Good day friend,

We here at Sentenced are HARD AT WORK!

This is SENTENCED’s sixith weekly newsletter. Thank you for signing up! You will not be disappointed.

It is TUESDAY!

Yes! We have returned once again on a beautiful Tuesday to bring you all the goings-on of Sentenced Literature. We’ve had a great week of relaxation. One of our editors is on a sojourn to a tropical island, one stays the course, and two are trapped in their apartments under feet of snow. Even considering all of these conditions, we’re HARD AT WORK.

It’s Tuesday, February 24th!

Just Kidding.

The newsletter is one day late for a reason. We did this on purpose.

You’ll see later, but it was essential that we delay the newsletter just one day so our Private Eye Fluke Dimsworth could get his report in for the week. This was not a rush job.

We thank you for your understanding.

New PIECE: The Red Internets

We are so happy to have our first piece of non-fiction on the site, The Red Internets by Jocelyn Boulding.

An excerpt:

There is a story that used to be told. The story is about The Internet. The story goes like this: hackers are cowboys and the Web is a John Ford movie, anarchic and empty of peoples and history. It flatters the Americans, who had developed TCP/IP, ARPANET, and who consider themselves pretty good at blogging and Marxist literature collectives and stuff. But they weren’t first, just longest-lived.

You can read the rest here!

​https://sentencedlit.org/the-red-internets/​

Fluke’s Update

Fluke is back with another update, and it seems that things got really dark this week. Content warning for all kinds of awful violence.

I had Crazy Jake tied up in my basement for ten days by the time he was willing to talk; Tuesday, February 24th. Hadn’t so much as laid a finger on the guy, even though I wanted to. I hadn’t laid a finger on a perp since I got kicked off the force all those years back, in a different city with a different name. Some people will tell you a cop can’t change, that we’re all bastards. Well, I’ll tell you the truth: cops are like beautiful butterflies, waiting to show their wings.

No, in the end, Jake broke just because I didn’t feed him or give him water for ten days. So much for that omerta he kept preaching. Swore up and down he knew nothing about the business affairs of one Mx. Period, didn’t know shit about Sentenced, yet he spilled it all for a graham cracker and an Electrolit.

When he finally broke, he was sobbing, and after, he was lapping up that coconut flavored sports drink like he’d spent forty days in the desert. “Ramadan mubarak,” I said.

As for the information he gave, it wasn’t much. Mx. Period was a cokehead, evidently, but no one knew. Ze was just too round for anyone to tell. “No one knew what was up with hir,” he said. “Ze would come around and ask for coke, and when we didn’t give it oh so readily, ze would lash out. Once, ze took a tire iron and smashed our glass coffee table into little pieces, splayed out on the carpet.”

“You didn’t defend your property, then?”

“No,” Jake said. He shook his head in disgust, then spat blood onto the ground. Who knew where it came from. “Ze was always strapped. And ze caught us at a time when we were… indisposed.”

“Drug use,” I said. Jake nodded. “This all comes as a surprise to me.”

“You didn’t know your friend as well as you’d thought.”

“I guess so.” I sparked up a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. A little positive reinforcement. “The gun, where’d it come from?”

“Gun store on Division Street called Wallace Liberty. They front as legitimate, but in the back…”

I put down a plate of rice and beans, takeout from a Mexican joint down the road. He wasn’t getting out of the basement, not yet. You never let a hostage out the second you get your first ROI. You always want to keep them there for a rainy day, when your back’s against the wall.

After all that, I was coming up against the deadline for my report. Sentenced called, mad, and I asked for an extension. The editor, a dumbass, voice as shrill as lemmings falling off the cliff of literary obscurity, a whole throng of bright-eyed rodents following the leader… Only, I remember that’s a misconception. Lemmings aren’t really so dumb, just prone to a scare.

“We can’t delay the newsletter,” she said. Sounded like a whiner if I’d ever heard one, the type of spineless dame you saw all about the newly gentrified areas of major cities these days, listening to their hipster music and drinking their matcha lattes. “Our readers expect consistency. When it comes to content creation, consistency is key.”

“Content creation, huh? That’s how you see it?”

“I mean, of course,” she said. Like I was attacking her, trying to put her down. “We have to think of it as content, otherwise we can’t compete.”

“Well if you want great work, sometimes you have to delay the reader’s gratification.”

“What would you know?” She had the gall to ask something like that. Lucky I wasn’t the type of man to take it out on her, or I might have driven to the office with a blackjack and let loose.

“I know a hell of a lot more than you,” I said. “Now, if you want my report, you’ll have to wait a day. I could write it within the hour, but it’d be a rush job. You wouldn’t get the kind of details that elevate the work into sincerity, beyond a mere parody of the hardboiled genre.”

“What’s a parody about any of this if it’s really happening? Now, you’ll write fast, or you’ll write nothing. We’ll put the thing out without you.”

“You won’t put it out without me. What else do you have for it?” Silence, leaving me in disbelief of the incompetents I’d made bedfellows with. “Never forget: you’re as complicit in your beloved Period‘s death as the one who really did it.”

Another pregnant pause, and then, with the terse tongue of a tranquilized snake, a response: “We’ll wait a day.”

Then, a click, and the rusty dial tone of the payphone.

Thanks Fluke, although we’re not so sure it’s worth it anymore…

Sentenced at .625:

Strong, Prosperous and Respected

You may be questioning why the newsletter is shorter this week, and you may not believe our story about why it’s late. You might be worried that this newsletter, which has been a source of entertainment for many, is going down the shitter— and fast.

Your worries would be wrong.

We’ve had so many historic wins in the past two months that it would put all other literary institutions to shame if we even glanced at them. We’ve proven time and time again that we can put out fires and keep ourselves on the up and up. In our first ten days, we ended eight careers, each of which would have been catastrophic to American letters.

In a breakthrough operation last January, Sentenced Lit obliterated autofiction with an attack on Angeleno soil known as Sentenced Period Live. For months, it has been Sentenced policy to prevent the publication of another Tao Lin book, and we’ve taken great strides. We are still editing the video of the live show.

Sorry for the wait, but history takes time.

And, apologies for not saying Ramadan mubarak in our prior newsletter. We will try to keep all holidays on our radar going forward.

See you Tuesday.

Same bat-time, same-bat email.

Sincerely,

Sentenced Lit

sebtencedlit.org