I started writing over two years ago after graduating with a degree in applied mathematics. The fear of losing myself to the world of actuaries gave me the courage to pave a different path in my life. I wrote poetry exclusively at first. It’s the best medium for my raw emotion and fine tuned the effectiveness of my words. I used meters and rhyme schemes to force myself to have a succint voice, which became useful when I wanted to write my first short story.
Prose was a challenge before writing poetry, and after a year and a half I eked out a short story. I became drunk on the possibilities prose offered, but I never had a focus until now.
Tinder Diaries and Other Collected Stories is a short-story collection that intends on giving a straight-forward account of the modern hook-up culture. The stories are told by a single, third-person narrator, "Zed." These are records of people’s experiences; some are made up, but most are true stories touched up to protect the persons. Not all of the subjects are related to the smartphone app, Tinder, but they all include subjects that are young and in love. The book’s namesake came from starting my research after downloading the app. I soon realized how vast the app’s demographic is and how it is a microcosm of the young American dating pool. The point is to reveal the truth behind a young society that admires both promiscuity and fidelity, in hopes of discovering a connection or root cause. This birthed my novella’s introduction:
The name’s Zed, Zachary Clermont for long. I usually don’t award that liberty to many people, but seeing as how I won’t meet most, or any, of you, I don’t really care if you know my full name. Sucks, doesn’t it? I ultimately digress—I’m here to present to the general public a series of stories, some of which happened to me and the others to people around me—you’ll never know exactly whose narrative you’ll be reading. Each of these short stories [sic] will be presented in the third person, and I, your grossly inadequate narrator will be the stand-in for every male protagonist or antagonist; whichever side you choose (some choices are easier than others). The theme? Who knows—it’s somewhere treading the line between the foggy, opaque, never-clear “love” and decidedly certain, destined, unfailing (think about it) “lust.” Again, feel free to form your own opinions, hence the third person—let’s just be on the same page from the beginning.
This isn’t about love; this isn’t about lust; it’s about the inquisitively daft relationship they form because like Harry Potter and Voldemort, “one cannot live while the other survives,” or something to that effect…People ignore this truth and it is why so many relationships fail today. Whether it’s starting a relationship or protecting an almost wickless candle in the wind. That sounds worse than it is—I’m not a pessimist about love, I’m just a very stern critic of today’s forms of love (or lack thereof). Many relationships have survived the winds of time and it’s because they either knowingly or unknowingly recognized the same thing. Lust isn’t a sin when coupled with pure love, and likewise, love loses is meaningless when emaciated of lust. I’ll let it be for now, I’d hate for you to think I’m biased—I certainly tried my hardest to keep my opinions and philosophies well away from here. I pray you trust me on this, given that I told you my name and all. Thus, a mutual trust binds us; you must keep these stolen memoirs to yourselves.
I think of this collection of stories as a deviant "Chicken Noodle Soup"— it collects the thoughts of a finite number of people in order to spread a message to all. However, the prose allows the reader to derive their own meaning because we each interpret the human experience differently. I hope to evoke a sense of realism likened to Twain or Crane because life’s message echoes best through simple characters. The biggest inspiration for a collection of stories comes from the masterfully written "Haunted" by Chuck Palahniuk, but Tinder Diaries will focus around a theme instead of a narrative.
With the funds raised, I hope to fully fund my book’s publishing costs and with any left over funds I hope to afford a train ticket to travel home to Boston while siphoning stories from strangers to gain a grander perspective.