I try to be patient, but, like Morpheus, I’m well aware that time is against us. Since I write obsessively, manically, even, and each day reminds me I’m aging, I find waiting months for publishers to be very trying. Time to take the red pill.
Along with my daily efforts to produce new content, I’ve also been working at packaging. That is to say, putting together a collection of stories to try to farm out to someone who understands me.
There are publishers who still do short print runs of collections of short stories. I own several such collections, and when a novel is too long for the time that I have, I turn to the short story to fill the space. I’ve written several, and have had thirteen published. There are many, many more that have offended publishers across the internet.
Since the time of finding sympathetic editors seems to have passed, I’m thinking it might be time to put a collection together. Problem is, I write in several different veins. Perhaps my stories all begin to sound the same after a while, but I write satire and literary fiction as well as gentle horror.
Trying to think how to describe my work to a potential publisher, I think something like: Edgar Allan Poe meeting Ray Bradbury for drinks at a bar run by H. P. Lovecraft. My work resembles none of theirs completely. All three are nevertheless present.
I strive for a mood of helplessness to circumstance in my stories. Forced into a genre corner, I would call them “Existential Gothic.” We live in a world we don’t really understand. Those of us born into humble circumstances just don’t know how to go about breaking into the hallowed halls of publication.
My characters tend to be paralyzed with fear. Some editors have suggested that I have them do something about it. The fact is, faced with the horrors of publication rejection, I simply don’t know what to do.
Uh-oh. It looks like I’ve become my own metaphor again.
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