Alan > Recent Status Updates

The Answer Man

$25 PER FIVE MINUTES

YOUR FIRST 2 ANSWERS FREE

Wow what a great story! Stephen King is the best!

The Journey to Galway

What a short and sweet story!

Life, in an absolute sense, is worth living, just as art is worth pursuing, science is worth exploring, justice is worth seeking. However, the fact that something is worth doing doesn't always mean a person is endowed with the capacity to do it, or that a person, once endowed with that capacity, can retain it.

That a mother can do all things humanly possible for a child, and yet she can never understand the incommunicable vastness and strangeness of the world felt by that child; that a mother cannot make the world just a little more welcoming so the child feels less alone; that a mother cannot keep that child alive-these are facts I have to live with now, every single day, for the rest of my life.

Now that I have a garden, I've come to understand Trevor's point: gardening is good training for a novelist. One learns to be patient, one learns to make concessions, one learns to redefine one's visions and ambitions, and one learns to stop being a perfectionist. A garden is good training for life too.

You did everything you could to help James find his place in life, but he wanted to leave and one must let go—

Very few people, in my experience, have the moral courage to say what Christiane said to me on that day, precisely an hour and a half after a child’s death.

Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream

Wow! THREE! What a great story! FIFTEEN! 5 Stars! SIX! TWENTY TWO! SEVEN!

“This book is about life's extremities, about facts and logic, written from a particularly abysmal place where no parent would want to be. This book will neither ask the questions you may want me to ask nor provide the closure you may expect the book to offer.”

If all this amounts to you as nothing more than drivel, then you might also consider a simpler value of the written letter, which is, namely, that reaching out in correspondence is really one of the original forms of civility in the world, the preservation of which has to be of some value we cannot yet see. The WRITTEN WORD, Mr. Watts. The written word in black and white. It is letters. It is books. It is law.

Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream

She's good-looking in a severe way, but it's the man who draws Danny's attention, although he can't initially say why. Later it will occur to him that you instinctively recognize a nemesis when one appears in your life. He'll try to dismiss the idea as bullshit, but he's clear on what went through his mind, even as he approached them: Watch out for this guy.

The Fifth Step

Wow that came out of nowhere! Interesting start, then WHAM! The end!

Thus, in my garden there is light.

There are trees that grow, nourished by that light.

Leaves sparkle, translucent, and flowers slowly open.

Over the past three years, I have gradually come to realize that this work is fundamentally transforming my very constitution. As the gentle warmth of this small place holds me close, quiet. With the rhythm of the light changing each day, each moment, each season.

I must think on the silence of snow.
Think how snow inhales sound,
How it might inhale "my" own voice, too, and the sound of birds.

Only snow, at last, once the wind stopes.
Only snow; completely noiseless, absorbing all sound.

When I write, I use my body. I use all the sensory details of seeing, of listening, of smelling, of tasting, of experiencing tenderness and warmth and cold and pain, of noticing my heart racing and my body needing food and water, of walking and running, of feeling the wind and rain and snow on my skin, of holding hands.

Why is the world so violent and painful?
And yet how can the world be this beautiful?

Late

It's so strange, he told himself. All my life I was famous for my punctuality, even for showing up earlier than required, and now that time has slipped my grasp, I'm going to be-well, I am—forever Late. The Late S. M. Arthur.

This struck him as funny and he began to laugh, too hard, almost a hysterical laugh. Control yourself, he thought. You're a dead man. Dead men don't have much to laugh about.

The Musician of Kahani

The name of that dynamic is revenge.
Best eaten cold.

The Musician of Kashmir

“My brilliant husband falls for a stupid fraud. My brilliant daughter falls for a stupid playboy. I am left alone in our home without the two people who were my whole world. But everyone says, 'Oh, Meena Contractor, she's tough, she can't be broken, she'll be fine. But guess what, I don't think I'm fine. I think I’m broken. And yes, you're right, there are things magic can't repair."

He was invigorated by Xavier's presence in the apartment, the whole of his being energized, as if he had suddenly shed years. He behaved like a man who had things to look forward to, and it was only in that mo-ment, I suppose, that I understood how limited it had become for him, the idea of our own future together, nothing more than a downward slope into old age.

In the South

"He was my shadow," he said to the woman with the wooden leg, "and I am his. Two shadows, each shadowing the other, to that we were reduced, that is so. The old move through the world of the young like shades, unseen, of no concern. But the shadows see each other and know who they are. So it was with us. We knew, let me say this, who we were.

In the South

"You look terrible," Junior told Senior, as he did every morning. "You look like a man who is only waiting to die."
Senior—nodding gravely, and also speaking in accordance with their private tradition-responded, “That is better than looking, as you do, like a man who is still waiting to live.”

“Well, here you have it: here is the law you were looking for. Congratulate yourself; you found it. We sent him because we needed to; we abandon him because we must. That is the discipline you
Admired." He turned to Smiley. "You too: I find you contemptible. You shoot us, then preach to the dying. Go away. We’re technicians, not poets…”

"Well, it isn't a conference then, is it? A conference isn't operational.
Not unless," she added with a giggle, "you're having it in the Kremlin."
"All right, it's not a conference. It's an operation. That's why I'm getting subsistence."
She looked at him cruelly. She was a thin, childless woman, her eyes half shut from the smoke of the cigarette in her mouth.

THE WEEK AFTER I MET XAVIER FOR LUNCH WAS A PEriod of extraordinary concordance in my marriage, a period I would later examine, one that I would remember. I had not been so closely attuned to Tomas in years, to the subtle weather of his moods, the cartography of his expression. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I thrilled to his presence, or that I had a new appreciation of his intelligence and kindness.

Two people who want the same thing will never generate the same intensity as two people who want different things, or one person who wants into an absence, a void as was in fact the case with Xavier, who wanted something from me that I could not give. More than that he wanted something that I could not begin to fathom, a desire with which it felt dangerous to collude or to involve myself.

It is a place of old faces and young bodies; of young faces and old bodies; where the tensions of war have become the tensions of peace, and voices are raised to drown the silence, and glasses to drown the loneliness; it is the place where the searchers meet, finding no one but each other and the comfort of a shared pain; where the tired watchful eyes have no horizon to observe.

Collision

“I know,” Gentry says. “You just want to do your time. It don’t work that way slick. See, you’re still thinking with your civilian mind. You have to start thinking with your prison mind.”

The Lunch Break

“Boone and Dave went to Brittany’s trailer to tell her that they’d just dismissed her assistant/drug mule.”

The North Wing

How close are the ties that bind a family? What would you do to protect your alcoholic, screwup cousin?

Final Score

Wow! Great story, what a start!!