I thought about moving every comma from the body of this post into the footnote but figured that would stretch the bounds of good taste

Part of the reasoning behind my decision to attempt a story a month for the duration of this year is that it should, in theory, force me to try to differ the style of the text in drastic ways, when possible, within certain limits. One limit being, for example, that these stories have all, so far, been first-person narratives. That might not be so much a limit as an impetus to shift styles from story to story. If these are all, indeed, supposed to be different narrators, they should all have unique, differentiable voices, voices that do not sound quite like my own. I'm not sure how successful this has been or will be as the year progresses, or how enjoyable it would be to read were these stories to be grouped into the strictly-hypothetical collection I envision them being shuffled into at the end, after the New Yorker kindly tells all other authors to go to hell for a while and publishes each of my stories one by one by one.

I suppose to some degree the stylistic shifts have been quietly straight-forward. I tried to give each narrator a few odd words they'd sprinkle throughout their stories that none of the other narrators would use. The one word that comes to mind right now is "upchuck," which I suspect was so blatantly inappropriate for the narrator who used it, that I was forced to make him use it, and I still find myself perversely and self-satisfyingly thrilled with having done so. As I've falteringly progressed through this project I've realized that's kind of what I'm trying to force myself to reach for: the things that I wouldn't normally do, that normally wouldn't sound quite right, the odd off-beats in the dance-punk disco tracks. It probably borders on gimmickry, and I'm really trying to avoid gimmickry, but I'm starting to suspect all writing is about gimmickry at some level, and that the trick is to make your tricks feel as little like Shyamalanesque hammer-clunkers as possible. (1)

The March story, it got away from me, and it became long, and it took a lot of effort to get it to be less than obscenely long. My natural tendency is probably towards wordiness. Or, long sentences. Or, complex, rhythmic language. Something like that. Why use two sentences, I find myself typically asking myself, when I can join them together with commas and conjunctions? That really wasn't the main problem with the March story, the main problem was probably that I couldn't stop thinking of new things to put into the story and that I had a lot of trouble finding things I liked less than I did other things, but I'm sure it was a contributing factor. The April story is a sort of direct retaliation against the March story, both in that it shoots for a dedicatedly-focused plot-line with little room for additional material or asides or expansions of detail, and in that I'm trying to pare back the language as much as possible. I don't naturally subscribe to the Hemingwayish school of thought, as any reader of any online-writing of mine could probably attest, and neither am I sure this story is my attempt to try out that mode, but that's probably as close as I can come to describing what it is I'm trying to do, stylistically. Keep the sentences short. Declare things. Let the little sparks of comma-joined thoughts shine as appropriately and as vibrantly as possible. Use no unnecessary words. Not that my usual fiction writing makes use of unnecessary words, mind you. I mean, if you're going to write a 3,000 or a 5,000 or an 8,000 or a 120,000 word story, those are going to be the only words you'll get to tell your story worth, so they should all count towards the ultimate goal of telling a really good story. It's just that I typically use more necessary-words, and now, this time through, I'm trying to fewer such words. If that makes sense. All things said, it's interesting, on my end, at least.

All of which, by the way, means: hence, advanced footnote technology enabled footnote number one, above. I've got extra words in my daily allotment. Use 'em or lose 'em.