July 11th & 18th, 2022 - A King Alone

Dear TNY,

It’s another Monday and the other night, way late, I realized that I didn’t see that you published four stories in your fiction issue, not three like you usually do, so I just finished up with “A King Alone”.

And it’s okay. 

It’s got grit.  I dig that, as you know.  There are really great details along the way.  For example:

“They bent language like glassmakers…”

“People with guns could be pretty corny about them.”

“You don’t see the yellow-meat watermelons much anymore,’ the photographer said. ‘And no one calls it meat.”

And that’s great.  All that detail, the grime and the grit and the dirt, it’s all great.  But my big beef is that there’s nothing at stake for 80% of the story.  As the reader, I don’t care about the MC or his relationship with the daughter that much.  It’s just not in the text, you know?  All this detail, all this grit, all this darkness, for what?  Not a relationship.  So I’m left wanting, getting bored with all the cheap Americana on hand.  Which, if done in short bursts is cool.  Very Poe Ballantine.  But with these pages and pages of the same shit with nothing at risk, it’s like watching someone play the same treble loops and waiting for the beat to drop.  Cut that shit.  Or, drop a fucking beat.

Now, after he picks up his last ride, there’s something at stake.  Is it his daughter?  Likely not, but who knows.  Is she crazy?  Drugs?  Where’d she go?  There’s some fucking teeth, you know?  Al dente, as they fucking say in the industry, right?  But it’s so fucking far into the story that who cares about the rest of it?  I sure don’t. 

It was nice to see grit.  It was nice to see dive bars and spare writing and hitchhikers and one-legged happy hour hobbling motherfuckers.  But this isn’t a story so much as it is facts and then an aborted fetus. 

Regroup, go back, and cut this thing way down at the start and then push the end a little more surface.  I mean, come on.  This is fucking 101 level editing.

Sorry I missed this by a week.  But really, I’m not that fucking sorry because you sonsabitches are fucking trash and you never read this shit anyway.

Adios, cock/clitsuckers!

Nick