By Macon Holt.

Walter looked up from his keyboard with extraordinary frustration. He looked incredulously at the document open in front of him. 70,000 words and he had not noticed. He had given the twenty-something protagonist of his newest work of contemporary prose his own name. This of course he had noticed immediately; in fact looking back it had been intentional. “Let the mainstream press pour over this, to try and find the truth of my salad days and let the intellectuals hunt in the gray space between fiction and the world outside”, he had thought. Walter hated the word “fact”, even in his private thoughts, in his work it was a word often used ad-nauseum by antagonists and the absurdly caricatured victims of his memory turned text. A scholarly collection was soon to be released entitled Walter D—— and Facts: Politics, Prose and Truth Content. Walter had been sent copy and replied with his blessings though the volume remained wrapped in publishing house cellophane. This name sharing was not a problem after all, authors using their own names for characters in their work is a well established trope of literary fiction. Indeed in this case Walter had even included the first letter of his last name, though replaced it with and elongated hyphen to add distance and ambiguity. Continue reading →