Downloads/Reads

• Creativity Meets Bureaucracy: A Letter from the Empire (JPG, 58K)
  
  Hyperbole is the order of the day in this less-than-friendly letter from the Community Relations Manager of a Barnes & Noble store. Clearly, she is not amused by the lengths to which writers will go to find readers. She writes that her store is "quite generous" to new writers, but when Kurt and David called her store three times in an effort to promote What the Shadow Told Me, how many of their calls did she return? The answer, of course, is zero.
  
  
• Essay: "Tales from the Dumpster" (PDF, 56k)
  
  In this memoir, Kurt and David tell of their participation in the first Project Greenlight screenwriting competition. The experience did not make them feel bitter. It made them feel unclean. Even if they sound BITTER, what you're really hearing is UNCLEAN. They swear! Written in 2001.
  
  
• Insanity: "A Movie Producer Who Never Produced a Movie Freaks Out at Kurt and David" (PDF, 51K)

  The title says it all.
  

• Opening Lines: The Sentences (PDF, 192K)
  
  Kurt and David are not entirely sure why they took the time to write these 1,001 opening lines for short stories (or novels). In part, they were generating ideas for future projects. Thus far, however, they have used only one. (Kurt and David wrote a short-short beginning with sentence #11.) As well, they use the sentences in their fiction-writing classes as a bank of ideas for their students to draw on. While they retain the rights to these sentences as a whole, anyone who sees an idea that they like is welcome to use it!
  

• Radio interview: Kurt and David on "With Good Reason" (M4A, 9.76 MB)

  From WMRA-FM, the NPR station for Harrisonburg, Virginia. This interview first aired on December 6, 2004.
  

• Review: Biminim Strimpoonanamam reviews What the Shadow Told Me (JPG, 448K)
  
  Biminim is perhaps Kurt and David's most objective critic given that (a) he is their friend and (b) they made him a character in their book! Nevertheless, his review is well worth reading. It originally appeared in The Cadet, the VMI student newspaper, on October 7, 2005.
  

• Short story (incomplete first draft): "I'm Not Sniffing Your Children" (PDF, 30K)
  
  The failure that started it all, this was Kurt and David's first attempt to write a story together. They imagined a narrator who tries to recapture his lost childhood by smelling the toys of his youth. This habit, however, would get him into trouble, as the story's title implies. 860 words into a first draft, Kurt and David abandoned the project. Written in September 1998.
  

• What the Shadow Told Me: Chapter 1 (PDF, 2.35 MB)

  The literary equivalent of crack! The first hit is free, but you have to pay for the rest—and you'll do whatever it takes to get the money!
  

• What the Shadow Told Me: The Complete Epigraphs (PDF, 91k)
  
  When Kurt and David were nearly finished with What the Shadow Told Me, they decided to put an epigraph at the beginning of each chapter taken from Biminim Strimpoonanamam's Who See Blackie?, a brilliant untranslation of Rufus Walter Eddison's masterpiece Darkness Visible. Kurt and David had just become friends with Biminim, and the Thai untranslator thought that this was a wonderful idea. His publisher, however, balked at the passages that Kurt and David had chosen. Spine Monkey Press felt that the selections, taken as a whole, were too long. They were worried that the collective length of these epigraphs might cut into the sales of an untranslation published in Rangoon, Myanmar! So Kurt and David dutifully trimmed down the epigraphs. Strange as it may seem, however, the Spine Monkey brain trust has now decided to allow the shortened epigraphs to appear on the Internet in their full glory.
  
  
• What the Shadow Told Me: Discussion Questions (PDF, 100K)

  Even if you haven't read the book—what, you're immune to crack?—you'll want to read this! This stuff is almost as funny as the book, and it's 300 pages shorter!