Don > Recent Status Updates

I could've started and stored at the Cleveland chapter, but I'm glad I haven't.

The half with the mirco-essays on writing has turned out to be one of the best writing resources I have now.

The half with the mirco-essays on writing has turned out to be one of the best writing resources I have now.

5* for "Jagannath." A story so clear, I could see a short film version playing in my mind as I read.

2* for "Aunts." Some really nice lines in this story, but I didn't find the piece very compelling. Seemed to amount to little more than Augusta Prima, part 2.

4* for "Augusta Prima." Sort of like a reverse Twilight Zone episode.

3* for "Pyret." Got really interesting toward the end, but took too long to get to The heart of the matter IMO. The payoff ultimately didn't justify the length.

3* for "Cloudberry Jam." The first page of the story reminded me of "Miss Nyberg...." It's a compelling story, but all too familiar at this point.

3* for "Reindeer Mountain." Fairly compelling piece despite starring another "mysterious woman" from "somewhere else, no one knew where." But it just took too long IMO to get to the heart of the matter, or to where I felt something (anything) was at stake. Trick intro didn't help, either.

4* for "Brita's Holiday Village." The main character's writing journal could be my own. I really liked it, even after I realized this was "Miss Nyberg" redux which then telegraphed the ending to me.

3* for "Avrid Pekron." The main character reminds me of the public persona of Harvey Pekar, "the flunkie with a government job." Imagine this character set in John Kessel's story "The Red Phone," if that story had a Kafkaesque twist. You'd think I'd have liked it better...

5* for "Herr Cederberg." A "boys and their toys" piece that, again, almost reads like a Fredric Brown story with a twist. Not an O. Henry "gotcha" twist; rather it was the fact that this honest, clockpunk version of the story of Icarus, turned out to be just what it promised in the beginning.

5* for "Ninieslando," wherein Waldrop takes an obscure WWI school of thought to its logical (and heartbreaking) conclusion. Also, a textbook example of what Orson Scott Card is talking about when he talks about a "milieu" story.

5* for "Frogskin Cap." If Paolo Bacigaluppi was a little more economical (yet still effective) with his post-apocalyptic world-building, it would look like this story.

5* for "Avast, Abaft!" The very model of a modern, major pirate story to end all pirate stories because of this line: "It was as if he were living a dream; he was translated to a higher state of consciousness that included a perceptual breakthrough and had a paradigm shift. It was like having deja vu two times in a row."

4* for "Kindermarchen." I should've just given this a 5, but it did bother me that the piece didn't have the punch I thought it should, being 1600 words long. Of course, that could've been because I'd pretty much had the end figured out before I got there.

5* for "Thin, on the Ground." I don't think I got a single reference/Easter egg in this story. It totally didn't mater.

5* for "The Bravest Girl I Ever Knew." King Kong is real. 'Nuff said.

5* for "The King of Where-I-Go." I think this is the kind of magical realist story of childhood past that Steven Millhauser tries to write, but with a heart(ache) to it that only Waldrop can pull off. Also, "Coca-Cola comic book orgy." is now my favorite HW line.

5* for "The Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode in On)" for delivering exactly what HW promised, as described in his afterward, "...a miniature Da Vinci Code done shorter and better, and with a pantomime horse, too."