{"id":6837,"date":"2013-06-05T10:27:12","date_gmt":"2013-06-05T14:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bullmensfiction.com\/?p=6837"},"modified":"2022-08-03T13:16:17","modified_gmt":"2022-08-03T17:16:17","slug":"bullshot-armantin-varona","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/fiction\/bullshot-armantin-varona\/","title":{"rendered":"BULLshot: Armantin Varona"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>PW<\/strong>: <span>A modern dating story told in an olden language and voice reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe. Will you tell us about the creative process for choosing this voice?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>AV<\/strong>: A close friend of mine once told me about some guy or another who<br \/>\nwrote her sugary notes. Except for a few oddly specific requests, the<br \/>\nmessages were innocent enough. Standard stuff, really\u2014forever not<br \/>\nbeing long enough, something about every passing breath, planets and<br \/>\ntheir supposed music. Well, he did write excessively. But not even his<br \/>\nprodigious output bothered her as much as this other thing. See, the<br \/>\nreal problem was, above all, his style. How she described it, \u201cthee\u201d<br \/>\nand \u201cthou\u201d were the most frequent words used.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, I wondered, \u201cWhat if it worked?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A question, though, is hardly a story. I had to come up with a<br \/>\ncharacter. One with enough charm to accomplish his goals. Not knowing<br \/>\nthe actual boy of HER story, my imagination was free to create<br \/>\nwhatever felt right. In this case, what came out was an insufferable<br \/>\nsnob. Eager to condescend, but also yearning acceptance, I found that<br \/>\nhis contradictory voice came easy. He thinks of himself as being<br \/>\nsupremely cultured, yet surrounds himself with what he considers \u201cthe<br \/>\nvery basest of the base.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Great. The voice and the beliefs were there. But the initial<br \/>\nquestion&#8230;wasn&#8217;t quite doing it. The more I became attached to this<br \/>\ndandy, the more I found his relationship&#8217;s destruction to be the more<br \/>\nscientific pursuit.<\/p>\n<p>So the question became, \u201cHow would somebody like this screw it all<br \/>\nup?\u201d It was obvious: he would bring about his own demise\u2014kind of like<br \/>\nthe narrator of \u201cThe Tell-Tale Heart.\u201d That character, though, doesn&#8217;t<br \/>\nseem to learn anything. Would mine? Would he dare become modern? Those<br \/>\nanswers were obvious as well: no; he would turn it all into a<br \/>\nself-affirming philosophy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The author of this week&#8217;s &#8220;The Champion and the Louse&#8221; on the inspiration behind the voice and language of his story<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[272,280,214,364],"class_list":["post-6837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-anxieties","tag-edgar-allan-poe","tag-self-image","tag-the-tell-tale-heart","writer-pete-witte"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6837"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17575,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6837\/revisions\/17575"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}