I have a reader. I have had people read this blog, quite a decent little # in fact (somewhere around 100 I think), had people comment appreciably, but I’ve now had someone come up to me and say that he had stopped by but there was nothing new. So, I have a reader.
I have been writing, I told him, but I’ve been writing for submission, and those things can’t go on here because it would take away their first publication rights and render them basically unpublishable. Still, knowing that someone actually looked and took the time to mention it really moved me and inspired me.
I told him that I planned to put about four posts on the site after I got through the story I’ve been writing, but I don’t think I’ll wait that long.
I currently have 12 active submissions.Those include four new short stories. One of those stories is a piece of flash fiction, while the other three range between 5200 and 8000 words. Aside from those two forays into flash fiction I did a couple of months ago, these stories seem to constantly get longer. The one I’m working on now has ballooned to 11,000 words, and when all’s said and done–tomorrow hopefully–it will have probably left the realm of the long short story and entered that of the short novella.
Yes, I have to see that as growth of sorts, but the longer these stories get, the fewer markets there are available.
This current story, what with all of its ballooning, is actually a revamping of a story I worked on somewhere between 15 and 20 years ago. “Milton Albrecht Takes the Field” is the title of the story in its present form, and that was the original title of the original story. That story really did some ballooning, getting to novel-length if memory serves and went on to have a couple more titles: The Art of Building Tin Foil Houses and Shared Schizophrenia and the Art of Building Tin Foil Houses.
Again, if memory serves, I got to at least 350 pages, some of which was written longhand I think.
Milton is a bullied pipsqueak of a boy in both incarnations of the story, and the makings of his torment are pretty much the same in both, but my treatments of his plight are quite different. I originally had in mind a sci-fi endling–I’m sure that was because I was all about writing what I should write in those days–where this one ends with a boy struggling with faithlessness and thoughts of suicide.
So, even though the current story is ballooning, it’s going to be much slimmer than the one it is crafted out of.
And it hasn’t been the easiest write. It hasn’t been. Milton’s plight is difficult, and 30 or so pages in and not too far from the end, I’m still not certain of his fate. I’ve gotten to about 90 percent certainty but not all the way. And Milton is struggling to survive through a good part of it. But, we’re getting there, me and Milton.
Thus far, I have been rejected by Field, Sow’s Ear, The Sun, and Copper Nickel, and I was thankful each time.
All right, the kids are home from school, but now there’s something here if my reader stops by, or if you perhaps do.
Paulelmo's Blog 