Literary Ops

My first story in Jersey Devil Press was about literary wish-fulfillment.  The idea was that, if someone loved literature enough, it would literally come alive whenever a book was opened.  As someone who has always wanted to have a published novel, this was the most guilty pleasure I could imagine.

For those of us who write, everyday reality can often be painful.  We work jobs whose sole objective, on most days, seems to be to crush the very creativity from us.  I awake inspired every morning, and return from work each day completely emptied and dispirited.  Life, but not as we know it.

“Literary Ops” was a story of profound hope.  Although the protagonists awake each day to various, historic world empires attempting to destroy their home (let the reader who has eyes to see understand) they may rebuff attacks by knowing just which author calms the marauding hordes.  In my dreams, life is that simple.

In today’s business-driven world, there is no place for those of us who would rather just sit, think, and contribute through ironic observations, a mirror against which society might compare itself.  Such an entrepreneurial society prefers to smash such mirrors—you can always buy another one.  Writers like us are, literally, a dime a dozen.  Most of us do it for free.

Even so, my published work is a mere fragment of a much larger whole.  I was showing my writing partner Fantasia the large collection of my literary output.  She was impressed, expressing surprise at just how much I have written.  How much remains unpublished, read only by a snarky editor or two who patly dismisses it.

“Literary Ops” is a profoundly hopeful story.  It is a world in which those who, against all odds, manage to get their literary voice recognized, can literally change the world.  That is something of which I still dream.  And each morning I awake inspired, but I know what will inexorably happen by the end of the day.