I supposed that this would be a good place to "drop-off" the brainchild that I have been working on since near the beginning of last year.
It started when my mother Fed-Ex-ed me a package containing two beautiful, leather-encased journals. One was black, the other red.
I took the red one for myself, and gave the other to my fiance, and I began to think about a collection of short stories. I have been obsessed with the idea since I heard of Sherwood Anderson's collection of short stories, "Winesburg Ohio", and I have been feeling a little anxious about completing a work of longer fiction, since I am such an amateur author.
I started with my writing in this notebook, I got an initial idea from some sort of a conversation that came up in my Ethics class. The idea itself sounded more Science Fiction than, well, horror, but as I wrote it, I began to feel the influence more of my favorite horror literature than my favorite science fiction. In a sense, I began to enjoy the "polish" and the sheen of the idea behind the story than the people themselves. I enjoyed focusing more on the symbolism and the dark underlying shadows in this first short that I wrote, and I enjoyed the experimental feeling that writing it gave me.
It was then that I began to feel a unifying theme that would begin to establish itself in my work. This loose collection that I wrote became about a lot of different things for me. A kind of sarcastic expression of innocence, a sort of experiment with old stories that I have always felt were always inside of me, a mirror on my obsession at the time (the urban legends and the scary short stories from the internet (especially creepypasta.com) that I was entrenched in at the time), a play on the structure of nightmares, and, what I can feel strongly, a personal expression of some of the underlying fears and phobias I have growing inside of me.
These stories have a frame story which I planned to "wrap" around this collection, like the covers of the journal itself. I think I can try to keep just that semi balance of order from the original text that I wrote, and the rest of the stories I am trying to find an order to that makes sense to me, on some level. Their order does not matter, at least, at this point I cannot see any importance that can be made of ordering them in a certain fashion.
I am crossing my fingers that someone could read these for me, someone who could help me understand what an outsider to my writing would think of it. I am a little apprehensive, as some people may understand, about uploading my work so freely on the internet. Do I care about this collection, even though I am not charging for it? Yes. It was my labor of love and paranoia, and it was how I practiced my crude craft for a long while. Like many other authors, I would be devastated if someone took my work as their own, and rest assured, I would fight if something ever tried to extricate my work from me. Copyright is on my side, and I keep everything I have ever written that regards this work. I have hard copies everywhere, and I have dated every short story in this collection.
That aside, how I will do this is to upload excerpts of what I have put on my computer from the hard copies, heavily edited, carefully proofread, and I will wish that someone - any one - takes positive interest in it, and that I can have the feedback I desire and need for my writing. By my estimates at the moment, I have somewhere around twelve - maybe thirteen - pieces that I wrote that I believed fit into the collection like a makeshift puzzle piece. They're all quite different from each other, there may be some that you have no liking of. I just hope that you enjoy at least a few, maybe even just one.
I'm going to have fun with this, and I hope you will, as well.
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