There’s different content going up on the fiction page in a couple of days, so I want to take this opportunity to pimp Derek Goodman while "The All-night, One-Stop, Apocalypse Shop" is at the top of the queue.
First of all, I want to make the claim that I discovered Derek. There, I said it. It’s now part of the permanent record.
I was going through the Space Squid slush one day, and it’s some pretty hairy slush as these things go, because on the contributor guidelines page I rather rashly told people not to send in their best work.
But that’s not the point. I read a slush story called "Power Pastry," about a convenience store clerk named Caleb who fights evil on the night shift, and it was everything that I had been looking for when I first formulated the concept of Space Squid. It leapt from the pile of vulgar alien-abduction flash fiction. It was fun and it was funny.
Now Space Squid is a pretty skeezy zine. It is exactly seven legal-sized sheets of paper, photocopied on a free-cycled copier, folded in half, and stapled on the fold. Most of what we publish is flash-fiction just because of the relatively high real-estate value of every square inch of paper. "Power Pastry" was long, longer than what we even said we would accept on the guidelines, but we went with it anyways, publishing it in Space Squid #3.
Derek Goodman went on to give us another story that we couldn’t turn down. We ran it in Space Squid #4, and he became the first author to publish in two successive issues (not counting the rantings of Mikal Trimm, Space Squid’s sworn nemesis, who will never get any official accolades from us). "Crossover Event" departs from the world of the One-Stop convenience store, taking us to a world of over-powered superheroes. For those who have been keeping track of common Derek J. Goodman motifs, there’s some familiar material. There’s genre tropes portrayed as part of a daily routine, there’s an ordinary schmo who works in the service sector, and there’s the immanent end of the world.
Some people might look at this collection of work (this brilliant collection of work that I helped usher into the brilliant limelight of the public consciousness) and see a synthesis of the aesthetics of Kevin Smith and Joss Whedon. I see a Midwestern sense of irony that echoes the blue-collar sensibilities of The Onion writing staff, a troupe of Wisconsin dishwashers and liquor-store clerks who became the greatest comedic institution of their generation.
Some other links to Derek’s work
The Voices in my Head Don’t Like You – an anthology of his work
Gods and Monsters – an anthology with one story by Derek
Time for Bedlam – another anthology with a Derek J. Goodman story
