This week in Vintage Fringe we republish Mark Brinker’s “Notes From a Man Trapped in a Giant Bottle,” which originally ran in Issue 17, back in December of 2008.

Mark was kind enough to answer a few questions about taking a look back at “Notes.”

How do you feel about “Notes” in reading it 2.5 years after publication?

I’m still pretty happy with it. It’s one of the few things I’ve written where I don’t start to get annoyed at myself the more I read it – when I assess each sentence I still feel satisfied with it.

Would you change anything about the piece?

I played around with changing the section numbers, like either have them dated, or have them skipping around indicating there are notes missing from the sequence, but in the end I worried it would get too confusing and just kept the numbers consecutive.

Also I’d change the main character’s name to David, because I have another story where the character’s name has to be Robert, and I don’t want to give the impression that all my characters have the same name.

How has publication in Fringe aided your writing career?

I actually got solicited for a story after someone read my story in Fringe, so it’s directly led to the publication of at least one other piece.

How have you changed as a writer since “Notes”?

I’ve been trying to have more fun with my writing. When I wrote this piece I was in the middle of writing a much longer story that I thought was more important, and which I wasn’t enjoying writing at all. Then one night while taking a break I saw a dead moth inside an old beer bottle, and from that somehow this story just emerged and I wrote the whole thing right there. I’ve been trying to give more importance to those kinds of inspirations rather than slogging through stories that I think are important but that are a complete pain for me to write.