August 20th, 2018 - A Refugee Crisis

Dear TNY,

“A Refugee Crisis.”  Jesus fuck is it honest.

I’m gonna get into it.  But, first I want to preface this by saying I’m beat.  By life.  I don’t have anyone else to talk to.  Yeah, this plays into the assessment of the story.  Hold your shit, dog.  Also, I’m a liter deep in a German bar and I’m crying.  Sue me.  What I’m saying is that I needed you to come through.  I needed something.  Because I’ve got at risk kids and I love someone that doesn’t love me back in a way that's actionable.  Is it sad that it’s cliche?  Fuck yeah.  But it’s my life and I bet it looks a lot like the rest of humanity.

I’m saying this to preface that I fucking loved the honesty in this story.  This was exactly the opposite of your agenda bullshit that I see from week to week.  This felt as dejected and apathetic as humanity feels right now.  AND it felt as self-righteous as humanity feels right now.  God did I hang on ever fucking word of this.  I mean, you really put something out there that was well crafted, had exceptional characterization, the scenes were spare but correct, and the dichotomy of the characters screamed reality.  I only have one negative note, that being he introduced the notepad at the end and it had an influence on the conclusion of the story.  It seemed so cheap compared to the rest of this story to pull that shit at the end.  Why not earlier, in the scene where he asks her to put the headphones on?  Don’t manipulate me with a device, bro.

What I’m saying is I really fucking liked this story.  I respected it.  I respected you for going outside your normal trashbox of name-based shortfalls…I mean stories, short stories.  I respected that you went for a male character that was an ass.  But that, somehow, redeemed himself via his humanity by the end.  And you went for a female character that was uber altruistic.  And you made her somewhat rotten by the end.  Goddamn, I said it before, I’m saying it again:  The characters were fucking pristine, my man.  So fucking good.

Here's something:  The MC is not a coward if he wrote something this honest.  Maybe it was the most honest thing he’d ever written.  Therefore, his giving over was even that much better.  That by building a fucking perfect castle, the MC withered to dust.  I’ll grant you that it’s likely only writers will see his actions as courageous because superficially he looks like a pussy.  But he’s not.  Because he documented it as it was.  And that’s…God, that’s hard to do.

Back to my life being shitty, and how that fits in, I cling to fact that the only way to move forward as a writer is to be as vulnerable and honest as possible.  To lay bare the ugliness as well as the beauty.  To paint those fruits on the table so goddamn glorious that the reader can smell them, even their rot.  And to do that, to do that requires courage beyond measure.  Anything short is just “Cat Person” (note that I still fucking hate you for putting that in the world; WHAT A TRASH PIECE OF SHIT THAT WAS AND YOU TOTALLY CATERED TO THE FUCKING BIASED POPULAR MEDIA INSTEAD OF UPHOLDING ARTISTIC STANDARDS YOU FUCKO ASSFACE).  And that kind of courage is how I have to move forward here, in my life, in this place.  I, like the MC, am trying to hone the truth in my craft as well as my life.  And I’ve got mad respect for the author who cast that spell.

Thank you.  I really appreciate you caring about literature almost none of the time.  Because that almost is so precious to me.

 I’ll see you next week.

Nick