. Spinning .

Trying to find a post I made a while ago on Flash Fiction, but gave up because I think I can give you the gist of it, and as it applies to some current short stories I’m reading as well as a recent workshopped story we did in our last Narratives meeting.  The post was one listing a few of the comments by writers in either "Flash Fiction" or "Sudden Fiction" to illustrate the point that while a complete story could be told regardless of length, whether it be a novel or a three-pager, the difference was in the details.  Compression is essential in the short story, and clever use of language to give the most information in the least amount of words.

In the stories in I’m referencing, one published in Glimmertrain, both are heavy in characters, specifically, giving full names and often a tidbit of information, whether descriptive or involved in a vignette, that do not serve the story but tend to confuse the reader.  Readers tend to take any new character introduced in a narrative seriously, thinking that the character will figure into the plot and thus they are willing to get to "know" and hold onto the character.  After sticking all these people into a "holding" room in the mind, and then finding that they are never brought up again is frustrating.  It often happens, as did to me in this last reading, that I actually lost track of the antagonist in the crowd, and had to go back a couple pages to sort everybody out.

Another good lesson learned.

Not literature, exactly, but certainly story and besides, I wanted to keep all the "reading" questions and discoveries in one category.

In putting together a pc, the hard part is really the software and getting it to work correctly.  Everything else, cables, wires, screws, have a predetermined place to belong and it is then a matter of either reading the how-to or reading the motherboard and everything that attaches to it. 

Things get especially tricky when you need to establish an operating system, such as Windows, and if you need to upgrade it as I did from WIN 95 because that’s the only o/s I have in full copy format (don’t laugh, I have to put in Windows Office 3.1 as a starting point to get it up to the latest version), it starts to balk.  The newest hardware is unknown by the older operating systems.

So I was stuck for a while trying to get the CD player to work until I tried using a WIN 98 boot disk and that solved the problem.  But even though I was able to install WIN 95 that way, I couldn’t install the motherboard drivers nor get the system to boot to Windows on the hard drive. 

So I had to read the system.  Learn what it was telling me.  By trial and error, I found that using the startup disk and employing the CD, I was able to immediately install the WIN 98 upgrade, and voila! 

There are still some things that aren’t quite working properly, but the paths of comprehension in learning how to work both within and around the software is challenging.  I am reading what my computer has to tell me.

As I mentioned in a previous post, what I found most interesting (at least from a writer’s viewpoint) in this collection is the sudden thoughts that cross the mind when asked to make up a story on a particular topic, and how the first story seemed to be that bam, bam, bam of ideas.  I only wish that I, like Dr. Arnzen, could complete a story as quickly.  All the story starters I have cluttering my hard drive–if only they could, with a sentence, climax and end with such precision.

His short-shorts are the epitomy of murderous thoughts, as when the woman sitting next to you on the bus is blabbering away about her grandchildren and you imagine yourself swinging a machete, watching her head pop off and bounce to the ground.   Where her mouth still moves in soundless speech.  This, I believe, is the appeal of 100 Jolts.  Arnzen gives voice to all those unspeakable thoughts we visualize in our minds while nodding and smiling, eyes glazed and empty, listening to someone ramble, watching someone cut in front of us in line, hearing someone rudely blast a car horn when we make that decision to slow for a yellow light.

That is perhaps the only way to feel safe on a certain Pennsylvania campus; to believe that truly, we all have thoughts like this, don’t we?

Now here is where everyone will jump down my throat, but something just came up that somehow relates to our ongoing literary questions of good, bad, and says who?

In one of the boxes my husband brought home from his grandmother’s house was a framed pencil drawing of a young woman.  I did a doubletake when I first caught a glimpse of it because it was so much in the style of my mother’s drawings.  Same era, 1929-1933.  I studied it carefully, looked up the artist on the internet and found nothing.  I cleaned it up and put it aside, then took another, closer look. 

While the face was in profile, approximately 1/2 scale, some of the subject’s features were full profile, while others hinted at a slight degree of angled view.   And the hair; P. W. Galpin couldn’t draw hair anywhere near the level of competency of my mother.  My mother was, I nod sadly, a much better artist than evidenced by this piece by a stranger.

What!?!?!?  Can you compare two different pieces of art and propose that one is better?  But I think that in a case such as this, that you can.  The work is similar enough, separated by a number or two of pencil lead softness, that it would not come down to perception or even technique, and certainly not medium, but this:  execution of pencil strokes.  One enjoyed drawing hair and shadows, the other artist was not as skilled or simply didn’t enjoy that part of a portrait (these are heads only).  Am I naturally prejudiced toward’s my mother’s?  Maybe, but it has nothing to do with that.  I think that most people seeing this piece compared with one of my mother’s drawings would easily agree that one is a bit more skillfully accomplished an artist, or one piece has been more skillfully executed.   

Heck, even I can draw better hair than this.  So then, what have I proven?  Perhaps only that in some cases, there is sometimes a viable criteria for what is good, and what is better.  At least in looking at the two works in only this manner.  Needless to say, there are other ways of looking at the pieces as well, despite their great similarity in nature.  I shall try again to scan them in to get viewable images to allow you to judge for yourselves.

What a lovely dip into the pool of blood after a long dry day on the sands of reality. 

It’s been staring up from the pile with a horrific grin for quite a while, and I finally couldn’t resist Michael Arnzen’s "100 Jolts shockingly short stories" any longer.  Under his introduction "Minimalist Horror", Arnzen has this to say:  "Horror is a thrill ride that’s over before you expect it to be, yet none too soon."  This book has 100 of the quickest rides I’ve ever read.  Coming off a Contempory Fiction course that introduced me to the world of Flash and Sudden Fiction, I was still amazed at the half-pagers in this book.  But then, the first story proved that a paragraph can hold a story as well.

Skull Fragments sets up the tone with a man and his daughter at a fast food restaurant.  As the father rushes in answer to his daughter’s screams, he finds her desperately trying to escape the playpen of color balls after finding a skull among the colored globes.  After they get home, he dreams of various skulls, each with its own little story:

12.  Doofus.  A boy tears the jaw off his brother’s skull.  "Who’s the doofus now?" he asks, as if expecting the grim overbite to answer.

That one’s my favorite, although not the goriest, certainly the shortest story, complete with conflict and character.  What Skull Fragments (including eleven more stories within it, as the above) reminded me of was the spontaneous writing exercises often part of creative writing courses, and knowing that Arnzen in another shade is known as Professor Arnzen at Seton Hill University may have convinced me.  It could have easily been a self-induced brainstorming session that just as in a classroom, produces some of the best gems hidden within the caves of our mind.  It also reminded me of the New Media course concepts of the many paths a story can take, and the manipulation necessary to be able to say, what the hell, I’ll  put ’em all in and let the reader travel the maze.  It certainly does offer many different little jolts no matter which skull you choose.   Sort of a nasty little ending to the "mother" story as well.  Rather a clever technique. 

I’m looking forward to digging deeper into this anthology, and perhaps further, into how this author makes the transition into full length horror, avialable in some of his other books.

But for now, twelve down, eighty-eight to go.  They must wait, however, as the night is getting late, and it’s awfully dark outside…