It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World
No doubt, I've been neglecting this blog for over a month. Maybe some kind of schedule is needed to ensure regular inputs to the system. Truth is, I've been keeping very busy, struggling to put words on paper.
With everything going on these days, I feel like I am so unprepared according to my own internal timeline. To be honest, I've been doing a lot of research on a story thread that's been bouncing around in my head for some time now. That's how it works for me. I get just a thread of an idea - an inkling, or bug, that just won't go away. I might spend a few hours or days, or even months running the idea down. Sometimes it pans out into something I must pursue further. Often times, the doubt monster sneaks up from behind to snatch the idea from me.
I've been thinking about a story I published on Smashwords not long ago and am considering re-writing it into something longer. This, of course, is The Sentient Soldier, written as flash fiction and published by Eclectic Flash Magazine back in 2010. This story was originally intended to be of much broader scope but I felt it a worthy challenge to parse it down into the smallest piece for sale to the magazine.
At the time, I was very proud of myself. I somehow managed to get the story down from near-novel size to just under seven hundred fifty words. Of course, a couple of reviewers of the work make clear their thoughts of its length. They said it should have been a short story or novel and it didn't really work for them at such a short length. Message heard, loud and clear!
Maybe soon, I'll post another story of one of my many follies as a child. I certainly seem to have an endless supply of those. I might write about the time I had to drive home with the passenger door to my car in my trunk after losing it in the mountains while mushroom picking. Or, I might tell of my first bit of combat training when one of our neighbors shot us with rock salt for playing in the woods behind her house. And people wonder why I'm all broken down now as I enter old age.
With everything going on these days, I feel like I am so unprepared according to my own internal timeline. To be honest, I've been doing a lot of research on a story thread that's been bouncing around in my head for some time now. That's how it works for me. I get just a thread of an idea - an inkling, or bug, that just won't go away. I might spend a few hours or days, or even months running the idea down. Sometimes it pans out into something I must pursue further. Often times, the doubt monster sneaks up from behind to snatch the idea from me.
I've been thinking about a story I published on Smashwords not long ago and am considering re-writing it into something longer. This, of course, is The Sentient Soldier, written as flash fiction and published by Eclectic Flash Magazine back in 2010. This story was originally intended to be of much broader scope but I felt it a worthy challenge to parse it down into the smallest piece for sale to the magazine.
At the time, I was very proud of myself. I somehow managed to get the story down from near-novel size to just under seven hundred fifty words. Of course, a couple of reviewers of the work make clear their thoughts of its length. They said it should have been a short story or novel and it didn't really work for them at such a short length. Message heard, loud and clear!
Maybe soon, I'll post another story of one of my many follies as a child. I certainly seem to have an endless supply of those. I might write about the time I had to drive home with the passenger door to my car in my trunk after losing it in the mountains while mushroom picking. Or, I might tell of my first bit of combat training when one of our neighbors shot us with rock salt for playing in the woods behind her house. And people wonder why I'm all broken down now as I enter old age.
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