April issue of the Absent Willow Review is up

A couple years ago I was trying to write a novella. It was kind of disfunctional family/kitchen-sinky, populated by angsty, unhappy characters doing their darndest to make one another miserable. Their success in that effort was moderate, but they were excelling at bumming the hell out of me. Their story was vague, turgid, and boring as shit. For whatever reason, I couldn’t convince myself to give it up. I knew it was awful and I hated the act of writing it, but every night I’d sit down at the computer and crank out another thousand stupid words, suffering through every one of them.

Somewhere around the fifty-thousandth word, I knew I should be wrapping things up. Unfortunately, not a whole lot had happened yet. Mostly just a lot of griping and sulking. I’m not sure where I got the idea, but I came up with a solution: apropos of nothing, I threw a monster into the mix. It took five pages for it to eat everyone. Then I typed “The End” and finally let myself move on with my life.

A year later, I dug the novella out of the drawer where I’d buried it and gave it a read. It was exactly as bad as I’d thought while writing it…except for those last five pages, which were actually kind of fun. I dumped the rest and worked them into their own story.

It’s called “Sweat” and it’s up in the April issue of The Absent Willow Review.

Despite my (obvious, I assume) love of the horror genre, for whatever reason I hadn’t actually written anything that qualified since high school. It was a total blast, and I’m sticking with it.