Nicholas Tyler Bibliography I

Seven Time
"So there I was, sitting on the trunk of my car with two stolen pizzas, waiting for The Man to come."

I wrote this novel sporadically over two years. I recycled the first sentence from a letter I sent to a friend (it began a jokey description of an actual event) and let it lead me through the first thirty pages. Later, I retrieved the thirty pages and took them with me to Chattanooga for a writer's conference. Bret Lott sat with me and talked me through a plan for the rest of the novel, mostly by saying "This is going somewhere, right? It's fun to read but you can't sustain a narrative with two stoned kids just wandering."

Seven Time was written in spiral notebooks, on various computers, and on a Royal manual typewriter.

6:41 (Six Forty One)
"He thinks of photographs as he falls asleep."

This electronic novel was composed and constructed in ten months. The idea had floated around in my head for several years, and became insistent in the fall of '99 when I had a chance encounter with an editor in which she told me "That's a great idea. That's exactly the kind of thing we are looking for."

6:41 was written on an IBM Selectric, a Smith-Corona Electra II, and by hand in a Boston coffee shop. It contains 35mm photos manipulated in Photoshop 5.5, and was constructed in Storyspace. I could not have finished it without the use of paper cement and a sturdy pair of scissors.

Yes
"Easter weekend, I'm back in Virginia."

This short story is a direct result of a wedding that my brother and I attended in early '99. Two-and-a-half years later, I wrote the story in three weeks, in Malden, Massachusetts.

Yes was composed entirely on the previously mentioned Smith-Corona typewriter.

The Goat
"Friday morning, at the end of a bad week, at the end of a bad month, we are all listening to Rick read his short story, THE GOAT."

What happened with this is Spoon told me a story, so I told her another story, and she said "Write the shit, will you?" so I did. Get a bunch of drunken writers together and somebody's going to embarrass himself.

The Crab
"When I checked into this motel yesterday, I asked the clerk if he thought the sound of my typewriter would make it through the walls and disturb the other guests."

My father, a horseshoe crab, and mortality--not an exgirlfriend in sight.

Like Swimming
"I want to tell you about Bradley Underhill and what happened to him on his twenty-fifth birthday."

This one took me almost a year to write, which is quick for a novel but fucking slow for a short story. However, it appears to have been worth it. Dave said "No one ever writes about the relapse. Good job."