Back on the Blog Again

Back on the Blog Again

The iTune player has found “Realize’ by Menthol James. That is some deep digging by the iTunes player but not much of a prompt to start a blog. This is two weeks in a row that iTunes has let me down.

Not so much. FLASH!  I’m a Writing Flashy.

I had my first attempt at writing flash fiction returned. Why? Well they didn’t say. I have several theories but I could never prove any of them.

1. What is flash fiction?

Maybe I don’t know. Or I do know and I also know that what I sent in was not. Flash fiction has a beginning, middle, and end. It does this in 1,000 words or less. My story had a beginning and middle, but did it really end? Well, sort of, but there was a carry-on-to-tomorrow aspect which was unresolved. Perhaps if someone had entered to kill one of the main characters then it would have definitely had an ending.

2. Genre Please.

On order to remain employed editors need to please their readers and their readers demand: science fiction, humor, horror, satire, or romance, but probably not much in-between.  Don’t give me any damn romance when all I wanted was to have the bejeezus scared out of me.

My story it was part fantasy, part horror, part ghost story, with what I hope was a touch of humor. I other words it clearly fit in the … genre. Mr. Editor, I feel your pain.

3. Too Sophisticated for the Intended Publication.

Yeah, that’s likely. But please, allow me to tell myself this while I cry in my beer.

(The iTunes player rises to the occasion to mock me as it plays George Harrison’s ‘That’s the Way it Goes’.)

What’s Next?

Chuck it all in? Learn to write like Dave Barry OR Stephen King but not both? (The world already has a Christopher Moore.)

Well, “THE’ story is actually pretty good. If not good, at least it has been edited well, most of my sometimes excessive comma splices having been removed. I would read it to my son. I wrote it for him many years ago.

So, I’ll find a home for it – somewhere. There are places that accept literary pieces; there are places that publish crap. Someplace there is a place where this story belongs. And on that note, with Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’ playing in the background – blog out!

Back on the Blog

Back on the Blog

The tune playing as the blog begins: The Beatles, a bootleg of a live performance, ‘I Want to be Your Man’. Well, that’s a tough one to use as a jump off, or a prompt, or whatever the term du jour may be.

FLASH!  I’m a Writing Flashy.

What is flash fiction? It’s a novel for those of us wanting instant gratification. It’s for those times when Cliff Notes are too much.

As luck would have it I happened to have a story collecting dust that seemed almost a perfect for the format. The format is, basically, to fit a complete story with a beginning, middle and end into 500 to 1,000 words, or 300 to 1,000 words, depending on whose definition you’re trusting.

It turns out that writing flash fiction can be a great exercise, especially for a master of the superfluous. Limiting oneself to essential words results in cleaner writing. All those words intended to add color – gone! (They probably didn’t work anyway.)

Story ready, off it goes. Will it be accepted? I don’t know, but just in case I am making plans for the $60.

Clever, eh?

At one time I intended that this blog would tackle serious subjects: religion and politics. Reletics, get it? Anyway I’m going return to take a turn in that serious direction for a moment. All while ‘You Brought the Sunshine Inside’ by Jude Bowerman plays in the background.

Shortly after it started appearing on Facebook I started following the Clive Bundy ranch fiasco. It was supposed to be an assault on our basic rights but I wasn't getting it.. So I read and then read some more, but I still didn’t get it. How was one rancher’s sense of entitlement to freely use land that was not his, endangering our rights? He said he didn’t recognize the Federal Government but would willingly pay the state authorities anything they asked. That doesn't make sense. We can’t legitimately decide not to pay people we owe but to pay some uninvolved party instead. Bundy had been making his usage payments until around 1993, so what changed? His claims to have been farming the land since the 19^th century don’t appear to be valid. Land records indicate his family purchased their land in the late ‘40’s, and probably didn't start farming (or ranching?) until the mid ‘50s. It doesn’t appear that they ever owned the land in dispute.

So, without hyperbole about the armed thugs of BLM – Since, even if they do exist they didn’t show up on the scene for 20 years – what’s the story?

The Final Tune for the Evening.

Once more I depend upon the iTunes random selection to close out the evening. Tonight it’s “March of the Meanies” from The Beatles, Yellow Submarine soundtrack. For a moment I was thinking that I might have to re-think this iTunes strategy, but I actually like this.