July 1st, 2019 - Son of Friedman

Dear TNY,

It’s Monday and it’s “Son of Friedman”.  And it’s fucked.

I probably made it about a thousand words into this story before I could no longer go on.  Reading, like anything, is a distraction from the fact that everyone you love is going to die.  Now, I want to make the distinction between everyone I love and the fact that I, myself, am going to die.  Because I do not love myself.  So, it is not sad if I die and I do not need to be distracted from it.  I do, however, not want to think about everyone I will ever love as empty husks, the once brightness in their eyes turning into nothing but cloudy, dead meat.

I say all this to say that this story was incapable of distracting me from that fact.  This story was incapable of distracting me from anything.  I could not, even for a thousand words, engage with this story.  Why?  Well, there are a host of characters that seem to be interacting with each other, but the writer was very insistent about interrupting these scenes with exposition that derailed any coherent story flow.  Moreover, the particular choice to have so many characters in a third person POV means that the writer must then differentiate them somehow, which is difficult.  In this case, none of these characters are actually defined by characterization in scene.  They are defined by long riffs of exposition (which, exposition is, by default, more boring than the actual story because it’s a storyline that is beside the main flow of the story, and not contained within it).  So, the main differentiators between these characters that are non-names are boring and unmemorable (the exposition) so the characters must then be divided via their names.  This leads to using the character names over and over and over and over and over and over again.  This is especially compounded by the fact that there are multiple same sex characters interacting at once so the usage of “he” must be very well applied. Evidence of excellent application, I could not find within the text.

What I’m trying to say, TNY, is this story is some real community college writing workshop level garbage.  And like most of the shit you publish, it probably should be a novel that a person like myself would never read.  One where all this exposition could be expanded into scenes and the story would feel more full and fleshed out than it does as a short story. 

But I get it, man.  I’m not your market.  You aren’t marketing to people who actually know what literature is, especially in the short form.  You are marketing to the people that would read this novel.  The people that ensure literature continues down the rabbit-hole of being dumbed-down into barely a shadow of what the artform once was.  These people vote on literature with their wallets, and that’s what you are at the end of the day, right?  A business.  You’d publish 50 Shades if you felt like you could pull it off.  Because, hey, fuck the preservation of humanity through its arts, right?  Let’s get those dollas, motha-fucka! 

Or it could be that humanity itself is devolving into the pile of shit that Chet became at the end of Weird Science. That feels like it could be accurate too. It feels like the whole world has left me behind.  Not just you, dude.  Seems like people are okay with glad-handing and mediocrity.  With “good enough”.  With “awesome without trying”. With feeling so good about themselves that they don’t need to improve.  Fuck my face, TNY. Don’t do it.

Yeah, I’m in the dumps today.  You probably have no idea what it’s like to believe that you are beautiful and spend your whole life finding evidence that you are wrong.  Rather, that you may be beautiful, but that no one cares.  Nah, you probably wake up every day feeling pretty fucking good about your reflection. 

I was hoping for more from you today.  And you didn’t come through.  I’ve been doing this for a year and a half.  I don’t know why I expected anything different.

Nick