YOU WON'T SEE ME
You Won’t See Me is a fast-paced adventure told through the lens of a New York City paparazzi photographer.
Skip Leviathan/White Whale Media. Remember the byline.
When we meet Skip, he’s on the brink of his greatest success, and is moments away from bagging a wannabe do-gooder former A-lister who has eluded him for over six years.
But then things start falling to shit faster than he can shake a follow.
Skip is no stranger to controversy. He’s been down and out before. He’s always just dusted himself off, grabbed his long glass, and gone back out on the hunt. But this time it’s different.
This is not just another assignment.
Skip is going to have to literally shoot his way out.
His trusty camera is his only escape.
Otherwise, it's curtains.
THE ILLITERATE
Just when everything is finally going right for Jones, a 30-year-old writer living in New York City, one day he mysteriously wakes up unable to read.
After discovering his illiteracy, Jones consults a number of doctors, but nobody knows what’s wrong with him. His friends don't understand either. It's like the whole entire world has conspired against him.
Jones isn't sure what to do, but after a couple of days hiding out in his apartment, he knows he can't stay there any longer, so he sets out on an adventure into the city in search of answers.
But he is quickly humbled and disappointed. For every door he figures out how to open, he stumbles on another half-a-dozen nailed shut. Some are even guarded by other “illiterates” with similar afflictions.
Even as Jones gains small glimpses of clarity, it's uncertain if he will ever find a way back to himself and his previous life.
Back in the glorious days before the absurd comedy that defines the world of The Illiterate consumed him.
Back in the simple days when he could read.
Excerpts from The Illiterate have appeared in the literary journals Monkeybicycle in 2012 and SPACEY in 2013.
THE UNFULFILLED
It's the spring of 2003 in New York City and artists have started getting arrested.
The first is Silva, a poet who kills his girlfriend and uses her blood to write verse on the walls of his apartment. The second is Smeed, an installation artist who is suspected of trying to procure blood for an upcoming gallery show.
No one in the artistic community of the city can stop talking about these arrests, but our narrator Eleanor, a young visual artist, thinks these occurrences are a sign of bad tidings to come.
This is right around the time when Bishop, a determined young writer with a murky past, appears on the scene. Eleanor meets him one night, and feels compelled to take him under her wing, but before long he becomes the unlikely star of this strange new art movement until he suddenly disappears.
More arrests follow, and Elenor, disturbed by the dark direction of things to come, sets out to create an homage to her friend that forms the narrative, just a series of short sketches of this strange new world, in an effort to understand the ghosts that haunt her.
There is nothing Elenor wants more than to find a way out of the world that used to be her world, the strange scene that had become overrun by people like good old Bishop, overrun by The Unfulfilled.
An excerpt from The Unfulfilled appeared in H.O.W. Journal in 2014.