Skip to main content

Gotham Writing


Life is plenty complicated without writing.  Life’s impossible without writing.

You see, I’ve got tons of fiction here.  Well, it be tons if I printed it out.  I’ve been writing every day for decades now.  Long past the limit Neal Stephenson once told me, the 100,000 words you throw out before calling yourself a writer.  The problem is, life’s complicated.

I happened into a New York City bookstore.  On the same shelf paperbacks by the aforementioned Neal and Robert Repino.  I know them both.  I returned home and fired up the laptop.  Hundreds of stories.  Half a dozen novels.  Amid all of this, just one story of mine that one small journal thought was worthy of actual ink.  It won third place in a contest.



There’s no way to count pre-computer writing.  I was born before the advent of the household CPU.  Before electronic calculators.  We thought the TI-30 was a big deal, little red lights and all.  I’d been writing for years already.  How many words?  Who can count that high?  Who has the time?  Life, remember…

So I fire up the laptop and start counting.  I quickly lose track how many individual stories I have in Scrivener.  At various stages of completion.  Many finished, sent out, and rejected.  Many more being polished and awaiting the click of the “send” button.  Even many more not yet done.

I click through some of the older stories.  I can’t remember where I was going with them.  When I started, the idea, I know, was pretty clear.  Beginning, middle, end.  Characters so real they could be sitting in this very room.  Now, however, I don’t recall their names.  Backstories.  Why was that character suicidal at that particular time?  What do I know about whaling, beyond Moby-Dick?  Perhaps one with flashes of intense emotion like me should be a poet instead?

It’s raining in the city and I recall one of my published stories about Bryant Park, just outside this plate-glass window.  That window’s like time.  You can see through it, but you can’t change it.  Not without breaking the law.  And life’s already complicated enough without doing that.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Patterns

  There’s a pattern I’m noticing.   For fiction publishers.   Even if you aim low you’ll find it a struggle.   Part of the reason is the pattern. Lots of websites list publishers.   The smaller, hungrier presses either eventually close or get to a place where they require an agent to get in.   That’s the kiss of death. Although my stories have won prizes, and been nominated for prizes, I can’t get an agent interested.   I’ve queried well over a hundred, so the agent route is one of diminishing returns.   This too is a pattern. Back to the smaller presses.   I check many lists.   What I write, you see, is highly idiosyncratic.   It’s literary but it’s weird.   Publishers don’t know what to do with it.   If a smaller press published stuff like this, I’d find it. The pattern includes writers who never get discovered.   Ironically, a number of editors of fiction literary magazines (mostly online) tell me they enjoy my wor...
Post a Comment
Read more

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.   ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Maybe Okay

  A couple pieces of encouraging news, perhaps, dear struggling writers.   I had a couple short stories accepted for publication in recent weeks.   As a fellow writer recently said, “You've got to keep trying.  Somebody will like what you wrote.” That’s a bit of sunshine.   And it’s likely true.   But the stories:   “The Crossing,” about two men in a boat trying to cross the Atlantic, was accepted by JayHenge Publishing.   JayHenge is a small, but paying publisher.   I was flattered when they wanted it for their Masque & Maelström: The Reluctant Exhumation of Edgar Allan Poe anthology.   Being associated with Poe in any way feels good. The second story, “St. Spiders’ Day,” had been brewing in my mind for years—yes, this is a long game!   A friend pointed me to The Creepy podcast.   Since the story hadn’t been written, I followed their guidelines of what they wanted.   It worked. I recently heard a successful wri...
Post a Comment
Read more