Chris Dodds

My first guitar was a 1930s Harmony acoustic that was mostly held together by its own memory of having been a guitar. It lasted all of six months before I convinced my parents to splurge on a $100 upgrade from the local music store. I don’t even think it had a brand name. I’m pretty sure the head was labeled “GUITAR”, in case anyone was confused about that.

I kept going for the next few decades, playing a little, occasionally upgrading, setting the guitar in the corner for a while. I never really felt compelled to get better at it. Good enough felt good enough.

About two years ago, I got the itch to get better at singing. I’m not really sure what triggered it. I think there was a vague feeling of “I need to find a way to get some of the meh out of me,” and guitar alone wasn’t really cutting it (and I hadn’t really considered ramping up writing again). So, after a couple of false starts, I found a teacher.

Progress was quick, as it often is when you start something new. My recital performances were a pretty consistent upward arc through increasingly challenging songs. I started with Elliot Smith (Waltz #2) and was doing some simpler Alter Bridge and A Perfect Circle songs with reasonable competency (if not ease) within a few months. The performances themselves left me a little cold though, and I was getting frustrated once some of the early, fast ramp started to steepen.

Doing Joni Mitchell’s “River” for a Christmas showcase made me feel hollow. I hit the notes, but I couldn’t feel the room. Right after I got off stage I watched a woman with a harp melt everyone in the audience, which kept me from wallowing, because she melted me too.

So we switched it up a bit and started to focus more on performance skills rather than pure technique. And that felt good, for a few performances. I picked simpler songs (Dave Matthews, Dylan, a very simplified Sleep Token cover) for the performances and was able to inhabit them better and feel the audience reaction. I’m not good at appreciating things for longer than a millisecond though, so right after the adrenaline of performing drained out, I was right back into “I want to do X, Y, Z that are 10x harder.”

We’re trying to balance technique and performance, with lessons split in half. I’m struggling to manage my own expectations about what should be easy (or easier) at this point and recognizing the progress I’ve made. My teacher called me out on it in our last lesson. “You’re not failing at this. You just keep picking the hardest stuff to tackle and then feel bad about it because it’s not immediately what you want it to be.” I confessed that I don’t know how to not be this way. I’ve got this asshole “be better” tiger chasing me. My taste is super specific and always outpaces my skill.

But I have progressed. I can admit that - logically speaking. It’s just hard to feel any of it. My guitar playing is better, because I’ve been playing more and adapting it to vocal accompaniment. I’m by no means competent at piano yet, but the onramp has been much smoother than it would have been two years ago. My range is much wider (and higher). Hitting something like a G5 is no longer a pipe dream. I know how to breathe now. I can absolutely crush karaoke parties. And it’s not happened a lot, but on a few occasions, I’ve been able to build the audience resonance that I’m chasing — that feeling of “I just shifted the room” — and it is intoxicating.

My current project songs are mostly female performances in their original key (Lolli Wren’s “All Mine” and Maphra’s cover of “Unethical”). Another is Periphery’s “Satellites,” which is ~10 minutes of code switching gymnastics backed by jazz-infused metal. There’s a new wrinkle in the learning arc as well, where I’ve discovered that a lot of the things that sound very emotive and cathartic to the ear, like pitched screaming, are actually pretty boring and/or technical to perform. The disconnect between sound and emotion is uncomfortable and a bit of a let down. The sound of angst feels like working a math problem.

I’m not sure how people find the joy in the process. All mine seems to come in those moments where everything locks into place and I nail whatever it is I’m after. I want to be capital-G good, but I don’t know that I could easily define what that means. Maybe it’s being able to move the room consistently. Or being able to reach for a song and the skill and intuition is there more often than it isn’t. I don’t know. I’m not good at being bad at things.

Someone is speaking at the lectern. There’s not enough room in my brain for whatever it is they are saying. An old man in front of me coughs every few minutes. Children tap their feet, whisper when will this be over, crumple paper. Parents shush. Teens in the balcony smack gum. Two ladies at the back murmur. Someone kicks a metal water bottle, picks it up, clicks the lid shut. I hear and feel my starched collar rubbing the hair on the back of my neck.

My hearing isn’t great — it’s fairly damaged, actually. The problem is that every one of these sounds arrives with the same priority as the speaker’s voice, and my brain won’t let any of them go. Each one lands like a small, sharp weight. My heart rate ticks up with every addition.

For most of my life I assumed this was just how rooms worked. That the stress was a character flaw I could train away with stoicism and “toughness.” I got good at the performance. Calm under pressure became part of my identity and people noticed. A coworker once told me, “You’re the guy everyone wants around when they crash a plane in the wilderness.” I told him we’d eat him first. I filed those compliments away and used them as fuel: if I can’t handle a situation, I’ve failed.

What nobody was measuring — including me — was the cost. The plane-crash guy isn’t serene in the wreckage; he’s running on adrenaline and habit, scanning every input, holding the whole scene in working memory so nothing gets dropped. That’s not peace. You’re just filling up a buffer until it overflows and you start dropping stuff or buckling under the weight. It’s fucking expensive.

About six months before I turned 40, recovery stopped working. Situations I’d glided through — or at least white-knuckled through — became impossible. A loud room for more than half an hour. A week of back-to-back social immersion on a work trip, ending with me curled up in a ball in my hotel room. The beach, which I’d always found busy, turned into something that felt like the whole universe landing on me at once — crash of waves, seagulls, yelling, four wheelers, the wind, the sand on my skin, umbrellas, my wet swim trunks, everyone else’s swim suits, the spray hitting my face, every piece of trash, the grass in the dunes, the salt smell, the fish smell, the suntan lotion smell, the beer smell, the clouds.

My therapist mentioned autism. I laughed. “You’re a world champion at masking, but the debt has come due.” I’d read a bit by then, and I knew the label fit in the abstract. Knowing and believing your own experience are different things though. I don’t really care about the label, but it’s hard to quiet the judgemental voice that I’ve heard most of my life. “There is no ‘specialness’ here, only flaws to fix.”

Then I started talking to people in my life about it and the response was almost universally “Yes. Correct.” It turns out, I was the last to know. My wife asked “You really thought it was normal that you could sit in a chair doing a puzzle for 10 hours at a time?”

Yes?

I keep getting slapped in the face with evidence and I’m still “Hmm, maybe I just didn’t get enough sleep last night.”

Three months on from January:

• 12 pieces: 1 novella, 3 short creative nonfiction essays, 8 short stories
• 80 total submissions
• 43 rejections
• 6 personalized rejections
• 1 short list
• 1 long list
• 1 acceptance
• 1 thing I can’t talk about yet, but is very exciting.

Has turned into:

• 14 pieces
• 119 total submissions
• 80 rejections
• 8 personalized rejections
• 2 short lists
• 1 long list
• 1 published (short CNF)
• 2 accepted, forthcoming (novella & a short story)

First publication: “The Desert” went up at Marrow Magazine on April 6th. Short CNF. Travel, grief (or lack thereof). Go read it and the rest of the issue. Lots of good stuff.

So… currently: 36 responses pending across 11 active pieces. Mostly flash / short-short fiction with a literary horror lean. Still finding the right rooms for some of it. So maaaany journals.

I keep posting about this stuff because I think the data + context is helpful. Duotrope, Chillsubs, and Submission Grinder will give you just the data, but having it humanized is important too. I see people on reddit and forums despairing over not hearing back from a journal after 2 weeks and I’m like “Oh, you sweet summer child.”

The rest of life has been busy recently so my output has slowed a bit, but I’ve got a couple of pieces in progress that will join the herd soon. Fly, my pretties, fly!

It’s one thing to write a book, another thing to get it published, and yet another thing to market it. I am very much out of my depth on the marketing side of things, but I’m trying.

I don’t have an audience anymore. The one I had before I quit tech blogging wasn’t massive, but it was something. I largely abandoned social media several years ago, so that’s dead too. I know that SEO takes a while to come to a boil and there’s a whole AI dynamic now that has changed the search landscape. Newsletters are king now along many axes, but I don’t have a list anymore. So what to do? Where to start?

1. I put up a marketing site for Necessary Cuts and cross-linked it across several of the web properties I own. It’s a new domain name so that in itself will dampen the SEO juice, but you gotta start somewhere.

2. I wired up a fragment of the book to some low-key visuals and sounds and made an interactive narrative. Check it out.

Interactive narratives have interested me for a while. I’ve seen quite a few at this point but haven’t really loved that many of them. I usually want them to be more ambiguous than they are. The potential feels like it’s there and there are a least a few successful examples. Kentucky Route Zero is a good one that comes to mind. I also like Betwixt, even though it sits a little closer to a “therapy” app.

This was an opportunity to play around with something basic and get a feel for how I might approach a larger work.

What I made

I started by pulling three of the more cinematic/vibe-y scenes from the latest manuscript draft and turning them into a basic screenplay. I knew I wanted to keep it simple, so I limited myself to visuals that were CSS-only, no image assets. Initially, I played around with generated audio, but it was too limiting for what I wanted to do, so I pulled some clips from open source audio libraries (water lapping on a shore, a car driving away on gravel, etc.) and wired those to events in the text.

From there it was just a lot of tweaking. Find the pace, fine-tune timing and transitions, smooth out rough edges. I’m pretty happy with the result and it helped solidify what a future project might look like.

The project only uses vanilla JS, CSS, and HTML. The fanciest thing in it is some Web Audio API stuff that shapes the audio experience (looping, fade-ins/outs, dynamic volume, etc.). It’s not really a game, per se; there’s no real narrative branching or similar. But it is immersive, which I think is the main goal for something like this. Drop the user in the world of the book and let them soak up the vibe of it.

What I learned

1. I actually like this type of design. The constraint of text + CSS means you have no place to hide and that’s fun. You have to dial in on the details for it to work and when it does work, it really feels like it lands.
2. Developing something with a very exact “shape” for modern mobile web suuuuuuuucks. I had the desktop experience basically done in an evening. Getting everything dialed in on Mobile Safari took a lot longer.
3. It really feels like there’s space for literary-flavored interactive narratives. I’m not sure it’s a commercially viable niche, but it should exist as art. There should be more things like this. I would play them.

Will this give me an SEO boost? Will it help me build an email list? Maybe? I like it as art either way though.

I wrote a while back about the back piece I’ve been working on. I was ready to be finished at the time, and wasn’t learning anything more from the discomfort. That held true.

It’s done now, minus the final round of healing. August 2024 to February 2026. Sixty-something hours sitting. The last eight were a slog going over scar tissue and the thin skin of my lower spine. Ladies who get mastectomy cover ups must be made of much stronger stuff than me. I earned this ink though. The little voice in my head that undercuts compliments and warns me I’m flying too close to the sun can’t win this one.

Progression, from first session to last (missing a couple of pics I can’t find at the moment):

It’ll settle down a bit once it’s healed. I have a small, silly piece scheduled next month, but nothing more on the books after that. My left arm is probably next though—thinking geometric + organic (leaves, fronds, something like that). We’ll see.