5 posts tagged “short story”

Well I can finally cross this off my list. I figured since I did it, I'd share it:

"Inheritance"

Peter returns to Harlan County for his mother's funeral and his inheritance consists of an old steamer trunk, a keepsake brought back from his father's second tour in Vietnam and the Purple Heart that came with it. He discovers that the secret of the trunk, which he shared with his mother, is only a sliver of the story. His father's suicide had been a lie, designed to hide the fact that his p'ai (minor soul) lives inside the shell of his body, sleeping in an abandoned mine. Upon her death, Peter's father awakens, emphatic that he will make his wife a creature like himself but Peter has other plans for his inheritance.

"Nine" is up at Northpoint. Here's the permalink.

So I printed out a copy of the new story (I'll call it "Cole" after the one character for now) for Hawk to read. Apparently he read it sometime last evening. His single comment on it was "Is this based on someone you know?"

Yes. I know so many rock stars and, as you know, I am a world-traveling music journalist.

He did the exact same thing w/ RFM. To this day he insists he is Seth. This means he is a 19 year old drifter who writes poetry and smokes weed.

See, I made the mistake of once writing a story that was based on something real that involved him: Time Bomb. It was a fun little piece that I actually got published. He loved reading about himself. Since then I've written two books and I don't know how many short stories and he keeps looking for himself in them.

I think he'd be better off to look for me in what I write. As I was working on my NaNo, I realized that I have some very definite theme that I write about. There is always a sibling relationship that somehow drives my MC. This is strange as my siblings (I'm an adoptee; they're biological children of my mother) want nothing to do with me and never have. Probably why I examine the theme so often. Another theme that has come up in each book is an unintended pregnancy. In WS, it's central and in RFM, it's incidental; in Nine it's a false alarm that works as a catalyst. That probably comes from my fears in my teens & early twenties and then issues beyond that within marriage.

Naturally the core of most everything I write is sex. I'm not sure what all it says about me but I know it says a lot. I'm sure psychiatrists, behaviorists, etc. would enjoy the analyzation. It was hard to keep it out of this short story. I had to fight it off (but there's a little something in there). When I told Hawk, "Be prepared. There's no sex in this." He said, "But you always have sex in it." I think he was disappointed. In fact, I'm sure he was disappointed.

When I was actively writing and publishing BDSM erotica, he was under the impression that I was 100% into everything I was writing about and putting myself in the female role (even in my ultraflash guy-guy story so I don't know how that worked). That's not to say I wasn't interested or that I didn't find it exciting; that's pretty much the point of the genre.But he couldn't draw the line between me and my characters.

I ran this latest reaction past a writer friend and she said, "I can see he'd say that. Because, of course, everything authors write about is always true." We went on to have this exchange:

I had a cool dream last August with a fairly realistic plot. I woke up before the dream was over but I thought, "I could make this into a story, I think." All writers have this plan approximately 27 times during their careers and it rarely works b/c dreams aren't like that.

So I wrote some when I could and it kind of fizzled out. I didn't know the ending and I didn't know, in terms of it being a short story, what I wanted to say with it. I had some symbols in mind, dependent on a real life setting. I had two characters, the narrator being one.

I went to open Nine yesterday, saw this and thought, "Work on this." So I did.I didn't know my end point, whether I had the right narrator, whether some backstory I put in was too tell-y and should be excised, etc. So I made a Google doc and shared w/ three writing buddies. Then today I managed to make time to finish it up. Jam gave me some good insight on it last night & made me think that in terms of an ending, I was looking beyond the natural end. So I took her advice and brought the endpoint closer and it seemed to work.

Since it's a first draft, it'll need more work (of course) and I'd like to get it under 5k but I think I'll be able to send this out before too long.

Oh and it needs a title. I would rather send it out to a dozen journals than have to come up with a title. I hate titles. I'm so bad at them and when I come up w/ one it's boring or bizarre. I could actually call it "Untitled" if I wanted to b/c that's kind of a part of the story. Hrm. That might work. I'll think about it.

A writing friend of mine is an editor at an online journal. She announced their annual Halloween contest and, of course, I'm a sucker for Halloween. I asked on the TC boards if it had to be Halloween-specific and it doesn't. It does have a theme: "post-Apocalypse."

Years ago I had a post-Apocalyptic dream that was so real and so long, I thought I was living it. When I woke up, I wrote a lot of it down. So I used that scenario for my version of the Apocalypse and went from there. It's also horror and the word limit is 2500. Hard to achieve horror in 2500 words but I think I made it a bit scary.

I won't say the name of the story in case my friend, who's a judge, reads here. Thats also why I'm not saying anything specific about it.

Hawk read it and his reaction to "did you like it?" was "Um yeah." Whatever. He also said there were some typos. Fine. He's been a real help as a reader lately.

Anyway, I have a little time to clean it up. A couple people might look at it and then I'll submit it. I haven't sent anything to a contest in ages so this is a step back toward writing for publication again. Yay me!

I haven't decided if I'm trying NaNo or not. I know I could do it, as I proved by finishing RFM as I did. I have zero ideas for any stories (I was lucky that the Apex contest had a specific theme & genre to focus me). Maybe I'll try an erotic novel, like last year. I didn't do too badly in NaNo 2006. I just got bored & overwhelmed by life & stuff.

I had a form rejection while we were on vacation but the agent I sent sample chapters to hasn't contacted me and the Dream Agency still has my complete ms. The form rejection -- meh. I haven't sent any new queries b/c I want yes/no answers on the few I already did first.