Tag Archives: Chicago

My Fiction In Review #1: Blood, Snow, and Sparrows

15 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Book of Dead Things

It’s a time of transition. A little lull. I’m rearranging my writing space, both physical and virtual. Retooling. Getting ready for future projects. I finally cleaned up and updated my Written Works page.

So I figure it’s a good time to dust off my wares and review what’s come before. Starting today, every day, I’ll set out a juicy sample, an excerpt and some commentary for each of my published and available works. Care to time travel with me via spilled ink?

Our first story takes us back to the beginning, 2007 (and some years prior), back to Twilight Tales.

Twilight TalesTwilight Tales was weekly genre reading series in Chicago. Every Monday, area writers gathered in the warm, dim light of the Red Lion pub to read their genre fiction to the gathered audience. It was a motley collection, all ages, all experience levels. A lot of writers shared their wisdom or cut their teeth here. The Red Lion (a British-style pub) was itself a character. Old and creaking, with a splendid beer garden with a tree, our Yggdrasil, growing impossibly out of all the buildings. It was on more than one haunted tour. Hell, this is the place that Captain America beat the crap out of Giant-Man/Ant-man. Sadly, the Red Lion was eventually torn down. I here tell it has since risen again in a new incarnation (though I haven’t been there yet).

Twilight Tales was where I honed my words. Reading to a live audiences teaches you storytelling lessons you don’t learn in any other way. I met fantastic people. I heard wonderfully bizarre stories. It was just the right place, the right time, and the right mix of folk. It was my sandbox and playground, and I miss it fiercely.

Twilight Tales takes us to The Book of Dead Things. Published by Twilight Tales Press, I had submitted a story to it (I forget what) and it was rejected. Later on, I read a different story at the open mic. Tina Jens (one of the editors) liked it so much she asked to include it.

Success! “Blood, Snow, and Sparrows” was my first professional sale in print. I wrote it in a grad school class. I’m looking at it now. This goes back far enough that I can cringe at parts and think Ugh…did I make that sentence? But we have to start somewhere. And it did earn me one of my favorite comments:

Joshua Alan Doetsch is not good. Joshua Alan Doetsch is darkly transcendent. It was so amazing it was like Ray Bradbury got high and started listening to Nine Inch Nails and decided to write about ‘the
Crow’.

You can pick it up in one of the few copies of The Book of Dead Things still floating about. You can also listen to the entire story, for free, as an audio read on the Psueodpod podcast.

Without further delay, here are the first few paragraphs (and a little mood music by way of the Psuedopod intro tune).

Blood, Snow, and Sparrows (an excerpt)

Desdemona used to trace the stars with her finger, connecting the dots, naming her own constellations.

I call upon her name.

Desdemona.

I call her name when I want to remember.

Desdemona—who gave me thirty-one birthdays when I had none. Desdemona—who laughed and made snow angels on rooftops because the snow there was cleanest, the closest to Heaven. Desdemona—who made an angel of snow and blood in the dirty street on the day I lost her.

I remember this, now, as Zeek struggles in my arms, anger and fear evacuating his body in crimson spurts, and my smile dislocates my jaw. Zeek with the shroud-eye, one eye glaucoma-clouded, said it was his evil eye, said he could hex a body with a stare, cast a pestilence. But, see, I knew better. I knew it was Zeek’s dirty needles that killed the kids. And the night collapses with primate shrieks, as Zeek tries to lift his bloody gun and…

Freeze. Too far. Backtrack.

Once upon a time, Desdemona Mercer giggled in frustration and joy and chucked her astronomy textbook off the roof we made love on. She connected the dots and named her own constellations, and when the winter wind came, we folded in on one another, seeing how close we could get in my sleeping bag. We spent hours seeing how close we could get.

Now, I stare in the cracked mirror, and I connect the track marks on my body, form constellations with them. I name each one. But then the memories cut too deep, and I give up on the angry stars burning in a pale Milky Way of collapsed veins, and I plunge the needle behind my eye and inject.

I count the bullets—one, two, three—and wonder how many good deeds it’ll take.

Where you from?

29 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

There is a writing exercise you might try over HERE. It takes a George Ella Lyon poem, “Where I’m from,” and turns it into a sort of advanced ad-libs, where by you fill in some info and describe the places/people/events that formed you. My attempt is featured below. If you try your hand at it, post the result in the comments. I’d like to see where you’re from.

EDIT: Thanks to Martine for showing this to me.

-WHERE I’M FROM-
by Joshua Alan Doetsch

I am from the goblin roads, by the bog, where early A.M. mists tickle hands hanging out passenger windows, a thousand degrees colder than the surrounding summer night—from Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and the grinnin’ skull-bead bracelets my mother makes for me.

I am from the house with the shrieking-turquoise garage door, the tropical biosphere interior, impossible anomaly of the Midwest—waxen, Vincent Price sideshow bedroom—glamour photography by dad. From the wooded, backyard deck, the iron fire pit, listening to audio fiction, punctuated by coyote calls that sound like the second, fifth, and ninth steps of going insane.

I am from the whispering leaves, the groans-by-night corn.

I am from Jack O’ Lanterns picked fresh from the patch, at Great Grandma and Grandpa’s farm and playing card games by candlelight through tornado warnings, from my father, Mark the Magician; and my mother, Renee the Potter; and my brother, Nick the Pirate; and my sister, Danielle the Scream Queen—and every cross-hatched eccentricity—Bradford to Bradford—Doetsch by Doetsch.

I am from photographing gators in the Glades of Ever and walking ghost tours in Key West, which is really Cayo Hueso, which is really “Island of Bones,” which is really full of t-shirt shops and frozen drinks.

From the prayers to St. Anthony to find all things lost and the chewed stubs of the whole carrots left out for Santa’s reindeer the night before.

I am from the Catholic cross, the confessional, the Body and Blood. And then from the rum prayers, the happy macabre, the sugar skulls that hummed voodoo hymns to me on every Caribbean pilgrimage.

I’m from October Country, Chicago’s shadow, and Ray Bradbury dreams remixed—pumpkin pie and double-decker pizza that was divine until the restaurant owner was knifed by her son.

From the great grandparents, Lord and Lady of the Patch, who contrived a big sleep of exhaust, in a car in a parking lot—when their minds and bodies began to go—together forever, and the other great grandma, Mima, who was a writer, who told me to write, who died while I was away, waking to our van surrounded by bison in Yellowstone.

I am from inside my head, where I hang it all so prettily upon my hueso walls.

A Return to Blogs & Dr. Skallymagtanomous

14 Tuesday Dec 2010

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dear Blog:

I wholeheartedly apologize for my absence of near on five months. I was sidetracked while thwarting a nefarious scheme of world-domination by a dimensional hopping race of hyper evolved foot-fungi, with the help of a most unlikely companion: a talking, homicidal salamander named Dr. Skallymagtanomous. I would have been here sooner, but he insisted I accompany him on further adventures across the omni-verse, and…well, he has a laser scalpel. Sorry I’ve been away. But now I’m back!

your friend,

-Joshua

P.S. Unless, of course, the good, scalpel-wielding doctor has a penchant for wearing other people’s faces, and I never did come back.

sincerely,

-Dr. S.

P.S.S. Like a glove.


Five Months Gone & the Fjords

Hey everyone!

I’m back and in the process of building up my brand new blog (smell that new blog smell) over here at: https://joshuadoetsch.wordpress.com/ having uploaded about 8 years of bast blogage.

If you are reading this at another blog, worry not, there is a good chance that shouldn’t change and I’ll find a way to forward posts there via client, cut ’n paste, messenger pigeon, or by carving it with my laser scalpel upon the flesh of those who cross me. But…if I’m absent again from here (wherever that is), then go to the above link.

Now…the last five months could use a lot of elaboration. There have been multiple continents, projects, and alcoholic beverages made out of distilled metaphors. But there is no time! Inigo, what should we do?

“We sum up!”

Right. So last we left off, I was still in Norway, a year into my gig writing video game dialogue for Funcom. I was getting ready to hop countries, again, this time to Montreal, Canada, to write at Funcom’s new studio there. But there were things to do before leaving Scandinavia. One was to go with Oliver, a British buddy from work, and take a backpacking week through the Norwegian Fjords. This deserves its own post (and perhaps it will get one), but for now, let us say it involved rescuing a caterpillar; drinking in a meed hall; having a Nordic epic about brown cheese read to us by an Icelander and a Norwegian; a terrifying man pointing at us, in the cemetery, and shouting, “Mr. Inbetween!”; and seeing lots of scenery like this:

 

Norwegian fjords (2010)

An Interlude Home

Before reaching Montreal, I took a month of vacation at home, and made a mad dash to see as many of those I missed as I possibly could. I went to Island Lake, to Chicago, to Milwaukee, to Springfield, to Indianapolis, and other places besides. I also visited GenCon 2010 to get a nice injection of my gamer roots. So much to tell here…but time is short…and my new face itches!

But perhaps I could take a moment to elaborate on…

“Sum up, damn you!”

Right! Moving on.

Montreal: Real Women Wear One Painted Boxing Glove

I moved to Montreal. Much to say. But there is no time! Let me hit some random highlights. I got an apartment and I adopted a one-eyed black cat named Raven.

At a party, a girl from work mixed metaphor drinks. That is to say, there was a large and varied supply of drink accouterments, and she would not accept regular orders. Instead, you had to give her some image or idea and she would make the drink to fit it. I ordered two drinks that night. They were as follows:

DRINK #1: Flying and skidding across rooftops, like a skipping-stone, across the night city-scape sky, powered by wind and umbrella, kicking up roof tiles along the way.

DRINK #2: A dwarf sits in a graveyard, atop a mausoleum, playing sad, plastic kazoo nocturnes to the love he never had, interred within.

Both drinks tasted spot on. We drank metaphors and we were merry.

On more than one Sunday, I visited the park and the Tamtams. It’s a wonderfully gypsy collection of people organically gathering, drummers and other musicians, vendors, and an assortment of others. They play by the statue and if you wander in the woods you come across folks having medieval battles with foam weapons.

One day, while walking down the street, I came across a very long patio that ran the length of what I thought was an apartment building (but now suspect is some kind of hospital). A woman in a bathrobe marched up and down the patio, very officially. A set of giant headphones connected her to a discman. As she marched, she shook a pair of maracas to the beat of whatever she was listening to. A single boxing glove, decorated with very bright paints and designs, hung from her waist. She stopped me to ask the significance of my T-shirt (it was my I’M A NEIL GAIMAN CHARACTER shirt). I said he is an author. She nodded knowingly. “Spiritual books.” No, I said. He’s a fiction writer. At this she shook her head, realizing there were graver duties to be getting to, and she put back her giant headphones and went back to her maraca marching, the super technicolor boxing glove bouncing at her waste. I wish I’d asked her what she was listening to.

That’s all for today, lambkins. The little hand says it’s time to skedaddle.