by Stephen L. Burns
Ever wonder where inspiration comes from?
Dear Span,
It’s said that confession is good for the soul. I suppose it can be if it buys a loosening of the thumbscrews, and besides, the Winfrey Commission is circling my carcass like a shark scoping out a hapless swimmer and trying to decide whether it’s in the mood for white meat or dark. So I figured I should write my favorite magazine editor and give him a heads-up before mine gets taken off.
Mention of Oprah’s Inquisitors and my use of the word confession are, I’m sure, sufficient clues to give you dire warning as to what’s coming next. My advice: reach for those Rolaids. Or that bottom draw where you keep a flagon of Old Blue Pencil whiskey.
Yes, it’s true. I admit that for the past several years I’ve been on the juice, taking Macrologic Storieoids. Prolixitum has been my dope of choice. With occasional experimentation with Multiloquentia and Pleonastical.
Hell, I haven’t been just taking them, I’ve been abusing them with all the cautious self-control of a frat boy with his lips wrapped around a beer tap. I have been drunk with them, blasted on them, my nervous system lit up like a magnesium tinsel Christmas tree struck by lightning.
Calling them “performance-enhancing” drugs is to damn them with pallid praise and downplay their tremendous effect. Thanks to ‘roids my head is so full of story ideas that my nose hair now comes out as plot twists, and my ear wax has sequels. Fully juiced, I can type at five hundred words per minute, and I burn out one of those old-style industrial-duty mechanical keyswitch keyboards per month. The letters on the keys are hammered off in less than a week. Once, after a mismeasured dosage, I got typing so fast I literally melted the keycaps. My fingers might have gotten stuck in this smoking goo if it weren’t for the fact that I wore my fingerprints off in my first six months as a hype hack. Plus stepping back from the keyboard is easier since I have to type standing up; there are so many needle punctures in my backside that years ago I had to give up regular underwear on favor of Depends liberally greased with Neosporin.
Yes, I admit there have been a few minor slightly negative physical costs associated with keypounder’s crack. My eyes are shot; I now have to work with a thirty-inch monitor placed less than a foot from my nose, and have to use actual Coke bottle bottoms as corrective lenses. My forearms look like Popeye’s, and my knuckles are the size of walnuts. For some reason I am unable to eat any food that starts with a vowel. My testicles—well, let’s not go there. Suffice it to say that my wife hasn’t left me—yet—probably because those rare times I emerge from my writing room I am as biddable as a lobotomized clam and inclined to agree with everything she says. My social life is in ruins, but then again it wasn’t in all that great shape before I got on “scrivener’s smack.” The difference is only in degree; perhaps the difference between post-New Year’s Times Square and present-day Baghdad.
Forgive me for digressing. Addiction does not tend to build character (though mine has made creating characters as easy and inevitable as producing dandruff) or courage. The subject I have been skirting is, of course, informing you how Winfrey Commission exposure of my sins will impact you, and Astrolab magazine.
Of the fifty-four Stalin L. Bungs stories you have purchased and run over the years, forty-nine were produced while I was spiked. Yet I believe that this in no way lessens their intrinsic merits, or the popular acclaim they have garnered in the Astrolab Reader’s Poll. The work of Romantic poets is not diminished by their taste for the poppy and Green Fairy, or the product of the Golden Agers tainted by their fondness for booze. I hope you do not feel compelled to asterisk me.
Unfortunately there are a few other stories under various bylines you have run in the last decade or so that are actually my work as well. Okay, more than a few. Rather than force your long-suffering and already overburdened staff to try to find where the bodies are buried, I herewith present you with a list of my crimes, as best I can recall them. I was the following authors, and you purchased the listed number of stories from them—from me.
Mickey Flinch: 43
Inez Rambo Struck: 7
Ragu Vanishingcream: 15
Jolly Kookaberra: 19
Flan Pan Clove: 11
Raviola Loose Wheel: 7
Shea Turtlepot: 23
Mork Reach: 4
Mackey Burtankard: 31
Rod Soyuzer: 29
Crophone Moscow: 19
Now it’s possible (actually, almost certain) that I’ve forgotten one or two noms de jus. There has been, regrettably, a certain amount of fairly serious brain damage. Which reminds me. When this goes public there are certain to be numerous ugly rumors and unfounded allegations swirling around, but I swear an oath on my tattered copy of Strunk & White that I am not now, nor have I ever been, Spud Starhake.
You may have detected a certain elegiac tone to this missive. The Winfrey Commission will come for me soon, taking down this gimpy second-string scrivener from the rear of the herd as a way of working itself up to going after some of the Big Names. But that is not the reason I am decamping into a hastily self-created writer protection program. No, there is a more ubiquitous and dangerous force out there, one worthy of beat-feet grade terror.
I am bailing out for fear of denizens of the Slush Pile. When that teeming and disgruntled demographic learns that I am not just one Old And In The Way, filling slots that should rightfully be filled with their deathless prose, but several of them, my life won’t be worth a single blow-in card. They will come for me with pitchforks and Wite-Out, and if they find me their vengeance will be lurid and extravagant.
Do not judge them too harshly. And please do not allow any of the overheated rhetoric that may ensue to incline you toward prejudice when you read those over-the-transom submissions. There is a lot of undiscovered talent and untapped potential out among those writers who have yet to build any sort of name.
Watch your slush pile closely. I am sure you will find some promising new writer able to fill the hole the bowing out of Stalin L. Bungs will leave behind.
Actually, I bet you will soon find several of them.
Best, Stalin L. Bungs