Some "Behind the Scenes" w/ John Leary

+ a few other Short Story, Long announcements!

A couple real quick notes, before we get to the real stuff:.

• I’m almost caught up reading submissions from December, and planning to open submissions again for the month of May!
  

• That said… I’m going to take the next few weeks, maybe through all of May, off from publishing new stories. Going to be extra busy here for a minute as my semester ends, and then I’ll be traveling, and trying to get back into a couple of my own projects, etc. etc. I might drop with a few updates here and there, and am hoping to come back with some real bangers and surprises.
  

• Reminder that stories are always free; interviews with authors are an added bonus for paid subscribers. Paid subscriptions help me pay writers and artists!

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Aaron Burch: I’m kinda always curious where stories came from and what the seeds of idea were. Can you tell me a little about the genesis for this story?

John Leary: For 10 years or so I wrote stories about a company called ProTechTec. Bill is the main character in a few of those stories. I spent a lot of time trying to shape those stories into a novel; it was sort of like a crappy version of The Corrections where the dad works at the municipal aquarium and 2 of the 3 kids work for ProTechTec. (I’ve written a couple of novels. At least, I think I have. I mean, it could just be like something where you have an asthmatic cat but tell people you’re in the exotic animal trade… until your cat starts coughing in all of your Zoom calls.)

And then the pandemic happened, and I was reading a lot of Lucia Berlin. And I wanted to write a story that wandered. And this story is the result.

When I mentioned the idea “bonus material,” instead of or in addition to a short interview, a couple ideas arose: some kind of “list” of inspirations for the story, and also maybe just some chatting and reminiscing of the “old days” of online lit journals. Let’s do both!

Yes! Here’s a list of places where the story came from:

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