{"id":27770,"date":"2021-02-25T10:21:40","date_gmt":"2021-02-25T16:21:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=27770"},"modified":"2021-02-25T10:21:40","modified_gmt":"2021-02-25T16:21:40","slug":"so-i-wrote-a-short-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2021\/02\/25\/so-i-wrote-a-short-story\/","title":{"rendered":"So I Wrote A Short Story…."},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, alright, alright, alright, I wrote a draft<\/em> of a short story. Based on something my oldest said when he came into my office, “Imagine a soldier deployed gets a call that his spouse has died,” which I turned into a military sci-fi story, sort of. It’s kind of funny–I don’t read<\/em> a lot in the genre of military sci-fi. Well, not counting The Hero<\/em><\/a> (2016), Halo: First Strike<\/em><\/a> (2011), Robotech Genesis\/Battle Cry\/Homecoming<\/a><\/em> (2016), Titan AE<\/a><\/em> (2020)…. Okay, I read some, and I read a lot of men’s adventure novels with a military bent. So of course I mash them up. My next novel is likely to be a military sci-fi book–I already have a first chapter, almost, I think, and the rudiments of an outline in my mind.<\/p>\n

You know, I have written, what, five poems since November 2019<\/a> (and recently got my first rejection for them from a publication!). I hadn’t written a poem in years, either, but I finally finished off the one that’s incomplete on the cover of Coffee House Memories<\/a><\/em> and then had some late night ideas for others, and I took to laundromats and coffee houses to scratch them out.<\/p>\n

I have a new technique for writing poetry–maybe it’s the same as my old technique–it’s been so long that I might not remember, but judging by my old notebooks, this is a new technique: I write the opening lines and subsequent lines over and over again. When I get to a spot where I’ve stalled on progress, I re-write the poem from top to bottom. I make some minor changes, but then, hopefully, I surge onto the next lines until I am finished (which, granted, is sometimes weeks or months later–whenever I get back to the coffee shop).<\/p>\n

This, of course, is no way to write fiction, either long or short.<\/p>\n

When I was younger–college or thereabouts–I could sit down and pretty much plow through a draft of a short story with no problem. Of course, in those days, I was often writing short stories when I should have been writing papers for school. But I wrote them pretty much straight through with confidence that they would come out okay and that people would want to read what I wrote.<\/p>\n

Well, fast forward a couple of decades. I managed to, over the course of a couple of years, write a novel that I thought was pretty good (John Donnelly’s Gold<\/em><\/a>–which I still think is pretty good). I could not get an agent nor a publisher for it–and aside from a couple of publications in the middle 1990s (“Reading Faces” in Show and Tell<\/em>–for which I got paid $5, brah–and “Small Bore Gun” in Artisan Journal<\/em> in 1997), all I got for my short story submissions were rejection slips (apparently, I have not yet done a feature on my collection of rejection slips, which fills a 3″ binder). So my confidence has been shaken.<\/p>\n

I mean, I have banged out some nonfiction articles about software testing, some in actual printed publications, but nonfiction is pretty linear when it comes to writing. Fiction is… different.<\/p>\n

I have a couple of short stories that I’ve started but never finished. One, called “Gunter Escapes”, is on its second decade of incompleteness by this point. Another, “The Understanding”, is only a couple of years old. And the military sci-fi novel, The Saviors from Mars Deep<\/em> (working title) is only a couple of years old. Surely not five (right?).<\/p>\n

On each of the incomplete fiction pieces, I’ve gotten to a certain point and have really gotten stuck. On some, I’m unsure what to add or what to take out. I would reflect on the paragraphs I’d written and get hung up on them to the point of immobility. It’s not like writing the poems, where I can rewrite the whole thing to build the momentum again. So I put it aside. I put a lot of things aside and for long blocs of time. Sometimes, it seems, decades.<\/p>\n

So with this last short story, I said damn the torpedoes<\/em> and vowed to bang out a complete draft even if some paragraphs were only sentences. A couple of times I got to that point where I would put it up and abandon it, but I stuck through and finished a draft. Even though I am pretty sure the last half of it reads more like an outline with a couple character names in it.<\/p>\n

But it’s done. Now I can revise<\/em> it to shuffle in some better prose, characterization, description, and whatnot.<\/p>\n

Except, I’m a little afraid to look at it right now.<\/p>\n

I have printed it out, and it’s on my desk and has been for a week now. I have not read it nor started in with the red pen.<\/p>\n

I should probably do so before it gets cast aside for a really long period. Maybe I’ll have my oldest read it first to see what he thinks of it. After all, it was his idea.<\/p>\n

I’m trying to find this an encouraging step to the return of my dream of being a Writer, but once the story is revised and done, will any publication accept it? Will anyone read it?<\/p>\n

Time will tell, but probably, no.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, alright, alright, alright, I wrote a draft of a short story. Based on something my oldest said when he came into my office, “Imagine a soldier deployed gets a call that his spouse has died,” which I turned into a military sci-fi story, sort of. It’s kind of funny–I don’t read a lot in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27770"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27775,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27770\/revisions\/27775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}