You look at me across the table. A pane of glass is all that separates us. Unthinkable miles are all that separate us. So easy to forget that you’re not right here after all. Not even close. Sometimes I wonder if I’m imagining you. Is that bad? I reach out to touch the screen, gingerly, pulling back at the last minute. Your hand moves toward mine, tapping the glass, and the sound of it is the most solid thing in the room.

“I miss you.”

“Silly. You can’t miss someone you’ve never met.”

“But I do. I can imagine what it feels like to be there with you and smell you and touch you, and I miss it. I want it.”

You smile, tilting your head down and sideways in that way you have. It’s either charmed or condescending or both. I know what you’re thinking: cute, but obsessive. I also know you feel the same inside but need to keep your distance. People close to you have never seen your vulnerable inside like I have. The screen melts your inhibitions like wax. You’ve said things–and done things–that you never would if anyone were in the room with you.

“I’ve got to go,” you say, standing up from your sofa. I catch a glimpse of your room. Territory so familiar but unreachable, like the face of the moon. When you stand it’s like the camera’s panning down the length of your body, and I close my eyes and try not to think about that.

“I guess I can let you out of my sight. For a little while. Where are you going?”

The corners of your mouth twitch in the smallest flash of annoyance. I broke the fourth wall, and it was too much. This isn’t real to you like your world is. It’s not the first time I’ve realized that. How do I win back someone I can’t touch, who was never mine anyway?

Now you smirk and bat your eyes. “I promised a friend I’d have dinner with her. Why? Jealous?”

You’ve given me an out. Thank you. “Always. Until I get you here, all to myself.” Not as cool as I’d like, but it’ll do.

You bend toward me and plant a cursory kiss on the screen. “I’ll be thinking of you the whole time. Naughty thoughts of you.”

“And you’ll share them with me when you get back.”

“Not a chance. I’m saving them up for Christmas.”

Christmas is what we call your visit. It’s all planned out, but you haven’t bought your ticket yet. After your next paycheck, you said. You wouldn’t let me buy it for you.

“I can’t wait. Christmas better get here soon, or I’ll have to come after you myself.”

You wink and kill the connection.

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Client Operations Director Aloysius Wade opened the unmarked door to the company’s inner sanctum. The result of opening the door always took him by surprise. The outside of the door was plain, but surprisingly imposing at the end of a short, bare hallway. There was no secretary. Wade smiled to himself. Most people did not know that the tradition of having a secretary was an American invention of the early 20th century. Inside, the office of company CEO Erik Hansen was surprisingly sumptuous. Luscious maroon carpet harvested from dozens of Berbers covered the bare floor upon which Wade’s loafers tread lightly. Every inch of wall space was occupied by tall shelves of books ranging from All The President’s Men to The Tipping Point to The Prince, an Italian Renaissance-era treatise on how to effectively rule a dictatorship.

The room was dominated by a massive teak desk handcrafted from the wreck of a nineteenth-century clipper ship, the HMS Indomitable. CEO Hansen, a slim, spare man with the salty, patrician air of a yacht captain, surveyed his company from behind this desk as the captain of the Indomitable might once have surveyed the open sea. He was wearing his typical office attire, a Brooks Brothers navy blue blazer, tailored button-down Oxford shirt, and jeans. His gray hair always looked windblown despite careful styling. He smiled an easy smile, his shockingly warm yet sometimes icy blue eyes greeting his trusted friend. “Come on in, Wade.”

I hope I’ve gotten that out of my system now.

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INBOX (1)

SENDER: Joseph

SUBJECT: Come back

Please come back, Philip. I don’t know where you’ve gone. I’m looking everywhere.

So my name is Philip, he thought. He didn’t know who Joseph was. He didn’t know much of anything else either. He pressed Delete.

He saw the city for the first time, unburdened by memories. Is this what being born is like? A hum began deep in his chest, a tune he had no words for. It swelled and burst into unashamed song. People all around stopped to listen. It was a beautiful day—his first day.

* * *

INBOX (1)

SENDER: Joseph

SUBJECT: Where are you?

I’m afraid I’ll never get you back. Please remember me and come home.

He poised his finger over the Reply button, but had no idea what to say, so he pressed Delete instead. Today was overcast, but a crowd was gathering in the square anyway. They were all he had, and they were waiting for him to sing. He put away the phone, and sang, and the coins pooled around his feet.

* * *

INBOX (0)

The emails had come with less frequency as the weeks passed. Joseph, whoever he was, was giving up the ghost.

That was fine with Philip. People came from all over the city to hear him sing. His agent took care of the money. Even the amnesia was fading. Not that he remembered anything; when asked about his past, he made something up.

At night, when he curled up in the tiny apartment, fending off the cold, when he thumped his arm to coax out a vein for the needle, he wished the lies were real.

* * *

He awoke. The twinge in his arm told him there was still a needle in it. It wasn’t the first time. He smelled alcohol. It was the kind they used in hospitals, not the kind you drank. A man in blue scrubs approached his bed.

“Good morning, Mr. Peters. Good to have you back with us.”

Peters? Was that his last name? He couldn’t remember ever using it. For the first time, he noticed the restraints tethering his arms, legs and forehead.

“How did I get here?”

“You came here yourself, three days ago. You’re past the worst of the detox.”

He didn’t remember any of this, and said so.

The blue man smiled. “You told us you might have some memory trouble. You left yourself a note.” He picked up a scrap of paper from the nightstand and held it out.

Welcome back, Philip.

-Joseph

He remembered everything.

I was so lonely, said Joseph in his head, and then Joseph was gone, leaving his memories behind, and there was only Philip, clean and whole.

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I’ve also been outlining a novel for the last couple of weeks, and this morning I laid down the first words–a whopping 263 of them! Here’s a small, completely unedited sample:

As he approached the corner, his gait became jauntier, less purposeful. By the time he reached the crossing street, tapping out a text message with the fluidity of a native language, he was one of a crowd of hundreds, converging on the roped-off front door of the nearest club.

I plan on releasing companion stories to the novel as I go along, so watch Copyhacker for updates!

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1. Forget about the length (and all hope of wrapping another finished product anytime soon) and make it a novel.

3. Finish the first draft as briefly as is feasible and fix it in rewrites.

Option 1 only makes sense if I’m going to give up on short stories, and it’s way too soon for that (after all, I did finish one). Besides, finishing a work of specific length is an important discipline, and I don’t think I can delay my gratification long enough to write a whole novel at this point. It felt too good to finish the first story. At under 500 words a day, it takes long enough just to do a short piece.

Option 3 seems practical, but what if this story doesn’t want to be short? The idea for it flowed out of a specific situation, and I have yet to come up with a resolution for said situation. There may not be one in ten thousand words or less. But you’ll notice I left out…

2. End it with a cliffhanger, and make it a sort of serial.

With this option I abandon any hope of marketing this particular story as is. But there are some things to like about option 2:

• Readers love serials. Get them hooked on the product and keep pushing. See also: TV and comics.

• The story would be (more or less) complete in itself while leading into a larger experience. This is kind of scary, not knowing where the whole thing is going (see also: X-Files), but I also have some ideas for tying it into the novel that’s sitting on my back burner.

• I get to build a universe as if I’m writing a novel, but do it a bit at a time (and hopefully not write myself into many corners).

• The more I study the short story, the more I realize how underrated it is. So no one buys them. Who cares? Novel sales are down too, with a lot of people citing the death of the American attention span. Well, a ten-page story requires much less commitment than a three-hundred-page novel. Maybe the time is ripe for the short story (or some version of it) to make a comeback–and if the old-guard publishing industry isn’t interested, well, they’re a topic for another post.

If I do this, don’t expect a logical order of progression. We aren’t talking linear like a TV show–we’ll all be turning over puzzle pieces one at a time and trying to figure out where they fit in the big picture. And hopefully there is a big picture.

So what do you think? Too ambitious, or a sneaky way of avoiding responsibility? Let’s save the story before it’s too late. Who’s with me?

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Grab the PDF, and an excerpt, from this page.

Happy reading!

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Huge piles of thanks to all of you who voted for me. This is my first honest-to-goodness writing gig (unless you count the AskSpace thing a couple of years ago). It’s unpaid, but I should pick up some readers, and I’ll get to find out if I can produce under a deadline. Besides, now I can sit in front of the TV and say it’s for my writing career.

Stay tuned!

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The audition process is basically a head-to-head competition against the other submitters. The powers that be must have liked me, because I got a first-round bye. Now, I’m counting on your help to get past Round 2.

Head over to this page and vote for my recap of Wife Swap! You have to sign up for a message board account, but you love me that much, don’t you? I thought so. Now get to it!

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How a character handles a given object can be immensely revealing. Briefly describe, as specifically as you can, how the following characters would handle a pencil:

• a harried middle aged librarian named Greta Hurleyburton

Wears one over each ear and is constantly sharpening them with old-school crank sharpener mounted on her desk

• an elderly lawyer named Gregory Wooster IV

Imports handcrafted koa wood pencils from Argentina and keeps them in a humidor on his desk. Uses special Amazon rubber eraser and sharpens with a pocketknife (he likes to whittle also)

• a ten year old boy named Bruce

gets the big fat sparkly ones in 20-packs for pencil fighting, and trades them for candy

• a purple-haired installation artist who signs her work “Ahn R Keyy”

Sticks pencils in the eyes and private parts of mannequins as a theme. Makes pencil pincushions out of dolls of certain political figures.

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Another tantrum, sure enough. This one’s a doozy. The house shakes with the screaming. I pause in my dinner prep, trying to muster the intestinal fortitude necessary to ignore the assault on my ears. You know that chemical that causes the feeling of stress, the one I can’t think of right now because I’m too stressed out? Yeah, that one. I’m up to my eyeballs in it. What’s that crash from the vicinity of the living room? I run in to check. She threw her stuffed squid at the lamp and knocked it over. The lamp is fine, but the lampshade, the one that my wife found for $1.50 at Michaels and spent an hour painting dots on, is toast. The metal ring tore right out of the cheap paper shade material. I can’t wait to hear what she’s going to say about this. Not the toddler, the wife. The toddler is making her views clearly felt right now. As I wonder how the afternoon could get any worse, I realize that the new smell is that of my tortillas burning in the toaster oven.

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