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Local screenwriter and crime novelist Johnny Shaw has cranked out nearly 90 works of fiction since July 2022. Or, rather, a single page from nearly 90 otherwise nonexistent works of fiction (and fictional nonfiction).
In his Patreon called Torn Pages, Shaw “uncovers” such lost works as The Rock Star and The Abattoir (a romance novel), Mirch Drinkwater’s never-finished opus Donatello’s Wake (“a mashup of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Finnegans Wake”) and Domesticity, Violence, and the Narrative of the Absurd: Juggalo Crime Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century (a Ph.D. thesis). There are also cookbooks, poetry, newspaper columns, arrest reports, limericks and a concert set list.
For Shaw, 54, Torn Pages is part writing exercise, part literary homage and part an outlet for his stray ideas. “It’s a goofy thing I started to hone my skills as a parodist,” he says. “But I really like it as a medium, as it forces me to get to the heart of the premise in about 300 words.”
The Patreon has only a handful of paid subscribers, but selected entries are unlocked. “As weird as it sounds,” Shaw says, “it’s some of my best—or maybe just funniest—work in the last year.”