I think that it works in this case because the whole story is, for all its tragedy, it’s a send-up, a big old joke with this core of pain. Which incidentally, I love. Funny-sad gets me every time (which is why I could finish Infinite Jest without breaking a sweat and like it).

I am not sure about the line: “I am merely an image you would understand. Were I to show you my true form, your human mind would explode into a thousand personalities and leave you wailing in a pile of your own fetid mess.”

It’s a bit… ThisIslandEarthy for me. A bit of a… CLUNK. If you know what I mean. I cringed a little while reading it… but soldiered through and realised, on a second reading, that the whole thing was satire. But I had to break through the barrier the line created before realising that the line wasn’t what I thought it was. If that makes sense. I think possibly hanging some sort of notional lampshade on the daft aspects of the plot a little earlier on might help. I don’t know.

I find dialogue exceptionally hard, and sweat over it.

This speaks to a larger problem: I don’t do short very well. I do short, punchy language, but I don’t do short form fiction very well. Even this story is an exercise in restraint: I had a novel-slash-novella in mind about this whole thing, that incorporated some of the back history and advertising characters of Jack Kenny Whiskey, that had a more cosmic scope to it.

An example: I had a short fiction idea that was, in essence, “Man meets flying cat.” I wrote a 20k story. I trimmed it to 13k, and that’s as bare as I can let it be. (The good news there is, I adapted it into what I think is a pretty strong spec script.)

That’s an issue — I get an idea, and I want to keep riding that idea until the beast has worked itself up to a potentially fatal froth, a livid lather.

The sassyness of the narrator, that would be harder to extract. Frankly, I’m so used to writing such horrific, wretched sequences in my fiction that I deeply enjoy playing with that voice, that winking approach. I feel like a gleeful dog rolling around in sweet, sweet filth.

Glad it worked, for the most part. I’ll see what I can’t do to give it a future trim, see if it can’t resurface for another look in the coming months.

This thing really rides the line, doesn’t it? There are points where the narrator’s casual sassyness almost goes too far, but the momentum carries the language veering around the next corner and it just cannot be stopped. If anything, though, I feel like some of your great texture and details tell us what’s important and what’s being rushed through for mechanical purposes. Like, I love the winking eye of the projector. I like the cold soda machine and the flick of candy from a molar.

I bring this up, ’cause I think it’s maybe too long. Brevity, wit, etc. I’ve read it twice now, and both times I find myself jumping ahead a bit, interested in seeing the action unfold and hopping over exchanges of dialogue. Which is crazy, because the dialogue is over-witty in that delicious but unrealistic Whedonesque fashion, but yet I found myself hopping ahead. (That I wanted to see how the story turned out was never in question.)

As an exercise, I wonder: What would you do if you had to cut this thing down by, say, 25%?

I’ll say this, though: I’ll bet my instinct to trim it down wouldn’t exist if I SAW this, if actors were doing it. I find myself fighting against my literary desire to savor in pursuit of my cinematic desire to see the dialogue fly by. Maybe that’s why I was hopping.