Slant storytelling, if I’m being honest, is the only way I know how to write fiction. Unless the form of the story is as interesting as the story, I get bored. Goes for the fiction I read, too. Unless the author writes the way we talk, that is, I get sucked into the prose as if I’m hearing — and not reading — the story, I get bored. And I put down the book and move on to something else.
Makes me kind of a schizophrenic reader.
Functional, fictional form. Leading me to several storytelling methods: An eye chart, the Dewey Decimal System, text messages, and then Facebook: How way we use Facebook to communicate, and update, and let our friends know what we’re doing and where we’re doing it and with whom we’re doing it.
And how better to let people know you’re going to commit suicide than to post a status update.
Side B Magazine, in its postcolonialism issue, includes my Facebook-inspired fiction, Status Update, in its just-released postcolonialism issue. Come to find out what happens to Max; stay for the company my story keeps.
Status Update: I’ve been invited to Max’s suicide, via Facebook: “to kill myself”: an event to mark on a calendar. Max is going to kill himself in his closet sometime between 9 p.m. and 12 a.m.
Event Description: I will get wasted and blow my head off with a shotgun tonight.
Read more: http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/383556
Then buy the issue. For a limited time, if you buy the print issue, you get a free digital download.
