A sad little personal note about the #election, and my #writing. Trivial in the grand scheme of things, but I want to get it off my chest.
For close to a decade now I've been complaining about the #WINMP (work in not much progress) and as those who follow my illustrious career know, recently I managed to turn it into the #WISP (work in some progress). What's more, it's published, at least in embryonic form. I feel really good about that.
There were a lot of reasons it took me so long. One is that after thinking about it for several years, I finally wrote the first draft in 2016, finishing it a couple of months before that year's election.
Well, that draft got two kind initial reviews and one ... much less kind, from someone in whose writing judgement, and judgement in general, I put a great deal of trust. That knocked me off my feet for a while. But I wasn't going to give up. The story wanted to be told.
And then—November happened.
You see, the story as it was depended on a functioning #US #government. Not necessarily one with everyone's best interests at heart, and I planned some pretty nasty events down the road. But competent, and ideally not run by someone composed *entirely* of equal parts malice, ego, and stupidity.
I spent a good part of the next four years thinking about ways around this. Throwaway dialogue: "Nobody in #Washington really knows what we're doing here." "Not even the #President?" "*Especially* not the President." But I wasn't actually writing it.
The election of 2020 made that kind of workaround unnecessary—permanently, I thought—and I breathed a sigh of relief. Easier to do when you're not choking to death on your own liquefying lung tissue ... I'll get back to it any day now, I told myself.
Come early 2024, and a friend responded to one of my WINMPy posts with an offer. Sounds like your story would fit into my anthology series, he said. Here are the deadlines. Send me a manuscript.
I hadn't been that motivated since I first started writing the thing.
I did the thing. The thing was done. First in a fairly lengthy list of planned stories, eventually to be collected in a novel-length compilation. Over twenty years after my last publication, I was a *writer* again.
And then—November happened. Again. Motherfucker's like Freddy Krueger without any of the wit and charm.
So here I am. Again.
WISP though it may be, the story will not be denied. Long and long it slumbered. Lying undisturbed in the strata, one might say, bits of once-living tissue being replaced one by one with bits of mineral. Then entire bytes, and eights of bytes, and sixty-fours, and soon the whole thing was kilobytes of stone.
Then resurrection.
Surrounding matrix carefully chipped off, the skeleton revealed in painstaking steps. Shreds of preserved soft tissue softening under drops of saline. Bones glistening again with life. New flesh merging with old, growing outward from the bone. Muscles, organs, blood. Skin, and at last feathers—
—I mean, you didn't expect anything else, did you?
This is my monster, and it's *hungry*.
But I sure do wish I didn't have to jump through so many hoops to feed it. That's all.
https://www.amazon.com/SF-Horror-Boundary-Shock-Quarterly/dp/B0DJD9JDLP/
