“Nowhere” is a longish, meandering story that's sort of about one thing and sort of about another. There are some ideas that work well, like the juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane, some musings on music and artists, etc.
The basic story is that a man's mother invites him to go to Midnight Mass with her on Christmas. He accepts, and while he's there he recognizes a woman he'd had a one night stand with back in the fall. The story of this one night stand is interspersed with the priest's sermon at mass, and the story ends on an ambiguous note.
The main concern I had in the story was to contrast the contemporary dating world with the Catholic Church’s teachings on life, and the command to be fruitful and multiply. I am not personally religious, but there's a certain nihilism in modern dating that I wanted to dig into, and there's a certain sanity in Catholicism that I also wanted to depict.
There's absolutely a chance that a story involving a priest’s homily might come across as a little “preachy.” But since the priest's viewpoint is not my own and the narrator's viewpoint is also not my own, I consider it artistically legitimate. The reader isn't being told what to think, simply being shown a set of potential points of view.
To that end, the priest spends a fair amount of time talking about how Mary, the mother of God, willingly agreed to bring Christ into the world. The ambiguous modern parallel with this is Maria, the woman our narrator knew a few months ago. The names drive home the parallel and reinforce some of the ambiguity at the end.
Are there things I would change about this story if I had it to do over? Probably. There's a random aside where the narrator and a couple of other drunks are yelling at each other about Morrowind. Which may be my favorite part of the story, but it should probably come out. As so often with editing, priority number one is to cut out everything you particularly enjoy or have a sentimental attachment to. I may not like the aesthetic standard that instructs writers to cut out everything that doesn't directly serve the plot, but it is in my mind.
I might also focus a little more on the transient tenderness that develops between Maria and the narrator. The narrator himself mentions that that tenderness was not nothing, and it would have been good to explore that a little more thoroughly in the story itself.
As it stands, “Nowhere” is a flawed story that tries to do some moderately interesting things, and doesn't do any of them particularly well.
Good God, I need to get somebody else to market my books for me. I can't bring myself to say anything nice about my own writing. With that in mind, just remember that anything I write is probably a good deal better than I say it is. If we were ever satisfied with our work we'd stop writing, now wouldn't we?
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The Invisible Woman and Other Stories is available on Amazon.
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