Short story – “I Just Write Stories”

“I Just Write Stories”

As a regular patron of the bookstore, Janet had often seen the fliers for the Pen Jockeys, the writing group that met every month in the store’s café.  She didn’t consider herself a writer, just a dabbler who wrote two or three short stories a year to post on her blog.  Several people – not just her friends – had said that she had talent and should write more.  After much debate, she decided to at least check out the writer group and see if she could learn anything from real writers.

In the café, two tables had been pushed together to make room for about a dozen people.  A sign in the middle of one proclaimed the tables reserved for the Pen Jockeys.  It was still about ten minutes until the meeting time, but two men and a woman already sat there.  They welcomed Janet and had her join them.

“I’m Brian,” the first man said.  “I write gay fantasy.”

The second man introduced himself as Doug.  He explained, “I write science fiction with strong libertarian underpinnings.”

“And I,” Samantha added, “write historical fiction with strong female characters.”

“It’s nice to meet you all,” Janet said.  “I … just write stories.”

The three looked confused.  “What kind of stories?” Doug asked.

Janet shrugged.  “Whatever comes to mind.”

“Do they have specific themes?” Brian asked.

“Um … no.  Just your basic run-of-the-mill stories.”

“What are you trying to achieve with them?” Samantha asked.

“Ah … they’re just fun.  I usually post them on my blog.” Janet looked around at them for a moment before asking, “Is that a problem?”

The three looked at one another.  “Well,” Doug began, “if you really want your writing to take off you need to write to a specific audience, be they gay, libertarian, feminist, what have you.”

“Oh,” Janet replied.  “Well, I’m just starting out, so I’m more interested in learning about writing, not the marketing aspects.”

“Writing is a business,” Brian stated.  “Too many people who want to be writers never learn that.”

Janet was quiet as she thought that over.

Samantha then asked, “You said you just write … for fun?”

“Yes.” Janet looked around.  “Don’t you?”

Beating a weird, coincidence horse

I believe it was a sometime in the summer of 2001, a few weeks after I moved into my first apartment, my phone rang.  I answered it, and a guy says, “Hey Steve, it’s Tom.”

I didn’t know any Toms, so I asked, “Who?”

He replied, “Tom,” slightly angrily.

I took a moment and thought.  I had gone to school with a Tom, but I hadn’t spoken to him in a decade or so, and there was no way he could have gotten this number.  “Who?”

“Karen’s brother,” he almost shouted. 

I almost shouted back, “Who the fuck is Karen,” but I stopped myself and said I think he had the wrong number.  I think in the following months there was a message or two on my machine for the other Steve, so apparently our numbers were very close.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I put up a post asking “What’s the weirdest conversation you’ve had?” and I gave a condensed version of that story.  A few days after I did that, I came across an old blog post I had done that resulted from that incident.  Apparently, I was trying to come up with a very short story, and I came up with an idea:

The story was set in one of those dystopian futures where people have numbers instead of names, for example, A517 or A to his friends.  Well, A sits down to a “genuine, vat-grown steak” when his comm buzzes.  He answers and someone goes, “Hey A, it’s T.” A doesn’t know any Ts, so T explains he works with R at the clone factory.

A still doesn’t know who T is, so T in frustration asks, “This is A571, right?”

“No, I’m A517.”

“Oh.  I’m sorry.  I guess I have the wrong number.”

Now, I know the first draft – let alone the rough outline – of everything sucks, but I highly doubt any amount of editing could turn that into something … halfway good. 

I wrote that in my notebook, and then forgot about it.  Some years later, I was flipping through my notebook and saw it, and wrote up the blog where I was thinking about an author putting out a collection of their terrible stories, and what would be a good title for it.  And I wondered if how we react to our bad stories could be some sort of personality test for writers. 

So, the chain of events: I got a wrong number call.  A few years later, I use that as the base for a failed short story.  A few years after that, I come across this failed short story, and use it for the base of a blog post.  Many years after that, I use the original wrong number story for a social media post.  A week or so later, I come across that old blog post, and use the whole story for this new blog post.  At this point, I’m wondering what I’m going to do with this in five, or ten more years?  Maybe I will put together a collection of my terrible stories, and I’ll basically just copy this for the introduction.

Writing Newsletter First Quarter 2024

 

Probably the biggest writing news for this first quarter of 2024, is that for the first time in years I’ve submitted a story to a magazine.  I’m still waiting to hear if they’ll accept it, but I hopefully will have good news on it for next quarter.

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I’ve continued writing a story for my website each month, publishing “Scheming,” “Outstanding Merit,” and “Always a Catch.” I’ve also posted “Deaf Ears,” “Always Have a Strong Finish,” and “Deadweight” on my Ko-fi account.  And I also posted “How Did They Get Our Number?” on one of my blogs.

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In these three months, I’ve posted microfiction stories on my Mastodon and Bluesky profiles on the following days: 1/12, 3/6, 3/11, 3/20, 3/23, and 3/25.  I’ve also posted haikus on 1/8, 2/19, 3/4, 3/18, and 3/26.  I’m slowly working on collections of both, so my plan is to post them more often to force myself to write the hundreds of each I need.  I guess we’ll see how well I do.

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In this quarter, I only managed one Free Story Idea, that of Star Jumping.  In my last Newsletter I wrote that I was thinking of only doing one a quarter, but I had been trying to do one every other month.  But, like other times, it seemed other things kept coming up.  And as with everything else, we’ll have to see what I’m able to do.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – You need to write

 

Your reaction to the title was probably along the lines of, “No shit.” So let me explain my point.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a previous Random Writing Tips about Schedules.  In that I talked about how if people know every third Tuesday there will be a new Random Writing Tips post on your blog, they’ll be more likely to check it out.  And I figured having schedules for posts on social media would work as well.  I had a schedule of posts I did on Twitter, which I modified when I moved over to Mastodon.  And over the past year, I’ve added new things to post.  For example, every Tuesday there’s a writing quote, I pose a question every Thursday, and I have a poll every other Sunday.  To keep track of all of this, I have an Excel document where I can check off everything once I schedule or post it.  The system is a bit cumbersome, but I’ve used it for so long I know how to work through its problems.

Then last week, I had an idea for a new system.  And I probably spent several hours setting this new system up.  The over simplified explanation, is that I went from each row representing a week, to each row representing a day.  And with some functions I just learned how to use, it should be easier for me to see what I still need to do to keep to my schedule. 

And if you’re wondering what does all that have to do with writing, as I said, I spent several hours preparing the system for the next two months.  I’ll see how it works, and if there are any little improvements I can make before spending a few more hours setting it up for the rest of the year.  But at several points while working on this, I thought to myself, I could be using this time writing a story.  Will this new system make me more productive with my scheduling resulting in more people finding me and learning about my books?  Probably not.  I did have a system, a clunky system I admit, but I knew how to work through the clunks.  But I wasn’t just cleaning the house, or whatever because I didn’t want to write, I was setting up a new system that was “writing related” which, is close enough.

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Image from Pixabay.

Writing business cards

Recently, I was doing some cleaning and I came across some business cards I made years ago.

I think, in some office supply store, I found a pack of blank business cards.  Each sheet had like ten cards you could separate, and the pack had four or five sheets.  On the pack there was a note about how it worked with some template in Word.  You filled out the template, then put the sheet in your printer, and you could even print on both sides.  And then you had business cards.

Part of why I wanted business cards was because there were businesses that had containers on the counter with signs like, “Put your business card in and we’ll draw one each week for a free pizza.” I wanted business cards to get free pizza (I never won any such drawing) but I also figured if the business card was interesting enough, it might get people to check my stuff out and maybe buy one of my books.  I could also leave them in places where people could find them and be intrigued.

So I needed something interesting to put on a business card.  I don’t remember if I came up with “Professional dreamer and destroyer of worlds” before I started making my business cards, but I figured it was perfect to be noticeable.  To explain, I think writers are professional dreamers.  We dream of something and, if we’re lucky, we get paid for it.  As to the destroyer of worlds, well, not to brag but with my bare hands I’ve driven humanity to extinction, twice.  At least twice.  More like four or five times, but some of those stories start with humanity extinct, so should they count?

Anyway, these cards are no longer good.  On the back I had my website and my writing email, which are still good, but I also had a writing blog I haven’t posted to for over a decade as well as my writing Twitter, which I don’t do anymore.  Should I make new ones?  I don’t know if I have any more blank sheets, and I don’t have a printer.  Plus, where I used to live there were dozens of pizza places within half-an-hour.  Where I live now, there’s … one.  Also, do places still do business card drawings?  I don’t go out much, but business cards seem more for businesses so customers can know their website and email, and not for people.  Of course, I could be wrong.  But I still don’t see much point for making new cards, even if all I’d need to do is update the back.

Writing so bad … it’s good?

I watch a bunch of YouTube movie reviewers. One topic that many of them discuss at some point are movies so bad they’re good. As they explain, the difference between bad-bad movies and good-bad movies is intention. The word that often comes up when discussing bad-bad movies is “cynical,” while the word for good-bad movies is often “inept.” Bad-bad movies are made by people saying, “X is popular, let’s slap together an X-movie as quickly and cheaply as possible so we can make money off suckers who’ll pay to see it.” Good-bad movies are made by people with a passion for the project, they just have no clue how to make a movie. The reviewers I watch – most of whom make their own films – get nothing from watching the bad-bad movies. They’re usually stupid and they see all the seams on how it was put together as quickly and as cheaply as possible. But the good-bad movies – which may be just as stupid – they are intrigued by the nuts and bolts. They often talk about staring at the screen repeatedly asking “Why?” Why did the filmmaker decide to film the romantic scene on the side of the road with trucks rumbling past? Why did they cut to Joe during the climactic battle for no apparent reason? And other such questions that even the filmmaker probably can’t answer. And as someone who has barely scratched the surface of bad movies, I can see the appeal. Of course, it may just be that the reviewers I watch look like they’re having a good time.

Now the point of this post, is that as a writer I was wondering if there are stories so bad that they’re good. And I … don’t know. I’ve read my fair share of bad stories, some inept and some cynical, but to me they’re usually just painful. For example, there was a story I read years ago that was serialized in a big-name magazine. In the first few sections, there were hints that this character had a secret plan to save the world. But once the plan was revealed, not only would it not work, it would make things worse. I admit, it took me a few seconds to work that out, but only because I didn’t think anyone could write something so stupid. I don’t want to shame the writer, or the magazine, but trust me, it was fifty pages on a secret plan to save the world only to get to “burn all the forests.” I don’t remember my exact response, but it was probably close to “Are you fucking serious?”

Having spent way too long thinking about this (this is the fourth or fifth draft) I think the difference between bad movies and bad stories is that there are limitations in filmmaking. The script says this scene takes place in a lawyer’s office, but we only have the budget to shoot in grandpa’s study. Law degrees and bowling trophies, same difference. And I can see how figuring out how the filmmakers worked through the problems they faced can be entertaining. But in theory, there are no limitations when writing. So when you write this prestigious law office filled with bowling trophies, it just seems wrong. I’m not saying there’s a definitive right and wrong way to write a story, but sometimes it’s just wrong. And that’s not entertaining, that’s confusing.

Anyway, am I wrong and there are good-bad stories? Maybe we can start a list.

Voter registration drive and book sale

I know a lot of people are tired of being told that every election for the past decade WILL DETERMINE THE VERY SURVIVAL OF THE NATION!  But it’s true.  The fastest way for the anti-democratic forces to fully seize power is if We The People can’t be bothered to vote.  And the anti-democratic forces already have too much power as it is.  To keep our democracy, we need to vote, in this election and every election.

But in order to vote, you need to be registered.  If you’re an American citizen who will be eighteen by Election Day, November 5th of this year, and you are not registered, I ask you to register.  Your state’s website should have all the necessary details.  And if you are registered to vote, I ask you to check your registration, which you should also be able to do on your state’s website.  The reason to check your registration is that the list of voters needs constant updating as people register, move, and die.  And even without nefarious voter purges, it’s possible for mistakes to happen.  If a mistake is caught early, it can be fixed early, and things can go a lot smoother for everyone come Election Day. 

Democracy only works if the people participate and the first step of participation is to take a few minutes and register to vote.  To help sweeten the pot, starting Monday, February 26th, I’ll be having a book sale for four of my ebooks.  Register, or check your registration, then grab some free books.  Well, there’s no way for me to check if you register, so we’ll just go on the honor system.  And if you aren’t an American citizen, then I’ll just ask that you participate in your country’s political system however you can, because the anti-democratic forces are not limited to the US.

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The following four ebooks will be free to download from Monday February 26th, through Friday March 1st.  I hope you enjoy, and I hope you’ll vote in the next election.

 

Political Pies

Everybody complains about politics, but does anyone do anything about it? My attempt to do something about it is to collect forty of my short stories with a political element into my Political Pies anthology. The stories are either politically neutral or equally condemning of the national parties. Instead of trying to sway you to one ideology or another, my goal is to just get people thinking about politics in the hopes a rose might grow out of all the political manure.

The Most Powerful Man in the World and other stories

The Most Powerful Man in the World and other stories is a collection of five, short, scifi stories to provide a sample of my writing.

A being from the distant future with almost unlimited powers comes back to help Ian Steele make the world a better place in “The Most Powerful Man in the World.” One bookstore customer has an entirely different reason for wanting books in “Black Market Books.” “Motherhood” tells the story of Thomas Gillespie, the surrogate mother for a baby AI. “Storyteller” is about an author thinking his book into existence. And “Deadworld” is about the alien world humans are reborn on – in alien bodies – after we die.

A Man of Few Words

A Man of Few Words is a collection of fifty of my flash fiction stories. What would really happen if a “T-Rex on steroids” attacked a city? Why do science fiction writers make the best lovers? How does a company get to Second Base with VIPs? I explore these questions and more using less than 1,000 words and in various genres from humor to horror and general fiction to science fiction.

An Ounce of Prevention

Like most people, Jason Fisher wanted to make the world a better place, but he doubted he would ever have the chance to make much of a mark. Then a “woman” came to him, asking his help to save humanity by threatening it.

Random Writing Tips – Prewrite your bio

 

I recently did something for the first time in a couple of years: I submitted a story.  As of the posting of this, I’m still waiting to hear back.  But the submission process brought back the scourge of many writers: the cover letter.  I don’t care for cover letters.  I prefer sites that just have a form you fill out with your name, story title, word count, etc. and they either take your story or they don’t, and that’s it.  For me, cover letters are like the About Me section on dating sites.  How do I make myself sound interesting without outright lying, and the feeling that no matter what I do, it’s wrong. 

Fortunately, the place I submitted to only wanted a brief bio, which, couldn’t that wait until after they buy a story?  Anyway, some years ago I wrote a couple brief bios so I could pick the best one for the situation.  Which is great, except I couldn’t remember which folder I put them in, so I had to rewrite a bio. 

So my tip is to prewrite a couple bios which you can just copy and paste into cover letters, maybe with some slight adjustments, and to keep them in a place you will remember.

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Image from Pixabay.

Novels in a few sentences

I recently went through some posts on an old blog of mine, and I came across this little gem.  Years earlier, I had heard that a good exercise for creating pitches was to describe your novel in three sentences.  So I tried it with two of my ideas.  For my novel, Damocles, I came up with the following:

Most people go through their day-to-day lives worrying about “important” things: career, money, marriage.  But what if one morning everyone wakes up to learn that in four days there will be destruction on an unprecedented scale killing tens of millions and there is nothing we can do to stop it.  What becomes important then?

But for my novel None of Them Knew the Color of the Sky, I managed one sentence:

Will a treasure from the past be enough to unite the survivors of a nuclear war; or, are arrogance, mistrust, and hatred too akin to cockroaches?

That’s a great exercise, and all, but some ten years after I first posted these, I still only have notes for Damocles, and None of Them Knew the Color of the Sky is still just half-finished.  So I think I’ll try to finish some novels before coming up with pitches for them.

To scheme, or to write?

I spent a decade or so sloooowly building up a miniscule following on Twitter.  Now, Twitter had issues before Musk bought it, but he didn’t fix the issues I had with it, and he made more.  So I left Twitter for Mastodon.  Is it better?  Well, probably everyone I’ve interacted with on Mastodon Musk would claim is “woke,” so yeah.

The main way I used Twitter, is I had two accounts, one for writing and one for everything else.  But I would post about my ebooks every day, alternating accounts.  The way I worked it, is in one month one account would post only about The Most Powerful Man in the World and other stories, while the other would only post about The Future is Coming, so I could see which account I got more sales from.  Of course, in all likelihood, the only sale I’d have that month would be for Duty, and I’d have no idea how that person found it.

Even with my “audience” on Twitter, my sales weren’t that great.  And then I started over from scratch on Mastodon.  But I didn’t want to just redo what I did on Twitter, where constantly trying to sell your books was … normal.  So on Mastodon I’m trying to just be an interesting person, who only occasionally mentions their books, so maybe someone will be curious enough to check them out.  But that’s a lot of goddamn work, especially for someone as introverted as me.

This has led to a bit of a conundrum: do I spend my time writing new books in the hope that people will somehow find out about them, or do I spend my time scheming ways to sell the books I already have?  Ideally, I’d do both, but as is, I already need an extra day or two a week just to catch up with all the other non-writing stuff I need to do.  Of course, this has led me to thinking of greater and greater schemes trying to come up with a simple act that would have a measurable impact on my book sales.  And while such thoughts did lead to this blog post and my short story “Scheming,” all the time spent on them is less time spent talking to readers or writing.

I know that’s not a very satisfactory way to end a blog, but I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place with no clear direction forward.  If I ever find an answer, I’ll do another blog post.  Don’t hold your breath.

Free story idea – Star Jumping

I have a lot of ideas for stories.  Like, if I wrote a novel’s worth of them every month, I’d still most likely die before getting through them all.  I will admit that some of the ideas probably suck, but I think there are some that a good writer could make something of them.  I’ll just never get a chance to.  So, I give them to the world.  If you can make something of these, go right ahead.  And if these are the ideas I’m giving away, maybe check out the ones I keep.

Here in the real world, you can’t accelerate a mass up to the speed of light.  The closer you get to the speed of light, the more energy you need, and it quickly becomes outrageous.  Thanks Einstein.  But what if you could … negate the mass, or cover it up somehow?  That’s a key element in this story.  I don’t know exactly how it would work – you would need to come up with the basics at least for this made-up physics – but the idea is you build a ship with some device that creates a bubble, or field around the ship.  This makes the ship nearly massless for the tiniest split of a second.  During this time, you fire a laser pulse at the ship.  Now, one of the whacky bits of Relativity is that time – to an outside observer – runs “slow” for things moving near light speed.  So this ship – while nearly massless – when hit by the laser pulse, would fly off at near light speed.  The tiniest split second later, as viewed by the ship, the bubble or whatever would collapse and the ship would regain its mass and screech to a halt.  Hopefully slow enough so that the passenger isn’t smeared into a red paste along the backwall.  To the passenger, it would seem they traveled lightyears in less than a second.  But to an observer back at the laser, years may have passed.  The laser would fire, then eight years later you’d get the message from the ship that they traveled four light years: four years for the outward journey and four years for the message to come back.  I’m sure physics people are banging their heads wanting to explain why all of that is wrong.  As if warp drives and lightspeed engines make any sense.

Anyway, this story follows a star jump test program.  The first issue is how long do you set this bubble or whatever to exist, and how do you fire the laser pulse at the right time.  So basically, you build a robotic probe, call it Interstellar A, and it turns on the bubble, you fire the laser, and two years later you get the message that it traveled one lightyear.  So you do a few more test runs with probes Interstellar B through F to fine tune things, over a couple decades. 

But now they’re ready to send the first human to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri.  The plan is once the Interstellar G mission – with an astronaut and the human-level AI that runs the ship – arrive at Proxima Centauri, they’ll set up a robotic miner on some asteroid.  Over a year or so, it will mine needed materials to build a laser system.  It will also mine materials to build a shield for the craft because space is only nearly empty.  Hitting a dust grain while traveling near the speed of light would cause some damage, so the shield the craft had when it left Earth is very damaged and needs to be replaced.

While all that is happening, the astronaut will explore the system.  The ship isn’t designed to land, so it can only orbit any planet and drop probes.  Some of these probes will return with samples, either just rock samples or maybe some lifeforms, if there are any.  Once the laser is built, the plan is for the astronaut to use it to come back to our solar system with their samples.

I image the story will be beautiful descriptions of alien planets along with long conversations between the human and the AI on the meaning of life, and exploration, and whatever to pass the time.  Along the way, the human will point out that they really don’t want to go back to Earth, they’d much rather keep exploring.  I forget who it was, but I read years ago there was some American pioneer who if they could see smoke from somebody’s cabin, it meant they were too close to civilization and they had to move further west.  This astronaut – with their AI companion – would rather just keep exploring further and further out into the galaxy. 

Fortunately, Interstellar F finally shows up.  While this probe was launched sooner, it wasn’t fine-tuned enough and so only made it 99.9999% of the way to Proxima Centauri.  But, it then fired up its engine and over however many years finally inched its way to the system.  So they load Interstellar F up with the samples, give it a new shield, and fire it back to Earth.  They then build another shield for Interstellar G, and fire it off to the next nearest star system.  They don’t use it to go to the main Alpha Centauri system, because there’s probably already a mission on its way there.  Not to mention, Proxima Centauri will probably soon be crawling with scientists who will also take the short jump to Alpha Centauri.  And our main characters would rather be elsewhere.

They don’t plan to disappear.  At each new star system, they’ll mine resources to build a new laser system to move on, but which later explorers can also use.  They also stockpile samples, and materials for shields.  They also write detailed reports on all they find and beam them back to Earth, and the other star systems they’ve been to, and explain where they are going next. 

But that’s their plan at the end of the story.  As I said, I expect the main focus of the book would be these long discussions about what it means to be a pioneer.  Which, I would find interesting, but I doubt I could write.  So hopefully, someone else will.

Random Writing Tips – Am I just writing gibberish?

 

There is a project I’d like to finish in the next few months.  The idea of the project isn’t that difficult, it’s some essays on a subject I have a great interest in.  So I don’t have to deal with foreshadowing, or coming up with interesting characters, or any of the complexities of fiction writing.  I just have to coherently describe my thoughts on this subject.

Of course, since I first started this project, I’ve shifted the focus three or four times.  That’s not a bad thing, since it was rather unfocused to begin with, but I have now figured out a framework for it.  But that means writing, and reading, and rewriting, and rereading, and rerewriting, and rerereading, etc., the same paragraphs over and over again.  Each paragraph is fine, but with each refocus I need to massage them to fit the new framework. 

So one night, I’m tired, and I’m reading this paragraph for the twentieth time trying to make sure it fits, and it felt like it wasn’t even written in English.  Just words mixed together like some kind of vocabulary stew.  That was an obvious sign to take a break.  I went back to it a few days later, and while there was a bit of clunkiness, it’s nothing a good polish wouldn’t fix. 

And I wondered how many tired, overworked writers saw the “gibberish” on the page and gave up, thinking they weren’t “real” writers?

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Image from Pixabay.

My writing goals for 2024

 

Four or five months ago, in an attempt to get my act together, I set deadlines to finish five of my projects.  Three of those deadlines are this year.  I want to publish Collection X, my tenth short story collection, a collection of essays on building a lunar base, which I’m still hammering a title out for, and Rediscovery, a novella I started years ago about a writer rediscovering the world and her novels after she lost her memory in a terrorist attack.  Altogether, I’m probably about 50% done on all of them, I just have to actually finish the other 50%. 

Great idea.  Will I actually meet these deadlines?  I guess only time will tell.

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Each Election Year, I’ve reread my old ebooks to update them or fix any typos that have managed to survive all these years.  I still plan to do that this year, I just think that for my first ten or so ebooks – which I’ve already done this to two or three times – it will be the last time.  I’ll still update the front matter to include new ebooks, but I think I’ll stop doing these four-year updates.  They take a lot of time, time I need to be writing new stuff if I’m to meet any of my deadlines.

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Last year, I started my Monthly Stories, where I posted a story on my website each month.  In 2024, I plan to continue that.  I also plan to start posting a story each month on my Ko-fi account, largely because I’m not sure what else to do there.  The Monthly Stories are stories I come up with and write that month, while for Ko-fi I’ll repost stories, or write some and hold on to them for a few months. 

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I guess the last goal I have for this year is to submit some stories to magazines or websites.  There is one site I know I want to submit to, and I’d like to submit to at least two other places.  We’ll see.

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Well, to meet all of these goals, I need to get writing.  Wish me luck.

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Image from Pixabay.

This hurt my brain

 

Maybe the sea was too rough.