Our friend Joseph Grant, whose work appeared in the last issue of Faraway, has several new stories online for your perusal.
The short story “The Cypher” is online at a delightful digital journal, Six Sentences. Click here to read it!
You can also find the lengthier tale, “The Perfect Hit”, in Underground Voices Literary Review. Check it out!
In our continuing effort to be up-to-date Faraway has been upgraded to the newest wordpress 2.7. The theme has also been upgraded to the newest version. Some of you who post here will notice a difference in the admin section. WordPress 2.7 has introduced a host of new features that make it easier to use, but it’s new so it might take a bit to get used to.
Even though things have slowed down a bit in the recent months we want to let you know that Faraway will continue and it will be more relevant than ever. We see great things happening in 2009 and hope that you will join us in publishing new art and literature.
We still welcome new submissions so if you have any art or literature that you would like published please Register here. By registering for this website you will be able to post your art or literature right here, for free.
So what are you waiting for… go register already.
Now, for the first time, you can read K. C. Wilson‘s powerful new novella completely for free, presented by Faraway. By Florida-based author K. C. Wilson, Doing the Dead – 1983 is a superb piece of writing about a man turning thirty and recognizing the entanglements that made him who he is. Along the way an unforgettable cast of characters deals with murder, betrayal, love, friendship, music, and loss.
Click here to download the novella in its entirety.
For interviews with the author and more, click here.
And to purchase a print edition, click here: 
In December, we serialized K. C. Wilson’s novella Doing the Dead – 1983. To start off the new year, we are going to bring you that novella, in full, for the first time. Come back tomorrow to download the full novella by this outstanding writer!
And now for the final chapter of K. C. Wilson’s novella Doing the Dead – 1983, presented by Faraway!
Click here to purchase a copy of Doing the Dead – 1983, or click here for complete coverage of the publication of this new novella.
Kate came by early in the Cougar. Ingrid got up to see me off. Lyle was leaving to go to work. Susan slept. Russell sat on his couch on the porch, drinking beer and watching early morning TV on the portable black and white. The house was peaceful, calm. Ingrid waved a tender goodbye from the doorway. All I had to do was get in the car and go.
The moment of going provided a focus on the receding house. Inside the Cougar, reality and time were linked to no houses. The moment of going extended outward into a prolonged transition, like one of those endlessly changing Dead jams that segue in a hundred different directions before the full surging power of the band converges on a single resonating chord that announces the end of the song they were playing as it fades into the beginning of the next song, the next new song in the sequence. The music never stops.
Click here to download the sixth chapter of K. C. Wilson’s novella Doing the Dead – 1983, presented by Faraway!
Click here to purchase a copy of Doing the Dead – 1983, or click here for complete coverage of the publication of this new novella.
My younger sister, Kate, often came by the house and parked in front when she went to the beach. She was dating a doctor who was also a Grateful Deadhead with an extensive library of live recordings, which I had been borrowing a few at a time for several months. Kate was excited about the upcoming tour. Through her doctor friend, Doc, she was connected to a vast network of other Deadheads. She herself was “a Dead virgin,” and looking forward with great anticipation to her first Dead concert.
She had extra tickets for me if I wanted to go. Two shows, at Hampton, Virginia and Morgantown, West Virginia.
“It’s pretty much worked out,” she said. “We get to Charlotte and park the car. Pick up another ride there.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” she said. “How do you feel about driving Gloria to Charlotte? Think she’ll make it?”
“If it doesn’t rain,” I said.
“My car’s too small. So is Doc’s.”
“It would be better if we had windshield wipers,” I said.
Be sure to return tomorrow for the final chapter of Doing the Dead – 1983, “Daybreak on the Land.”
Recently, writer K. C. Wilson, whose novella Doing the Dead – 1983 is being published this month by Faraway, took some time to answer some questions about his work, his writing process, and his experience in publishing. Part 2 of the interview is below. (Click here to read the first part of the interview, and here to read the second part.)
Part 3
Writing
Describe your writing process. Where and when do you write best? How often do you write, and how much do you write at a time?
I write best in the mornings. I’m a morning person, generally, but late at night, also. It all depends. Lately, I’m a weekend writer. When I’m working on something nowadays, I have to be adaptable. At any moment, my daughter might want me to watch her stand on her head or something. I try to comply. I do more rewriting than writing these days, but when I’m working on something, I’ll stay with it for hours, as long as I can.
Who are some of your favorite writers? Or who are some writers who have influenced your work? In The Route especially I’ve detected plot elements that I might call “Adult Kerouac”: the sort of vagabond existence that Kerouac writes about, except in your work it’s tied to characters who still feel strongly about being involved in society, who still feel strong emotions for their families, who still feel like they want to accomplish something other than being a vagabond, exemplified by Pete in The Route. How do you feel about this characterization?
I never think of Kerouac in relation to The Route. Although he was an early influence, as he was on most of my generation, I soon found that I couldn’t write that way: the free-flowing, headlong rush into the midnight of a thousand crazy dreams kind of a thing. Not for long, anyway. Although what you call “Adult Kerouac” might well be a reflection of the aftermath of the beat/hipster lifestyle. After the glory of youth’s debauch the piper must be paid.
I read the Beats in college and had every intention of following the same tracks, riding the rails, hitching, hoboing, writing my own vainglorious novel. I did that and it’s safely tucked away in drawer where it belongs. Along the way, I found a lot of writers I admired, but I found that I couldn’t write like most of them, either.
For The Route, I used, as a model for tone, Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat. That little novel, to me, is perfect. I’ve reread it a bunch of times.
First person narratives always attracted me, particularly what I call the “desperate narrative,” like James M. Cain’s Past All Dishonor, for example, in which a Confederate spy holed up in a cave hastily writes his story while the Union army closes in on him. In these stories desperation rules. The rock is rolling downhill throughout. A man will do anything for love, even murder. James M. Cain owned that genre.
I went though all the hard boiled crime novelists. I wanted to write those cheap paperbacks with bad men and sexy women on the covers. I was determined to master the first person narrative but as time went by, I did a lot more reading than writing. What I did write tended towards the personal.
The first writer who was my truest teacher of style was Andre Gide. His novels, his notebooks, everything he wrote spoke to me of a narrative ideal: a personal, intimate tone that quickly establishes a confidential bond with the reader. What he wrote about never mattered as much as the way he wrote. But I was too young then to rely on style alone. I needed a story to tell and I didn’t have one.
Current writers I greatly admire are Nick Tosches, whose In The Hand of Dante is the novel of a lifetime, James Ellroy, whose output seems to have slowed down of late, and Cormac McCarthy, whose work towers over most modern literature.
You have mentioned to me that The Route was based largely on actual events. Why is it that you have relied on autobiographical events in your writing, and how has this differed from any writing you’ve done that was entirely fictional?
Louis Ferdinand Celine bowled me over with Death on the Installment Plan and soon after, Henry Miller swept me away on the sea of his stories. I had tried to write pure fiction, but the writers I loved most were raconteurs, storytellers, personalities so strong they couldn’t be separated from their stories. In college, a friend turned me on to Diary of the Seducer by Kierkegaard, a self-contained fragment all but hidden inside the tome, Either/Or, seventy stunning pages of wickedly honest narration. I wanted to do that, write something so true you could not put it down.
I’d made up a few imaginary tales, but the stories and anecdotes I heard people tell, stories of real people’s lives were always the better stories, to me. I came to the realization that I was not the kind of writer who was inclined to conjure up stories out of nothing. Unless they were grounded in some kind of truth or reality, the stories I made up didn’t matter much to me. Once I accumulated a few interesting experiences of my own, I tried to tell them the best I could. By the time I had mentally filtered the experience, edited the dialog, changed the names, elaborated, exaggerated and introduced a point to an often pointless scenario, I felt pretty secure about calling it fiction rather than fact. I never set out to write factual stories. My view of fiction is: change the names and leave out the boring parts.
Along the way, I involved other people. The Route was based in reality, no question. The narrator, Peter Foster, was based on the actor and writer, Bruce Kerr. I could never have written from Bruce Kerr’s perspective and called my narrator Bruce Kerr. I’m not Bruce and Peter Foster is not Bruce either. Peter Foster is a pale shadow of the Bruce Kerr I knew, a fictional approximation of a great friend.
Have you had any subsequent troubles due to including reflections of real people in your stories?
Not yet. Time will tell. Many characters in my stories and novels were drawn from real people. Most of them, in fact. Maybe they value their anonymity so much that they’ll point out to people, “Hey, that’s me in that book.” No one’s ever likely to know who any of these characters are, or were based on, originally. A lot of them are already dead, and eventually, they’ll all be dead. I’m the only one who remembers them in my own particular way. It seems doubtful to me that anyone is likely to sue me over mis-characterization. Anyway, it’s a chance I’ve chosen to take.
Is there any advice you would give to young writers about the craft of writing?
Be sure to come back tomorrow to read the sixth and penultimate chapter of Doing the Dead – 1983, “Dawn of the Dead.”
Busy times, I know. But perhaps sometime today, during halftime of the Lakers-Celtics game or while you’re waiting for dinner to be ready, click here to read Doing the Dead – 1983, a novella by K. C. Wilson presented by Faraway.
We’ve also got a Christmas story by Michael Pitassi, Baptism By Ice Water: A Christmas Tale.
And, two poems in a series by Katie Friedman, First Date and Physical Love.
Click here to download the fifth chapter of K. C. Wilson’s novella Doing the Dead – 1983, presented by Faraway!
Click here to purchase a copy of Doing the Dead – 1983, or click here for complete coverage of the publication of this new novella. And be sure to return on December 19 for the second part of our interview with K. C. Wilson!
Meanwhile, in Arkansas, Ingrid Smythe, nee Thorvald, was embarking on a separate vacation from her third husband, Andre. She had relatives to visit and various friends to look up in Florida, and if she had time in five days, she also planned to drop in on me.
On the next to last day of her vacation, she knocked on my door. I hadn’t seen her for five years, not since the lost weekend we spent together in a Flagler Beach motel.
“Surprised?” she asked, flashing her megawatt smile. She did a little pirouette on my doorstep. She’d kept her figure.
“Very.”
Initially when I wrote this poem I didn’t have anything specific in mind. Now I guess it can apply pretty well to the Great Deprecession of 2008 – 200?. The only things missing are cardboard and corrogated iron Bush- and Cheneyvilles. When will it end? Nobody knows. And for the record, I coined two new words in this blog post alone!
Happy Winter!
This month, Faraway is serializing the novella Doing the Dead – 1983 by K. C. Wilson. Doing the Dead – 1983 is a superb piece of writing about a man turning thirty and recognizing the entanglements that made him who he is. Along the way an unforgettable cast of characters deals with murder, betrayal, love, friendship, music, and loss. To help you catch up, here are links to what has been published so far, including interviews with the author and a review of his novel, The Route, along with forthcoming publication dates.
The Route Review
Interview with the Author – Part 1: About K. C. Wilson
Interview with the Author – Part 2: Publishing
Chapter I. The Life and Times of Baby Brenda
Chapter II. Take a Number
Chapter III. Painter’s Eye
Chapter IV. Susan
December 23: Chapter V. Ingrid
December 26: Interview with the Author Part 3: Writing
December 27: Chapter VI. Dawn of the Dead
December 28: Chapter VII. Daybreak On the Land
For full coverage, you can always visit Doing the Dead – 1983, or click here to buy the novella in full.
Baptism by Ice Water: A Christmas Tale
By Michael Pitassi
December in Augusta, Maine, just after the unveiling of the town lights and decorations, is loved by nearly all who experience it. I say nearly because there does happen to be one rather vocal dissenter among the otherwise joyous inhabitants of this enchanting town.
Eugene Ash, a man only forty-five but thought by most to be many years older, was the town crab. He had gained a reputation for growing exceptionally bitter, year after year, as the month of December advanced toward Christmas Day. He was rather cheerful the other eleven months of the year, but as the rest of the town began to perk up for the holiday, Eugene Ash took on the persona of a cloud of soot. And he didn’t mind the negative attention, in fact he more or less asked for it. He purposefully wore darker clothing around this time, perfected his scowl, and needled the townsfolk with caustic and satirical remarks. Eugene Ash had become as much a part of the holiday traditions in Augusta as the giant Christmas tree in the center of town or the lights strung along Kennebec River.
Because Eugene Ash lived alone, and more so because of his Christmastime theatrics, he came to be known to some as Augusta’s Ebenezer. It was an expected association, but one that wasn’t entirely warranted, for Eugene Ash wasn’t a miser or a “scrooge.” He had very logical and intellectual reasons for disliking the Christmas season. Continue reading
Recently, writer K. C. Wilson, whose novella Doing the Dead – 1983 is being published this month by Faraway, took some time to answer some questions about his work, his writing process, and his experience in publishing. Part 2 of the interview is below. (Click here to read the first part of the interview, and here to read about the publication of Doing the Dead – 1983.) Doing the Dead – 1983 is now on sale! Click below to buy it now.
Part 2
Publishing
Describe your work with Barnyard Books (K. C. Wilson’s first book, The Route, was published under the banner of Barnyard Books, which Wilson created).
Any writer knows how frustrating it is not to get published. Year after year accumulating only rejection slips is hard on the psyche. I took my lumps, called it paying dues, whatever. After awhile it started pissing me off. Three novels and I couldn’t get a break. No stories, no poems, nothing. One filthy story I was ashamed to sign my name to, that sold. Nothing I considered good.
I started writing songs with my friends and we had a blast recording them. Selling a song had to be easier than selling a book, I figured. Actually, it’s not. Same degree of difficulty, as it turns out. For me, anyway. I made a lot of demos in my living room. The recordings were cheap and crumby but had a certain charm. Not enough, evidently. Out of sixty something demos, I couldn’t sell a single one. Most of them were novelty songs, light comedy, jug band music in folk, blues and country styles with a couple of serious efforts thrown in. We called ourselves The Rubes.
What I learned about song publishing was that you could be a music publisher basically by calling yourself one and registering with BMI or ASCAP. I started thinking about becoming first a music publishing company and later, maybe publishing books, too, starting with The Route, which had spent the entire nineties bouncing around the publishing world. In 2000, my company, Barnyard Productions, produced our first CD, The Rubes – UNDISPUTED. MP3.com was still an online entity and there were other similar sites, like Garageband.com, and cdbaby.com. Both of which have survived, to date. I put our music online and the CD sold isolated copies around the world. Some Russian in Irkutsk is familiar with The Rubes. I picture him walking along an icy street, humming, “I ain’t got no biscuits for your dog …” That still makes me laugh. The Rubes were all about making people laugh.
Describe self-publishing your novel The Route.
Tragedy struck The Rubes in 1998. One of our guys died, Adam Kerr. A year later, his dad died. Bruce Kerr, the model and inspiration for The Route’s narrator, Peter Foster, “El Indispensio” himself, was gone. We put out the CD in memory of them both. In 2001, Barnyard Books published The Route. The actual process overwhelmed me. The artwork, the graphics, the nuts and bolts of production I could learn, given enough time. At the marketing end of it, publicity, distribution, promotion; I was hopelessly inept.
Would you recommend self-publishing to new authors?
With reservations, I would say, depending on how new you are to the business of writing, that self-publishing is an option that deserves consideration. It definitely carries a stigma with it and I don’t see that disappearing, ever, although things are changing so rapidly in the publishing business that my opinion means very little. If your psyche can handle being pre-judged and lumped in with the also-rans of publishing (all the other writers who abandoned, or never even began the quest for “legitimate” publication) then you may find self-publishing to be a significant improvement over remaining unpublished. But if you want vindication, validation, respect from writers you consider your peers, you’re not likely to get it from self-publishing. There’s no denying that it’s a thrill and a good thing to hold your own book in your hands, but when you weigh it against the years you spent trying to get published for real, it’s a hollow victory.
Describe your experiences with agents.
I paid the Scott Meredith agency, once a pre-eminent NY agency, to analyze my novel. For $350. I got four pages of analysis written by an intern. See you later, bye. A few years later, the price went up a hundred bucks. I tried again with a rewrite. Same thing. See you later, bye.
I used to scour the Writers Market for publishers who would accept a complete ms [manuscripts] because sending out queries with sample chapters was such a colossal waste of time. Publishers asked for a synopsis and outline. And agents expected a query letter to be “the best letter you ever wrote.” I spent hundreds of hours trying to write that perfect query letter. All of it time lost, time down the drain. Finally, an agent responded. He wanted to see my work. I sent him The Route. He sent me a contract. He wanted thirty-five dollars. Thirty-five dollars? Okay, fine. I sent him a check. Heard nothing from him for a couple of months. Then he sent the check back with a note saying he changed his mind. Another agent liked The Route. He wanted a hundred dollars for a year contract. Okay, fine. This agent kept in touch regularly, but couldn’t sell the book. Finally, he recommended a co-op publisher. I wanted nothing to do with a co-op publisher. The co-op publisher contacted me by phone and charmed me into agreeing to let him publish 10,000 copies of The Route for only a little over five grand (my cost.) Talk about a hollow victory. That company, Northwest Publishing, was the subject of a huge class action lawsuit, of which I became a part. I was the last of hundreds of authors to be bilked. They never published a single copy of The Route. I never got my money back. I just got a big S stamped on my forehead for “Sucker.” Between fooling around with half-ass agents and bogus publishers, The Route went unsold for a decade. Meanwhile, I worked on another novel, Goat Island. I got another agent. She wanted $150 for a six-month contract. Sure, I knew better than to pay agents up front, but the reputable agents were giving me a pass, so I took another chance. She couldn’t sell Goat Island. I renewed after six months, gave her another $150. After a year, still nothing. I went back to the Writers Market, started looking again for publishers that I could approach directly. Every year there seemed to be fewer of them.
That was the state I was in when I published The Route in 2001. I saw no other options at the time. I was not content to let the ms fade away unread in a drawer.
What advice would you give the young or unpublished writers visiting Faraway about getting published?
My advice is to try not to publish any work you consider mediocre. The chances are readers will think even less of it than you do. The internet reduces everything to content, word space, filler. But if you’ve written something good, have faith in it and try to find a place where it fits. Be aware that it’s hard to stand out when you’re just like everyone else.
Click here to download the fourth chapter of K. C. Wilson’s novella Doing the Dead – 1983, presented by Faraway!
Click here to purchase a copy of Doing the Dead – 1983, or click here for complete coverage of the publication of this new novella. And be sure to return on December 19 for the second part of our interview with K. C. Wilson!
“So. How exactly do you go about running over a mailbox?”
One morning, I asked Lyle that question as he was giving himself a haircut with scissors over a towel spread in the bathroom sink. “What’s the procedure?”
“I hallucinated,” he growled. “I thought it was you.”
His gruffness discouraged repartee.
“You’re an idiot,” I said.
“And you, my friend, know nothing of serious matters.”
A sidelong glance belied his mood of gravity. “I met a friend of yours last night,” he said, squinting through the wisp of rising mentholated smoke. The cigarette projecting from the corner of his mouth vibrated like a tuning fork when he spoke. “Apparently, she knew you in your formative years.”
I leaned one hand on the paneling outside the doorway and waited for Lyle to finish trimming his mustache and continue. Once his teeth were visible again below his Pancho Villa mustache, he flashed a grin and gestured silently to peek inside his door.
Click here to download the third chapter of K. C. Wilson’s novella Doing the Dead – 1983, presented by Faraway!
Click here to purchase a copy of Doing the Dead – 1983, or click here for complete coverage of the publication of this new novella. And be sure to return on December 19 for the second part of our interview with K. C. Wilson!
By the time Lyle Stone moved in, I was well ensconced in my abode. T.S., my friend from North Carolina, had a problem with Russell, his father. Rondele and Fatima, the two lesbians T.S. rented a room from, had decided they had put up with Russell Sharpe long enough.
They liked Russell fine when he was sober. They had met him at the train station when he arrived, brought him home and let him stay on the couch for a couple of weeks, no problem. He painted their house. He was sober at first, then he wasn’t. Then they came home and found him sprawled out drunk on the living room floor beside an empty bottle of cooking sherry and they put their feet down.
“What am I going to do with Hoss?” T.S. turned to me for help.
“I guess bring him on by.” A sudden, short deliberation.
Russell was actually there before Lyle. He was sleeping on the floor for some reason, and the house was still dark from too few light bulbs, or no light bulbs, and, coming in late, Lyle tripped over Russell in the dark and fumbled a twelve pack of beer.
“What the hell’s going on?” Lyle blustered.
I’d like to thank another group of Faraway supporters for making donations to our continued efforts to publish new authors. Karen Greenbaum-Maya, Suvi Mahonen, and Luke Waldrip, all of whom have work appearing in the latest issue of Faraway, each made much-needed donations.
Suvi Mahonen had this to say: “As I’ve said before, it’s great that journals such as yours exists. Thank you once again for accepting our story for publication.”
We also received this comment from contributor and donor Vic Fortezza, who just received his copies of the print edition of the journal: “Beautiful. I’m proud to have been a part of the issue.”
If you would like to make a donation, simply click the button below:
And be sure to come back tomorrow, when we will be publishing the third chapter of K. C. Wilson’s novella, Doing the Dead – 1983.
Click here to download the second chapter of K. C. Wilson’s novella Doing the Dead – 1983, presented by Faraway!
In the late half of my thirtieth year, I was making an effort to take stock of my life. Moving acted as a catalyst. Certain tenets and theorems of my philosophy regarding women were drawn into high relief and reconsidered.
All my possessions went in one carload from Doris and Lyle’s apartment, where I was staying in their guest room, to the beach house on 28th Avenue.
Doris and Lyle’s relationship was dying a slow and torturous death. They took me in when I was flat broke, after Darla, the dancer, flew back to New York, and they let me stay there with them for several months while their relationship disintegrated.
Click here to purchase a copy of Doing the Dead – 1983, or click here for complete coverage of the publication of this new novella. And be sure to return on December 16 for chapter three!
Come to FarawayJournal.com this Saturday to read the second chapter of K. C. Wilson’s novella, Doing the Dead – 1983. If you still need to get caught up, follow the links below.
* The Route Review - Read the review of K. C. Wilson’s novel, The Route.
* Interview with the Author – Part 1: About K. C. Wilson - Click here to read an introductory interview with K. C. Wilson, in which he tells about his writing.
* Chapter I. The Life and Times of Baby Brenda - And click here to read the first chapter of the novella, Doing the Dead – 1983.
To buy a print or digital copy of Doing the Dead, follow the link below:
I want to draw attention today to our many supporters, whose donations keep this journal up and running. We’ve recently received much-needed financial help from Alfred Scolari, Kyle Hernandez, owner of Second Story Books of Claremont, and Gay Degani, Michael Woodcock, Vic Fortezza, and Joseph Grant, all of whom have stories or art appearing in the latest issue of Faraway. I received the following letter from Joseph Grant, which I wanted to share with you all:
Thank you so much for including my story in your fine review. I am honored to be included in it. The typesetting and graphics look great. Keep up the good work. . . . I believe in what you’re doing, so keep doing it. Therefore, here is a small contributions towards the next issue. Best of luck in your literary efforts.
Sincerely,
Joseph Grant
To contribute to Faraway and help keep this independent journal alive, please click here.
And remember, we are currently serializing the novella Doing the Dead – 1983. We just published the first chapter, with the second chapter to follow on the 13th.
Click here to download the first chapter of K. C. Wilson’s novella Doing the Dead – 1983, presented by Faraway!
That book was never going to be written, not by me. And I was Brenda’s one hope of ever being remembered.
I sat by her hospital bed and listened to her snore, remembering how that snore had trained me to endure it, to protect and serve it, to tune my ears to its nuances and to love the perverse and tender duty of watching over it. I used to lie awake next to her wondering how she ever made it through a night alone. The sound her shallow breathing made was a pitifully faint wheeze until her chronic sleep apnea disorder kicked in. All through the night, at irregular intervals, sudden constrictions in her throat would block the fitful rhythm of her snore. Her lungs agonized and strained, expanding and contracting without drawing breath while she slept on, oblivious, until by some angel’s hand or a nudge from me, she’d gasp in one more breath through the blockage and resume her shallow breathing pattern.
Click here to purchase a copy of Doing the Dead – 1983, or click here for complete coverage of the publication of this new novella. And be sure to return on December 13 for chapter two!