Kevin Spaide’s Comments

One day (February 10, 2010 to be precise) I decided I was having WAY too much fun revising and revising and revising my glorious, weird-ass novel and thought it might be time to do something else for a change. Take a little breather. So I sat down and wrote a story. Actually I sat down and wrote the first line of a story. Then I stared at it for a minute or two. Then I wrote the rest of the story, four or five pages, without even really thinking about what I was doing. It just kind of came out of my fingers and appeared there on the computer screen—one letter at a time. This had never happened to me before. It felt exciting, odd, painless, unsustainable. I didn’t ask any questions. I wrote and wrote. When I finished I read the story through and laughed a few times. I thought: I’m out of the fucking quicksand! Everything is going to be all right! It felt so good to write something new, something fresh. So the next day I wrote another story. The next day another. I thought things like: If I keep this up for a year I’ll have 365 stories about these people.

It was February, it was pretty cold outside, the days were short, I didn’t have a job …

I’m straying from the subject here.

Anyway, I wrote around twenty-five stories about a guy and his wife. “Lawnmower,” “The Sweater,” and “Oncology” are three of them. Probably all three—all twenty-five for that matter—were written between ten and twelve in the morning. I doubt I was even really awake yet. Just sitting there in my clothes writing stories from who knows where. Just writing. Sometimes laughing. I don’t know exactly who those people in the stories are—but I love them and am grateful they came to visit my head last February. The guy, the often-confused husband, seems to have inherited some of my foibles and weaknesses, but his wife (I feel compelled, out of fear, to make these awful distinctions, this being the Internet) is not much like my wife—though I think she does quote her directly once. For example, my wife has never made a sweater. Not that I know of. She doesn’t have a car either. Nor does she own a bike (the wife rides her bike a lot in some of the other stories.) Also, we’ve never had a porch to sit on. And I don’t know any sixteen-year-old girls. Come to think of it, I know almost no one between the ages of eleven and twenty-two.

My point here is: these stories are about ninety-seven percent made up. They are probably the most made-up stories I’ve ever written. Who knows where they came from? Out of my secret fears and hopes, I guess. As usual. Hope you like them.

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