It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. November of last year, in fact. Not because I haven't been writing. I have.
Over the past few months I’ve been experimenting with writing styles to see what happens if prose is driven not by plot mechanics, but by something like musical architecture.
I’ve tried a Philip Glass approach — repetition with variation, small shifts accumulating into pressure. I’ve experimented with Beethoven-like structural escalation — themes introduced, stressed, resolved. I’ve leaned into Miles Davis minimalism — restraint, silence doing the heavy lifting. I've also tried the painter Jackson Pollock as inspiration-immersive saturation, narrative as surface, not sequence.
The most successful of these, in my view, is what I’m calling "Parker Unhinged" — a tribute to Charlie Parker.
Parker’s genius wasn’t chaos. It was disciplined volatility. Rapid phrasing. Fractured lines that recomposed mid-flight. Breath you could hear inside the instrument. Precision without politeness.
That’s the model.
Parker Unhinged on the page means rhythm over polish. Psychological immediacy over physical sequencing. Sentences that interrupt themselves. Memory colliding with present action. No tidy thematic summaries. No authorial reassurance. You stay inside the character’s nervous system.
The new story, 1:13, is the cleanest expression of that approach so far.
At 1:13 a.m., a message is sent — a confession that crosses a line long held in place. By morning, it’s been read. The story unfolds not as spectacle, but as interior detonation: two people on a borrowed couch confronting years of restraint in real time.
You’ll notice something else: it’s less explicit than some of my earlier work. That was a conscious choice. I wrote several more graphic drafts. They worked technically. They did not work rhythmically, and they broke the tone and voice of the story. In this style, explicit anatomical detail turned the story back into choreography.
So I pulled back.
The sex is there. It’s just not itemized. It lives in pressure, breath, friction, decision. In my judgment, that makes it more volatile — and more honest.
I’m continuing to experiment with this musical-structural approach to prose. I’m interested in whether the cadence carries the heat, whether the fragmentation deepens immersion, whether the restraint sharpens rather than blunts.
If you read 1:13, tell me what you think. Does Parker Unhinged work?
— Eric Ross