Something new
Hi all. Happy 2019! I’ve decided to take this newsletter in a new direction this year. In the past, I used Some Bullshit to compile links from around the Web while promoting what I’d written the previous week. But I want to try something new.
This year, I’m going to send you weekly, short bursts of fiction I’ve written. I’m talking very short, 150 to 200 words per dispatch. I’m not sure what form these dispatches will take — whether they’ll be unconnected vignettes or chunks of story that eventually add up to a larger narrative. (Melissa Mendes’ serial comic, The Weight, has been a big inspiration for me.)
The point of all this, I think, is threefold: 1. getting back into writing fiction, 2. writing more consistently, without worrying too much about editing it before sending it out into the ether, and 3. making my writing more concise, traveling more narrative ground with fewer words.
So, without further ado, here’s the first installment of ... whatever this is!
1.6.19
On the night Luca got sick, eighteen of the nineteen families who made up the village, high in the Dinaric Alps, had gathered at the the orchard keeper’s house to celebrate the Solstice, eating the last of the season’s fresh beef and game, and drinking the new batch of slivovitz. It was the last night the families would all be together before their houses were socked in by the snow for the next six months. The next day, the village’s wives could be found at the baker’s house canning vegetables and packing the remaining beef, along with venison, wild boar and rabbit into barrels filled with salt. The orchard keeper’s wife would bring from their apiary the smoking bellows used to calm the bees, which her husband had specially ordered from a cousin in New York the previous summer. They used the smoker to inject smoke into the barrels before sealing them shut with resin from the larch trees that encroached on the village on all sides. There had been some debate two winters ago about whether larch resin or beeswax would provide a better seal on the barrels, but all parties eventually concluded the beeswax was too precious for candle making to be used for other purposes. They saved jarring the pickled plums for last, at which point one of the wives would joke that it was about time for them to start pickling themselves.
That’s all for now! As always, I appreciate your feedback. Please share this newsletter with anyone you think might like it. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week.