Vigorously Lazy

Small press power house Matt Bell just put up the newest issue of The Collagist, an online lit quarterly. As always, Matt’s discriminating tastes yields some choice words. Personal fave: Amazing Peter by Chad Benson. Chad’s got a funny, commanding voice and shows his characters clearly and simply. Also, it contains this line: It won’t be the fanciest party, but we’re not exactly talking Fishstick Tuesday, here, either.

So, kind of a winner in my book.

Stephen tells a story about getting the shit beat out of him and reads more from The Adderall Diaries.

Tuesday’s thread got me thinking about exposition. Is it ever necessary? What would happen if you cut out all the exposition  and backstory from your stories? Would your stories become more streamlined or would the audience not know wtf is going on?

Follow-up: how much do you trust the audience? How much, if at all, do you take into account their intelligence when writing?

Sheba posed this question to me the other day:

What “classic” of literature have you started, but not finished? This question was spurred by a mutual friend who’d failed to get through the first few hundred pages of Ulysses for the  fourth time.

What about you? What classic author or title are you embarrassed to tell the world that you’ve started but never finished? Or worse, never even attempted to read?

From Facebook:

I’m relaying a message from eric graf and Rae, CT’s mom. CT is in a hospital and called his mom from there; eric is driving to the hospital to see CT. So this is really good news – CT is safe.

We’ll let you know more information as soon as we have it – for now, thank you thank you thank you to everyone.

Things have been a little quite on the old blog this week, so to make up for it here’s the first installment of Stephen Elliott’s reading at Stardust in Winter Park, FL. Put your headphones on, hide the window and pretend like your working while you get  healthy dose of The Adderall Diaries.

Literary costumes are weird. Unless you hang out with a dedicated book crowd, chances are you’re going to be standing in the corner by yourself at the party, occasionally launching into 5 min+ speech explaining your costume to the sexy maid who was unfortunate enough to ask.

But maybe I’m wrong. Send pics of your literary costume I’ll post them and we’ll let the internet decide if they were effectively scary/funny. Best costume gets a free copy of Annalemma Issue Five!

Pic: The Inkwell

In case you haven’t been paying attention to my media barrage, I talked Stephen Elliott into coming to Orlando.

It’s required by city law that if you spend more than 24 hours in Orlando you are required to go wakeboarding.

Stephen reluctantly obliged.

He was a good sport and pretended to have a good time.

He even showed off a little bit for us.

You’re a good sport, Stephen.

I didn’t take any pics from the Stardust reading cause I was too busy stressing out and keeping the drunks at bay.We did, however, shoot some footage from the Stardust event and will be cutting it together in a little bit. Keep your peepers pealed for that.

This was from the next night. Stephen read for a fiction writing class at Urban Think.

It was way quieter and much fewer drunks.

Thanks Stephen!

Orlando people: don’t forget tonight. Stephen Elliott reads from his new memoir The Adderall Diaries at 9pm at Stardust. This event is free and open to the public. Come out! I promise you will not want to miss this!

Read the reviews:

San Francisco Chronicle

Bookslut

Time Out New York

Washington Post

Boston Globe

HTMLGIANT

Fanzine

Tent and chairs: check.

Keg of decent domestic beer: check.

Shadow puppets: check.

Magician: check.

All right, now we’re ready to have a party!

I’m usually too busy running around picking up cigarette butts and worrying about whether or not everyone is having a good time to take decent pics at these events that I throw so this won’t be the most comprehensive look at the Issue Five release party, but I’ll do my best.

Travis Winkler, mentalist/magician, kind of blew everyone away with his feats of psychic ability.

And I did a video reading and Polly helped me with the shadow puppet show. See? I told you this wasn’t that comprehensive.

“Hey, you guys are cute with your little puppets and all but we came here to do two things: Keg stands and kick ass…”

“…and it looks like we’re almost done with the keg stands.”

I can neither confirm nor deny that this is a picture of the esteemed editor of this magazine doing a keg stand.

Nick silently tolerated this childishness.

What would you call this? Reverse keg stand? Human stand?

I don’t know about yall but I had a blast. Thanks to everyone for coming out and making this the best release party we’ve ever had!