Today’s some made-up holiday, which means places are closed, so to celebrate, here’s a new story by Nick Mamatas. It’s a weird little ditty with lols a-plenty, I mean, if you like that kind of stuff, laughing, I mean, out loud.

And here, Johannes Goransson says a metaphor to explain his vision of an ideal poem is an “infestation of language.” I like that.

And here, Michael Kimball says he likes pizza and ice cream. I like pizza and ice cream too.

And, just for holiday kicks, she got married yesterday, and seriously, the big story is about her dress.

And that’s all I have to say.

On Twitter, Michael Kimball asked why zombies are so hungry. Maybe he’s doing research for a new book? Maybe it’s for

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You missed the 4th Live Giants reading with Michael Kimball, and Andy Devine.

Through tomorrow you can get Devine’s Words for $8 from PG here.

Consider checking out their work, here and here.

This Thursday April 29, at 9 PM Eastern, Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody and more, will read live here at HTMLGIANT from his home in Baltimore. Special guest appearance by Andy Devine, author of the newly released Words. Mark your book and bring your good hat.

I have been thinking lately about traditional storytelling, experimental writing, narrative and anti-narratives. In a few threads here and on other sites, I’ve seen discussions alluding to narrative fatigue—a weariness for stories containing traditional elements like plot, exposition, linearity, etc. Experimentation is a vital thing so this is not a condemnation of experimentation but rather, a bit of appreciation for the traditional story.

My favorite story (though I enjoy all kinds of writing) is told simply and without artifice, one where I turn the page and can’t wait to see what happens next, where the characters are interesting and well-developed and where I am invested emotionally. I love reading something so great that I want to find everything that person has ever written immediately.

I was reminded of my love for a good story when I read Scott McClanahan’s Stories II, a collection of short stories completely stripped of any bullshit. From front to back, the author’s voice was clear, charming and genuine and it was one of the most refreshing, satisfying books I’ve read in recent memory. As I put the book down I thought, “That’s how it’s done.”

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We are writers. Writers use language. There are lots of things we can do with language. As Robert Lopez says: “I always start with language.” And when he says that, he means his language, his particular language, and that every writer should have their own particular language. Raymond Carver gets at that with this (from “On Writing”): “It’s akin to style, what I’m talking about, but it isn’t style alone. It is the writer’s particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another.”

When I think of language, I think of sentences. As John Banville says: “The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.” There are lots of things that we can do with a sentence. We can manipulate the syntax, the diction, the stresses, the tenses, the acoustics, the morphemes and the phonemes, syllables and prefixes and suffixes, the speed, and the length. As Andy Devine says: “The English sentence – because of English syntax – is infinitely expandable.”

We can manipulate objects, subjects, predicates, infinitives, participles, gerunds, phrases, clauses, and determiners. We can manipulate articles, nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions. Joseph Young says: “Articles propel the sentence, push it off and keep it moving.” Stephen King says: “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” Joseph Brodsky says: “Don’t use too many adjectives.” Andy Devine says: “Adjectives are not as bad as adverbs.”

For instance, I like to structure sentences around articles and conjunctions and prepositions—the more perennial parts of language—so that my narrator has a singular way to speak. And I like to move prepositions to the end of the phrase or the end of the sentence. That was one of the first sentence things that I figured out for myself. It’s not what we’re taught to do, but it is still quite obviously English, and it creates a kind of semantic link in the sentence—and this vaguely unsettling feeling.

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Kevin Sampsell lives in Portland, Oregon and works at Powell’s Books. He started the press, Future Tense Books, in 1990 and has published many writers including Mike Topp, Zoe Trope, Chelsea Martin, Susannah Breslin, Elizabeth Ellen, and Claudia Smith. His own books include Portland Noir (as editor), Creamy Bullets, and A Common Pornography. Harper’s Magazine says, “Sampsell’s talent for observing the ordinary….is perhaps best displayed in chronicling the cringing inelegance of adolescent sexuality: the embarrassing hookups, the acne-cream-flavored kisses, the obsession with pornography, and the preoccupation with discarding one’s virginity.” And Jonathan Ames says, “This is the kind of book where you want to thank the author for helping you feel less alone with being alive.”

Michael Kimball: One of the most striking things about A Common Pornography is the way you lay yourself bare on the page. There are so many awkward, funny, difficult, honest, and maybe embarrassing episodes in the book. How did you get to a place where you were able to do that and what was your mindset as you approached each episode (maybe especially as compared to your mindset writing fiction)?

Kevin Sampsell: It’s mainly a matter of time going by. I’m 42 now. You just get to the point where you don’t really care if other people are bothered or feel uncomfortable with whatever you’re writing. I always think it’s weird when people say, ‘I didn’t like this book because it was so depressing or so dirty.’ I don’t think an author should treat readers like children, or like they have to protect the reader. Personally though, it was hard sometimes to let go of some of these things that I didn’t tell anyone about. I didn’t even tell my girlfriend, now my fiancé, about the prostitute stuff until a couple of years ago. The dilemma I think most writers have is that they don’t care about embarrassing themselves but they do worry about how their family or co-workers or lovers will react.

Compared to fiction, it’s maybe a little harder. At least with fiction you can say to your mom or whomever, ‘Oh, I just made that up.’

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Here’s a quote from Rachel Carson: “The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his 
subject has to tell him.” I always read “still” as “sit still,” which makes me think of this quote from Harry Crews (via Opium): “Sometimes you need to affix your ass to the chair.” That is, sometimes, sitting down and doing the work can be the most difficult part of being a writer. Sometimes, it’s the other parts of life that get in the way. Other times, it is the fiction itself, how we think about the fiction at different points in the process.

So how does the writer get through the rough parts, the blank parts, the parts that we know suck? Virginia Woolf says it is determination: “It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.”

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So let’s say we have a great opening and maybe even a good idea or an interesting voice to go with it. Now what? How does the writer keep going? One of the things that has helped me keep going while I’m working on a novel is not thinking about it. That is, I try to not think about what I’m writing when I’m getting it down (the thinking, so to speak, comes later). For me, it’s just a voice speaking, a way of talking, and I’m trying to be receptive to it, open. I’m just trying to get from one sentence to the next sentence. Often, I do this by looking at the previous sentence—its syntax, the words in play, the acoustics of it—I’m thinking in these small ways, but not so much in bigger ways (say, story or plot or idea). I’m just trying to get material down, which is the hardest part for me. After that, after I have something to work with, then I feel like I can do something with whatever I have on the page. It’s the blankness that is difficult for me, filling in the blankness.

Here are some quotes from Sam Lipsyte, Gary Lutz, Joseph Young, and Blake Butler that discuss a similar process in somewhat different ways.

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[We're very excited to have today and in coming weeks a series of guest posts from the one and only Michael Kimball, author of three novels included the much lauded Dear Everybody. Enjoy! -- BB.]

I’m doing a talk-thing at a free writing conference and the talk is going to be called something like “The One-Hour Crash Course in Fiction Writing.” I’m going to try to cover ways to think about beginnings, language, syntax, details, voice, character, plot, story, revising, endings, etc. I had the idea because it has always been little bits of advice, something that I could hold in my head — whether from a teacher, from something I read, or from another writer — that were the most useful thing to me as I tried to figure out what I wanted to do as a writer. So this will be the first in a series of guest posts about some of the elements of fiction. The posts will include the ways that I think about different elements of fiction, the ways other writers and teachers do, and, hopefully, it will lead to a larger discussion – how you think about it, other ideas from other writers and teachers, etc. OK, here we go:

Openings, there are lots of ways to think about them. Chris Offut said, “The secret is to start a story near the ending.” Elmore Leonard said, “Never open a book with weather.” One of my old teachers used to talk about the importance of the first sentence, the need to overcome of the inertia of nothingness, to immediately capture the reader’s attention. She amended that to say that the first sentence needed to be declarative in some sense, to have a particular syntax and diction, to have resonant acoustical properties. Those first sentences that immediately come to mind, many of those are first sentences that do that. And there are lots of examples, below, from people who are thinking about first sentences.

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Unless you’re weird, you probably already listened to Giant amigo Michael Kimball’s interview on NPR. It’s about his project, Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (On a Postcard), which, unless you’re weird, you’re probably already hip to, too.

I thought the interview was great, that what he said was about more than his project, and more than a criticism of Facebook culture — that we’re all promoting ourselves but no one cares — but it was about a profound sort of other-centeredness, about Story and the importance of getting to know the story of other people’s lives.

I’d say more but I gotta go read some Levinas. What did you think of the interview?

Oh, and check out this video of Blaster Al Ackerman reading for the 60 Writers movie Michael’s making with Luca Dipierro (I know, Sam linked to one yesterday but what the heck, my man was just interviewed on NPR).

there is a new lamination colony. lamination colony is by far my favorite online journal. the new lam-col was edited by michael kimball, who i’m assuming is the brother of detective john kimball from kindergarten cop. so far i liked the work by michael bible, adam robinson and gena “thug life” mohwish.

Michael Kimball and Luca Dipierro have been working for a while now on a video project, ‘I Will Smash You,’ which entails, essentially, videos of people smashing stuff, most often items germane in some way to their life.

A new trailer for the film features Michael Kimball going to town on a desk, which is a dark fantasy I live through almost every day. It is nice to see the release contained:

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 Sean Lovelace turned me on to his new Ander Monson-inspired journal, The Crystal Gavel (v1).  This first issue features new work from Ander Monson, Darby Larson, Daniel Bailey, yours truly and more. Not just anyone can get published there, though: Amazon is handling the rejections.

This is an important idea, really. Fight absurdity because it is yours to defeat. I am excited to see what’ll happen in issue 2.

So what else is new?

Aaron Cohick of New Lights Press, the wizard that brought us the $400 Brian Evenson book (no shit, $400 – I offered Cohick $200 cash on the spot for a copy and he declined — what an ethos! Eat it, JA Tyler and your $2 Evensons [do we need a link?]!) is looking for writers who want to work with him on an artist book version of their work. Check out the press, consider it carefully, see what happens.

Also, I really, really like this video about Michael Kimball and his book Dear Everybody (which, though it’s a pretty high-ranking book, has only half the reviews that the crystal gavel has) (eat it, Michael Kimball). Michael Kimball once published a poem in The Quarterly that went like this: Now Do You Remember?

This concludes my first ever HTML Giant mamma-jamma (sp?).

If you haven’t heard by now, Michael Kimball, who I also like to think of as a genie who broke through his own bottle, was recently inducted into the Guinness Book for International King of Postcards.

Over the past few months, Kimball has been working on a series of postcards in which, after speaking to his subject for a while, he condenses their life story into a text small enough to fit on the back of a postcard. Then he mails them the postcard. It’s a pretty peculiar experience, to receive this little piece of paper that encapsulates you into these amazing microwords, lanced by Kimball’s stellar, steady eye. Me, I can’t even draw a decent sketch of a dude’s head.

The results, besides being in the mail, have been cataloged online at his postcard life stories blog. Among others, you can read, in less than a couple minutes, the lives of folks like Kim Chinquee, Adam Robinson, Myfanwy Collins, Josh Maday, Jen Michalski, and a wide range of people from out of nowhere. The scope of the thing is just kind of flabbergasting: Kimball as a filter for all these people’s years. I can’t imagine anyone else capable of such an undertaking.

Oh, and besides all that, he just so happens to have also published one of the hottest, most innovative books of the year.