5″W x 5″H | 28 PAGES | SAMPLE

In 2004 I did an experiment where I took a bunch of story ideas I had and wrote them out so each would fill up a single page for a zine. I have a hard time writing long form, so I thought a group of short stories would be easier… but this proved to actually be quite hard. All these stories ended up being several pages long, I didn’t want to cut scenes from the stories, so I had to keep fine tuning the language, making it more and more concise to get the story to be that short. It was a ton of fun and on a whim I submitted them to McSweeneys… and then never heard back from them…

So I self-published them myself, in The Carbon Based Mistake Issue 10: The Noise Between Stations. Issue 10 is now out of print, but it ended up winning an award from Print Magazine’ Regional Design Annual, so the sting from McSweeneys rejection was soothed.

I still enjoy these stories so I decided to re-print them as a single issue, which I present here.