Ah! That feeling you get after the first time you re-read an old story of your own that you had previously put aside for a long spell. That just happened moments ago. The only thing is this particular story is heavy on the bizarre and I’m not sure what the bizzaro market is like these days for short fiction. Truth be told, the story in question, “The Other Roommate”, should have been submitted to, and included in, Joe Jablonski’s Like Frozen Statues of Flesh anthology back in the Summer of 2011 (where does the time go?), but I needed to make a few more passes at the piece before it would be ready and the deadline had come and gone, though not before I managed to get my other bizarro pieces “The Underneath” and “All In a Day’s Work” accepted for the book. Now, this piece is ready for submission, ready to be sent out into the wild for consumption and perhaps resulting in indigestion. So I need to research the short fiction market because I’ve been out of the game for quite a bit and I don’t know who is publishing bizarro fiction these days. Though I no doubt need to step up my digital publishing game these days, I tend to prefer to submit work to prospective markets first before taking it upon myself to self-publish. So I will attempt to do that with this one. I think it would sit very well in the company of other bizarro stories of its ilk.
In addition to everything else, it just occurred to me that I need to task myself with resurrecting a couple of old stories that I wrote and lost several years ago. It was actually prior to the turn of this century. I keep everything and I really can’t recall losing many if any other significant pieces of writing, but somehow between PC and technology upgrades and such over the many years, I somehow lost both of these works-in-progress. I remember the titles and their themes — “Scars” and “Ride”. The concept of the former has been borrowed for my lyrics to a song of the same name that I worked on last year, which is why I don’t think it will be hard to re-envision and re-write that story when I sit down to do it. The latter will require more creativity but the positive here is these stories will benefit from being written by the now early 40’s Me instead of the late 20’s Me. Or at least that’s the optimistic way of looking the situation. And optimism is a welcome word for me to be using today, given that yesterday was not a day of optimism, if the most recent Hello, Blank Page post was any indication.
As previously mentioned, I’ve been using the month of December to play the role of archivist, using this website as the ultimate source for my artistic output — past, present and future. I figure, heck, I could die in a week, a month, a year and there would be no archive of my having done something with whatever meager amount of talent I inherently have. So since I’m still doing maintenance and content work here at the ol’ website, I can’t say with any certainty that I’ll get started on brand new work before the new year commences. Yet this was part of the grand design because as I slowly dip myself back into the fiction-writing pool, I always like to warm up with reading and critiquing my old work, and playing with previous works-in-progress and seeing if I can successfully add to them, or tweak the old ones before I take the full dive, if only for the analysis of the progression (who doesn’t get a kick of confidence out of seeing your own growth?) and the flexing of dormant muscles. That said, I’ve always tried to start a new year off with brand new writing. I do, after all, have a blank page fetish.
Well, I better get back to it. There’s a WIP that desperately wants me to look at it so that I might finally finish the damned thing.
Until next time, when I discuss the insistence of dreams on a writer’s muse and some other stuff I didn’t fit in here…
– BLR
Hit me up at @RuckerWrites if you’re the tweeting kind
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