost part. I feel like I did the right things.

She called the doctor and the doctor said:
Let’s get the rhythm of the head — ding-dong! ding-dong! (8) The twelve year old chubby ADHD girl who never smiled stomping back and forth endless circuits around the downstairs sugar high and restless with feet slapping so hard and fast they sounded metal snored through her siblings turning into Cronenberg body horror homage, shot mapping later, if they’re lucky, the trajectory of her head’s components onto the corner wall and back of the door. All you see is her trying to stuff herself into Sarah’s big girl clothes, black bra, black dress, playing her neverfuture at the end of the hallway by the steps to the basement, after they stole half the storage and took it upstairs, before the shaking boy, their sitter, their older older brother, sixteen maybe, walked down the hall looking like you were ICE outside. Black nitriles. Close the door without a dull click on the way out, it’s a skill. Fuck that kid, and fuck the head she don’t got anymore. Close the curtains on those big fuck front windows they leave open eternal with all the lights on, kill all the lumens but the porch and the kitchen. One lone ranger fly, a few weeks early to the scene buzzes around the muck. The Brains on the walls, the blood on the floor, the dead Abuela cursing you with John 10:10 and the one bad shot that left the poor grey girl you step over in agony for precious eternities while her synapses fired their last, and the only thing important is those bags on the buck who was abandoning all of them to a man with a gun. Yank ‘em off the coward, toss em on the island. 3 bricks vac wrapped in the ugly little duffel. Jansport covered in blood, unzip and it’s full of cash. Rolled and bundled mixed bills, bound every one by thick blue rubber band.

Mama, mama, I’m so sick

Call the doctor, quick quick quick

Doctor, doctor, will I die?

Count to five and you’ll be alive

One, two, three, four, five— I’m alive!

I don't think there's a reality that would have allowed the two of us to meet.

Leave the bricks and some cash a voodoo offering for the SLPD joint taskforce. Render unto Caesar. Your OG said you gotta pick one brother, the work or the cash, never both. Mexicans with five bricks of powder and pocket money is a would be a tragic drug war massacre on FOX2 News, but you leave the Praetorians their cut, they muzzle the news, active investigation, no compromise, win for FED district 44 DEA Mustang Federal Joint High Drug Trafficking Area Taskforce, and the last 5 foreverminutes turn into an incident report with some pictures stapled to it, signed, filed, and stuffed at the back of the drawer never again seen or cared about, but half the blow still hits the street.

I don't think there's a reality that would have allowed the two of us to meet.

Leave the tribute with a shelf pilfered Santa Muerte candle burning, take someone’s extra keys, find the basement deadbolt. Reload the Glock and tuck it. Leave the way you came. Other room the little four year old has a hard on. No head and a hard little dick. Angel Lust. There a song about that isn’t there?

Something else would have had to end to allow a beginning like that, and we're far too self sacrificing.

Imagine you have felt nothing since before man counted time, because you taught man how to count time, and that’s how long it’s been since you’ve felt touch, emotion, anything but an empty numbness permeating you, seeping into every single moment of your life. And because you gave them time, you gave them fire, you gave them measure, this all goes on at the speed you gave humanity.

I will visit you on Saint’s Day

Winter’s comin’ round again.

Nyx says she had a dream about her. She visits all the time. And you see her, the Saint, Black Madonna of the Roma-

Supernova, you fed off whispered sucrose crystalized from dead tongue

KNOW I CLAW FROM THE OTHER SIDE BLACK BEAR ROAMING, ROARING

FROM THE SKIES

Where you will always find me

{when you were never fully mortal}

standing in front of your dresser, playing with a folded paper crane.

Next - More Violence

(RR Meme, 2023, the annus horribilis, great song)

Gentlepeople of all shapes, sizes, and sorts, as we regain tempo and I steady rhythm, we finish another week as demanded by the Television Sky overhead

Welcome to the Autopsy

I trust you found your invitation and are ready for the show. (Welcome)

Before we go any further, please find a seat in the theater while I prepare my tools and we finish some housekeeping for anyone new:

Autopsies Archive & Guide

HOW TO GET ON MY TABLE (READ THIS)

• Submissions are OPEN 24/7.

• Send up to 5 pages of narrative prose (short story, scene, etc.).

• Format: single-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 pt.

• If you try to sneak in Garamond 10.5 to squeeze more words, I notice. Don’t get cute.

• Email: emilottoman@gmail.com

• Subject line: AUTOPSY (exactly that, nothing else)

• In the email, intro, prelude, body, prayer, confession: introduce yourself and drop your Substack handle. I will byline you if you get chosen.

8-15 people on average over the course of the series ask to be opened up in public. Last week it was only 2, so I solicited 3 weeks worth so y’all could catch up and submit for the 16th autopsy.

What you get:

• If you submit, I try to send short notes even if you don’t make the main cut. I read every entry.

• If I pick you, I’ll do the full autopsy in front of everyone. Weigh every organ. Hundreds of dollars of developmental work for free.

Price when it’s not free:

• Short stories (10 pages or less): $250 flat.

• Longer short stories (up to 15 pages): $250 + $10 a page

• Manuscripts: $0.04/word with gentle or flexible payment plans.

• Ongoing editorial / consuling (I found a better word): $45/hr. Or 2 hrs/mo for $100, 4 hrs/mo for $200.

If you’re broke: still email me. I will often do a quick dev pass on a sample and tell you (1) “trash it” or (2) “you’ve got something.” If you’ve got something and I give a shit, I might take you on cheap. I believe in access.

• You’ll get more from this than you may want if you’re picked. This is my entire life’s work and project for free. All you have to do is offer your words to my scalpel.

• Pay attention, you’ll be a better writer after reading a few of them. archive link below

So be brave, you cowards. Send me your best, your worst, your problem prose.

I WILL NEVER PAYWALL THESE POSTS. I DO THIS FOR SUBSTACK’S FICTION COMMUNITY, FOR THE WRITERS SENDING ME THEIR WORK IN GOOD FAITH, FOR THE LOVE OF OUR CRAFT, & TO HELP WRITERS GROW.

Tip The Ripper

I AM YOUR MIDNIGHT VAULT II EDITOR (if you want it)

CLICK THE PIC FOR SUBMISSION DETAILS

I am one of three suggested editors (along with S.E. Reid and Kristen Weber , both fantastically talented as well) if you want to spit shine an entry for The Midnight Vault II. You have 15(ish) days to submit.

If you’re submitting to Midnight Vault II:

• Subject line: MIDNIGHT VAULT

• I will prioritize you.

• My short story rate for Vault pieces is $200 up to 10 pages

• You get a mostly guaranteed 2-day turnaround, because you’re on a clock.

If you “can’t afford it,” email me anyway. I’m not gatekeeping a publication that could hit print. I am, however, about that paper, pookie.

Editorial Services When You’re Not On The Slab:

• Short stories (10 pages or less): $250 flat.

• Longer short stories (up to 15 pages): $250 + $10 a page

• Manuscripts: $0.04/word with gentle or flexible payment plans. (I’m not a monster)

• Ongoing editorial / “coaching” (I hate that word): $45/hr. Or 2 hrs/mo for $100, 4 hrs/mo for $200.

Why People Listen to Me/Exhibits

Why People Listen to Me/Exhibits

“Emil is The Editor—a pass from him will 100% make you better.” —
“A warlord’s sense of tactical organization.” —
“His edits made me a better writer. Period.” —B.R. Yeager
“Emil Ottoman is the writing community’s resident editor.” —Thaddeus

“I HOPE YOU’RE HAPPY!” —

And that’s a mic drop from my brother.

SANDOLORE’S WORKSHOP IS ALMOST FULL

SIGN UP

• A 6-Week Fiction Workshop for Writers Who Are Ready to Go There

• Led by Sandolore Sykes creator and editor of SUM FLUX

• Starts Nov 14. Fix yourselves. You have six extra days to join.

• 10 spots, 4 left as of posting

• $250 a seat

• two week one on one intensive extension with Sandolore for $100 extra, but WORTH IT

• When you cowards fill it, doors close. Waitlist only

Details and Enrollment

Your Instructor, Sandolore Sykes, presents from the Television Sky and the Mind who Brought you Sum Flux, her debut SOLO writing workshop.

Why? I’m Emil fucking Ottoman and I seek out the best talent, for the most return on investment, with the least bullshit and fluff. Cult names who haven’t taught in a decade, debuts from Indie Horror Queens, from multidisciplinary geniuses who have an IDEA that isn’t what you’re going to get ANYWHERE ELSE.

Sandolore is up. Not ready for her? Give someone who does the gift you won’t give yourself, coward.

But I’ll let her talk, because if it’s worth saying, it’s worth saying again.

They say you can’t teach voice. I say otherwise.

In this course, I’ll guide you through mimetic prose—writing in which form and perception mirror each other, where language doesn’t describe experience but creates it.

We’ll study how your prose coughs, how the nails of your characters tap, and how fiction can emerge from a character rather than merely happening to them. Through a kind of method-acting investigation, we’ll locate each character’s precise vocabulary—the sensory logic that shapes how they experience their world.

Through a series of sensory and structural experiments, we’ll dig into the archaeology of your characters: tracing how sensation becomes syntax, and how inner perception evolves into voice. We’ll explore épuisement—the deliberate exhaustion of the senses—as a technique for writing prose that feels inevitable, muscular, and alive.

You will:
• Work asynchronously through Wet Ink—an active space for discussion, critique, and exchange.
• Receive extensive individual editorial feedback from me on every submission.
• Access six detailed weekly sessions, each introducing a new sensory or stylistic experiment.
• Be paired with a partner for peer feedback and dialogue.
• Complete a series of innovative, sense-based exercises designed to generate several short pieces (1,000–2,000 words) and one microfiction.
• Conclude the course with a 45-minute one-on-one consultation with me to discuss your complete body of work.

6 weeks: $250

with a focus on voice-driven work and interior intensity.My teaching bridges the body and the page, drawing from art, performance, and prose to help writers uncover the precision and physical intelligence of their own language.

Optional 2-week intensive individualized extension: +$10

Class open to beginners, intermediate and advanced writers.

(Take ADVANTAGE OF THIS, most Television Sky Workshops are intermediate to advanced. Sandolore doesn’t want you to be an MFA contender, she just wants you to want to express yourself with words and she’s an amazing teacher. The price plus the open field is a GIFT. It speaks to Sandolore’s abilities as a leader and a teacher. When I run a workshop if you trip, you’re landing on knives.)

SEATS LIMITED

FICTION CREATES CULTURE

therefore

FICTION IS CULTURE

and so

WRITERS CREATE CULTURE

And what are we, but writers of fiction?

and so

FICTION IS CULTURE

WE BEGIN. LIGHTS ON IN THE THEATER. EVERYONE SIT. HUSH. PRESENTED FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT, EDUCATION, & ENJOYMENT:

The Autopsy:

Today we find out if writers really are ALL COWARDS, and how they react when I pull out the knives.

I asked for people to volunteer for the next three autopsies to give everyone who didn’t submit time to get ready for autopsy 16.

Welcome to Autopsy 13.

The document on the slab is titled The Hallway. It is just over 3 pages and 2054 words long. We’re. Not talking about genre right now.

While I may be brusque, I am not cruel, and I take this work seriously.

I do thank you for trusting me with your work in public. But now we find out if you can handle it when the truth may be slightly less than pretty.

I do like the author who has slabbed his work for me today, . Their work is interesting, if uneven. But I do take issue with one thing. Which an email just clarified. The author under the knife is ESL. As such, they were mistaken for something they were not. Now that I understand the full context, you can consider this to be an exhibition instead of a conventional or normal autopsy.

In good faith I would like to show you what it looks like when everything that can go wrong does and I turn into more of a sawbones.

I will be sending Saint-Lazare much less erratic and psychotic notes on their story, but until then. Please, click the link below, I do hope you have Google Docs. Feel free to comment. This is how my workflow actually looks, more or less, depending on platform.

And Lazare, if you would be a kind sport, I do have productive notes on your story that are MUCH less. Well, let’s just say the Autopsy this week is an abattoir.

This was an EXTENSIVE edit.

Title: The Hallway

Author:

2054 words

The experiment:

Please, click the picture below to start the exhibition.

FIN

Thank you everyone for reading, thanks to Saint-Lazare for being good natured, I will send you real notes tomorrow as soon as I can.

Sign up for Sandolore’s Workshop.

Go home, don’t you have families?

And though it’s an exhibition, read the doc, and remember why I’m the fucking EDITOR.

If you’re reading this, up your game. If you’re reading this, stop and go write.

There is only the work

And the work is Never Finished

Nihil Perditi

- The Editor

Love Wins, Violence Provides

But keep your eyes up,

Watching the Television Sky

Fade

(art credit to SoSlow I guess.)

BURNT OFFERINGS TO DEAD GODS

I mostly post editing and writing content (so you can become the best you can be), fiction, psychotic (psychedelic) rants and mental breakdowns in notes.

I compartmentalize my longer rants, recommendations, and carny shilling here in the Autoclave. While my instruments from an autopsy are being burnt clean, I can sit around and sip and spill tea on my bloodied scrubs.

AUTOCLAVE INDEX: ONE | TWO | THREE | FOUR (The Fiction Is Culture Rant) | FIVE

Today:

1. Midnight Vault II reminder.

2. A transmission from George Kalantzis and Sandolore’s first Workshop

3. Sandolore Sykes’ first solo workshop under Television Sky again, because I say so.

4. Programming notes & Future Cult Activity

5. Quick Thoughts & Outro

If you read nothing else, read #2 and #3.

Tea Money

1. The Midnight Vault II News

CLICK THE PIC FOR SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

There are three suggested editors, we’re all awesome. I’ve got one piece in the books and done, 1has a lead on all of you for this pub already. You have 16 DAYS to polish. Scared you’re chewing the insides of your mouth over a story and it doesn’t vibe, feels off, doesn’t work how you want?

Email me: emilottoman@gmail.com | Subject Line: MIDNIGHT VAULT

I’m human and I’m fuckin’ burnt out but cash starved right now. Thank you Landlord for the missed opportunities at making enough money to live over the past month or so. Don’t worry, I’ll give you your usual 20% tip.

All the best,

-Emil

What’s that mean!? It means you may get a deal. And everyone will be offered a fair chance who inquires.

I need a Midnight Vault Editor

NEED AN EDITOR BUT NOT FOR MIDNIGHT VAULT?

Email me: emilottoman@gmail.com | Subject Line: EDITORIAL INQUIRY

Email Body: Scope of what you’re looking for.

Cost: $250 flat for short stories at 10pgs | $.04 a word for longer work with generous flex pricing | Story Consultant/Retainer/Secret Sauce $50 an hour on flex with a $100 bottom and a START FEE ($500 usually moves the needle in a pinch)

Why hire me?

“the editor is walking talking hellfire in this life and the next and never not on point.” -

Snagged fresh today.

2. A TRANSMISSION FROM

YOU WRITE LIKE A COWARD, Sincerely George Kalantzis

(Don’t look at me, for once I didn’t write the title. I “met” on notes early, when he was COPYWRITER’S REVOLT. I saw voice, anger, and the same shit I knew he’d been doing and was REVOLTING against.

His audience outpaced mine, he did numbers, I DM’d him and called him on it in private. Not out of jealousy. I messaged him because I didn’t even know if he realized he was repackaging his trauma using ingrained tricks and slapping a new label on it for a new platform because he was jaded and mad, and lying to himself.

His anger was valid, but it was buckshot. Legend has it he once told me after reflecting on that convo, he almost left the platform.

Instead, well, he’s good at telling his own stories, trust me, he’s got fire in his veins and he believes in things, he’s going to be one step ahead of the game too, because he KNOWS what he knows, and most writers don’t.

If that already made something in your chest tighten up, keep reading. That’s the door into Sandolore’s class.— (But I’m still a bit of an asshole, so I’m leaving in his typos.)

“From George Kalantzis’s IPhone,
(yes I did write this form my notes section because I’moldschook)

I used to write like I was being graded.

Perfect arcs. Clean dialogue. Characters who changed just enough to seem believable.

People hit the hearts.

You know what they never did?

Remember.

My stories didn’t live inside them. They didn’t echo. They didn’t cut.

Because I was writing for approval. Writing from my head. Writing what I thought made me a real writer.

But secretly? I hated what I wrote.

Somewhere under all those clean sentences was the real stuff. The perversions. The rage. The obsessions I edited out. The scenes I deleted because they felt like too much.

And the worst part?

I knew it was there.

I just didn’t trust myself to go there.

There was this thing I’d do.

Write a scene. Feel something. Feel it hard. Then immediately soften it. Sand down the edges. Make it palatable. Make it good.

Like clockwork.

The rawness would hit the page for maybe three sentences before my internal editor—that sniveling little coward—would whisper…

‘Too much.
They’ll think you’re fucked up.
They’ll know.’

So I’d bury it.

Replace the truth with something that sounded like truth. Something that wouldn’t make anyone uncomfortable at a dinner party.

My characters never really sounded like themselves.

They leaked…politely.

My sex scenes had passion but no sweat or shame or the ugly sounds people actually make.

My violence had consequence but no meat. My darkness had a fucking dimmer switch.2

I was writing stories about being human while actively editing out everything that made us human.

Then November happened.

When my neighbor started fucking someone new and the walls were thin and my daughter called him dad for the first time on speakerphone. When my best friends 20th anniversary hit all I could see was his meat suit crushed underneath a Humvee.3

I sat down to write something. Anything. Make it stop.

What came out wasn’t a story.

It was a confession. A scream. A bloody handprint on the page.

I wrote about the bottle I’d been sober from for six years that kept whispering my name. About trained reflexes that don’t go away just because you’re not in the sandbox anymore. About lying next to someone and feeling more alone than you did sleeping on dirt.

I wrote the scene I’d been editing out of every story for a decade.

The one where the protagonist doesn’t learn anything…

….Doesn’t grow…

….Just survives another day and calls it a win.

I posted it. Emil found me.4

Didn’t edit. Didn’t soften. Left the typos like evidence.

Expected silence. Expected disgust. Expected to be told I wasn’t a real writer because real writers have craft and control and don’t vomit their guts onto the page like some kind of emotional crime scene.

Five hundred people subscribed.5

Not because it was good.

Because it was true.

Here’s what nobody tells you about writing:

The stuff you’re afraid to write? That’s the only stuff worth writing.

That character who reminds you too much of yourself? Write them.

That scene that makes you squirm? Write it.

That truth you’ve been burying under three layers of metaphor? Dig it up. Put it in the light. Let it bleed.

You don’t need permission.6

You need to stop writing like someone’s watching.

Sandovile or Emil aren’t here to teach you structure or plot or how to nail the three-act whatever.

Every story you’re afraid to write is already written. By you. In your head. At 3 AM when you can’t sleep and your brain won’t shut the fuck up.

You already know how to write it.

You’re just too chickenshit to let it out.

(How Sandolore wants to make you feel during her workshop, visualized)

So here’s why YOU NEED THIS

Emil asked and Sandolore built. Not a course. Not a workshop. Not some bullshit where you talk about your character’s motivation7 while carefully avoiding anything that might make us uncomfortable.

This is for the writers who are tired of their precious safety nets. Who know their best work is buried under years of should and appropriate and “what will they think?”

This is where you write the scenes you delete.

The characters who scare you.

The truths you’ve been editing out.

You want in?

Good.

But understand something first:

This will not make you a better writer.

It will make you one who will never stop writing.

And that might be worse.8

Because once you stop writing for approval, once you stop softening the edges, once you let the real shit bleed onto the page…

You can’t go back.

You’ll read your old work and want to burn it. You’ll cringe at every safe choice. Every cleaned-up sanitary scene. Every character who changed because the arc demanded it and not because that’s what broken people actually do.

You’ll see all the places you lied.

And you’ll never be able to lie again.

So yeah.

This is your warning.

And your invitation.

SIGN UP

3. NOTHING HAPPENS, EVERYTHING HAPPENS

• A 6-Week Fiction Workshop for Writers Who Are Ready to Go There

• Led by creator and editor of 9

• Starts Nov 14. Fix yourselves. You have six extra days to join.

• 10 spots, 5 left as of posting

• $250 a seat

• two week one on one intensive extension with Sandolore for $100 extra, but WORTH IT

• When you cowards fill it, doors close. Waitlist only

DETAILS AND ENROLLMENT

Sandolore doesn’t teach like an instructor10.
She edits like a mind-reading transdimensional fortune teller with a magic Tarot deck that knows your insides. 11

She doesn’t fix your sentences.
She forces you to ask what part of you is hiding inside them…

…. And what it would cost to stop.

This class isn’t about improvement.

It’s about mutation.

You’ll get:

• Weekly writing experiments built on mimetic prose—writing that hijacks the senses

• 6 core lessons on structure, sensation, and psychic collapse

• Personal, line-level feedback on every piece from Sandolore

• Peer microcritiques that don’t hold your hand

• A closing 1:1 consult to drag your body of work into the light

And an optional 1:1 two week intensive extension with Sandolore for $100, if there’s room.

But none of that matters unless you’re ready to write something that could make your hands shake.”12

Your Instructor, Sandolore Sykes, presents from the Television Sky and the Mind who Brought you Sum Flux, her debut SOLO writing workshop.

Why? I’m Emil fucking Ottoman and I seek out the best talent, for the most return on investment, with the least bullshit and fluff. Cult names who haven’t taught in a decade, debuts from Indie Horror Queens, from multidisciplinary geniuses who have an IDEA that isn’t what you’re going to get ANYWHERE ELSE.

Sandolore is up. Not ready for her? Give someone who does the gift you won’t give yourself, coward.

But I’ll let her talk, because if it’s worth saying, it’s worth saying again.

They say you can’t teach voice. I say otherwise.

In this course, I’ll guide you through mimetic prose—writing in which form and perception mirror each other, where language doesn’t describe experience but creates it.

We’ll study how your prose coughs, how the nails of your characters tap, and how fiction can emerge from a character rather than merely happening to them. Through a kind of method-acting investigation, we’ll locate each character’s precise vocabulary—the sensory logic that shapes how they experience their world.

Through a series of sensory and structural experiments, we’ll dig into the archaeology of your characters: tracing how sensation becomes syntax, and how inner perception evolves into voice. We’ll explore épuisement—the deliberate exhaustion of the senses—as a technique for writing prose that feels inevitable, muscular, and alive.

You will:
• Work asynchronously through Wet Ink—an active space for discussion, critique, and exchange.
• Receive extensive individual editorial feedback from me on every submission.
• Access six detailed weekly sessions, each introducing a new sensory or stylistic experiment.
• Be paired with a partner for peer feedback and dialogue.
• Complete a series of innovative, sense-based exercises designed to generate several short pieces (1,000–2,000 words) and one microfiction.
• Conclude the course with a 45-minute one-on-one consultation with me to discuss your complete body of work.

6 weeks: $250

with a focus on voice-driven work and interior intensity.

My teaching bridges the body and the page, drawing from art, performance, and prose to help writers uncover the precision and physical intelligence of their own language.

Optional 2-week intensive individualized extension: +$100

Class open to beginners, intermediate and advanced writers.

(Take ADVANTAGE OF THIS, most Television Sky Workshops are intermediate to advanced. Sandolore doesn’t want you to be an MFA contender, she just wants you to want to express yourself with words and she’s an amazing teacher. The price plus the open field is a GIFT. It speaks to Sandolore’s abilities as a leader and a teacher. When I run a workshop if you trip, you’re landing on knives.)

SEATS LIMITED

Why Sandolore?

Her creds: She’s been teaching over fifteen years across writing, visual art, and improvisational theater. She studied literature, creative writing, and art at the Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, and the University of Arizona, and received a Watson Fellowship for writing and visual artwork.

She’s the creator, publisher, and editor of SUM FLUX an independent literary magazine devoted to experimental prose, and she writes The Inversion Field—psychological fiction that explores identity, transformation, and the porous boundaries between self and other.

Not enough?

Selected Plaudits:

“I contributed a fiction story to Sandolore’s publication SUM FLUX in which she sent her feedback and edits. These were some of the most helpful edits I’ve received as a writer. Some comments I still consider when writing new stories. If I needed a professional, thoughtful, and thorough review of my work in the future, I would absolutely reach out to her. Sandolore carries a pure attention to detail and an understanding of story in order to lend it what it needs in order to be successful.”

C.S. Mee

, Author of Some Scared Sister

“Sandolore edits with the sharp eye of a writer. She asks leading questions, sees your blind spots, and suggests edits that makes sense because she UNDERSTANDS the work. I have never had my story described in such a sexy way until Sandolore. No bullshit, direct clean editing, and a sharp pen to boot.-

NJ Fiction (I adore NJ’s work - Emil)

​“I love working with Sandolore. She is always clear and specific about what she wants but is just as ready to improvise or stay open to a writer’s ideas. She is the best kind of editor/teacher/writer because she allows room for the unexpected.”

Deirdre Lewis, Snaps

One of my faves for last

“Sandolore Sykes writes from the static between heaven and a nervous breakdown. Every line hums with voltage, loneliness recast as prayer, grief turned neon. She doesn’t describe madness. She translates it. Her work pulls you through the dark and makes you see what’s still alive inside the wreck.”

-Andrew Robert Colom

ARC

DAMN HE GIVES THE BEST BLURB.

You’re a coward. It’s OK. Every writer is.

Cowards who click the link and sign up are my favorite though. They have a growth mindset.

SO SIGN UP OR ADMIT IT

But if you have something nice to say about a class experience at Television Sky or Sandolore Sykes, please, feel free to leave a comprehensive comment on the post.

4. WHY SO LONG ON THE PROMO EMIL?

So I can get to this.

Upcoming from Television Sky, workshops from:

because you don’t know how to sell yourself or else you wouldn’t be reading my fuckin’ shit.

presents her debut workshop in January (so you have time to give it as a gift) Infinite Inspiration Through Worldbuilding. But you know worldbuilding? Are you sure? Because you think you do but I know what the Velvet Bard is cooking up, and you don’t. You have a surface level understanding of a complex system that she’s boiled down to core concepts like no one I’ve seen before.

will return with The Writer’s Workbench in the New Year.

And even if she doesn’t know it, I’m going to convince to run Psychodemonics again because it was a BREAKOUT HIT.

And I’m announcing prematurely and right off the cuff I will be either starting a long running affordable “chill vibes” workshop/writer’s group for the fringe in January that will run forever, or will be presenting my workshop “One Shot One Kill: If You Do Violence, Do It Right” Or both, I have impulse control issues.

Rap Fiction

Fiction, I Never Left You

My wife told me I was in an abusive relationship with you…

Listen now

5 months ago · 52 likes · 18 comments · Andrew Robert Colom

Read and listen to this or you have no soul.

(STL NATIVE) has been hiding excellent fiction from us. Read it or you still have no fucking soul.

abstract alex.

Strangers in Costumes: The Loadmaster

I broil underneath the sun as the heat index climbed over 100 degrees on the flight line. Shade from the plane barely cools me off as sweat trails under my chin before landing on my camouflage top. I watch Oz round the crates one at a time, recording each one before we depart. He’s the only person I talk to when he needs wea…

Read more

5 months ago · 34 likes · 20 comments · alex b.

and (Papi Boston) are winning the notes game this week by my count.

I’ll stop hunting you for sport once you have the nuts to roast Neo-Passéism.

THE AUTOPSY RETURNS (WRITERS ARE COWARDS 2.0)

I call, and you show your whole asses.

So to reiterate

The next three Autopsies in order of those who are unafraid, since they answered the call.

Saint-Lazare

for being bold and answering the call immediately, will be Autopsy 13. (One of my favorite numbers! It’s good luck where I come from)

Emily S Hurricane

for being second and also being interesting! You will be Autopsy 14. (trivia, I almost skipped Autopsy 4 because I’m a tetraphobe, so this is also a big deal!)

Colton Merris

for always being a delightful chap and fellow editor, you are blessed with Autopsy 15. (I was born on tax day, so that’s sort of special to me.)

Be bold or else I’m going to start batching autopsies like this instead of doing it by the week. So you have 3 weeks to apply for the 16TH AUTOPSY.

• Send 5 pages or equivalent in 12pt Times New Roman to me at Emilottoman@gmail.com

• Subject: AUTOPSY (nothing else. Anything past that hits filter and trash)

• Autopsies are posted SUNDAYS ideally. (**** my landlord.)

• I read every entry.

Elizabeth Lamont

I’d love to have an entry from you, even if it’s a little over. If you try to find something, I’ll try to work with it.

And don’t forget to tip your landlord everyone! (I usually go with 15-20%)

(I try to give at least a few words to every entry not chosen but lately have fallen off because of my housing crisis.)

So see that? YOU HAVE THREE WEEKS TO GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER AND DROP OFF A CORPSE.

That’s a Tom Lehrer line, but you know what, Fix your hearts or DIE.

Father John, play me the fuck out.13

YOU’RE STILL A PSYOP

Coming soon: ABSOLUTELY DISTURBING AND GRATUITOUS VIOLENCE

(Rainbow Rat Meme I made in maybe, I dunno, 2019?)

Gentlepeople of all shapes sizes and sorts, I am late with the eternal return. Time’s been flat and I’ve been below. My apologies. We continue on as demanded by the slipstream thusly:

Welcome to the Autopsy

I trust you found your invitation and are ready for the show. Welcome to the 12th Autopsy in the never ending series. This piece being one of just a measly few I got this week. It’s like y’all forgot my fuckin’ name!? Remember when some of us met, winter, about to be booted from an apartment. Guess what it looks like might happen again this year! Yeah. I would share more scandalous details but both legality and decorum prevent me from it. So we may as well dance.

Before we go any further, please find a seat in the theater while I prepare my tools and we finish some housekeeping for anyone new:

HOW TO GET ON MY TABLE (READ THIS)

• Submissions are OPEN 24/7.

• Send up to 5 pages of narrative prose (short story, scene, etc.).

• Format: single-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 pt.

• If you try to sneak in Garamond 10.5 to squeeze more words, I notice. Don’t get cute.

• Email: emilottoman@gmail.com

• Subject line: AUTOPSY (exactly that, nothing else)

• In the email, intro, prelude, body, prayer, confession: introduce yourself and drop your Substack handle. I will byline you if you get chosen.

8-15 people on average over the course of the series ask to be opened up in public. This week? Two. Pitiful. Do better. (Do not make me go through the archives…)

What you get:

• If you submit, I try to send short notes even if you don’t make the main cut. I read every entry.

• If I pick you, I’ll do the full autopsy in front of everyone. Weigh every organ. Hundreds of dollars of developmental work for free.

Price when it’s not free:

• Short stories (10 pages or less): $250 flat.

• Longer short stories (up to 15 pages): $250 + $10 a page

• Manuscripts: $0.04/word with gentle or flexible payment plans.

• Ongoing editorial / “coaching” (I hate that word): $45/hr. Or 2 hrs/mo for $100, 4 hrs/mo for $200.

If you’re broke: still email me. I will often do a quick dev pass on a sample and tell you (1) “trash it” or (2) “you’ve got something.” If you’ve got something and I give a shit, I might take you on cheap. I believe in access.

• You’ll get more from this than you may want if you’re picked. This is my entire life’s work and project for free. All you have to do is offer your words to my scalpel.

• Pay attention, you’ll be a better writer after reading a few of them. archive link below

Autopsies Guide & Archive

• So, be brave you fucking cowards. Send me your best, your worst, your problem prose.

I WILL NEVER PAYWALL THESE POSTS. I DO THIS FOR SUBSTACK’S FICTION COMMUNITY, FOR THE WRITERS SENDING ME THEIR WORK IN GOOD FAITH, FOR THE LOVE OF OUR CRAFT, & TO HELP WRITERS GROW.

Tip The Ripper

I AM YOUR MIDNIGHT VAULT II EDITOR (if you want it)

I am one of three suggested editors (along with and , both fantastically talented as well) if you want to spit shine an entry for The Midnight Vault II. You have 28(ish) days to submit. Until Saints Day my rates for short stories are $200 up to ten pages.

If you’re submitting to Midnight Vault II:

• Subject line: MIDNIGHT VAULT

• I will prioritize you.

• My short story rate for Vault pieces is $200 up to 10 pages through Saints Day.

• You get a mostly guaranteed 2-day turnaround, because you’re on a clock.

If you “can’t afford it,” email me anyway. I’m not gatekeeping a publication that could hit print. I am, however, about that paper, pookie.

( , it’s coming very soon, just, the landlord thing was life happening to us over here.)

Editorial Services When You’re Not On The Slab:

• Short stories (10 pages or less): $250 flat.

• Longer short stories (up to 15 pages): $250 + $10 a page

• Manuscripts: $0.04/word with gentle or flexible payment plans. (I’m not a monster)

• Ongoing editorial / “coaching” (I hate that word): $45/hr. Or 2 hrs/mo for $100, 4 hrs/mo for $200.

Why People Listen to Me/Exhibits

“Emil is The Editor—a pass from him will 100% make you better.” —M.P. Fitzgerald
“A warlord’s sense of tactical organization.” —Craig Clevenger
“His edits made me a better writer. Period.” —B.R. Yeager
“Emil Ottoman is the writing community’s resident editor.” —Thaddeus

“I HOPE YOU’RE HAPPY!” — Charlene Elsby

“word

keep in mind or neglect at your

peril

The Editor is first foremost

a bad moon rising motherfracking

WRITER.” — Will Christopher Baer (He said something about my editing too but fuck it I can’t find it and I like this.)

A WORKSHOP FROM SANDOLORE SYKES?!

• WORKSHOP: MIMETIC PROSE WITH SANDOLORE SYKES

  Yes, THAT , the one who made .

• Television Sky is hosting her first-ever live fiction workshop.

  - 6 weeks (Nov 8 – Dec 20)
  - Seats are limited and already filling
  - $250 base
  - Optional two-week 1:1 intensive add-on in January for +$100

• Sandolore is FUN, feral, structurally deviant, and teaches like an asymmetrical weapon. I’ve seen the lesson plan. It’s going to get weird in a way you cannot fake alone.

• If the class fills, we start an overflow list.

  CLICK THE IMAGE. SIGN UP.

  What is your favorite Bird?

  ---

TELEVISION SKY: Rule 35 Fieldguide To The Abyss

Rule 1. Don’t talk about rule 35 when the machines are listening.

Thie is Rule 35 field guide to the abyss

a TELEVISION SKY production

editor and builder of worlds:

publisher and damocles of sky: Emil Ottoman

author orpheus of the velvet:

This is Baer’s first new published work since Hell’s Half Acre. It exists in theory ONLY as a three-variant, colored-ink-on-colored-paper, prestige artifact run. No reprints. Ever seen limited digital release? No redo. When it’s gone, it never happened.

65. The velvet is the sleep that plays at death.

This is anticrowdfunding. This is Fucking insane. It only exists if enough of you say “yes, make it,” and then preorder. If you do, it becomes the first official release from TELEVISION SKY.

Click the horse above to sign up and register intent, click the highway below and it’ll all make more sense. This is/is not hypothetical. This is the point where fiction becomes a physical weapon again.

114. If you trap one or more humans in an enclosed space or abandon them under a naked sky there will be conflict.

7. Yellow claims no number.

FICTION CREATES CULTURE

therefore

FICTION IS CULTURE

and so

WRITERS CREATE CULTURE

And what are we, but writers of fiction?

and so

FICTION IS CULTURE

Current initiative:

Organizer of Fiction is Culture :

CLICK THE GODDAMN PICTURE.

I undersign, always.

Give and ye shall receive.

WE BEGIN. LIGHTS ON IN THE THEATER. EVERYONE SIT. HUSH. PRESENTED FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT, EDUCATION, & ENJOYMENT:

The Autopsy:

In his own words: “Glad to see the autopsies are back! At the heart it’s trying to critique modern dating in the age of the internet, but I don’t think that comes out until the later chapters? I’m scared the voice of the character will wear out its welcome through philosophical waxings at times, but that’s where the storytelling elements come in to break that up (hopefully?)”

Does it? Let’s investigate.

• Why I picked it:

• The VOICE. It’s confident, mannered, morally slippery.

• The structural gamble: direct address confession / interrogation mode.

• The problem space: Will the voice carry, or will it collapse under its own self-regard before plot arrives?

We’re going to test that in public.

While I may be brusque, I am not cruel, and I take this work seriously.

Thank you for allowing me to autopsy your first two chapters.

Format: Inline commentary in (italic parentheticals) Footnotes, easter egg links, snark, always a possibility. After the show there will be a break followed by a short discussion on whatever the fuck I feel like.

With no further delay.

Title: A Gentleman of Our Time

Author:

2516 words

The Text:

A Gentleman of Our Time (I like the title because it reminds me of a Kinks song.)

I – (Improper Introductions) (hey, I do the parentheticals around here.)

Sorry for the long pause; I’m just not sure how to... fully answer your question, that’s all. (Bold open. We start in media res during conversation, in direct address, authority is established by that alone. Does the first sentence earn the next? I believe so. Voice is already apparent, with a few tics. an opening sentence that asks a question in direct address from first person with a semicolon and an ellipses. I would only maybe say consider the ellipses. But now considering it, I’m considering that it may be appropriate. Still, I don’t advise using them too much in dialogue as it’s just… sorta gauche.) No, no! it’s alright—(Good to see people returning to the Em dash. Nature is healing itself) I’m sure it comes off as slippery and sleazy or cooking up some dodgy obscurantist (Already we have a big word. A good word. Obscurantist fits here. One thing I will say is I find the author’s not being fearful of the dreaded TEXT BLOCK to be interesting stylistically, and also a risk in first person address. Unless pacing is internally controlled very tightly, this can be a huge clusterfuck. Pull it off well and even if no one will buy your book for pub, you’re good at what you do. Fuck it up and you’re a floating corpse.) response—you asked me, and so my answer, at least as I understand it, would be to pose you a similar question: how can someone not grow a fascination with women in general? (I’m instantly for some reason reminded in a very specific way of Withnail and I, and I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe it’s just me. But we begin the closeout of para 1 with an awkwardly delivered question. It shows voice, it shows cadence, there is a certain rhythm, the character sounds mildly deranged but hey, it’s literature, that’s not a bad thing. The phrasing here is either very precisely written or not, but I like to think it is “how can someone not grow a fascination with women in general.” ) They’re endlessly interesting creatures; (Then he goes full creepy. OK, so we don’t know if he’s addressing a man or woman, but he’s addressing us, so we get to play the imagine who he’s addressing game, which is interesting when done well. So far I’m enjoying this. BAM, off the bat, we have a picture of a man just from diction, syntax, verbosity, and word choice alone. Honestly good stuff.) what they are, what they do, how they react to things; (with a proclivity for semicolons and a seeming thought that women are not the same species) and it’s not like you could ever hope to avoid them either. Ha! half the planet is man’s dislodged rib! (We introduce theology in a glancing blow. But you’re only allowed so many exclamation points in life, and does THIS deserve one? The Ha, I’d say maybe, but this, and the next? Consider it) They’re everywhere! But, no, to address your point, (He’s very much around the world and back. If I didn’t know what was coming I would say cut this, here I believe if you’re going to lean into the density, go full bore. If anything, find more rabbit holes to go down before getting back to the point. And while I’m apt to say “you’re not Pynchon” If you’re going to do maximalist paranoid first-person indirect confession, you don’t get to half send it. Pynchon will spend 40 pages walking you to a shit joke. You don’t have to be Pynchon, but you do have to be fully you, not diet Reddit Nietzsche. Always be yourself. And you can always give more life to a character, especially in direct address.) no one really deserves their lot in life (If you’re going to go down this route suddenly, since philosophically it’s so well trod, you better pull out the old razzle dazzle), so of course the same was true for her. I’m sure someone could try and argue she deserved it, as you implied; but that would be cruel and malicious; and I’ve always had a keen sense for justice. (The contradictions on display from the character, I enjoy. I’d lean into them more.)

Surely, you’ve spoken to at least a few people before getting to me. Or maybe not… (Fuck this ellipses in particular. Now we’ve moved to the question that I believe aside from voice will be the axis around which the story turns. Someone is asking questions about someone of the narrator and the referent is a woman he has known.)? Either way is fine. I’m an open book; and we both know how these things go: people brush with such broad and sloppy strokes, careless descriptors and strange tales laid out as if to speak to some unseen character, making men out to be monsters through implication. (Expand this section, if you’re going to do it, go big or go home. Commit to this bit. The protagonist is already circumnavigating all points, hyper verbose, and shows strange tendencies verbally. In short, no one talks like this. Which is fine, but you would do well to anchor direct address of this nature, which is leading up to a story, with some sort of pretense at either place setting, because, this is total narrative at the moment, no imagery, no place, the addressed could be anyone, us, a detective, whatever. Also, maybe give him some business. Love me some business. You can refer to things outside current narrative time, in place, past events, if you’re going to give him a voice that is so specifically obnoxious, I would advise you to commit to it, in at least one draft, take a para or the opening and write it to the outer bounds of sanity for direct address. He has a particular way of talking and he knows it grates on people, he says so later, what are ALL the exact components of this way of talking, or are we just running on the fly? I’d suggest making a list of tics, constraints, and peculiarities for the voice of the narrator. Stick to them. And there are a few spots where you have typos that create unintented burnt tongue. This is a story where a little burnt tongue, particularly in saying it wrong to end up saying it right, would go a long way.) No doubt there are definitely many man-beast hybrids skulking about these days (I suggest exaggerating this sentiment). Fortunately, I’m not afraid to admit anything I’ve done. (Notice he doesn’t mention he is NOT one of these man beasts, just that he has no shame for his actions, love the moral grey) No one should hold onto shame for their past—simply gives a stronghold for people to attempt to penetrate and abuse. Maybe someone told you this story already; if not, I definitely enjoy speaking about it. Perhaps you’ll see why and hopefully understand how it fits in the larger picture. (Rewrite between the last inline and here, say it, but say it different. Which is to say, you have the right vibe, but even so early, this seems oddly like it’s falling a bit out of the voice of the character for some reason, bordering on cliche piling. Editor’s gut instinct there, but hey, I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em.)

The first time I could’ve been with a woman I actually chickened out. (The braggarts humble brag) No, really! (consider your exclamations) I can see it on your face you weren’t expecting me to admit something like that—but I did tell you I’d admit anything! (I would expand this because if you’re going to blow it up, use a lot of explosives)An open book demands to be read! Let’s see: (the use of such a formal register for punctuation in direct address is interesting. It’s a meta move. I hope it’s a distinct stylistic choice. If not, I would suggest making the route to this point, where he starts, even more circuitous, possibly involving ordering another drink, showing a one sided conversation with someone, another opportunity for characterization if this is a bar setting, etc.) she would’ve been a girl then; (I notice distinctly he says she would have been a girl, but makes no implication as to the fact of this meaning he would have been a boy. There’s subtext there. I think you’re going somewhere interesting with a lot of this, but I’m working within limits.) I was fourteen and she was thirteen. I’ve always attracted girls and women for some reason, even from a young age. (He admits his age and gives the humble brag. His speech is off a tick. Call it a whisper in my ghost, but I’d suggest toying with the wording directly before this inline) I guess there’s something charming in how I carry myself (and no I’m not bragging, it simply is what it is) (Expand on “something charming” with something more specific than vague bullshit, this guy likes to talk. You have full interiority and this is direct address, I would suggest nixing the parentheticals, that’s going an extra layer deep in the onion of meta. Don’t get rid of what’s INSIDE them, get rid of the parenthesis, I would professionally suggest.), but all I’ve ever done is be honest and myself. And of course by simply being yourself, people will find you. (Go deeper on this, you’re scratching the surface of an insufferable asshole’s philosophizing, but you’re not getting to the heart of it somehow. This man, the protagonist, is very particular, I don’t think his philosophical waxing would be any less so. If it reads like something that you’ve heard before, I’d consider a rephrase, expansion, contraction, or full on rewrite. Iterate maybe.)

She was a friend of my sister (and isn’t that always how it goes at that age?) (Cut the parenthetical, why is that how it goes at that age? This man is circuitous but also oddly specific. The fact that I picked up on it immediately means that this choice and voice should bleed through everything.) She was attractive enough, having a naturally pleasant face, darker features complementing her dark hair; but as they say: the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. (Second religious ping. I feel, again, like the previous is not the character’s voice. Any specific visual sensory detail that is added to attractive enough, or naturally pleasant face, strengthens the prose in total.) I’m going to sound rude here. Bluntly stated, it took all of, what? ten minutes to figure out she wasn’t going to be the next Nobel Laureate;(But how? We don’t want to know just this detail, we want how he figured, there’s not enough story movement to get away with vague declaratives) and it really didn’t help she had one of those inexplicable sort of faces where you can just look at her, in her totality, and know she won’t have a great life. (Go deeper on this philosophical sentiment or you lose the story in my opinion. This is a flexion point whether you realize it or not. As is, it works, but it only works just so.) I realized that much later. She was also unfortunately (Why?) the sort of girl who was always seeking something from boys and men. (Everyone is usually most likely seeking something from the opposite sex or from people in general, if not in a transactional way, then certainly in a “we’re human and this is how we human” way. This sentiment is bland, make it sharp. As read, it says a lot but in a boring way while being very little) A nasty combination of cards to be dealt for sure. (You could have put a third low key religious bit here. Just sayin’. I like how self assured this tremendously awful character is. Lean into that. His statements made as definitives are good.) I’m sure a few people pop into your mind; sitting at just the right level of attractiveness to be absolutely irresistible to the type of luddite man who can proudly sport permanently thin facial hair with a certain swagger; and she simultaneously lacked in herself the wherewithal or self control to deny them the time of day. (Great, now rewrite between this and the previous inline.) How can I put this? There was something profoundly mourning (This is said wrong, it should by rights be mournful, but in saying it wrong I feel like you’re getting closer to the voice of the character. He’s cocksure, he’s brash, he’s not afraid to be a shit, so give him some tics, like this, or words, things he consistently gets very wrong, that contrast with his assuredness and his philosophical waxing. That’s burnt tongue. This character is screaming for some of it, along with some expansion in places NOT contraction. This is obviously a maximalist piece. But you want it to be your maximalism, and no one else’s, so find every word that is excess or that doesn’t fit your conception of his voice, and cut it hard, once you’ve cut that, expand everything, but wipe your mind of cultural pollution and preconceptions from other authors. You’ve got an invisible gun to the back of your head. If you write this and one line sounds too familiar, close enough to vague, bland, cliche, et al, your face empties onto the page.), in her eyes, like a constant vigil for her choices, even at a young age. (Great, but again, as I suggested.) I don’t know a more succinct way to put it than that. (These however, are fine if judiciously applied and in voice. Humans do have a set of stock phrases that we use to communicate. This is one of them, but the register reads right) Ha! and people say physiognomy (GO DEEPER ON THIS) isn’t real! Oh, don’t look at me that way, I’m joking. (Bullshit he’s joking, I don’t believe it.) This isn’t on record; (And the preceding is how we know he’s not joking.) we’re just talking, like you said. (Did we now?)

(I’m seeing a lot of potential here. But if you’re going Maximalist, I would suggest going big or going home. Personal opinion. I do tend to go to extremes and say fuck the middle path.)

Well, anyways she apparently knew of me, saw me in the school halls, and drew some sort of fantasy about me in her head in her head. (Expand GODDAMMIT! You’re to the story time, now expand.) She was incredibly forward about things too, which, as a young man, you can imagine how... (OK, this is totally a loaded ellipses but…) appreciated that is. (EXPAND. This is where you bring together the voice and the storytelling. You figure out how to do this all the way through, even and especially with any direct address passages not in storytelling form, by whatever means necessary, you don’t lose the reader.) I figured it could’ve just been the fact we weren’t talking face to face (God bless MySpace!) (Cut out the parenthetical, keep the rhyme, it’s a high point. Yes, I’m cheesy. I’m really well read, obscenely good at what I do, and I’m cheesy.)—everybody these days (undifferentiated time point, these days? Instructions vague, got dick stuck in ceiling fan. Fuck, now a Nico song is stuck in my head) knows how much easier it is to keep up a façade through a screen. But she proved me wrong. (As an end cap in such philosophical and sophist territory where you could go on for probably thirty pages digressing into a shit joke, or one where the punchline is lemonparty, what did she prove him wrong about? It’s vague, obscurantist at worst, sort of confusingly put at best. Long story short, it tripped me, if it trips me, well, I read basically for a job, so, marinate on that.)

I remember walking to her home with her after school. (I would ping you for a redundancy, but this is direct address, we are being told a story as a third party as the narrator with full interiority but also we are him embodied telling the story. If this was any other mode in first person, “I remember” from the POV character unless tied to externalities, is a redundancy, just say the thing. Here, it’s alright, but how did we get here? I feel like we’ve missed two steps.) It was winter, and a particular (vague, find a better word please) cold and bitter (Keep this, the day was bitter, I like that. That’s sauce. Whether you realize what you did there or not, golf clap. If you don’t realize what you did, stare at the sentence until you attain enlightenment, then practice doing it consistently.) day at that (At that can be taken out back and shot unless you include it in the character’s bag of lexical tics and grammatic or linguistic foibles. Since this is all direct address first person, it’s basically HEAVY on voice, which means the voice needs to be absolutely singular or else you’re just jerking off any other trucker in the Love’s truckstop handicapped stall), the wind whipping us the whole walk there (Somehow this is incomplete, if the wind is whipping them, give me more, embody it, simile it, metaphor it, embody the metaphor of it, literalize it, but otherwise wind has whipped so many people in literature, do you want to live forever or die a wishyouwere?). I ended up (No you didn’t, you don’t end up anything, you let her or you didn’t. You lent her. You were a gentleman, god I hate the protagonist but I see so much potential here.) letting her wear my zip up hoodie and we held hands, talking the whole way back to her place, making jokes, teasing each other by quoting back messages (This is reportage, gives us some show to go with the tell, make it a bit more vibrant.)—all the things young people do to probe and test out how to love someone or how to make them react to you. (Go deeper on this) And when we get there, her father and brothers are already home, but by fate, (Melodramatic bit innit?) all three of them were already (Not just a close echo but a close stacked echo? Sir. Sir, you must fix this, even if the echo was created by my inline) distracted by either games or the television and a cold drink, (Lil bland innit?) so we end up going to her room in the basement, (Well now I don’t believe it because people DO talk like this, so it’s out of register for the character a little. Do you see? Do you SEE?) all by ourselves, and she told me she was free to lock her door without any fear of getting in trouble. (Previous sentence is a syntax and rhythm clunker, rewrite) Her dad might’ve sent (odd phrasing, don’t know) a cursory (I’d take it to the limit, any glance can be cursory in this deflowering type of situation, but an accusatory glance says so much more if the father takes no action. Consider it anyway maybe.) glance my way to size me up but... well I was young, not very tall, so therefore not a threat, and I was generally oblivious to those types of vague and forced threats from old men anyways. (I find the syntax here odd, but almost right in the wrong way that I want it to be. I’d take Generally and throw it through a window, perfenestrate in Latin, as opposed to defenestrate, though )

So I’m sitting on her bed, (trying to sound entirely too much like real people talk) kind of absentminded and looking around (No, you’re observing and taking note or else you couldn’t recall the story, nix or rephrase maybe.). She had all the usual things of the time: (I wore an onion on my belt, as was the style at the time, I think the register is right but how it’s presented is… somehow a click off? Everything one would expect of the time? The chicken needs fucking different, is my personal opinion) a Highschool Musical poster, a desktop with some scene girl as the background, band tees and some cute floral bed sheets, (Then here give the details more life and texture or else I don’t care about the space or what goes on in it.) so on and so forth. (Et al) But suddenly (As a writer, you have a limited supply of suddenlys. Once you use them all up, you WILL die. Is it REALLY suddenly? If not, perfenestrate it.) while I was sitting there I realized “oh my God! I’ve never done anything like this!” (Go deeper, expand. He has a major dorp moment and then you don’t go into the deep end.) And you know that sort of nauseous anxiety that grows in your stomach when you enter into exciting and unfamiliar territory? (I mean, yeah) Something promised, like a performer before a show, where now you need to keep up your end of the bargain but somehow you’re unable to even speak without the threat of something else coming up with it? (This is excellent, give it a better lead in)

Well, that feeling was with me for all of a second. (You’ve killed my anticipation and also any tension in the scene by making this a toss off after the above) All of a sudden (This is the telegraphed suddenly, and if you use too many of these, you just fall straight through the slipstream into the yellow) the smell of her room hit me. It was an utter litter box, both in the fact she had a cat and in the general sloppiness of the place;(Pause, separate these two things, OK, now wind them around each other, weave them together, more details on the cat parts, but contrast them with the clothes, feel free to use a 12123 or a 121213 or a 122123 structure 1 being a sensory detail about cat or litter or you know, if you don’t know what I mean, goddammit. 2 being the goblin state of her room, and 3) clothes strewn all over, nothing tidied up. (expand) And did I live in a similar filth? (3, this is 3.) Of course! I was fourteen! (Was it as exclamatory as suggested by the previous two punctuations?) But—maybe you disagree, and that’s fine—a girl in filth was somehow worse to me. (This is a characterization key, go deeper on it, you want to, trust me, it’ll do you well. One sentence, maybe two, it doesn’t have to be much, but a well placed detail or two here can be so fucking telling, it can be sensory, opinion, philosophizing, whatever, but you want to go deeper) Well, the next thing I know, (I walked straight into a fucking cliche) she starts changing and undressing in front of me! (Now this could do with a few details, just go ahead and make it as obvious to the reader that he’s fucked up as he is. Also, again, while people do tell stories like this, you’re in a repetitive loop for sentence starts at this point and add in the vague setting and blank description and you’re the opposite of maximalist, you’re not even putting up the bar right now and I can tell you can do better) And I’d never seen anything like that in person; (expand) but as I’m watching her, this terrible thought hit me. She’d told me she’d already been with someone before me, some boy in high school. And I hadn’t put much thought to it before then; but in that exact moment, thinking about the entirety of the situation, just how absurd it was to go from talking a few weeks before to her essentially stripping for me, I felt nothing but a disgust for her. (EXPAND! This is another hinge, it’s more important than exposition.) She would’ve been twelve when she was with him. (Side note, at least he thinks that fact is gross, but I don’t think for the same reasons as most people would) Her body might as well have been a spider molting, limbs splaying in every direction to try and draw me in. (Excellent. You keep showing these moments of brilliant spicy near maximum, but then pull back. Be fearless, write it weirder. Remember, write like there’s a gun to your head. You sound too generic, you end up in a hole.)

When she was done,(I want sensory details here, because this is just weird.) she came back (Her return could be a scene in and of itself in my humble opinion, or at least a micro scene.) and sat next to me on the bed, and it was immediately apparent to her something was off. (Expand, give us markers for it maybe. Reportage. If you’re voice heavy and story thin this early, I want you to have strong prose, because your story is riding on voice and action. Everything but this character’s voice, his thoughts, his philosophizing and way of speech, his story, is terra incognita, we started in media res, and now we’re here, so, when you have options, give precise details, because they’re the texture your voice will flow from if you don’t get shot in the head for being bland.) I wasn’t as receptive, I guess, no longer the same actor in her play. (Expand on everything before this sentence, but also keep this sentence as an end cap, because it is quite good and reads in voice and register) Eventually (Remember what I said about suddenly, same rule applies, and eventually is almost always a bad marker), after enough awkwardness, (That we know nothing about which annoys me) we made our way (What the fuck is this, the Oregon Trail, write it better. Made our way back outside my ass.) back outside and sat on the swing set in her backyard. (13/14 yr olds, on a swingset, sorta weird but I’d keep the detail.) She kept looking at me strangely. (RE: previous sentence. You don’t get to do that.) She ended up (This is too much like people actually tell stories, is the problem, and in writing, especially literature, as a style, since it is style that makes up the category of literature and not any genre per se, but, your verisimilitude to how people really tell shit boring stories, is entirely too real here. Add more artifice because it’s fiction and you can. If I wanted to read a vague story about something bland with some misogynistic weirdness sprinkled in I’d just go send an email to my uncle. (Note, I do not have an uncle like I describe, thank god, but you get the idea yes?))asking if I was even going to kiss her. (Give her voice maybe. Here’s the breakdown in technical bullshit writer terms. You’re writing in first person past tense direct address, the story is being told within the story by the narrator directly addressing us, thereby making it indirect, and since it is indirect, to give her voice you don’t even need quotations, because it’s already addressed to us, signed, sealed, delivered, I’m yours. But only if you don’t fuck it up. Either that, or as a reader, I want to know why he can’t remember what she said) I just flat out told her no. I might have let out a breathy laugh before I responded—I can’t remember exactly (I don’t like exactly, but this is like, the biggest chunk of this part of the text I would leave untouched, it gets the point across, it’s got verisimilitude, whatever, but you have to eliminate some of the other repetitive sentence starts that are how people who can’t tell stories tell stories or else I’m going to come and find you.) but it was something tactless. (works better if he gives examples of what it may have been if it was tactless.) I was prone to that sort of thing then. (You’re thinking I’m gonna say kill, but I say keep, this is in register, feels to me in voice, but also, telling of the POV char) God, I can still see the shame and disappointment in her eyes. (You watch Letterkenny? Read this in Dwayne’s voice. “Oh can ya now? So what yer tellin me is shame, literal shame, and disappointment, the literal words, were just sitting there written across her forehead. Well what was it, the fuckin’ Wikipedia articles or Oxford English Dictionary?”)

Funny enough (That’s not funny enough, that’s, that’s reasonable. Clown ass dude. Not you Zach, this guy.) I still can’t stand a woman with cats because of her; really the effects of toxoplasmosis needs a much fuller and robust body of literature. (I want this toxoplasmosis Gondi rant from this weirdo so bad and you don’t give it to me and now I’m sad because I’m probably so hyperaggressive because we’ve always had cats and I was fucked from day one.) But that’s really besides the point. (It’s only besides the point if you want it to be!) If I remember correctly, it’s so damn easy and fun to keep tabs on people (There, I removed the parenthetical for you), she’s unsurprisingly (This word seems… off… Writer’s gut, it’s too, it’s a very unappealing color of orange,) a single mother with two different fathers now, (two children by two different fathers? I take it, but I would also maybe if you play with his voice enough to give it a voice that’s not terminally contaminated by all other narrative media you’ve ever consumed, I would leave this slip here.) always vacillating between how men are trash or how she never needed a man to begin but posting thirst traps to Sabrina Carpenter music, until a few weeks later she finds another man and her attitude miraculously corrects itself. (I like this section for the character, it’s in tone, it’s got some syntax issues that are weird, the grammar isn’t perfect, yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ bout. There’s even some solid detail. Not MUCH, but almost enough.) Irony is a cruel mistress. (OK, characterization meets intention moment. He’s obviously a little bit misogynistic and weird. You’re the author. They say sometimes the curtains are just blue, yeah? OK, unless you’re writing commercial genre fiction or commercial lit fic, they’re fucking lying, the curtains are blue because her mother beat her, alright, they’re a metaphor for her abortion. So, as a person who knows curtains are never blue, not even in my own house in real life, why does the POV character sexualize irony as female coded? Irony could be a cruel master? I’m. Just. Trying to make you think about every choice you make in the story, every single fucking one.)

Oh...? “Fa-sci-na-ting”, not fascination? Wait, what are you talking about? Oh! you meant my father...? Well now I get the confusion on your face! Why didn’t you stop me sooner! But... but no, his death... his death being on the same day is a coincidence. You know, I hadn’t ever put two and two together like that since I didn’t hear about him until the day after he passed. Good God, you’re just letting accusations fly, aren’t you! Haha! I’m just kidding, don’t worry, it’s alright; I’m not upset; not as if I could be in two places at once, right? (OK, expand this awkwardness in the most completely awkward way possible, please, it’s the punchline reversal and it’s great, I got here and I was actually laughing. But careful with them exclamation marks.)

Come on, let’s try and get a booth instead for drinks. I’ve always hated sitting on these damn stools. (Are we man, woman, alien, I don’t care, but sure, why do you hate the stools?)

II - (Subtleties) (Nice)

Can you believe mankind used to have the unfettered ability to look up at the sky on any given cloudless night and without hesitation or even a thought—because it hadn’t even been conceived yet (Oh really now?)—get to gaze up at the stars of the milky way putting on a show and dancing overhead for all mankind? (Dude has never been very far out of a city has he?) People used to stake their lives on what the stars would speak! (Give me MORE) Do we fully—oh, hell, do we have any understanding of the lasting psychological effects of such a thing yet? (Light pollution? No, we really don’t. But I have lived in one of the darkest places in the United States at night, which is in southern Oregon believe it or not, and on a moonless night it is terror invoking. You can’t see your hands in front of you. Is he pulling a really poorly played distraction move here?)To be deprived of a beauty so fundamental and eternal and awe inspiring? “Beauty will save the world”, is the line (Is it?), isn’t it? Ah, maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about. (Teehee of course I don’t.) I’m sure the consequences are playing themselves out in some sense in our day and age and someone will tell us about it far too late when no one cares anymore. (This is like, half in his voice in my head and half out of it. But I don’t think this part of this section was maximalist enough for what I feel like it seems like you’re going for.)

Anyways, excuse me for being, well you know, if anything, slightly indulgent in my last little exposé; but I didn’t tell it without good reason. It’s a litmus test—albeit unintentional...(OK, wait, here’s the cover. Fuck these ellipses man. There has to be a better way. I’d have him fumble it by going on in the previous para about both light pollution, details about how people lived by the stars, and died by them, and also toxoplasmosis Gondi)? Some people start to grow squeamish or flinch as the words start to (Ok, now this is a redundancy) slowly tumble out as if I’m going to throw them into some overtly Nabokovian (First lit ref and I’m annoyed it’s Nabakovian for some reason, he seems like the sort of ass to say that though.) fever dream or really just the unabashed life of any given French intellectual (But as a whole systemic unit, the sentence basically makes little sense, suggest rewrite). But I tell it because I was noticeably different from then on. Internally at least. From then I suffered a violent, burning passion with the necessity of being relieved through the throes of something enthralling. (The last three sentences are great, you just need to write them better, or more coherently, alternately, more incoherently works just as well) I believe anything short of a full commitment leads to utter (I twitched, this seems out of line with character. Prone to absolutes. Utter sounds wrong tonally, as in it does not sound like good music here, I would go with total. Yes, they’re synonyms and both have two syllables but there is a sort of sub rosa connotation that differentiates them from one another and this dude seems like a total kinda guy, not an utter kinda guy) collapse, and the world is so full of passions (the etymology being of Latin roots, passio: suffering or enduring, in the 12th century specifically as a referent to Christ on the cross. By the 13th century it was more generalized suffering but more broadly and often attributed to martyrs, and by the late 14th century it had shifted semantically closer to the passion we know today. Just, you know, things to think about.) or that (Does this that really need to be here?) man is bound to haphazardly fall into them. Everything is a mystery grabbing at his attention, vying for his talents and aptitudes. (I love all of this, now blow it up like a bomb and splatter the walls with it. Commit to the bit, go big or go home.)

Also isn’t it funny how life works? (I would leave this here even though god, it’s gauche and a cliche) For the longest time, people would actually come and confide in me, if you can believe it.(I want this expanded a little, or phrased… more… less boring to read.) I’m sure it seems ridiculous considering how crudely I can speak at times; yes, I see my faults: (You wanna make fucked up complex sentences we can play that game, but fuck that parenthetical I murdered, I’d do it again.) but again that comes with being honest: let someone (Suggest anyone) speak long enough and they’ll reveal at least one vile opinion about an idea or group of people you’d never expect (I would fuck up at least part of this grammar or syntax so you know he’s a sophist even though he rails about sophistry shortly, but then again, I’m a pedant.). Or perhaps you would. Who really knows. But to get to this level of comfortability (I hate this word but it fits, and now he’s just speaking in a circle to save from showing ass, so maybe make it more Baroque) requires having sat on both sides of the proverbial confession booth (If you realize how you fucked up like a genius with that last line before this, please, comment about it and do that sorta shit more often), so to speak. I’m sure you already know from experience that genuinely listening to someone might be the single most intimate thing someone can do if done right: watching them spill their soul, lay it bare, raw, uncovered, pulsing with contradictions and turmoil. (Don’t know how I feel about this section. We’ve moved to a weird zone. I like the philosophy bullshitting, but I want it couched in a bit of story movement. If at any point it becomes tedious, I want to jump off a building.) And it’s much worse face to face, having them stare back in utter (Here he would use utter, but up there he’s a total guy.) vulnerability and anticipation of rejection. It can be absolutely heartbreaking. (GO ON) Sadly most people don’t know how to listen at all, how to be an imperfect reflection. They want to posit some half-baked, low grade generic advice too quickly to comfort the person in their struggles—which is understandable—but also wrong, in my opinion. (Ringo, you need to read the bible. This could be great, it’s coming in as tepid and dripping. I see you in there, I want to pull you out.) I learned long ago a great number of people are turned off by the way I speak, but I’ve never taken it personally. (Oh have ya never now?) You can’t take things like that personally. Divisiveness is a part of life—and finding your people in order to let the faults be forgiven is the other, like a parting of the Red Sea. (He doesn’t read the Bible, but he knows some Sunday school stories to use as sorta meh, metaphors) But prior the parting came the plagues, and so here I am. Oh, come on! can’t you tell when it’s a joke?! (Bro, narrator, you’d have to go on longer and bigger and ballsier and with more grit for me to believe in the idea of not being able to tell when something is a joke when the referent viz joke I’m unable to tell it was is so buried I don’t know where we are, who are you and how did you get in my apartment, rewrite, keep everything exactly the same conceptually, but expand it, and find the voice, fuck the chicken, stick the landing, and win the gold.)

Let me explain myself. I do consider it an illness (Wait, fuckin’ where did. How’d we get here? What’s an illness? Mom, help.), which is why I even talk about the nature of a person. There are some immutable characteristics that if you attempt to stow away beneath the floorboards start to rot the wood and bust through and make a much worse mess than if they were simply catered to and appeased from time to time. (Previous, excellent, now write it two clicks tighter and one click above what you think you’re capable of.) But there’s the parallel rot in being conscious of one’s nature, like a woman knowing her own beauty (Has bro ever met an actual woman?) or a fighter than instigates normal people. (Second verse, same as the first, but keep that typo.) It’s the oldest issue of the Garden (He fucked, see, these things, this is getting to the voice. The oldest issue of the Garden, that is phrased WRONG. END STATEMENT. But it’s phrased perfectly wrong.)—the knowledge of good and evil. That’s also the problem: every path forks through the heart of a man; decisions conscious and unconscious, voluntary and involuntary, known and unknown, in truthfulness and in deceit. (Reads sort of like wedding vows, if I see the parallel others will too, go big or get shit on.) I can go on and on, but you see the point. (I actually want him to go on more, but there to be a little more movement to the story, which is in here squirming, and also, I want it to be less coherent even maybe.) People can and do lie to themselves endlessly about the reality we live in, call them false binaries, spewing lofty and abstract ideas about experiences and systems and oppressions and kinds of esoteric academic sophistry in our day; but life is a fifty-fifty coin flip: things are either acted upon or they aren’t, and most people cannot bear the consequences of their own actions and throw the fault so quickly on others as if their hand didn’t make the move. (Has to be satire, it’s too over the top, you risk overwhelming the reader at this point. But I write intently to overwhelm the reader, it’s my goal. I will warn, it’s a knife fight ballet that one is mine. OK? Knife Fight Ballet, mine. You have to execute it perfectly or you risk losing them completely, those who would love your story, and those who COULD love your story. Unless you’re absolutely sure of what you’re doing and the intention of it, I would suggest giving somewhere in here to breathe, breaking in some story movement, something aside from the plebe’s buckshot of pop philosophy and, well, sophistry. Because I feel like half the joke is he’s using oh so many words and saying oh so very little that isn’t self evident, and none of it is novel) It’s why time and memory was made (Won’t lie, love this line), otherwise everyone would grow weary and retract their last five steps to sit and stall and contemplate for an obscene amount of time before finding a better position for themselves. (Blow previous sentence up like a fucking balloon because it’s what a lot is resting on here and if you do it right it can build tension until you get to the temporary release valve that is) I promise I’m not stalling myself. (This, because he is stalling.) You really don’t hide your expressions well. (I laughed on first read) I mean, I don’t either but, that’s neither here nor there, I guess. I just wanted you to understand my position before going into how everything has fallen into place. (Say this but say it in like, 300 more words and if they’re not exquisite and unique, a Hornady ball hollow comes out the front of your face and you’re dead at your desk, notebook, etc.)

FIN

Thank you for letting me hate this character so much. I honestly have the feeling from reading this that 1. You’ve not entirely uncovered, excavated, made, whatever, the voice of the narrator is incomplete. At times it is perfect, and at times it is intolerably boring. 2. Go full maximalist, break out the big fuckin’ words (but feel free to misspell some of them), break out the obscure facts, go down a digressive rabbit hole or two, so you’re not Pynchon, I’m not either, but fuck it, why not try to be the next better YOU.

If you want to make a sentence that’s as long as a paragraph and it fits with your vision for the story and the story and voice and character ask it of you, do it. If a wall of text five pages long is called for, do it. Do not flatten yourself for market. I’ve read enough of your work to say you are holding back in the exact moment the piece is begging you not to. OK. Honest opinion as an author AND editor. You’re better than you think, but you have the fear. So I went hard on you. Why? Because you owe yourself telling the story one rung up. Wherever you are as a writer, if you’re not pushing for that next impossible spot, that thing you can’t write, you’re dead weight, get out of my lifeboat. I’m Ahab and you do not get that coin nailed to the mainmast.

Right? I loved hating this character. I love the direct address. For one of the best examples of direct address I’ve ever read go here. Yes, is a fucking diamond. (Why y’all think Stockton on the Television Sky masthead?) You’re doing this, but you’re doing it TURBO TO THE MAXIMALIST.

And I honestly believe you can do better.

My suggestions are to redraft it, play with it, make love to it, but most of all, understand that you are NOT done with it. Consider rules and regulations for the character (Maximalist prose with conditionals, god, my heart is aflutter)

If I were writing this, I’d expect it to come out longer than you’ve told me you expect it to, bloat it, but bloat it well. Feed it the richest food you can, but also shove story inside it like medicine. Because this sort of character sketch is only so tolerable for so long and this piece is edging up on it without showing much movement aside from lateral, certainly only hinting side eyed at what you think the commentary of the piece will be. So let it all out, draft until you’re a husk of a human being, and know, until you have a draft, you have nothing.

The reversal at the end of the first chapter was a chef’s kiss, but one degree off. That moment is the hook. Linger. Squirm. Don’t rush past it. It’s where this stops being a monologue and becomes evidence of something. It’s where the story starts to SHOW.

Thank you everyone who attended and read, I hope you got something out of it, even if it is ponderously fucking long. Thank you Zach for letting me be this mean right out the gate. And wow, aren’t I awesome, fuckin’ up my first one back.

Fiction on Substack will be recognized when it DEMANDS to be recognized.

If you’re reading this, up your game. If you’re reading this, thank you. If you’re reading this and your lungs are burning because you need to go write, go write.

There is only the work

And the work is Never Finished

Nihil Perditi

Send me your pages. Pay me if you’re smart. Steal what you can from this breakdown and use it tonight. If your lungs are burning, that’s not anxiety, that’s craft waking up.

There is only the work.
The work is never finished.

— Emil Fucking Ottoman
The Editor / Television Sky

Love Wins, Violence Provides

But keep your eyes up,

Watching the Television Sky

And never forget .

P.S. ASK ME ABOUT MY LANDLORD

Fade

(True story)

BURNT OFFERINGS TO DEAD GODS

I mostly post editing and writing content (so you can become the best you can be), fiction, psychotic (psychedelic) rants and mental breakdowns in notes.

I compartmentalize my longer rants, recommendations, and carny shilling here. This is the Autoclave. While my instruments from an autopsy are being burnt clean, I can sit around and sip and spill tea on my bloodied scrubs.

AUTOCLAVE INDEX: ONE | TWO | THREE | FOUR (The Fiction Is Culture Rant)

Tea Money

(It’s here I’d like to make a note and suggestion: use anything but Buy Me A Coffee. It takes them 5-7 days to payout once you initiate a transfer and you have to have at least $10.00 in your account to even do so. Fuck them and fuck their families. Moving on)

BIG ASS TEA: RETURN OF THE MIDNIGHT VAULT

Click the link to find out the details. It should be live by the time you read this

Click the button below for submission guidelines

The Midnight Vault II

And if you want, I’ll be your editor…

One Toke Over the Line

So the year has been fraught for you and then water starts to drip drop plop through the light fixture pictured above for a night and a morning and a half and it takes your apartment management company two weeks to get to it and they take the fucker down, and you see corroded wires under the shit fire hazard rust fucked metaphor for what your life has become and you ask the maintenance man if he’s a fucking certified electrician because there’s been water intrusion into a live circuit and he brushes you off with a quick brusque, “yeah-uh” smacks his lips and one of his crew ask to use your ladder.

And it was such a lovely start to the week right?

So they get up there, pull down the fixture, and you see that, the wires, they remove the old fixture. The corrosion. A voltameter comes in frame from the right, beep-red, beep-red, beep-red. And you take out your phone and stare the maintenance man in the face and take this picture. They pull the dead fixture, drill settings for the new one, rusted diphalic wires hang limpid in your view while they chatter and your ears ring, like GOD is dialing your fucking head, beep-green. And is it hot the man asks and yeah it’s hot the man on the ladder says without a second look. Now you’re considering the drop knife, the Ka-Bar, the Kukri, the ice pick from two New Year’s Eve’s ago when your best friend’s father got so high off Solomon’s weed he gave everyone in the house knives the moving bags in the basement perfect for transport, waterproof, but the goddamn sawzall, you broke the blade drive and never got it fixed even with the lifetime warranty. Burning your brain you watch them install it over rust and liability.

And you know what? That’s not how this works.

Oh, it’s how it works, and you know it, but fuck after last winter and all that, the desperation, the PTSD, the constant drip, the sinus infection that wouldn’t go away, the feeling of just getting a dick stuck in your ass raw and pulled out bloody, nah, this ain’t how it works hoss.

You’re a Slav, you know how to dig trenches. You’re your father’s son and you fucking hate bullies. You took it from your last landlord after a $900 consult with an attorney who said, “take it from your landlord.” And since then you’ve been so noided everything is documented. You have maybe five tenant rights in this state but you can recite them, and your city tenant rights, Miranda warning, Bible Verse, the poem you have memorize, your favorite, Love? Love is the honey sweet of the locust blossom, and deep within it the sting lieth, You read the Bible Ringo? Ezekiel 25:17?

But you’re tryin’ Ringo, you’re tryin’ real, hard, to be the Shepherd, so spend the next day renaming all your evidence in legalese, putting it in incident folders, digging your grave for this winter, and at 1:15AM CST, you do the right thing. It’s never the right thing because this is just how things are. You’ve been told, this is just how things are. You’ve seen it in apartment after apartment, this is just how things are. You lived breathing mold for a month parading your ongoing psychosis and trauma like a bull on parade dancing for dimes and offering to work for pennies, and now you’ve done everything you can and you’re back in a groove making money on the way, light at the end of the tunnel is a train because fuck you that’s just how shit WORKS, when you’re poor. You take what you get and you fucking thank them for the fire hazard in your walls. You thank them for replacing the back porch and it still not being to code, the building code you’ve memorized by now, you thank them for giving you the bare minimum until you don’t because no, fuck you and fuck your family.

This. is. not. how. shit. works.

building code compliance CC: fire prevention bureau CC: you alderman CC: Neighborhood Stabilization Team BCC: Citizen’s Service Bureau-send.

Portal, general inquiry, formal notice, screenshots, timestamps, more evidence-send

Email to the ONE contact you have for your rental management company, notice, for forwarding, mirror of the portal notice, screenshots, timestamps, more evidence-send

You wake up to the first fusillade: If things are are so bad to you then we will let you out of your lease as of November 1, 2025. The fuck you will, that’s illegal because you can’t will the terms of my lease contract to change by fiat.

So you type I have not requested to terminate my lease, nor do I intend to vacate. My sole request is that the property be brought into compliance with the St. Louis Building and Fire Codes. But you’ve already got SR tickets from the city so you put them in there, screenshots, BCC yourself, evidence trail, add it to the ever growing files. Because with no due respect, fuck you sir, you’re not GOD.

The second Volley: The building is up to code and has always been up to code. As far as you and your family moving out, it has come to our attention that you don’t appreciate our team and our property. Therefore we will not be renewing your lease in March. According to your lease agreement, you are required to give us a 60 day notice but we will waive that just as long as you give us at least 15-30 days and leave the property in the same or better condition as you received it. I expect you to contact me and let me be at my property at the time of inspection.

On your back foot? Is that reactivity? Do you believe yourself a fucking Titan when one stands before you? That’s some mighty ego protective and really bad praxis you just displayed. Reply, screenshot, BCC yourself, evidence trail, screenshots, more files.

You’ve never seen someone say “Hold my beer and watch this” then suck on a pistol and blow their brains out the top of their head in so few words. Therefore we will not be renewing your lease in March. Now you’re GOD, because with SR tickets in hand there are certain protections you get, and one is from retaliation. And what you just read on the screen, that’s promised retaliation. That’s day zero, oh dark thirty, nothing has even happened yet retaliation.

And now it’s going to be the winter of razors and knives.

The Yellow under the Television Sky.

I WILL BE YOUR EDITOR, IF YOU WANT

Fuck Cashflow. This is America, it’s not a country, it’s a business, now fuckin’ hire me. Ten to one you’ve maybe read something I edited this week and you don’t know it. Big projects unless you have a full MS and are ready to commit are FULL.

Until Saints Day Short Story Edits (5pg) are $200.

that’s $50.00 off usual rates.

Until Saints Day Short Story Edits (10pg) are $250.

that’s $50.00 off usual rates.

These come with a guarantee of a 3 business day turnaround.

Email inquiries to Emilottoman@gmail.com Subject line: Editorial Inquiry

This gets you line, dev, dev letter if needed, notes, inline comments, and if you need or want, a quick second pass if you redraft it fast enough.

Send Me Your Stories

The link above will take you to The Television Sky.

Announcing, upcoming NEW workshops from:

- Infinite Inspiration Through Worldbuilding

and I’m proud to present the debut of:

- Nothing Happens, Everything Happens

Also:

will be returning with the third cohort of his massively successful The Storyteller’s Workbench

and doesn’t know it (or she does) but I’m going to be convincing her to run another round of the bang up workshop Psychodemonics as soon as humanly possible.

More details on Tuesday next.

Don’t forget to look up.

Autopsy Subs are OPEN (again)

Send 2500 words of 5 pages to emilottoman@gmail.com with the Subject heading Autopsy. The first new Autopsy will be posted Sunday the 26th. SEND ME YOUR WORDS.

Recs and Rants

The Wayback Machine

The Arena Of The Unwell

The year is 2004. It’s 3AM in London. The Hackney District. Dark roads and tower blocks, kebob shops with glowing red lettering, Pound World stores with their grates drawn down and scarred with graffiti tags: “The Iron Cunt”; “West Ham Massive”; “RIP Ghost”; “Holly Street Killers”. It’s freezing cold in the middle of June…

Read more

6 months ago · 17 likes · The Wayback Machine

This is a heater from , but the best line in the whole piece is “He’s wearing a dumb hat”

It’s not just a pretty picture, click it motherfucker. returns to the short story form like a bomb going off in a NicU after 3 years absence. Fuck.

Entropic Absurdity

Vajazzled!

How we got here…

Read more

6 months ago · 24 likes · 12 comments · Zani D

produced the single best thing you will ever read on Substack. Sorry, the game is over.

lower midlist

Men Need S-

Stories. Men need stories…

Read more

6 months ago · 18 likes · 5 comments · Peter Shull

CousinBrother interviewed and now I’m a fan of Alex Muka. The interview was that good. Check it out.

CANCY STEADWELL IS A PSYOP

Involuntary

Theory of the Fives

if you want to live call 911, the razor jones is too bright ponyboy…

Read more

6 months ago · 14 likes · 2 comments · will christopher baer

You either get this signal and know, or you don’t, there is no inbetween.

puts in a fantastic second entry to his debut serial (short?) Whatever. It’s good, read the first entry, then read this one. Outstanding work.

This is poetry you need to read

Ego Death

The Anchorite

Handwritten Chapter 1 zero draft, plus household menace…

Listen now

6 months ago · 2 likes · Alice M.

is a bomb going off and you need to read this. This is the first chapter, it’s up to 3 now.

The best interview I’ve read with .

THE SHIELDBREAKER SAGA

Introducing ASHCRAFT AUTHOR SITES

We the Undersigned, loosely and still unofficially affiliated by our core belief that Fiction is Culture, are back with another mutual aid effort to help one of ours in a time of trial…

Read more

7 months ago · 81 likes · 44 comments · Tom Schecter, Emil Ottoman, Zani D, ARC, Nick Winney, Haly, the Moonlight Bard ✒️, Luke Warfield, Simpulacra, Zivah, James Worth, Dylan Bosworth, Zachary Dillon, M.P. Fitzgerald, Brent Robbins, Vinny Reads, Keith Long, and Pablo Báez

organizes mutual aid. It’s a community effort. Fiction is Culture. Give back to your fucking community when people need help. It pays off. I wouldn’t be here if not for Tom.

And buy Tom's Book!

Click above and enjoy the magic of ’s current amazing period piece. It’s fucking outstanding.

CLANCY STEADWELL IS A PSYOP!

Click above and buy ’s new edition of Mars in Retrograde, because it comes with a cool pin. And bookmarks. And buy everything else too.

I’ll be offline for secret shit until Monday

Don’t blow the place up.

Or do, fuck it, over it.

Warren, play us out

(Meme of Father John Misty shooting Mr. Tillman, date unknown)

FUCK THAT CAT AND FUCK ITS FAMILY

Snag ‘em with the insane header, then pull back from the edge. Of every book on structure, you pick one based on the Save the Cat beat sheet? Come on Cousinbrother , you’re fuckin’ better than that. An appendix of better books concerning structure will be appended to the end of this essay.

I’m less concerned with this minor foible though, and more concerned in being in conversation with you (convivially for once, this isn’t really that antagonistic. It could have been, but I agree with your general framing, except for fuck, that, cat.)

So, we’re gonna talk about it in this Pathology Report.

But direct help is better

And for October, since this month is already fucked, inquire about discount editing.

• Short story edits (10pg cap) for $200 ($50 discount)

• Dev Editing: More negotiable than usual, but only until I light a candle on Saints Day.

• Line and Dev: I’m looking for another manuscript ready to get ready to pub. Novel length if you got one. Bring me your baby so I can strangle it.

• I also specialize in weird requests and strange challenges.

Wanna get done up?

Recent Plaudits: Charlene Elsby’s next novel, full edit, pubs in February. Think you’re better than Charlene? Well, do you!?

Upcoming Plaudits: It’s a secret but it’s coming soon.

Before we Start

wrote a banger first novel titled Why Teach. Go buy it (that’s a link to buy it. Don’t get it from Amazon, their author split sucks. Fuck them.)

He also brought me into a horrible addiction to FOUNTAIN PENS, for which I may never forgive him, but thank him every day.

If you don’t read his Substack, it’s worth reading. If it wasn’t worth reading, I wouldn’t have read it and felt the need to write this immediately.

He sent me his book for free, for being the first person on Substack to send me a book for free, it has cost me hundreds of dollars and a new obsession that turned into a rabbit hole. So, was it really free? (No, but it’s also a good piece of contemporary realist fiction. Solid midlist.)

Ok, now that you know we’re all friends I’m gonna strap on the asshole mask and pretend like I’m the swarthy asshole I play on here for you, my beloved readers.

Craft Pathology Report: The Cathedral

or

FUCK THAT CAT AND FUCK ITS FAMILY!

or

A Companion Critique to “Should You Save the Cat?”