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Art: Stories I Made Up

Update: In September 2015, I finally pulled all the little flakes of my courage together and set up a site devoted entirely to waving my writing around in people’s faces, rendering this page somewhat moot. I’m going to leave the items below in their current state, but if you want to see more (and in most cases even better), that’s the place to go.

When this blog was set up, it was mainly about blowing off steam and not sticking my head into the jaws of eBay, in a theme of fountain pens with a sub-harmonic of general anachronism.

…and then in late 2013, I had some kind of internal spasm in which three little internal status lights began to glow:

I am getting very close to running out of the power to type out stream-of-consciousness entries in the above mentioned theme without turning over old ground;
I have written enough of these things to knock some of the stupid out of my writing;
I have, perhaps, read enough of the works of others and on the theory of making fiction, to at last do a (possibly) decent job of it.

Thus, the shift from an intermittently entertaining blog to a stream of tedious misery for which I was called out eventually. That calling-out included the perfectly true observation that I was talking about writing a lot, but never letting anyone see it. As I explain a little more there, I’ve had a terror put into me on the subject of first publication rights, but cringing too deeply to that terror isn’t, in the end, going to help me with getting published.

There’s also the Scylla to that Charybdis; I’m old enough to go in awe of The Published Author, child of a Great Publishing House, whose works have been passed through the hands of The Professional Editor before being put out where anyone can see them. Without the magic wrought by a Professional Editor, I have an uncomfortable sense of going out into public not just with my fly open but with all zips, buttons and hooks missing entirely.

This page of the blog is meant to quell the terrors by showing a few small items of my work to the world in general, in the same way that other phobias are quashed by controlled exposure to spiders or poorly-supervised swimming lessons. When the world in general doesn’t catch fire or start throwing things at me, I may overcome my long-standing fears and either work out the levers of self-publication or correct submission to a Publishing House of some dimension.

The links below will take you to PDF version of the stories. There’s no charge, and I only hesitantly put a donation button at the bottom of the page. The items will be ordered chronologically… unless I change my mind about that later, in which case I’ll edit this whole sentence to conform with facts. Update: In September 2015, I finally pulled all the little flakes of my courage together and set up a site devoted entirely to waving my writing around in people’s faces. I’m going to leave the items below in their current state, but if you want to see more (and possibly better), that’s the place to go.

“The City Does That to People“: completed April 2013 (my records fail me a little), submitted to an open call for flash fiction of 800 words or less to fill some crannies in the Lovecraftian fiction anthology Whispers from the Abyss. Rejected, alas, so I feel I might share it (less PDFfy version here).
“The Notes of Erich Zann“: completed 26 June 2014, as yet unsubmitted. A semi-obligatory pursuit of a thought founded in my devotion to the writings (but not the politics) of H.P. Lovecraft (less PDFfy version here).
“Gone to See the Cat“: completed 29 August 2014, submitted for the Fantasy category of “The Cat With Blue Fur” writing contest run by The Drabblecast. The main rules were that a character in the work have the name of the contest, and that the entry be less than 2,000 words. In these things I succeeded, although I didn’t win the contest; I did, however, get enough votes to puff me up like a toad. Drabblecast has moved all the entries into a private area, but I’d always intended for it to be out in the public eye (less PDFfy version here).
“Door Ajar“: completed 5 September 2014, submitted to the Drabblecast forum area devoted to “Drabbles”, which are stories of exactly 100 words. This is actually out in public, and posting it here is a combination of egoism and the cautious application of distributed storage.
“Nice Costume“: completed 27 October 2014, also a Drabble and as publicly available as the previous, but it made me happy writing it, so I want to share it lots.