Documents
Mr. Palm Beach
Title of Publication, Date
"Now that he’s dead, my father’s hungrier than ever. That’s according to my mother. On a Monday afternoon in August, five months after he sauntered back into the kitchen despite having just been buried, she calls me up to gripe."
"The café itself isn't disgusting. It has everything required by Maine state law: charming brick walls, a heady dark-roast smell, soulful people slouched over laptops."
"There's a sleeper down in the theater. I've seen them before, these sleepers, and never know what to do."
"Since I got back from leave, I've been off. Like there’s this hissy static in my head all day. And I don't sleep. I rest, or I stay in bed for a long time without moving, but that's not sleep, not really."
I'm overhauling my short story Mr. Palm Beach (formerly called Hungry). Other titles I'm considering: Exit Strategy, How to Abandon Ship, Night of the Living Dad.
Das Booth, a short story in which a projectionist reflects on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as expressed in 1980s screwball comedies, is cooling its heels until I can think of a different angle. I guess that means it's both a story and not a story.
FYI, I've frameworked a preliminary iteration of another jargon-based short story. Tentative title is Agenda: Unpacking a Dream I Had with Several of You in It, Q4 Results If Time. Guesstimate on completion is somewhere between I have no idea and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Keep it on your radar!
I'm not sure if Baby Driver (better title TK) is a short story, a novella, or a novel, but it's in the works. Current first line: "At seven months of age, Janie was not licensed to drive."
In The Intimacy of Perception, a Fellini-obsessed film student unreliably narrates a quiet story in which he's oblivious to something right in front of him. Out for consideration.
Crushing guilt, familial dysfunction, and suffocating silence are the backyard games on tap for a Fourth of July barbeque in Winning at Chicken. Out for consideration.
I'm working on an untitled sci-fi novel. My realistic short-term plan is to get it made into a Hollywood blockbuster so I can retire to an island off the coast of Maine, getting to the mainland by boat, by submarine, by helicopter, or by a submarine that turns into a helicopter. We'll see.