October 5th, 2020 - Rainbows

Dear TNY,

It’s another Monday and the story is “Rainbows” and guess what?  I’m still here.  And your fiction is still an orange Home Depot bucket filled with plump, perforated rabbit intestines. 

The narrative is all over the map with regard to arc.  It’s like when you are driving a manual transmission car and you let the clutch out to get the vehicle moving, but you don’t give it enough gas, and the car herks and jerks forward trying to decide if it’s going to die or not.  I wish this story had died, though.  Also, I’m aware (from a previous story) that your understanding of a manual transmission is nonexistent so this comparison will be lost on you.

Additionally, the characters are all cardboard.  Every single secondary character in this story is obviously there to manipulate, from a craft perspective, the main character on her journey to the author’s predetermined destination.  So none of them are believable and how the main character interacts with them is like when my oldest son talks to what he calls his “friends” (hand puppets that he uses to make me laugh).  The difference is that in this story, it’s not funny; it’s just the sad state of short story editors such that you all believe this is good writing.

What I’m saying is no one in this story is real.  No one seems genuinely concerned about anything.  I don’t believe any of these words.  It has such a fucking canned happy ending that I’m nauseated.  This is some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen.  Not just in your magazine.  Not just in any magazine.  This is worse than about two-thirds of the stories I have read in writers’ workshops at the undergrad level.  

For instance:  That is my core skill, I believe: making phone calls promptly and persistently. It is a surprisingly rare skill.

First off, this quote sounds like our president (sic) said it as it has his famous self-aggrandizing follow-up complement after the first piece of information is given.  It also is fucking obnoxiously stupid to believe that making a phone call is a skill, let alone a rare skill.  This sort of understanding of oneself is akin to being proud that at age 45, you finally figured out what the roll of paper in the bathroom was for (which is a very Western example, I know; I’m trying to make a point).

I’ll stop.  I’m just being negative.

I want to talk about power.  Giving power.  Taking power away.  Jesus, so much of my power has been taken away.  By others.  By me.  Sometimes you cripple yourself so badly that you can’t seem to get unstuck, but it’s you that did it.  Humans.  So fucking broken.

I don’t know why I allow you to have power over me, TNY.  You, by almost every account, are a narcissistic moron.  You’ll never be able to hear the words:  You are doing a bad job.  No matter how much I try, how frustrated I get, how loud I yell, how many times I say the word fuck (or don’t).  You’ll never hear it because you have already determined what you are so you don’t need to change.  You are wearing a shirt that says “Awesome Without Trying”.  You are everything that’s wrong with America.  You are the epitome of the words that Zack de la Rocha screams out at the end of “Know Your Enemy”.  And you’ll never know it.  No self-awareness.

So why do I let you get to me?  Man, I don’t really know.  Last week, I was fucking down.  Way down.  I’m still down, to be honest.  But I’m still here.  So I want to take a minute to thank Matt Matt, which, there’s no way that’s your real name.  Your letter was so kind and I really appreciated it.  Still do.  It took me a few days of reading it to really understand that my words mattered enough that you reached out.  And that’s amazing.  Thank you.  Thank you for existing.  Keep existing.  People like you fucking matter.  We’ve got this magazine here, TNY, consistently filling pages with words and none of them fucking matter.  But your words mattered, to me.  That’s fucking powerful.  Thank you, again.

So maybe that’s why I let you get to me, TNY.  Because I believe deeply that words should matter.  Stories should matter.  That they should fucking do something other than address sociopolitical issues or fill pages.  They should change fucking lives.  Pick people up.  Carry us when we cannot carry ourselves.  Words should save the fucking world. 

And your words don’t and aren’t.

So fuck it.  As long as you are there fucking up, I’ll be here to point it out.

And you didn’t even fucking send me a love story, you twats.  Goddamn did I need one.  Still fucking do.  For any of the other readers out there, I know I rarely ever address you, send me your love stories if you want.  That would be super cool.  I love love so much.

Rambling now.

I’m out.

Nick