10 Tips for Aspiring Young Writers

by P-Fatz

1.      Eat until you get really, really fat.

2.      Always trust the little green squiggly lines Microsoft Word puts under your sentences. This goes for the red lines, too (duh).

3.      Try not to masturbate to pictures of people in pain, even if you can plausibly imagine they’re enjoying it, as this will dull your sensitivity to the world’s social ills and you won’t be a good writer anymore.

4.      Definitely go to graduate school for something related to English, probably an MFA, but take some Gender and Women’s Studies classes too and try to get really professional. You can never be too professional, really.

5.      Take a moment every day to look into the eye of the sunset’s deep rose, imagine your life without words, without silence, and adjust your inner meaning to the wistfulness of a life unsatisfied.

6.      Keep eating, fatass. Who told you to stop eating?

7.      When you see a child, imagine yourself as that child and immediately start writing. If you don’t think the child is old enough to write much, then start crying.

8.      Get an agent pronto. Your agent should be named Zadie Smith.

9.      The Internet: it’s a problem okay? You should look at it but only as much as it helps you to be creative. The only thing more important than eating is being creative and the internet can only help you do those things some of the time.

Go see a rom-com every now and then to remind yourself what is real life like. 

Ch. 2 of The Glass Eye and the Leopard

The Leopard continues to erase himself in the knuckles of a loveless Ocelot's embrace.  Already blank cavities resembling certain cancers of abused mouths have begun to riddle his once matte and hi-def epidermal advertisements of sexual pleasures.

"I am sadder," he sez, "The small pockets of my skin for which I have hoped to entreat an alms of your change have disappeared.  Consistently, the women I sleep with imagine they frisk the arrival of their future.  Always they search the orifices and report to me in tears, "Tomorrow holds nothing," declaring the package insufficient.  In such a manner as I continue parallel to them, I cannot but look at my hard-on and watch it swath itself as a dog might dying retreat to a patch of woods."  Stuck in the rut of the inscrutable, such is commitment.  So difficult this ditch to ditch, just so, is faith.

Our Name Means

gn, gen.  This root is so prolific that some scholars divide it in two.  It defies partition.  For its two meanings, to know and to beget, continue to entwine through the linguistic changes...Shakespeare, in As You Like It, iii, 2, has Rosalind say, "As the coney [rabbit] that you see dwell where it is kindled."  To kindle a fire is to beget the flame; from Latin form of this root we have ignite.  We retain the word kin, and have adopted kindergarten and Kriss Kringle, little Christ Child.

A punning rhyme is made in the Massinger-Dekker play The Virgin Martyr (1622):  "A pox on your Christian cocatrices!  They cry, like poulterers' wives, No money, no coney."  In fact, the rabbit may have gotten its earlier name, coney, from its prolific nature.  Since the word coney appears in the Bible, a pious euphemistic note advises:  "It is familiarly pronounced cunny, but coney is proper for solemn reading."  Perhaps a similar primness gave the long vowel to Coney Island, New York, named for the rabbits the early Americans hunted there.  From the "knowing" sense came the word cunning; but from the "begat" sense came cunny (alpha and omega, the beginning and the end of the begetting), cunt, cunnilingus.

--From Joseph T. Shipley's, The Origins of English Words:  A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots

O YESS HAI HAI HAI ARTZ PPL!!

Wow, you guys sure like free books, huh?  Y'all ate them all in, like, one day.  (WE HOPE U KNOW DEM WERE NOT SNAX, RITE?) Thank you thank you thank you for taking our books, we really really hope you lurv them lots.

OK SO  Well, we were all, like, "Hoo-wray, now dey will write words to us," but YOU HAVE NOT.  Yes, yes, we have been coy for a couple of years now, but now we are impatient and getting very desperate for you.  We want you.  We neeeeeeeed you.  We really, really, really love you.  We need friends.  We need ideas, we need hugs, we need paints, we need poems, we need drinks, we need help with the rent.  We give you things, and you just want to get the grades.  We do not give dat, tho, but if we did you would get a D- in friendships :( :( :(

Just saying how we feel, k?

Okay, so you know how R. Kelly made that album Love Letter and it was pretty great and he played it really cool, but no one wrote him back?  And you know he was going to make a great new party record full of incredible jamz called Black Panties but apparently the panties did not show up or something and he did not even get a textual massage and so he was like, "Baby, I am not too proud to beg," and so now he made Write Me Back and it is great, and do you see where I am going with thisssss????

We got up soooo early this morning to take more books to you.  We were not afraid of getting caught, because we have talked to you and you said, "O ha ha I cannot get up that early!" so we knew we were safe (becuz we are passionate and we listen to u not like the other boyz who are gonna just brake ur <3).

OK, so we left you more books but that is not all.  We also left you love letters.

OHMAGAWD OHMAGAWD WUT IZ N TEH LETTERZ???  All kind of things, you sweet beautiful creature, you.

Some lucky foolz will gits artz drawingz.

One lucky butthole is gonna get the man himself, with a very special note just 4 u.

Some dummies will get stickerz and others will get other stuffs.  If you don't get anything in your letter, we are sorry, maybe you should write us back and ask us for something nicely.

The pink yarn glows in the dark, by the way.

Okay, we are done begging for crumbs from you, you sweet succulent morsels.  Write us back, write Kells back, write your mother she misses you.  And remember, "liking" is for froyo shops, we are human beings with emotions and values and thoughts about things.  And so are you.  Lets start treating each other that way, k?

xoxxoxoxxo
CIBP

Else: A Story

I

Before McFritty had ever dreamed of such a thing as walking on water (or much less that he would do it, looking down at a Maori shark butting its snubby head against the water’s skin), he killed two farm hands with a smoothgrain garden hoe. 

Of course, without any shadow of a doubt, he had been planning (quite discreetly and systematically) for some time to murder his flatulent grandmother. But this was a different sort of murder, and one which has nothing to do with the following narration concerning his childhood. 

Whodat in dere sayin whodat out dere evertime I say whodat in dere?

If his dream were shriven for the screen there would be an alpenbone window, soft focus at first, ribbing a head, shoulders in a jaundice of light.  Fiberglass eyes ghostfont his face.

A steganographical stutter tourniquets infidelity to self—honesty gravitates, solemnly, in triage.

Airbrushed whirring at the introit.  Asynchronous sounds begin of feminine crying, tallowed in midnight geisha.  Then a rack focus.  A veined neck snakes from under a gruel of whiskers, hedging, funding an underdog-jaw.

A barechest swells out on both sides of the hips.  Large dark nipples sway above pink wires striating the bottom of his breasts.

Sometimes people rattle like stripped gears in their sleep, dreaming of betrayal and reconciled years with the betrayer.  They call this newmoania; chains of snot krannk, clot against the pistoned tears—stertorous rite—all sidle-down the idle engines of their throats.

I pray for the walking kind, that everyone else will die after prolonged paralyzations, choking horribly on my absence, all sense, rawed mind, taught wrong in a blind rest.

The first days came as fields of uncut cane.  Her cheeks grew red, throwing off the heat of sweet potentials. One morning God willed a different.

Her eyes cued an ideogram dammed with petals.

Broke eau-de-nil, her eyes damned first, pinnate, the five white lies.

She was unable to clear the table and sat.  Umber dusk fell low as timber, occult, and busked the table, unheard, in shadow.