“The Art Disease” to appear in Electric Velocipede

Electric Velocipede is one of the cooler publications around, and I just got the good news that one of my stories, “The Art Disease,” will appear sometime in the coming year.  2010 is proving to be a good year, and it’s not even here yet.

Till then, here’s the opening—

Derek and Emily had the art disease, the both of them.  Everyone they knew had it too.  That’s one of the symptoms:  Colonies, clusters, movements, splinter groups, manifestos.  Clumping, the experts call it.  She had a master’s in design and decorated cakes at Food One, not the one on 17th but the one near the park, open till midnight.  He refused to sell out.  He was determined to support himself with his art.

Selling poems in the park didn’t work out.  He didn’t get that many buyers, and when he did, he spent way too much time discussing the poems with them—arguing actually—instead of writing new ones, but it bothered him when he was misunderstood, and it seemed he was doomed to be misunderstood—another symptom of the disease.  He tried prose—carefully observed reflections on the vicissitudes of life—after taking a weekend workshop called Driveway Moments:  The Eternity of Now.  No demand.  Light travel pieces with a profound undercurrent proved no better, partly because he hadn’t done much traveling and couldn’t afford to do more.  He had plenty of profound undercurrent, just nowhere to put it.

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