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One of Those Years

 Did you ever have one of those years?  You know the kind I mean.  The kind of year when your best laid publication plans get shunted aside by the specter of life itself.

Many months ago I began posting a novel I've written here (The Space between Atoms).  The idea was simple enough—it gave me a regular source of material for weekly posts on this blog, and it might provide a chance for a reader or two to be drawn into the story.  One of the characters actually appears in my published story, "Friday before Senior Year."

The disc drive that holds all my files has gone bad and although it happened months ago, I haven't had the time to send it to a disc repair place.  Many files were lost and I simply haven't had time to recover them.  How do you find time for publishing in such a situation?

In December of 2020 I prepared eleven stories for publication.  I only sent out two and they've both been rejected already.  I haven't had time to send them back out again.  I don't struggle to write; I struggle to publish.

Ironically, I read quite a lot of fiction that isn't that great.  My guess is that the writers don't have failed disc drives.  Perhaps they trust the cloud more than I do.  Maybe they have connections.



Thankfully, among the files that live on my regular hard drive are the current stories that haven't been published.  (All the published ones now reside on a defective disc.)  Life is full of bottlenecks like this—time when time prevents the effective use of time.

Morpheus famously said, "Time is always against us."  As we make our way in this Matrix world you just have to wonder what the sentient programs have in mind.  I'm sure they haven't backed up onto a single external hard drive.

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