here's another teaser of a new story, about a group of climbers and base jumpers, out in the new "Transcendence" issue of The Missouri Review:

...He had wanted to be in magazines and have his name printed and for people to recognize him, glossed out and his name there in black, and himself hopping into a canyon or hanging from a headwall, certainly, yes, he had maybe even dreamed of these things, desiring it maybe too much, wanting it all too much. Now, now though, now he hated it, hated looking at himself.  He did not see what putting up the photos and videos did for anyone, especially himself. Everyone else had done everything anyway; every spot they had been to had been recorded before; every recording was really a re-recording. Nothing original. So when a new set of photos went up, a new vid, a new route they’d tried (which had been tried before, utterly and completely), other groups they knew posted response videos: nice whipper, but check this peel; reaching like a grandma for a dropped penny, pretty, but watch this one; awesome moonrise, what kind of exposure you use? I used a Nikon D5100 16.2MP Digital with a 55-200mm zoom on these shots in Moab. Always a competition. What the fuck happened to Chuck Pratt? I don’t want to write about climbing; I don’t want to talk about it; I don’t want to photograph it; I don’t want to think about it; all I want to do is do it. All these sandbaggers didn’t know shit about what climbing really was, everything made to show off, as a performance, to be better than everybody else. What it had become was what Kieran had wanted to get away from: selfish, vain, showing-off-playacting. This, in all, everything considered, this is what he believed to be the end for him. As soon as the photos began showing up in magazines and Blake began that website and became more concerned with showing others what they had done rather than actually doing the thing: the end...

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