I've decided that if
I'm going to take this writing thing seriously, I need to have a more active
voice out in the cyber community. I need to talk about my writing, which I was
hesitant to do because I'm an amateur and don't know what I could possibly have
to say on the subject. So this post is me strapping on my back-pack, grabbing a
long wooden walking staff and having one last seed cake before opening a door
to a scary and exciting new world.
Expect more updates in
this section of Genre Equality...Expect
a lot more.
First off, I have
successfully written two short-stories. The first one, titled Coming Around, is about a retired and almost
elderly undercover cop whose pride leads to his disastrous downfall, which
comes in the form of an encounter with someone from his undercover life,
someone utterly unexpected.
The second story is Mr. Skittles, which opens with a girl lying in her bed, terrified by
a local urban legend floating around her schoolyard-- the sinister tale of Mr.
Skittles, an ice-cream man who drowned in the lake, now back from the dead and
hungry, hungry for little children. Although it has all the trappings of a
ghostie story, the ending is something you might not expect.
Good prose is a psychic
connection between composer and reader that transcends time and location. Writing
is a muscle that needs to be worked-out if you ever expect to be any good. It
seems embarrassing to admit this, but whilst writing Coming Around, I thought that I was punching out prose like the
best of them (Dickens, King, Harris etc), but upon reading through it in the
editing phase, I was shocked at just how clunky it was. My girlfriend's first
comment upon reading it was 'It's good, but it just seems so...scripted...'
That's the thing about
art, when you are engaging in creating it, it's so fresh in your mind, and you
think that you're hot-shit, you think you are getting all your awesomely unique
ideas down on the page.
But, here's the thing, you don't ever record all of those good ideas--
shit you're lucky if you even get fifty percent. It's not until you let the
idea fade out of your consciousness, let the core of it become but a distant
memory, and then go back to what you have written, that you realise that maybe
you're not in the same ballpark as King or Dickens, shit you're not even in the
same continent!
Mr.
Skittles is better written than Coming Around-- we humans are good at learning from mistakes-- and
I'm actually pretty satisfied with the finished product. However, there are
still little niggling things that I would love to change, little ticks of
writing that I have since incorporated into my latest story, which I will only
talk about when the first draft is finished.
Between writing, doing
my last university assignments, teaching my last days of a practicum placement,
and researching Autism Spectrum Disorder for a job that I really hope I might
be able to get, I've also been reading a lot about the world of self-publishing
through Amazon Kindle. I submitted Coming
Around to an Australian horror magazine, Midnight Echo, and haven't heard back (and rightly so), and I'm
thinking that self-publishing might be good way to go with fiction. I'm not
convinced just yet, but I will keep you all informed.
Also, if you are a
writer and you have had your work published (on a blog, on the kindle store, or
otherwise), please let me know. I would love to read it, and I'll give you
honest feedback. We writers have gotta stick together you know, I heard there
are things much fouler than orcs out there.
- Adam.
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