Whenever I have a story published, I get asked this question: “What’s it about?” And I’m always at a loss for an answer. You’d think, since I wrote the damned thing, that I’d be able to tell folks what the story is about. But that’s the thing about stories…or at least that’s the thing the stories I write (and I suspect that’s true of most writers). They’re never about just one thing.
I have a story in the May/June edition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (which, by the way, is an absolutely wonderful magazine if you like short mystery or detective fiction). It’s called Where’s Dookie?. I can confidently say it’s almost certainly the best short story you’ll ever read about Kool-Aid collecting. And yes, that’s a thing: there are actually people who collect Kook-Aid. I wouldn’t make that up. (Okay, in fact, I would make that up, but I’m not.) But it’s not really about Kook-Aid collecting.
I could say it’s probably one of very few pieces of short detective fiction that deals with the obscene cost of insulin. That would be accurate, but the story isn’t about the pharmaceutical industry. I could say the story revolves around the importance of family, which would most definitely be true. But it’s not actually about family. It also deals with the difference between commercial art and art for its own sake, but I’d be lying if I said the story is about art. The story involves issues of gentrification, and dive bar culture, and retirement communities–but it’s not about those things. Not really. The title suggests the story is about Dookie, which it kinda is, but mostly isn’t.
So what IS it about?
I guess it’s about caring. Which may seem like an odd thing for a detective story to be about, but there it is. Caring for the community, caring for the past, caring for the future, caring for your work, caring for people.
But that sounds awfully sappy, doesn’t it. And it sounds so very sincere. Even serious. But how serious can a story be if it involves Kool-Aid collecting and a character named Dookie?
Anyway, the story is out there. Now if anybody asks me what it’s about, I’ll can just point them to this blog post. It may not answer their question, but it’ll save me some time.
A few days ago I mentioned I was actually busy, that I’d found myself in “one of those rare instances when I’m working under a deadline.” Some folks wondered about that deadline business. Allow me to splain.
Twelve days ago (on Tuesday the 3rd) I noticed a post on Bluesky (which, by the way, is by far the most engaging and positive (and frequently very weird) social media platform I’ve ever encountered) stating that Uncanny Magazine had opened submissions for short fiction. Uncanny has been publishing science fiction and fantasy fiction for about a decade. The magazine itself and the fiction it’s published have won numerous awards. Uncanny has published short fiction and novellas by a LOT of the big hats in the SFF biz.
I don’t write science fiction or fantasy. I write detective/crime stuff. I’ve always read SFF, and I’ve occasionally banged out some ideas for SFF novels, but I’ve never followed through. So when I saw the post about open submissions, I said to myself, “Greg, old sock, why not give it a shot?”
The obvious response was, “I’ll tell you why not. First, you’ve never written SFF in your entire semi-wicked life. Second, you’ve got less than two weeks to come up with an idea and write a short story, which is another thing you’ve never done. Third, there are a million other things you actually WANT to do instead of sitting alone in a quiet room making shit up. It’s October, for fuck’s sake, and you’ll want to ride your bike and see people and go on long drives to look at autumn foliage. Fourth and finally, let me repeat that you’ll only have two weeks to write a story in a genre you’ve never written and it’s the best two weeks of autumn, you massive idiot.”
So I decided to write a story and submit it.
Which is exactly what I did.
Finished it last night, formatted it this morning, just submitted it moments ago. About 9500 words in eleven days. It doesn’t sound like a lot. Less than a thousand words a day. But that includes coming up with the idea, envisioning the story world, populating it with believable (I hope) characters, ensuring the plot holds together, arranging the scenes, and putting all those words in a row. I’ve never written an entire short story, nose to tail, in such a short period of time.
I have absolutely no idea if it’s any good. I mean, I was satisfied enough with the story that I submitted it, but Jesus suffering fuck, 12 days? And, of course, the fact that I’m satisfied with it doesn’t mean a damned thing. The folks who’ll send you the contract and cut the check, they’ve got to be satisfied…and who knows what they’ll do?
But THIS is the part of the writing gig I’m really very good at: letting go. Most writers I know tend to fret about the stories they’ve submitted. Me, once I submit a story for publication, I basically forget it…until I get an acceptance or a rejection. Out of sight, out of mind. Done and dusted.
Which may be good for my mental health, but is a terrible business practice. Because if a story gets rejected by one publisher, you may want to submit it to another. This actually almost happened to me last year. I’d submitted a story to Alfred Hitchcock’s magazine and immediately forgot about it. Well, I forgot about it until I was ready to submit another story to different magazine. Then I remembered, “Hey, dude, it’s been maybe 3-4 months and you haven’t heard about the other story; that ain’t right.” So I sent an email saying ‘Don’t want to make a fuss, but if you’re not going to accept the story, let me know so I can sell it elsewhere.’ The magazine responded with a contract. That story eventually won an Edgar award. Go figure publishers.
Anyway, the story is written. It’s been submitted. And I feel liberated. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go for a bike ride.
I don’t spend much time thinking about myself. I mean, I’ve lived with me my whole life; there’s not much unknown territory there for me to explore. But I had this exchange on BlueSky (one of the more promising ‘next Twitter’ social media). There was a call to create an ‘authors feed’. My response:
This is probably silly, but I tend to be uncomfortable with the term ‘author’. I’ve published some stuff–short fiction, nonfiction books, a novel–so ‘author’ technically fits. But maybe it sounds too pretentious for me? I think of myself as a writer. I write stuff.
The reply:
Yeah, that’s the old imposter syndrome kicking in. The only requirement to being an author is to have authored something.
And I thought, “Yeah, that’s probably it.” I suspect anybody who has had some success in anything has, at one point, thought, “Lawdy, who do I think I’m fooling?” Normally, that would be it. Question asked, question answered, end of story.
But this morning, after I sat down at the keyboard, drinking my morning cold brew, looking out the window, reading the news, going through my usual morning routine before starting to write, I thought, “Naw…I’m not an imposter. I mean, I won a damn Edgar this year. That’s a pretty big deal.” And I looked at the mantle…
…and then I thought, “Hey…where’s my Edgar?” Because it wasn’t on the mantle.
Okay, some history. I learned I’d been nominated for an Edgar from Lori Rader-Day (who, by the way, is the real deal; you should go out RIGHT NOW and buy all her books). I thought that was pretty cool, but aside from doing some of the scut work associated with the nomination, I didn’t give it much thought. I didn’t expect to win. I even forgot about the big Edgar event when they announced the winners. Again, it was Lori who alerted me that I’d won. Again, I thought it was pretty cool and I understood I’d be getting a statuette at some point. And again, I pretty much forgot about it until it arrived.
Now THAT was cool. I took it out of the box, put it on the kitchen table (where I usually keep my Chromebook and do most of my writing in the mornings), looked at it a few times, then pretty much ignored it. Until I was reminded I hadn’t taken a photo of it. So I did that.
See? I won that thing right there.
Some time later, I happened to notice it sitting on the mantle over the fireplace. And I said something clever, like, “Hey, look…my Edgar.” To which Ginger replied, “I put it there a couple of weeks ago, you idiot.” So this morning, when I looked at the mantle to remind myself that getting an Edgar is a big deal and I’m not an imposter, I realized she must have moved it somewhere else. I’ll have to ask her later.
My point–if you can call it that–is I don’t feel like an imposter. I have actual, physical, tactile proof that I’m not an imposter. So what is my problem with the term ‘author’? And I’ve decided it’s this: ‘Author’ is a fixed, static state. You become an author when the work is done. ‘Writer’ is dynamic; it’s a thing you DO. I don’t think of myself as an author because I’m not particularly interested in what I’ve already done because…well, I’ve already done it. I am interested in what I’m doing, which is writing.
Like I said, I don’t spend much time thinking about myself, mainly because I’m not that interesting to me. But I realize some of this crap–like why I prefer to be a writer instead of an author–might be interesting to other folks. So, there you have it.
I want his head. I want to put it…where should I put Edgar Allan Poe’s head? The mantle is traditional, I suppose. It would probably look silly in the kitchen, next to the coffee maker or on top of the refrigerator. I don’t have to decide now; there’s probably plenty of time to figure that out.
But I want his head. I’m not entirely sure I deserve it, but I won it, fair and square. Really. Last night I won the 2023 Edgar Allan Poe award for Best Short Story. There are probably a lot of benefits that come with winning the award, but the one that has me most excited is Edgar’s head. You get (or at least I’m reliably informed you get) a small bust of Poe’s noggin. How cool is that? Very cool, is how cool.
I was curious about the actual size of Edgar’s head (that statuette’s head, not his actual head), so I googled it. And right there, first page, was a photo of Stephen Goddamn King with an Edgar in his hands. So, not exactly life-size (again, I’m talking about Edgar’s head, not Stephen King’s, which I’m pretty confident is life-size), but still.
Look at that, Stephen Goddamn King
Winning an Edgar is really a rather big deal, at least in the world of mystery and detective fiction. There’s a large, enthusiastic, deeply engaged community of folks who love mystery and detective fiction. Writers, would-be writers, fans–they create and join book clubs, reading groups, fan clubs, professional organizations. Groups like the Mystery Writers of America (who sponsor the Edgar awards), Sisters in Crime, and the Private Eye Writers of America–groups that feed and nurture that community. These groups are invaluable.
The thing is, though, I’m not really an active part of that community. I have a lot of respect for it; I’m terribly glad it exists and I benefit from its existence. But aside from writing detective stories, I haven’t contributed to it. I’m just not a joiner. I’m not even a member of MWA, but nevertheless they’re still generously offering me Edgar Allan Poe’s head. That makes me seem a tad ungrateful and vaguely misanthropic, although I’m not. In fact, I’m very grateful and I’m pretty damned anthropic.
— Mystery Writers of America (@EdgarAwards) April 28, 2023
At the risk of sounding immodest, I’m a pretty good writer. But there are a LOT of pretty good writers out there (including all the other nominees for Best Short Story). The thing is (in case you were wondering what the thing is), pretty good writers are nothing without a venue for good writing. And I’ve been lucky enough to be associated with two of the best magazines for mystery and detective fiction.
Alfred Hitchcock’s and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazines are two separate, independent magazines owned by the same publishing corporation. They are incredibly welcoming to writers, especially new writers. Without them, I’d just be an odd guy sitting in a room making shit up and putting words in a row.
If you have any aspiration to write short mystery or detective fiction, I encourage you to submit your work to either of these magazines. They may not buy your work, but they’ll treat you right. And hey, you might just get a shot at collecting Edgar Allan Poe’s head.
On some social media platforms I describe myself as a writer and a photographer. That recently led to an interesting question. I was asked:
“Do you shoot photographs the same way you write? Do you write like you shoot photos?”
My response was pretty simple: Never thought about it. And then, of course, I started thinking about it. I probably spent most of an afternoon thinking about it. Well, that’s not really accurate. I thought about it off and on for an afternoon. Because that’s a thing I do; I think about stuff.
Morning light, drinking coffee
My first thought was: Well, maybe I do. I mean, it was worth considering. Both writing and photography are vehicles for self-expression. They’re both grounded in craft rather than art, although they’re amenable to art. Do I need to go into the difference between art and craft? I suppose I do…but briefly. Basically, craft is about structured skills that can be learned whereas art is about unstructured imagination. I think that’s brief enough.
Anybody of average intelligence can learn the skills involved in writing and photography, stuff like the mechanics of grammar or the mechanics of exposure, or how to use punctuation in a sentence or determine an image’s depth of field. So in that sense, sure, I write and shoot photos in the same way. Learn the skills, apply them to the work.
But there’s a lot more to fiction than being able to correctly write a complete sentence; there’s a lot more to creative photography than being able to correctly expose a photo. It all comes down to composition: 1) choosing what gets included, 2) what gets excluded, and 3) how it’s presented.
Because while writing and photography are both vehicles for self-expression, they’re completely different vehicles. Asking if me if I write the same way I shoot photos is like asking me if I drive a truck the same way I paddle a kayak. It’s like asking me if I sing the same way I play the banjo. (Okay, I don’t actually play the banjo, but you get the idea.)
I can articulate my reasons for crafting sentences and paragraphs. I’m aware as I’m writing why I arrange scenes the way I do. I know I’m trying to amuse the reader, or distract the reader from something in the story, or foreshadow an event that will take place later, or reveal something about a character.
I can’t always articulate why I shoot a photograph. Sometimes there’s just something about the arrangement of the world that pleases me. Looking through a camera’s viewfinder allows me to put a border–a frame–around a chunk of the world. At that point it becomes about arranging the world within that frame. A step to the right, two steps forward, dropping down on a knee–all of that changes the arrangement of the world inside the frame. But I’m not always aware of why a specific arrangement pleases me. Afterwards, looking at the photo, I can sometimes perform a sort of autopsy on the image to figure out what I was seeing at the moment I shot the photo.
Seven posts
(Sorry…here’s a tangent. Autopsy is from the Greek auto, meaning ‘self’, and opsis, meaning ‘see’ or view’. It basically means ‘to see for yourself’. Since the late 17th century autopsy has been used to describe a forensic dissection of the body to see for yourself what caused the body to die.)
Anyway, having thought about the question ‘Do you shoot photographs the same way you write?’ I decided to do a brief autopsy on a few photos I shot recently. The first was shot while I was sitting drinking coffee and reading the news–the morning light coming through a window. The other two were just things I saw during a semi-short road trip to find a small town diner for lunch.
The first photo autopsy was easy. I was just pleased by the momentary arrangement of light and shadow, of lines and shapes. And it was momentary; five minutes later the earth had rotated enough that the light through the window had shifted and was no longer interesting. But THINK about that for a moment. That photo depends entirely on the alignment of the solar system. How cool is that?
I suppose the second and third photographs also depended on the cooperation of the solar system since all photography depends on light, but not in such an immediately obvious way. They’re photos of ordinary crap you’d see in the Midwest countryside. Some posts marking the boundaries of a parking area in a public hunting zone. A blue corrugated metal shed. Why were they worth photographing?
Okay, I’m going to get even more pretentious here. There was a French poet-essayist-philosopher with the cumbersome name of Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry (though he’s normally just called Paul Valéry). He wrote:
To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
That reads like a Zen koan, except that Valéry’s comment actually makes some sort of sense–or at least it does to me. The photo of the blue corrugated metal shed doesn’t depend on it being a blue corrugated metal shed. It’s ‘shedness’ is irrelevant. What matters is that it offers three different shades of blue, which pair well with the softer blue of the sky. What matters is the sharp angular lines of its shape, which contrasts nicely with the sinuous way the gravel road curves around it. It doesn’t matter that those three utility poles exist to distribute low voltage power to customers while keeping the cables insulated from the ground and out of the way of people and vehicles. It only matters that they provide a sense of balance to the overall image.
To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees. To forget the thing’s purpose, its use, its reason for existing. Those things can contribute to the complete effect of an image on the viewer, of course. I mean, the photo of the blue corrugated metal shed could be seen as a commentary on how humans have transformed the prairie by organizing its resources for commercial purposes. The photo of the posts in the parking area of a public hunting zone could serve as a reminder that early residents of the area hunted game in order to survive (and some still do).
But that’s all gravy. The photographs either work (or fail to work) on their own compositional merits. The words don’t always matter, and they shouldn’t. The visuals displace and supplant the words.
So there’s my answer. Nope, I don’t shoot photos the way I write. And more apologies, but here comes another pretentious moment. This is from TS Eliot’s Fragment of an Agon:
I gotta use words when I talk to you But if you understand or if you dont That’s nothing to me and nothing to you We all gotta do what we gotta do
I’ve got to use words when I talk to you, but not when I show you something. But if you understand the words or images or if you don’t, that’s nothing to me. And really, it’s nothing to you either. We’ve all got to do what we’ve got to do.
Okay, good news. This morning I learned I’ve been nominated for an Edgar. The Mystery Writers of America have been handing out Edgar Allan Poe awards for short fiction since 1951. The nominations are announced on Poe’s birthday, which is today. Getting nominated is a pretty big deal in the mystery and detective fiction biz.
The nomination is for a short story called Red Flag, which deals with red flag laws (hence the clever title). It’s a story about a man whose career was ended by a mass shooting. He returns to his home state of Michigan, tries to live a quiet life, but gets reluctantly drawn into a situation. A mother is concerned about her son–an alienated young man she’s afraid is thinking about committing a mass murder. Because the young man has broken no law, local law enforcement can’t do anything. So the protagonist cobbles together a sort of plan in the hope of disrupting what he sees as the inevitable mass murder attempt.
It’s an odd story. I was having lunch in a brew pub in a small Iowa town when I learned Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine was going to publish it. I was delighted. The very next morning, there was a high publicity mass shooting in a Michigan high school; four students were killed and seven wounded. Lots of people were aware of the shooter’s emotional problems–his parents, school officials, other students. They all knew he’d made vague threats about a mass murder. They knew he had access to a firearm. A red flag law would have allowed the police to remove that firearm, which might have prevented the tragedy.
The coincidence of selling a story about a potential mass murder in Michigan and an actual mass murder in Michigan less than 24 hours later was weirdly discomfiting. Obviously, there was no connection. And yet, it bothered me. Still does, in fact.
So I have mixed emotions about the story, about its publication, and about this nomination. I’m obviously chuffed about it. But I can’t entirely enjoy it. I’ll always associate this story with tragic events. And since I live in the United States, there’ll always be another tragic event.
Today is January 19th. So far this year there have been at least 33 mass shooting incidents in the US, resulting 48 deaths and 128 wounded. There’ll almost certainly be another one today.
I’m incredibly pleased to have been nominated for the Edgar. But I sort of hope I don’t win. I hope more people will read the story. I hope we can change our culture. I have hope.
I am weak to distraction. Doesn’t much matter what I’m doing, if I stumble across an interesting bit of information, an intriguing casual comment, a footnote in a book, almost anything that catches my eye and my imagination, I’m lost. I’ll stop what I’m doing and leap down that rabbit hole.
This morning on Twitter I came across a quote by novelist Henry Green, explaining the inspiration for his 1945 novel Loving. This is what he said:
I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks, and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: ‘Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.’ I saw the book in a flash.
It’s a great anecdote and an absolutely terrific line by the butler. So…there’s my rabbit hole. I tracked down the quotation. It was an interview conducted by novelist Terry Southern for The Paris Review (TPR) in 1958. Southern was also smitten with the butler’s line and used it to tweak the nose of the TPR’s editor. He wrote, “[Y]ou realize of course that the word ‘cunty’ makes the reply, gives it bite, insight, etc. I mean to say it simply would not do to rephrase it.”
Why was Southern pointing this out? Because five years earlier, TPR’s debut issue had included one of Southern’s short stories in which the term shit had been edited out. Instead of one character telling another “Don’t get your shit hot” TPR printed “Don’t get hot.” That’s a much weaker line.
Southern felt so strongly about the editing that he demanded TPR issue a correction in the following issue. And hey, they did. Sort of. Here’s their disappointing correction:
Terry Southern is most anxious that The Paris Review point out the absence of two words from his story The Accident (issue one): the sentence “don’t get hot” should have read “don’t get your crap hot,” an omission for which we apologize to all concerned.
The non-correction correction infuriated Southern, of course. So he was delighted (and absolutely correct) to force TPR to include cunty in the interview.
This made me happy for a couple of reasons. First, of course, is the butler’s line itself, which is simple but poetic. Second, because every writer likes to see an editor put in their place (even though editors are almost always right, damn it). Third, because I had a similar experience years ago.
I’d written a short story called Maybe the Horse Will Learn to Sing, which was published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. The story included this line:
So in trying to tweak Sweeney’s nose all I’d managed to do was to step on my own dick. There’s a lesson there, I suspect.
AHMM wanted to change that line to read, step on my own foot or something equally awful. Since I wanted to get paid, I agreed to change the line to some other weak analogy (I can’t recall what the final version was). The following year, however, that story was included in the 1999 anthology The Best American Mystery Stories, edited by Ed McBain and Otto Penzler. When I was asked permission to reprint the story, I agreed on the condition that they change the line back to the original. Penzler laughed and agreed it was a better line. That laugh was worth as much to me as the check.
So, that was today’s totally pointless but (for me) entertaining rabbit hole. That was probably 90 minutes out of my morning, including writing this pointless but (again, for me) entertaining blog post.
Okay, I probably should have mentioned this when it was announced. But that was a month ago, back in the middle of April, at the beginning of morel season, so I was busy. And there was something else going on at the time, though I can’t recall what it was. My guess is it was probably bicycle-related.
Anyway, I forgot about it until last week when Ruth Greenberg emailed me. She wanted to let me know she’d received a royalty check for a book we sorta kinda wrote together. That was back in…I don’t know, the distant past. I was in graduate school at the time, so it must have at least twenty years ago. I could do the math and figure out the date, but it doesn’t much matter.
The check was for 94 cents.
I’ve moved at least half a dozen times since the book was published, and I’ve never bothered to let the publisher know my new address. In fact, I think that publisher has been swallowed whole by another publisher–and I’m not even sure who they are. This accounts for why I didn’t get my US$0.94 royalty check.
But that email last week reminded me of another writing thing…which is the thing I referred to in the first paragraph, the thing I probably should have mentioned back in April but obviously didn’t. So I’m going to mention it now.
A short story I wrote–and which was published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine last autumn–won an award. Every year various groups hand out various awards for mystery and detective fiction. Most of those are nominated by…well, okay, I admit I don’t know how the nomination process works. Doesn’t matter. I’ve only been nominated once, about a million years ago, for something called a Shamus award. I didn’t win, so I didn’t pay much attention to it (I’m beginning to sense a pattern here). Anyway, nominations are made, a panel of judges read the work, choose the winner, hand out an award. It’s sort of a big deal.
The award I won wasn’t that sort of award. What I won was a Reader’s Award. You know, where readers write in and name their favorite stories of the years. And actually, I didn’t win that award either; I came in third.
When I got the email telling me I’d come in third in a Reader’s Award, I thought, “Hey, that’s nice.” And that was basically it. I mean, I’d already been paid for the story; that was reward enough. But I was asked to submit a 1-2 minute video acceptance speech for the award (which was being held virtually because of the damned pandemic). My response was basically a casual “Sure, why not?” But thinking about an acceptance speech made me actually stop and think about the award itself, and about the readers who’d read the story and voted for it, and about writing.
Let me be clear about this whole writing gig. It’s just something I do. I enjoy the act of writing. I like the process of writing. It entertains me and gives me pleasure. I like the discipline involved. Most of what I write (this blog, for example) I write for an audience of one–me. Writing this blog forces me to put my thoughts in order, which forces me to support whatever crap I’m writing about. I usually spend a LOT more time thinking about stuff than writing about it. For this blog, I like to write quickly and casually, and edit almost nothing.
But sometimes I write short fiction for money. That means writing for other people. It also means writing more carefully. Because a writer’s job is to give a reader a good experience. Not necessarily a pleasant one, or a happy one, but an experience they find worth the investment of time it takes them to read the story.
But here’s the weird thing. Once I finish writing a piece of fiction, I seem to lose all emotional attachment to it. I’ve done what I wanted to do with it, I’ve written the story, and now it’s done. I submit the story to a magazine; they either accept it (and send me a check) or reject it (and send me a rejection letter), but that’s their job. My job is over. Time to do something else. The finished story is old news; it just doesn’t seem very important anymore.
But I had to give an acceptance speech, right? So I had to think about all that stuff. I mean, yes of course I was writing for an audience, but it was a theoretical audience. Not actual people, sitting at home, drinking coffee and letting the cat shed on their sweaters. Suddenly, they’d become very real to me. I mean, the notion that strangers would read something I wrote–that they’d read it and remember it–that they’d care enough about the story to vote for it in an annual contest? That’s just…weird. It made me oddly emotional.
So I made an acceptance video. Okay, that’s a lie. I made like six of them. First, I did a quick practice video just to see if I actually knew HOW to make a video. Set up my chromebook, turned it on, nattered off the top of my head for maybe 90 seconds, then watched it. It was…well, embarrassing.
So I wrote out a short script saying the things I wanted to say–and shot a second video. That taught me to pay attention to the background (as a photographer, you’d think I’d know that). So I started moving things around, re-arranging furniture, shifting stuff around so it wouldn’t appear I was sitting in the basement, where I write in the evenings. I shot a few more videos.
They were fucking painful to watch. I mean, I was trying to present myself as a writer, and I was semi-reading from a script. It all looked unnatural. So in the end, I sent them my practice video–me nattering on, sitting at my basement desk, unrehearsed and stupid, thanking strangers for voting me the third most popular story for this particular magazine last year. But at least it was honest and authentic. So there’s that.
Anyway, here it is, for your entertainment. The whole thing is about 18 minutes long, which is a LOT to watch. I get introduced at about the 5:30 point. My awkward basement practice acceptance video kicks in somewhere around the 7:30 point.
Oh, yeah…the story. Janet Hutchings, the editor, introduces it in a way that makes it sound significant, portentous. When I submitted it, I was at a loss for how to describe it. It’s a detective story, of course, about the rights of street photographers. But yeah, it’s also about racial profiling. And about a missing teen-aged girl. But it’s also about the movie Under the Tuscan Sun, which I happen to think is important to the story. And I don’t know, it’s maybe about some other stuff too. Who knows?
Anyway, I probably should have mentioned this back in April, when it was announced.
gregfallis.com 