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Joseph Grammer, Author

The stories of author Joe Grammer.

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Comfort

For a moment the sun shielded Uono from the spattered limbs of his companions. His skin creaked with relief.

Gnats swarmed over the Kawago paddies, a thousand kilometers away, waiting to be snagged in broken bowls. Upon the dirt streets beyond the marsh Uono trembled before elders, chased his sons with a cattail, trained glares on the village punks. His wife murmured a haiku from their youth as they curled in bed, relishing the sweetness of rain-damp moss through the window.

The light passed. A man hobbled toward him with a gory katana. A crow shit between them into the valley where screams rolled through the fog. The two men quick-stepped, whirling, hissing through noses.

Yatsumara stabbed between the armored slats under Uono’s lung. The younger man dropped to one knee and growled at his clumsiness. The older man drove the sword in deeper.

“You are a crippled horse’s cunt.”

“And I shall personally ensure that your wife is raped by drunk macaques from Tadame. When I reach your village I will tie your children to stakes and take them apart with dull hatchets from a distance of ten meters. Then I will force your inevitably hunchbacked mother to—”

Hm. Nausea puddled in his stomach. His hand, without bothering to consult him, released its katana.

“What is this?”

Uono’s laughter uncorked the fear in Yatsumara’s heart. Pine trees and standard-bearers shook in the distance.

“Our archers are the most skilled in Edo, you monkey’s sponge. Every day they stick fat bastards like you through the center of your eye, and after nothing but plum wine and roots.”

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About Joe

Joseph Grammer - Author of novels and short stories

Joseph Grammer is a writer and editor who lives in Alexandria, VA. He currently serves as a Curriculum and Technical Report Writer for the Suicide CPR Initiative and Managing Editor for NOVADog Magazine, Northern Virginia’s main canine publication. He also works in a freelance capacity with different clients, helping them refine message strategies, edit articles, and other linguistic business like that.

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Read Interviews with Joe

On reaching the reader:

To me, directly attempting to teach the reader is heavy-handed. It’s too close to moralizing, and I think one of my criticisms about myself is that I unconsciously do this from time to time. At best, I hope to show readers a glimmer of what is possible through the lens of another person—often someone who appears different from them.
→ Read the rest on Strand’s Simply Tips

On forming characters:

I tried to take characters who were similar to me and characters who were very different from me and force them to interact. My opinion is that diversity breeds peace and love, but there is almost always an initial friction or awkwardness when individuals of different mindsets, worldviews, or backgrounds come into contact with one another.
→ Read the rest on Missy Writes


Why I Write

I write to push myself to connect. It’s not an easy business for me—not in a whining, self-pity way, but realistically. My hardware has issues with it. I also write to give others a worthy sense of participation with something that breathes and moves in their head. It’s fun to imagine and follow a plot, and my goal is to give you that experience.

The stories I make can seem weird, or disturbing. I’d like to qualify those perceptions by saying I strive for satisfaction and inner peace on a daily basis. I cook food with real nutrients, talk to random people on the subway, identify what I’m feeling and why. When my brain says, “Do this, it’ll make you happy,” I ask it questions.

My basic purpose in breathing and moving is to forge healthy relationships, and to help others do so, too. That said, some of the things I write deal with unhealthy aspects of connecting and being alive. I dislike bland optimism, and I enjoy a full portrait of the human crapshoot.

Is this a lame way of justifying why I might offend someone? Hopefully not. But to write is to divide, in many ways, and it can only be helped to some extent. I ask you to remember that, at heart, I’m coming from a goal of peace and other passé notions from Earth’s major religions.

Love,
Joe

Acknowledgements

The author is indebted to Anna Tulchinskaya, for her artistic skills, devotion, and patient mind; his family, for their unconditional support; and to his friends, who accept his odd ways and only occasionally heckle him.

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