This week’s newsletter - featuring with the first of my monthly FICTIONS releases – is in the send queue and I'm back to the work on the second Fic. Thought it might be fun to revisit a story I had abandoned but it ended up resurfacing the reasons I stopped it, so I've put the onus on myself to relentlessly push forward. No going back, not anymore.

BALLERINA (Lee Chung-hyun, 2023)

(****+ / *****): Few phrases inspire an automatic watch like "Korean revenge film" and BALLERINA is one of my recent tops: tight, taut, crowd-pleasing revenge story with great performances across the board – especially lead Jeon Jong-seo as Ok-ju (in a rather Michael-Caine-in-GET-CARTER-infused turn) – and narrative twists (one in particular being a fantastic subversion of the "hunt from the bottom up" fare) that jolt what can be – in less imaginative hands – a fairly rote genre with pathos and unpredictability.

Reading Rushdie’s KNIFE (it’s brilliant), and, as with every time I read Rushdie – quality of the work being immaterial – I’m overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy and jealousy, not just as a writer but as a person. No other writer does that or even comes close: intriguing yet nettlesome.

Monthly-release approach to writing fiction has given me what I needed (a defined timetable and a desire to find out what happens) to bring the once-MainFictionThing I threw out to make way for the monthly Fictions back from the bin (at least in this early stage) as the second and third of the Fictions. The first release is still rolling out in Sunday morning's edition of MacroParentheticals, with the former MainFictionThing being released in two parts in June and July. Think this might become the default approach: a two-parter followed a single, unrelated fiction before the next. Feels right.