August 25th, 2025 - Something Has Come to Light

Dear TNY,

Like a half-tamed farm dog, you have arrived on my porch this afternoon with “Something Has Come to Light” and what a fetid carcass it is.

I know I have said this a lot over the years, but it is astonishing that of all the stories you could publish, week after week you consistently pick absolute trash.  My favorite plot hole in this story is that somehow the grandma was able to fill the hole back in to such a degree that no one could find it in the yard.  That she somehow tamped the earth as if it had never been disturbed and returned the vegetation exactly as it had grown before she peeled it off.  That this team of people meandering about the yard, digging random holes, would somehow not notice a freshly dug hole that had been filled in, missing the inevitable mound of unpacked dirt as well as the fucked greenery.  This whole story pivots on the single event that the grandma wished she had said yes, but because she didn’t she had to go grave robbing, and the mechanics of that are so fucking implausible that even a dunce like me saw through it.

Yet, here you are TNY.  So far removed from real fucking life that you don’t understand how to dig a hole or what happens when you fill one back in.  The author?  Also a soft-handed loser judging by the lack of manual labor knowledge.  Also, your entire editing staff.  The fiction editor.  Hell, Remnick himself.  This shit went completely unnoticed.  Coolcoolcool. 

The only thing good in the story is the description of Roland playing the piano.  Oh, and the story was a short one for a change. 

But that’s it.  It was a pointless story that went nowhere. 

I was thinking about writers the other day.  And writing.  There are so many factors that go into a good story.  Not just technical proficiency.  Craft.  Vocabulary.  Freshness.  Pace.  Timing.  All of these things have to go correctly.  But first and foremost, you have to be fucking interesting.  And the vast majority of your stories are not interesting.  And I think it’s because most of the authors you publish aren’t interesting.  It’s just a bunch of droll, self-important losers.

I drove to the Home Depot today as I am working on a small remodel project (specifically, today, cutting a large doorway through a wall) and marveled at the absolute insanity that is driving through Seattle.  The dumbest people must live here now.  10mph under the speed limit.  Stopping at yellow lights.  Not going when the light turns green.  Not understanding construction sites and just stopping while being honked at.  No one can parallel park.  And then I got to the store.  People on their phone in the middle of the aisle, not making space for people to get around.  People standing in the way, no self-awareness.  People walking at a fucking snail’s pace, three wide, blocking whole aisles.  People not recognizing a line and then getting miffed when asked to go to the back of it.  Then back to the parking lot where no one understands anything.  How to move around.  How to fucking be.

I’m surrounded by ineptitude.  And you, you are these people.  Your authors are these people. 

I got a long text the other day about self-improvement.  What that looks like.  It was wildly inaccurate.  But lucky you, you have me to tell you what it shouldn’t look like.  It shouldn’t look like growing up the way I did, understanding that the more you know how to do the more valuable you are.  Or understanding the flow of time/space, fluid mechanics, and the motion of bodies.  Or having insight and work ethic and a high degree of pain tolerance.  It shouldn’t look like anything I’ve done.  Because the more you do those things, the more you see that almost everyone is a pile of garbage.  The more you actually do to become a valuable human, the more you see that everyone around you is a wet bag of meat breathing otherwise perfectly good air and shitting up our waterways. 

This story doesn’t matter.

TNY fiction doesn’t matter.

And almost every single person I encountered today does not matter.

Be fucking interesting.  Do something meaningful.  Have fucking value.  Don’t just assume that because you exist, you are special.  Because you aren’t.  No one is.  Until they prove it.  And this story doesn’t prove it.  For the author or your shitty little rag.

Well, hi Dad.  I see the asshole lives on in me.  But he also was a big fucking softie and was one of the best welders on the planet.  Value.

Find some, fuckers.

Nick