Notes on the Stories I've Posted Here
Writer Talking about Writing...Again
One of my favorite parts of Stephen King short story collections was the section where he talks about all of the stories. Which stories paid a traffic ticket. This story was rejected by several women's magazines for one line. King couldn't sell the self-cannibalism story, even though he was supposedly at the “sell your laundry list” success level.
Since I am still struggling with Job Chapter 38, I think it's time to revisit the stories that I've been posting on Substack. That way I'll post a couple articles this week and I can have enough time to clean my place for Shabbos.
Introduction to Let's Kill The Pizza Guy: The Love Poetry of Yael Friedman in Regards to Hadassah Herz.
Between 2008 and 2023, I wrote term papers for a living. It wasn't the most stable job and there were points where I was either broke or too busy to go outside. I was always late on my rent and clients weren't always the best. However, it was mostly steady work and after 2020, I assumed that I was going to have it easy with all my bills paid off. Then fucking ChatGPT showed up – and all the lazy college students who used to come to me to write their papers just went to AI. The slut came into town, gave it away for free and put the whores out of business. And now I'm fucking desperate for work. My best sources of income are gofundme and downloading a competitive candy crush game off of Free Cash and playing it to the reward levels. For this story, I had fun mocking the kinds of academic papers I used to read and write.
I wrote this story to publish in Tales from the Crust, a pizza themed horror anthology. I wrote it within the context of interconnected stories that take place in a future where America is torn apart by civil wars, spider robots wreak havoc and the Vav family massacred Dayton, Ohio for the honor of their sister. These stories are based on the end of Genesis with the Vav family standing in for the 12 brothers (some gender flipped) and Dayton standing in for Shechem. I named Yael Friedman after two women that I've had crushes on and Hadassah Herz after a woman I had a crush on but disliked at the time (it wasn't her fault that I built up a ridiculously perfect image of her that she could only disappoint but I blamed her at the time) and a shitty creepy roommate that also gets depicted as a Chasidic drug addict in self-published Kindle books (I assume that the author of those stories knew him. He's a creepy dude).
Beyond that, I sold it to Tales from the Crust, making me one of the 3% of submitters and then sold it again to Archive of the Odd, a brilliant anthology series where all the stories are written as non-stories (a syllabus for a time travel class, a review of a video game, and my pseudo-academic introduction).
Laura – I knew someone from Livejournal whose sister killed herself. She would talk about it a great deal and at one point, I knew that I had to cut it off with her because I was on the verge of using her sister's suicide in an argument. That's a pretty scummy thing to do and even though I didn't do it, I definitely still feel guilty about wanting to use that. Online fights bring out the worst in people. I used the suicide as the basis for a story. It's also second person, which is a fun story telling technique, but one to use sparingly.
Intoxicated Fuckheads – I consider this one my first sale, but I'm not sure. I don't remember if “Inclinations for Horror Writes” paid me or not. If they didn't pay me, then “Some Day We'll Meet” (soon on Kindle in a collection I'll title “Love Stories for Assholes”) was my first sale. Either way, when I posted it on Substack, I got a few fans for it, so that made me happy. It's an exercise in modern myth making and how we love rock stars for their extreme ways. I must admit that I really loved The Doors when I first saw it. It felt like a drug trip. Now I think it's pretentious and self-indulgent.
Hey Man – Sell one story to Shock Totem and you can feel good about your writing career. Sell a second story and you can call yourself a horror writer. I have been obsessed with the Black Death since before Covid and putting it in a pseudo-jazz story made me laugh.
A Gun to Your Head – Another second person story where the protagonist is doomed. One summer in my teen years, I was working in a law office and there wasn't much to do. It was one of those work study programs to get cheap labor/train at risk teenagers for the job market. It was a law office for juvenile court. I started reading the files and since I was 15, I gravitated to the sex crimes. I shouldn't have been reading these files for various reasons, but the chief one was discovering just how nasty people are. In reading these files, I found out that one of my classmates had been raped by a 17 year old guy who got her drunk and did what he wanted. At 14, I didn't want to know that about her. I didn't want to know that about anyone. The last time I saw her was at a class reunion and we talked about cats. A few years ago, she died of a heart attack. At least she had a better life than the people in this story.
Gentlemen of the Jury - This was a class assignment for a Gothic fiction class. I don't necessarily love it, but I've read Frankenstein at least 8-9 times. You can only read that book so many times before you start to think that no one can be as much of a whiny bitch as Victor. So I came up with this murder plot where Victor created Frankenstein jr. to kill his girlfriend so he could spend his life with his real lover Henry. I was shocked by how much sense that made once I started down the path. Also Frankenstein is the monster. He's his father's child so he takes his father's name. I added Lucifer Adam to the name since, like Byron, his favorite book was Paradise Lost.
Everything is Dark and Family Reunion – oh for the days when I only thought about rightwing Nazis. I happily ignored the Lefitsts and their Jew killing bullshit because I didn't want to hear them. Israel only got in short term wars so I would have a few bad weeks every couple years where every Noam Chomsky reading asshole was accusing Israel of genocide and spouting Hamas propaganda. That ended on October 7. I couldn't ignore my leftist friends anymore. These are mostly attempts at prose poems talking about the ways that people accepted Nazism as a normal thing. Family Reunion was based on my great great grandfather's 100 birthday party (he had dementia so he didn't know what was going on) and Everything is Dark was inspired by Kiss of the Spider Woman where a gay man lovingly talks about a Nazi melodrama.
Discourses on the Seven Headed Monkey – I never thought I'd sell this one. It's too Biblical, too full of private jokes about Tehillim and the days of the week. The Victorian framing story doesn't make much sense. Happily, Spectrum: An Autistic Horror Anthology bought it and not only bought it but at 10 cents a word gave me the most money I've ever received for a story. It's got all my Victorian obsessions including suffragettes and Oscar Wilde. This definitely gives me hope for my 1918 Jewish Communist werewolf story. Also, I got the acceptance email after October 7, so I spent months worried that the editor was going to pull my story because I am a Zionist, ie, a Jew who doesn't rely on the good intentions of non-Jews. Turns out that the editor talked about 86ing another story and one of the editors because they behaved badly in geek spaces – stalking, bullying, etc. I don't know how that went. I collected my $350 and now it's available for resale.
Company Policy – I got invited to an Aliens and Urban Legends anthology. The editor didn't buy this one, but I did sell it to a few more anthologies. I wrote it because every time I worked at a new place (usually a temp service) they had a pamphlet explaining the history of the company with the rules. I was always struck by how much the company always has humble origins. The temp services began as one guy with a truck driving the three workers in the company to their jobs.
Bus Stop at Night – This one is like Mrs. Dalloway, where the perspective goes in and out of people's heads. Its based on the bus stop next to the Uptown movie theater in Uptown, Minneapolis. It's one of those bus stops that I used to spend a lot of time waiting at because I lived in St. Louis Park and almost all of the buses went to Uptown and I had to wait for the one bus that took me home. I sold it to Fusing Horizons, but I'm not sure if I sold it to the online version or the print version. If it's in the print version then there are many 20 copies in the world.
If you like me, please consider getting a paid subscription, donating to my gofundme or hiring me as a writer/editor. I can edit theses, novels, resumes or write papers for you. You can email me at omanlieder@yahoo.com or
For more books, please buy a copy of She Nailed a Stake Through His Head.
You can buy a copy of Tales from the Crust from the publisher.
I also have a story in Cosmic Horror Monthly # 57. It’s a good one.