In the end, it wasn’t being mistaken for a Sasquatch that got me to quit drinking. Most people get that part wrong. Admittedly, if I’d known everything would go to shit that soon afterwards, I never would have taken off my shirt. But moshing on the rooftop had seemed like a genius idea, and it was a July in New York; I’m not particularly small, and anything I can do to minimize my own sweat is the best possible idea at that moment. And so I took off, a one-man circle pit, tracing my own circumference and never fearing dizziness or a stumble that might drop me to the sidewalk five stories below.

That’s from a new story of mine, titled “New Evidence of the Kings County Sasquatch,” that the fine people at The Fanzine have just published. I originally read it at at Storychord event at Housing Works. I’m hoping to do a bit more with this narrator — I have a couple of other stories in mind that will involve him.

I also like the idea of writing a character who, from this point on, won’t be drinking — an editor who turned an earlier story of mine down commented that my characters spent a lot of time in bars. I took that as a challenge, in the best way possible — or maybe not a challenge as much as someone pointing out a device I was using a little too frequently. We’ll see where this ends up, but if you notice future stories featuring an unnamed narrator with an aversion to booze and references to cryptids…

(This post’s title, for what it’s worth, is borrowed from Malcolm Ingram’s Drawing Flies, a film in which Jason Lee leads a group of unemployed Vancouver residents into the woods in search of Bigfoot.)