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.  When you’ve been writing for half a century, you learn a thing or two.  I hope, anyway.

Part of the problem is my stories don’t fall neatly into any categories.  Even “weird fiction” has come to mean something a little too Lovecraftian for what I’m doing.  There’s a bit of humor and a ton of thought in my stories, which is why they don’t prosper, I suppose.

Still, a writing life is a writing life.  Since my last post I had to go through and make PDFs of all my stories since software keeps updating and saying that files aren’t readable.  There’s a reason I don’t read ebooks.  Anyway, that kick in the ass got me thinking I need to submit more.

And so I have.  I happen to believe that if you spend half-a-century doing something you might know something about it, right?  In the biz that counts for nothing.  Which is why, this Groundhog Day minus one, I’m trying to dust this thing off.