I’m sitting on the loveseat in a room in disarray. A few feet away, Bird is stretched out on the couch, buried beneath blankets and dogs, reading on her Kindle. The light of the lamp is dim, and there’s shit piled all over everywhere: the house is a liminal place right now, a space between communal and a single couple (our roommates are moving out). I’m listening to Jimi Hendrix, Live at the Miami Pop Festival, and cannot remember the last time I heard a guitar so fuzzy and sweet and fine (unless it was yesterday, listening to Valleys of Neptune). Despite a few grumpy chirrups between Bird and I tonight (my fault), I am deliriously happy.
I sold a story earlier this month, to Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show. It’s science fiction; it’s called My Father’s Life, Furnished In Stars, and it’s about a lot of things: my father, for instance and unsurprisingly, and about me, and family, and time travel, and the cost of creating something. My Father’s Life is about dreams, and the cost of dreams, and what comes, both good and ill, of dreaming.
It’s my first pro sale. A couple of my stories have appeared in anthologies and zines, but to sell one to the Slicks? As the philosopher Billy Joe Armstrong once said:
I’m so fucking happy I could cry.
Scott Roberts, inimitable, beloved, suave, dangerous editor of IGMS, tells me that my story will be in issue #63, which will be out in mid-June. (Check out the magazine and keep an eye out HERE.)
I’ve got a few more stories out right now: an End-of-the-World Story (which is also secretly a Ghost Story), and a Hardboiled Crime novelette that I wrote in Maine.
And I’m writing.
Right now (not this moment, but you know what I mean), I’m writing a weird story about a husband and a wife, that smells suspiciously like an R.A. Lafferty homage, and which I’m enjoying immensely. I’m writing longhand again, in a hard black notebook I got ages ago, somewhere. Because I just finished The Dark Half by Stephen King, in which a writer’s evil pseudonym writes with black pencils, I’m writing with a Ticonderoga black.
I don’t write in pencil. I’m a fountain pen addict, normally, or racing across the keys to get at the dangerous broads and flashing razors and faces fountaining blood and the romance in the smoke...but I like the scratch. I like the feeling that the lines and the words are impermanent, susceptible to a little rubber or the careless, smudging thumb. The words feel less sacred, somehow, and come with less weight on their backs.
Not to jinx myself, but I think perhaps ‘twas the pencil, broke a late block.
The sale, the writing, the sending things out and looking for avenues down which to proceed: the last few months have done wonders bucking me up. It feels like, just maybe, I haven’t been wasting my time all these years after all.
(I’m telling you. Hendrix. Live at the Miami Pop Festival. You’ve never heard “Red House” like this before. The amps are practically begging to die beneath the weight of the feeling coming from this man’s fingers.)
The dogs are rustling and my knees and back are begging me to get up and move around, so for now, au revoir. Who knows? Maybe I’ll have even more soon.
Until I have more, I have exactly enough.
--Max Peterson
from the Miami Pop Festival on his couch