My Cheesy Story on Escape Pod

After a long, long wait, my story "Wheels of Blue Stilton" is finally up on Escape Pod! "Wheels" took second place in their flash fiction contest last year and is joined in this podcast by the other finalists: "London Iron" by William R. Halliar, and "Light and Lies" by Gideon Fostick.

Had a great time with the contest last year. There's some buzz on the Escape Artists' Podcast forums about putting together another one, and I'll definitely be looking into competing if and when it happens.

Three Down, Two to Go

I've subbed Twain Wreck, Keep the Doctor Away, and Stronger than Sunlight. Still working on Salmon. Decided it wasn't fair to cut out a 5th story and so I've replaced Welsh Rabbit with a story by the name of Crusade, which is more or less in the same boat as Salmon regarding what kind of work has to be done.

The paragraph above resembles gibberish.

The Show So Far

1: Stronger than Sunlight - Flash Fiction - Fantasy

Finished and still looking for a market.

2: Welsh Rabbit - Short Fiction - Strange

Discarded. Would need to start this recipe from scratch

3: Twain Wreck - Short Fiction - Magical Realism

Submitted to Space Squid. We shall see.

4: Salmon - Short Fiction - Magical Realism

A work in progress. Managed to trim down about 200-300 words but it still might prove unsalvageable. Might make a move to an en medea res type of beginning. Could work.

5: Keep the Doctor Away - Flash Fiction - Strange

Finished and still looking for a market. 


Alright, so not where I wanted to be at the end of the day, but it's progress. Will devote time to the rest tomorrow.

Finding a decent market to sub to is not hard, now that I think about it. It's just time consuming.

Need to Quit Being so Lazy

There must be at least five stories or more on my laptop that are more or less passable and could be good with a decent edit. My goal by the end of the day is to have an extra five submissions out there. I'll be posting the list here as I go.

Edit: Alright, found five I'd like to work on today. Finished editing #1 earlier. Now begins the rush to get these all prettied up and out the door.

1: Stronger than Sunlight - Flash Fiction - Fantasy

Finished editing and can now proceed looking for a landing spot.

2: Welsh Rabbit - Short Fiction - Strange

Came to the conclusion that this one would need to be totally rewritten. I'm not looking to write something entirely from scratch right now, but I feel better for having given it a second look.

3: Twainspotting - Short Fiction - Magical Realism

Edited and tweaked. I feel better about this now than I did when I opened up the file. Name has now been changed to Twain Wreck. It's a take on Mark Twain's Five Boons of Life, which I found bitter, predictable and preachy.

4: Salmon - Short Fiction - Magical Realism

Work continues, but this may fall the way of Welsh Rabbit. I remember now posting a drabbled version of this on The Drabblecast Forums just to see what it would look like greatly reduced. Needs some serious editing.

5: Keep the Doctor Away - Flash Fiction - Strange

Hardly touched a thing. More of a vignette than a complete story, and might be a hard sell. 

Thoughts of a First Time Novel Writer

I'm nearing completion of my first ever novel, "Up in Hell", and it's interesting how different it is from anything else I've written. Not thematically or even stylistically, just by sheer volume.

What had originally been intended as a short story about a sock puppet wandering around in hell is now sitting at about 72,000 words, looks to grow even larger by the end, and has broken some of my notions about how I should be writing. For instance, it's been drilled into me that you finish your story and only then go back and edit it. I've broken this little tenant four times now, and each time it's allowed me to proceed at a point where I'd previously gotten stuck.

I'm not even sure how you could get away with not editing a larger work like this, just to make sure you're staying consistent with your plot and your characters. And I fined each time that I go back the characters grow a little. My little sock puppet now has more personality than "scared shitless".

Well, not that a sock puppet should be shitful to begin with.

So now my sock puppet is anxious but willing to put herself in harms way to do the right thing. The marionette is an unwilling (and possibly useless) messiah. And the sandwich does not have a heart of gold.

Yes, there is a sandwich character.

Everything is Wrong

One of the best compliments I ever received went roughly as follows: "There's so much wrong here that a reader can't even begin to pick up the pieces."

No, it was not intended as criticism. To make a short story even shorter, the tale that sparked that comment involved a man without a head, a hobo decapitation, two neighbors and a ruffled flowerbed. The critic went on to explain that he meant that there was nothing in the situation the story described that allowed for an easy way to make things right.

And I love that, because I love chaos. There are any of a million stories where some problems arises and some person shows up to take care of it. They can be interesting. But what I really love is a story where nothing can be saved. Total chaos. Too many things wrong to even think of trying to right them. This is the kind of thing I mean.

While We're on the Topic of Beer

And because this is ostensibly a blog that deals with things like literature, now seems as good a time as any to mention English poet John Skelton.

Kind of reminds me of Prince.

Skelton was a poet in the late 15th to early 16th century, and tends to get overlooked. His poetry is not terribly complex, tending to be straightforward and musical. This is why I like him. With lullay, lullay, like a child is as good an example as you'll find. It's set in verse and could just as easily be a song. The word "lullay," which repeats, is basically another form of "la la la."