Chekhov's Ninth is based on my notes from a dream I had the night before an Astronomy
exam. It's also the source of my unusual psychological reaction to the
names Julia and/or Juliet. I started to write it up, and left it for over
a year; eventually I finished it and submitted it a an L2 writing class.
It's the only finished version, and ends up being rather dark and Poe-like,
and I shall probably redo it with some subtlety sooner or
later.
This was written for a freshman-level English class; the zeroeth revision
was, as that class pointed out, drivel. This first revision is much better,
I think, and they thought. I like it a lot, actually. Funny in spots, and
embodied of a sort of ridiculous futility that seems, in some cynical way,
highly apropriate as a splattering-spot for a fairy tale.
Irkles is an attempt at a story that involves IRC dialogue.
I've gotten mixed reports on whether it works or not. AFAIK, it stands
fairly well without them. It has some autobiographical parallels, but it's
entirely fictional.
When I submitted this to a writing workshop at UCD, to say that I and it
got panned would be to modestly understate the matter. I presume this to be
caused by (a) the highly inhospitable narrator, whom you tend to start
hating about the third paragraph, and (b) the uncomfortable storyline and
subject. When I submitted the same story, unedited, to an actors' workshop
in San Francisco, they spent all night with it and adored it pretty much to
bits. It's still unrevised -- plenty of things in here I have in mind to
change around, at least marginally.
Old Glory Young Glory is a motif-laden story concerning an evening spent
by a son in a highrise office, and a father in a Simpson County jail. The
prof for whose class it was written called it "very mature writing," which I
think mostly means he liked the historical aspects, he being a fairly
accomplished historical fiction author and as vulnerable to student
brownnosing as any other. That said, I didn't have the prof in mind whilst
writing it, particularly.