new story post the second

2009-05-14T14:41:00.001-07:00

this one is called Les Enfants Terrible. It's about child prodigies, career days, gifted schooling and the misanthropy. Enjoy. Send any edits, critiques and hatemail my way.

LES ENFANTS TERRIBLE

Stop Reading, This is Horrible... plus three stories

2009-05-04T14:18:00.000-07:00

Dear five to six people that actually take the time to come read this,

Fuck blogs, right?
This isn't a blog so much as an easy to put together website that I can update once in a while with free fiction for y'all. I already have one of these dedicated to sharing the abysmal yet minute glory of my unhealthy culinary decisions. Once I wrote a bunch on that site, I wondered why not one for the hackneyed drivel that is my prose fiction

My name is Joel and I've been writing since I was in grade four. I wrote my name and some math equations several times before I started to write stories. I was a voracious reader and when the teacher started asking us to write creatively, I took her up on it. The first story I wrote was about some serial killer hiding in a closet and everyone ended up dying. I hadn't even touched a Flannery O'Connor book at that point. I was reading Goosebumps and Roald Dahl. Then I wrote a greek legend about this prankster called Taralacat or something along those lines who was a compulsive liar. Those are the first two stories that I remember writing. My mother and my stepfather, an accomplished electronics writer, had encouraged me by saying that I was okay at the whole business. I was then encouraged by english teachers throughout high school to keep it up. It's a foolish thing to tell a man this bent that he has potential at doing something creative. He ends up wasting many people's value time with puerile nonsense directed at no one serving no purpose. Me and my little stories. Stories...it sounds so demeaning.

I was inspired to slap this site together after I read an interview with Kurt Vonnegut (its an excellent interview everyone should read once before they die) and when talking of young writers that get published he said that they " will have something other than literature itself on their minds. They will probably be hustlers, too. I mean that they won't want to wait passively for somebody to discover them. They will insist on being read. " I'm a cook and I hustle for every cent that I don't beg off my family. Hell, I was hustling pirated copies of Doom before the era of downloading and CD burners (one day suspension with community service). I'm not insisting that you read me, but I'm going to putter about this world wide web (where culture has come to die) and promote the hell out of my shitty writing because like all writers (save Salinger), I write to be read by one person other than myself. But WHY? To be frank, it's because I hold my staggering intellect in high regard and thou shalt all bow before the one called I am. But seriously folks, I think that the messages I try to convey in my trash fiction are worth twenty minutes of your life. I try to make them a testament to this thing of growing up in this era and I hope that if someone stumbles across this in ten years, it'll give them a glimpse into one twisted mind in one less complicated era.

I'm a creative writing program dropout with no major publications or appearances with any major presses. In terms of the secret midnight writer's society, I'm a nobody and in their eyes, probably no damn good (they're not far off). I don't think I could ever be a part of a group of people like that because I don't like networking or schmoozing. I'm not part of any small press and I definitely don't have any major book deals on the horizon. I am not in print as they say and I probably won't ever be in print because I lack the motivation and ambition to get in print. Do you follow? I've been published a baby's hand full of times but not in Harpers or the Walrus or anything like that. I don't have a long winded C.V. and I have a problem with I am only going to use this site to share my writing with the friends of mine who have expressed interest in reading my syncophantic rants.

On top of all this, by trade, I'm actually a line cook. Nobody pays me to write. And they shouldn't. Good riddance. If you couldn't tell by the closing of this paragraph, I'll let you in on a little secret: I'm an exceptionally mediocre writer. Probably less than mediocre. I'd go as far as saying I'm juvenile and immature and not very engaging. I have trouble creating realistic dialogue, unique and memorable characters and my plot lines are riddled with so many holes and gaps they resemble a Mescherschmitt dovetailing after a losing dogfight against the sun of 1945. And there's another. My metaphors are atrocious.

Despite the fact that its hosted on blogger , this is not a blog. Its an online portfolio. See what I did there? I tried to escape being called a trendy man of the information age by creating a euphemism. Look at me put that poetic license to work. More than anything, this is going to be a site for people to edit my stuff and ways for me to publish my stuff. Please, if you catch any glaring errors in my writing or if you don't like it, I would love to hear from you. Attack me and tell me what you hate about my writing and by proxy then what you hate about me. Please. I live to cry.

I'm working on self publishing a collection of short stories this summer. This site will also give me an excuse to force myself to write every week. So there will be at least two or three short stories per month. I will post links through Google docs and if this little collection gets off its feet, audio files for those of you too lazy to read. Perhaps even video.

I've been focusing on the end of the world lately because well, there's an endless amount of fodder. There's a lot of love stories going around and while coming of age tales never go out of style, I'd like to pander to the media and incite some fear. I've been dabbling in the genre of apocalypse horror. Another two are in the works and being edited. Here are three short stories:

DEATH HOUR: A Modest Proposal for the Last Generation (satire in need of polishing)

HISTORY DEPRECIATES: A Short Story

SURVIVORS ENVY THE DEAD: A Short Story hosted by Miss Elizabeth's Ghost Blog

thanks for stopping by.

jfb

the f stands for fucking by the way. fuck was my first word don't you know.

Fiction by Joel F. Brown

new story post the second

Stop Reading, This is Horrible... plus three stories