Guess I Missed That Memo

Spent a couple of hours reading through the past several months of McSweeney's online. Plenty of experimentation going on, but I was disappointed that a lot of the pieces seemed half-baked; clever clever stuff that was picked and put into the pie before it was fully ripe. Sometimes it really pays to do one more revision than you think you need before you press send. Here's a couple of my favorites, but then I always appreciate faux corporate memos: Mike Richardson-Bryan's "Career Days" and Holley Korby's "Resignation of a Ringtone Designer." Both of these use a similar method: They set the stage and then riff on five or six examples. Tough genre to hit a home run in; the longer the piece the harder it is to sustain the idea's intensity and cleverness through to the last example. I think it's great that McSweeney's has a forum for this kind of experimentation. Lot of fertile minds out there working in non-traditional forms. I see a few submissions like this at Storyglossia and wouldn't mind a few more.