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Bryan Wiler's avatar

THIS sentence - yes 1,000 times over. “Everybody understands a drunk in that kind of wet.”

Levi Polzin's avatar

Thanks, that is also my personal favorite sentence in the whole piece!

Bryan Wiler's avatar

it’s ending on the hard consonant of “wet” that makes it work so well

Levi Polzin's avatar

Agreed. Wet is sharp, it’s definitive. It hit like a punch.

Nivethine Mahendran's avatar

Loved the travelling Apple throughout this piece - it really acts as a grounding tool. I also couldn’t stop thinking “don’t eat that! It was on the wet ground… and some guy’s face!”

Great work as always!!

Levi Polzin's avatar

Thanks, Nive! I actually forgot to have the Apple travel to the bar when I first posted this. I had to edit it quickly and add that! A great reminder for everyone to never read the email version, hahaha!

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May 16
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Levi Polzin's avatar

The novel is about a guy and his anthropomorphic deer friend, who may or may not be real,/also his father, trying to hang onto the last final gasp of their addiction. It’s about the final throws of sanity and decency. It’s about one person seeking purpose, friendship, love, and his own humanity. It’s about this guy telling a deer to kick rocks so he can learn to love himself and the world again.

It’s a piece that started as a short story experiment itself, and Chuck P ultimately pointed me to continue down that route. Said there was something there.

So, with this piece, I was attempting to further abstract many of the themes and characters that had already been represented in the book—something like a Wizard of Oz tale. In which I take the characters from the novel and plop them into my love of crime noir books to see what happens. I think the result will operate much like interlude scenes in the novel. In a way that they can be a way for me to show in these fantasy sections that the MC, Lee, is searching for control in his real life—that he feels disarmed of control in his real life, so he makes up this crime noir character that is very much him, who is always in control and can ultimately “beat the Deer.”( his addiction)

After I wrote this one this morning, I started a few more and saw how they all weave into key parts of the book.

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May 16
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Levi Polzin's avatar

It’s becoming clearer. Just fattening it up a bit now. Thanks!