Tag Archives: whodunit

Happy Spring. Goddamn it feels good to take off that winter coat.

According to a lot of friends and family, I’m about to hit a milestone in my post-collegiate life: I’ve made it six months in New York without bailing back to Florida. Or shooting somebody.

Cue the applause. Seriously. This is apparently a huge accomplishment.

That said, one thing I have been doing the past few months is writing (keyword: writing. Quality of said writing is another discussion, and one I’m not going to have with you right now, thank you very much).

When I moved to this great, wonderful, eclectic, totally fucked up city, I like to think I did it without stars in my eyes; rather, I came with the knowledge that I’ll never give up, that I’ll work at this until somebody grabs me by the shoulders and says “Patrick, seriously, you got it, you’re done, now chill out,” and even then push that person out of the way, kick them in the head maybe (probably) and keep keeping on (disclaimer to whoever that shoulder-grabbing-person ends up being: I’ll never be “done”).

Philosophical side note: anybody who’s looking for an eye opening view of the inner workings of their mind should probably do what I did and get away from everything you’ve ever known, if it’s even for a couple of months before you can’t take it anymore and go back. You’ll learn a lot, I promise. Most of it sucks, but eventually you’ll get over the crap and be way cooler for it.

 

Alright, cooler might be pushing it…resilient. Yeah, resilient.

Anyways, recent news: another publication under my belt.

This time around it’s Etopia Press, which just accepted my short story “Stew”.

“Stew” is about a man who attempts to kill his controlling, sadistic wife by poisoning her stew. Yes, the title serves multiple purposes (hahahahaha, original, right?). Anybody familiar with the characters in my stories can probably also guess that this guy completely screws everything up. I think it’s a fun read (I wouldn’t tell you if it wasn’t though, so don’t trust me).

I have to admit, I never thought “Stew” would actually see the inside of a magazine. I wrote it purely for personal enjoyment, one of those rare moments when I simply wanted to remember where my love for the craft came from and didn’t really care if the result was half-retarded. I still think “Stew” is a little slow in the head, but I’ve also been known to be a horrible judge of character (get it? Character? Like, character as in character in a story but also character as in…forget it).

Anyways, there’s that. Check it out whenever they publish it. I don’t know when that is yet, but it should be soon.

In other news: I’ve embarked on a new project (had a lot of fun with True Stories, but that shit gets old real quick). This recent obsession seems to have a mind of its own, and I’m still wondering whether or not I will end up regretting indulging in it in the future. Time will tell.

You see, my primary desire has always been to be a novelist. Short stories, for me, are typically novels I started writing which just sort of…stopped. They always begin as these grand, sweeping visions of humanity with enough weight in the plot and characterization to carry me through 50, 60, 70, 80,0000 words.

Usually, I’m dead ass wrong, and it peters out around 3,000.

Occasionally, though, I get a nice lump of pages together and fashion it into something that doesn’t suck too much. My graduate thesis—Quarter Life Crisis, which I’ve already talked about exhaustively and am going to steer clear of right now—was only one of those works, and up until a couple of weeks ago it was the only one on which I had focused the entirety of my limited interest in promotional tactics, striving to get the damn thing onto somebody’s desk who can do things with it that will make me smile (promising developments on that end, but I’m not going to jinx myself by talking about them).

In the back of my mind, though, the Anthony Stephens novel has been just gnawing away. Something about the format, the content, the overall subject just kept popping into my head, right next to the word “timely” and “NOW!”

So I decided to bypass the traditional send-a-book-out-to-everybody-on-the-planet-until-somebody-takes-a-chance-on-you tactic of novel submission and just turn the book—written as a collection of interview and journal excerpts—into a running blog, with an excerpt posted every day until the entire mystery is revealed.

<— Hence, my most recent obsession, Who Is Anthony Stephens?

As the story is ultimately a murder-mystery, I don’t want to give away too much by posting a plot synopsis. So, instead, I’ll just say that I got the idea to write the novel during Christmas break of 2008, sitting in a Starbucks back home in Miami, cup of coffee in one hand, a pile of student loan paperwork in the other.

All of the papers said pretty much the same thing: a bunch of numbers above the words “This Is Not A Bill”, hinting ominously at the fact that eventually those words would disappear and the companies would want every cent of every dollar stated.

I read over the amounts, sipped my coffee, read over the attached pages-upon-pages of contractual agreements, sipped some more coffee, imagined burning the papers in front of the loan company’s office window then pissing on the ashes, sipped some more coffee, then thanked God that I was going to graduate school for the next two and a half years.

The bottom line, though, is that’s the day it started to really dawn on me how much shit I was eventually going to be in (“eventually” being some time around…now).

What really got me though was when I decided to actually read the fine print, sitting in my car later that day, alternating between staring at the words on the paper and staring mournfully at the gray sky above, all the Christmas energy operating around me despite the rainy streets and my foul mood. I remember staring at people smiling and happy, walking with their bags of gifts and their family members’ arms entwined in their own. And I wanted to run up to them, each and every one, and hold my loan papers up in their faces and say crazy shit like “how can you be happy right now??!! This is tragic!!”

And though the bulk of it gave me a sinking feeling in my gut, one thing that struck me as funny then (my still college-enrolled self found certain aspects of student loan debt humorous; I wanna smack that dude right now) was the clause in the contract where they talked about various ways you could get OUT of paying the loans back.

And what the loads of legal jargon basically amounted to were the company would gladly relieve you of your obligations…in the event that you died.

I laughed.

Then I got really depressed.

Then I wondered if anybody had ever faked their death to get out of student loan debt?

Like, had things ever gotten so bad for somebody that they just said fuck it and cut their losses, ducked out of their identity and never looked back?

Questions like that typically lead to story ideas, even more typically short story ideas. But this one took hold and within a couple of hours I had an outline for an entire scenario centered around this guy, this anti-hero indebted to society, this Anthony Stephens.

Over the next year or so, the story took shape, shifting and changing as stories do until there was a whole cast of characters who had a whole lot to say about what they knew (or thought they knew) about the circumstances surrounding Anthony’s disappearance. And the entire time, in real life, I could see the student loan debt crisis getting more and more serious around me, both in the lives of my friends and family and also on a larger, national scale in the media.

In the end (the end being a couple of weeks ago) I decided that I don’t really care if this one gets traditionally published or even recognized for anything more than the murder-mystery it is. Or recognized at all for that matter.

Regardless, it says something I want to say now, not five or ten years from now.

So, with that said, I’d like to ask you, oh wonderful reader (yes, that’s me sucking up) for a favor:

Go to the page—Who Is Anthony Stephens? (whoisanthonystephens.wordpress.com)—look around, get a feel for it, and if the subject piques your interest (which it should for anybody who’s been anywhere near a college campus in the past twenty years), leave a comment or two, click on the little “Follow” button in the upper right-hand corner so you can be notified when the next installment is posted (again, a post everyday until the entire mystery’s revealed), and share the site with your friends.

On the surface, this is a murder-mystery novel, with all the twists and turns necessary to hopefully make it live up to the genre’s prestige.

On a deeper level, this is a novel about a subject I’ve been hearing way too much about not to say my piece, a development that’s seriously screwing a lot of people in my generation.

And not the fun type of screwing either.

Aside from all of that, shout out to the many people I’ve met and grown extremely fond of in New York, and to my many loved ones in Florida and elsewhere (Jamaica, Chicago, San Fran, England, etc.)

Thanks for keeping me motivated. And medicated.

Deuces.

-PAJr.