Tokyo Drifting Into Your Inbox (With A Fun Little Short Story At The End As A Treat)
What’s good, pals?
I’ve decided to do a newsletter.
Like all things with me, it will be sporadic, unorganized, likely infrequent but full of grit and panache. I was gonna do a Substack a while back but life got busy and then Substack got Nazi and I lost the hunger for it.
If somehow this email is your first introduction to me, here’s a little intro: I am a writer of novels and short stories, I co-run Evening House Books, a small new bookstore in Buffalo, NY with my brilliant partner, inspiration + love of my life Amanda, and I am the EIC of the lit mag Cold Signal, where great writing is pared with custom digital collages by yours truly.
Fun news: I’m also starting to do freelance book cover designs! Developed a pretty fun process for making designs to promote stories through Cold Signal that led to me designing the covers for both of my books, which people seemed to like. Hit me up sometime if you’re interested.
You can find links to all my shit on my site johnchrostek.com.
I had two books come out this year: BOXCUTTERS, a short story collection with Malarkey Books, and FEAST OF THE PALE LEVIATHAN, a body horror politic dark fantasy novel, with Deep Overstock. I’ll write more about them here in time.
To give you a sense of my work, I tend to write in the middle ground between literary fiction and genre. I found a wikipedia article describing something called PARANOID FICTION, which has a lot of my literary heroes in it like Vonnegut, Kafka, PKD, Le Guin (to a lesser extent.) I think my writing fits in there.
I’d call myself a writer of the paranoid fantastic. I want to create works of careful absurdism, intricate satire, that try to make something substantive and genuinely fun for readers, cynical and optimistic, dream-laden and mundane. Containing the vast extremes of modern experience. All this to say there’s very little chance I’ll find anything like commercial success, but that’s fine, because I keep busy and I’m a stubborn asshole and I like what I like and do what I do.
I’ll use this Buttondown to share updates on new releases and projects, complain or wax poetic about stuff I dislike or like, talk craft, talk shop, or anything else I might like to say or share outside of a “skeet”.
So thanks for subscribing if you have, thanks for reading if you do, and since you made it this far, here’s that short story I mentioned.
It’s about guys who make TikToks and the people who watch those Tiktoks and judge them, nothing too crazy or new for me but still a fun one. A bon mot. An Hors d'oeuvre. A little free sample at the super market from me to you.
Subscribe if you’d like, why don’t you:
SKIT ROW
There’s a guy who lives on my block who has a big following online because he records videos of himself talking to the camera. Sometimes I leave the windows open when I notice him so I can listen in, even though I follow him on a private account separate from my main one (I don’t want him to know I’m watching) and can just wait until whatever he’s filming in that moment is edited and released for mass consumption. Most of his videos are about single fathers, or men on the dating scene who are unappreciated by their previous partners. They’re the singular gentlemen of this rotted world who, despite their bruised and battered egos, are always kind and considerate and open the door and ask about women’s days even after the relationship has ended. Men who are all too used to being the bad guy despite being anything but.
I just think it’s funny. Not in the way he wants, maybe. It’s funny to me because I’ve lived on the same street as him for six years and I know for a fact he’s been with the same woman for the last two years. Before that, I don’t think he knew much of anyone.
The woman he dates, she makes content, too. She records videos of herself jogging and doing cartwheels and motivational videos while she’s sitting in the mini-park between the two lanes of traffic on our road. Mindfulness. Yoga. The basics. She seems happy, though, and I like her considerably more.
So why does he make these same videos over and over again? They’re such frustrating watches. Despite how algorithmically visible they are, how much consistent engagement they get, I never see negative comments. I never see anyone notice that he’s actually very condescending in them. He’s convinced of his moral superiority, his Way, but these videos are just fabricated bits where he is talking to no one. The lemmings all reply and chat about like it’s a real situation he’s showcasing and not the biased scriptwriting of a lughead talking to the breeze.
Do people who know better just look away? Do they just not see the contradictions? I wish I could look away, but I can’t. He lives on my block. He waved at me once, and since then I wave at him, but since then he stopped waving back like he doesn’t know me, but I don’t know him well enough to ask about it. It’s just really awkward.
His partner waves at me, though. Sometimes we even make small talk. I don’t initiate it often, because that’d be an overreach. She just seems to not mind my company. I wish I could remember her name. She told it to me once. It starts with an R. She doesn’t have her name on her social media channel for security purposes, so I can’t check there. One of her videos mentions a stalker. An abusive ex. Which I find fascinating, given the context.
Shouldn’t his videos make her uncomfortable? Wouldn’t she ask him to do something different? I don’t get it!
I’m sure at this point you’re starting to think I’m going a little overboard. You’re probably right. They’re just two people I don’t know that well. What their relationship is like behind closed doors is a truth hidden behind a veil I can never part. Maybe he’s monetizing the channel in some way I can’t figure out. Maybe it pays the bills and helps them thrive together in domestic bliss. All I can do is speculate.
I wish I could pay a bit less attention to them, but I can’t. I’m just too observant. It’s always been my little problem. I’m normally good about keeping these thoughts to myself, but I guess I’m slipping up a bit today.
All this to say, I’m trying to do something productive with this energy. I’m writing a story inspired by them. I don’t tell anyone that’s where the inspiration is coming from, of course. A story about a relationship that shouldn’t work, but does. A brooding, edgy bad boy and a woman with a heart of gold. I’m drawing from real life in a way, but the story keeps changing as I write it. I notice there’s a bit of me in both of the characters. I see myself in both of them, and well, it’s changed some things.
When they pass me by on the street, I smile and wave, and Lord, I mean it now. I just see too many explanations for who they are to hold a grudge or think the worst of either of them.
My writing group likes the story a lot. They’ve told me to submit it to publishers. Romance is in right now in a big way, they tell me. But I think I might like to self-publish. If you go big, there’s more money in it. You just have to be willing to hustle. Put yourself out there. Do your own promo.
I think I can do that now. I’m learning this about myself.