Tag Archives: short stories

Bring on the progress!

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Back in June I looked at the calendar and had a horrible and depressing realization. The year was half over and I’d written not one single new story yet. I was pretty displeased, because writing is one of the big things I’ve been focusing on in my life over the past couple of years. Although, up until June of 2011, it seemed clearly that writing was only one of the things I’d been talking about focusing on, because there sure wasn’t any writing going on!

I was bereft, or at least rather put out about the whole state of affairs. Something had to be done. Here I’ve been wanting to write fiction so much, been talking about it, been reading it, and yet I hadn’t been DOING it! What can be done in such a situation? Let’s think that over for about two seconds. Oh, I know! How about, you know, writing!

Once I made that gigantic mental leap it was just a matter of getting the work done, sitting down and moving my fingers and making something happen on the screen/page. Right about this time I was reading the blog of Alex J. Kane, a burgeoning science fiction writer who has been making an honest and concrete effort to get his work out into the market. Alex made note of a web site by a writer named Dean Wesley Smith, and some of the thoughts he related of Smith’s seemed very positive and progress-oriented, so I went there and read some of Smith’s writing on the subject.

To cut things short, Smith was very energizing. He basically just said, “Write, then submit it! That’s it!” There was obviously a little bit more to it than that, but really not much, and when you get right down to it, those are the two steps needed for getting published: write story, submit story.

In view of this I decided that what I wanted was to have a bunch of finished short stories to my credit, and by a bunch, I mean something farther up there in the double digits. I already have a handful, maybe ten or so, but I wanted to add greatly to that number. I wanted to prove, I wanted to make it plainly, ridiculously obvious, that not only do I want to write fiction as a large part of my life, but that I’m not hesitant at all about doing the work to make that happen.

Beginning around the middle of July I started writing, just as Smith instructed. I didn’t sit around and worry over each sentence, each paragraph, each period, adjective, verb, and on and on until I worried myself to a halt. What I started doing was writing. Writing whole sentences, paragraphs, beginnings, endings, whole stories! And then I sent them out. I didn’t worry about having sixteen of my most perceptive writer friends pick them apart so that they shone brighter than polished stainless steel. I just made sure they didn’t have any horrible spelling or grammar errors and the like, made them look the best I figured I could make them at that point, and fired them off.

The goal is to write one new short story per week for the remainder of this year. I want to be able to say that I have at least 25 new short stories to my name by the end of the year. (I’ll fit in an extra somewhere to bring the total up.) So far it has been, well, work! But it’s fun work. I’m really enjoying it. It’s not always easy, but somehow I’m learning something, someTHINGS. I may not be known or admired or even have much of anything published by the time this effort is done (wouldn’t feel bad to have a sale or two, though), but I will have gotten better at writing, and maybe my December something will change, maybe I’ll sell to a pro market, or maybe I’ll just be writing stuff that’s still not so publishable, but is a lot closer to being publishable.

They say it takes a million written words for a writer to sharpen their instrument, hone themselves into a writer’s writer. I want that million words. I’ve written three novels in NaNoWriMo over the past three years. That’s far more than the 150K words that each year’s 50K minimum would put me at. I’m probably around 200K from that alone, maybe even 225K. Then we have the other short stories I’ve written since 2007. That gets me closer, maybe to 240K. That’s nearly halfway to 500K, and Smith said he started seeing some positive results at 500K. I’m nearly halfway there, and if we figure I’m writing stories that average about 4K each week, then by December I’ll have something like 340K (the last story actually went to 8K, so I may well go over).

So here we go, kids. It’s time to stop fooling around just talking about writing and make the writing happen. It is going to be fascinating to see how this all plays out, don’t you think?

The Beaumont Zone

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Aw, dudes, check this out!!!!

Collections of sinister, humorous, and just plain weird literary greatness.

Collections of sinister, humorous, and just plain weird literary greatness.

I know, old books. You’re as excited as I am, right??? If not, please allow me to explain just a bit. In the photos above what you see are original publications of short story collections by one Charles Beaumont. Like Richard Matheson, Beaumont wrote for The Twilight Zone. Unlike Matheson, Beaumont was not able to live a long life, thereby enabling him to spread his literary awesomeness to a greater audience, or to garner movie deals from his stories which would go on to be remade three separate times.

Beaumont died tragically at the young age of thirty-eight, victim of an odd condition that has now been said to be Alzheimer’s, but at the time was unknown. Due to his untimely passing, his career was understandably short, yet the body of work which he left behind him has led authors such as Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison and Dean Koontz to remark that his influence is deep and wide even today.

Doing some hunting around on Wikipedia in recent weeks, I happened across Beaumont’s entry, and became enthralled. I noted that, while he hadn’t been on this earth long, he’d still managed to produce enough work for several published collections. Not being flush with cash, I checked the local library catalog. Zilch. I then realized that, while there were a few newer anthologies of his work, each one omitted stories here and there from his original publications. This would not do. I had to have them all!

Raiding the change jar (literally – I found I had fifty-two quarters sitting on my dresser in a pickle jar), I went to abebooks.com, recommended by a friend, and typed in his name. Oh, the joy when the search results pulled up numerous copies! I bought all three of his first anthologies. It’s been one week since I received them, and I’ve read every single one of them. They’re outstanding. Some of it is sci-fi, some horror, some are just plain humorous, but all are excellent.

I’ve started making notes for myself on the how and why of his writing. It’s very interesting stuff. For instance, out of 17 stories in his first book, only six of them have death directly incorporated. Out of those six, only four of those deaths are violent, and this from a book subtitled “A Collection of Violent Entertainments.” Here’s a guy who obviously pulls off the creepy and fearsome without resulting time and again to hack and slash violence. It’s not overdone or overwrought, it’s just plain good storytelling, and this, friends, is what it’s all about: telling a story well. If you can do that, then you don’t need to come up with some crazy new idea that no one has ever done before. Although, honestly, Beaumont pulled that off too. His short story “The Crooked Man” caused quite a stir when it came out in Playboy in 1955. No one had seen anything like it in mainstream press at that time. His idea to flip heterosexuality with homosexuality in a word where births were controlled in a lab, making hetero relationships illegal – powerful stuff in that day and age. Still a good story to this day.

I will continue going through these and making notes. He was an expert, a pro, and there’s certain to be much I can learn from him. If you’re at all curious, I suggest hunting down some of his work. For six or eight bucks including shipping, you can do far worse than indulging in Beaumont’s work.