Skip to main content

Free Writer

I’ve been a bad boy.  I haven’t been posting on my poor, neglected blog lately.  You see, like all truly creative types, I’ve been protesting.

Call me simplistic, but I always thought America was about freedom.  I grew up writing fantastic (as in wild, unusual, not as in great) stories and nobody said anything I wrote was threatening.  I didn’t know any better—I was just a boy with a tablet and a pencil.  I wrote my imagination.

Now we have a president who’s trying to slash the National Endowment for the Humanities.  There’s no profit in it, you see.  And this after having W say just a few years back that freedom isn’t free.  What?  You have to pay for freedom?  Forgive me, but I’ve always been a live and let live kind of guy.

My horror isn’t gruesome.  It’s existential.  Maybe that’s why I have such a tough time getting published.  With nearly twenty stories in press I hope my writing’s not that bad.  I can live with people just not getting it.  But I protest a government that can’t support the humanities.



I’ve been a bad boy.  I went to Washington to join the Women’s March.  I may not be a woman, but half the people on this planet are and they should have the same rights as the other half.  And throw in an order of freedom while you’re at it, please.

All this fighting for freedom has taken its toll on my fiction.  Not that the ideas are fading—they’re not—but who has time to tweet their congressmen all day and then write stories?  Who thought politics would ever interfere with good, old-fashioned creativity?


I like my freedom free, just like my imagination.  There’s no places barred to it, and there’s no limit to the number of genders or races you might find there.  Is it too much to hope for a government that’ll just leave me alone to be free?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dusty

  My, this thing is dusty.   My fans—hi, Mom!—perhaps believe me to have perished in the pandemic.   No, it was nonfiction’s fault. Since the pandemic began I’ve had two nonfiction books published and have written a third.   With a nine-to-five job something’s got to give.   Unfortunately it’s been fiction. Well, the groundhog didn’t see his shadow yesterday, so it must be safe to come out.   I shuffled away the rejection notes and began submitting again.   I’ve got a backlog of weird stories and maybe some new publishers have emerged? The thing is, don’t you just hate it when you’re in the mood to submit and some lit journal has its window for submissions firmly shut?   My last story, “ The Hput, ” was published about three years ago.   Oh, I’ve submitted since then, but with no traction.   Well, it is winter. I’ve got a lot of stories lined up.   I’ve been sending them out again, dreaming of making a dime at what I love doing best...

Creative Righting

  Rejection of my writing is a rejection of my imaginative world.   That’s why I was cheered by the acceptance of one of my stories this week.   That makes number 31. I’ve been working on a lot of fiction lately, even as nonfiction book number 6 is going to press.   The ideas are still there, and bizarre as ever, but publishing venues just aren’t welcoming. The other day I had lunch with a professor whose wife is also a professor.   She just had her first novel published, and so he pointed me to her indie publisher.   I went to their website to learn that they’re closed to submissions.   I have to admit that my latest accepted story, “Creative Writing Club,” was probably given the green light because I know the editor.   That seems like a pretty dicey way to get any notice, doesn’t it?   You have to know the right people even in the low circulation world. My fiction is difficult to classify.   It’s got speculative elements to it.   ...

Creativity

  Maybe you’ve noticed this too.   When you step away from fiction writing for a while, your creativity becomes flaccid.   I’ve had to step away from this blog for a while because I was writing my sixth nonfiction book.   God, I’ve missed fiction! Now that I’ve entered that phase of waiting for publishers to respond, I’ve turned my limited writing time back to fiction.   I submitted a couple of stories this week and am waiting to hear about those as well.   When you’re a writer, waiting is a way of life. Opening my software where I store my fiction stories, I was amazed by how many I found.   Some of them are bad—so bad that they’ll never (rightfully) be published.   Some are surprisingly good and have been sitting around while I finished up my nonfic. The vast majority, however, are unfinished.   Some years back I realized that when I’m writing in the heat of inspiration but don’t have time to finish a story that I need to write down where I...