I managed to take another pass at two different short stories over the course of the week last week, and have completely nullified my last post’s claim of order and structure during my periods of short story output. Neither of these two stories, finished and submitted, fall into the mold of The Great Wide World Gone Dark.

Partum is a miserable pile of masculinity, written from the point-of-view of a man who conceived a child with his wife, with whom he then made a joint decision to let the child gestate in an artificial chamber at the hospital so that both parents could continue their careers and lives. You’ve read stories about mothers dying in childbirth, right? Partum is about what might happen if the mother died before childbirth. Long before.

Incidentally, Lis and I are trying to conceive.

Stilts is a story about horror stories, and it had two primary inspirations. One: I think horror is unfairly maligned as a genre lacking strong emotional resonance. Not primal resonance, but emotional. Two: I have learned, too many times, that I have unintentionally hurt someone — even in the smallest fashion — by including a part of their life or experience in my story and perverting it just this side of beyond recognition. So, Stilts is about a writer who perverts the lives around him into wicked stories, and about the people who are capable of recognizing that the soul of such horror is essentially romance.

Hopefully, they’ll both find a home before too long and then they’ll wind up posted here.

I’m kind of sad that I ran out of worthwhile, published work to post here. It has been awhile since I finished anything that felt publishable, but I recently sent out a couple of short stories to higher tier magazines, and am waiting on a response, now. 

There are three big writing projects occupying my interest at various times, right now:

1) CHUD.com. I love this place. I love how it has evolved over the past few years. I’m really happy that I have the time to contribute again. According to my DEVONthink database, I’ve done 21 DVD reviews since I started in early April. Criticism isn’t my best skill, but it’s a fun one to exercise. 

2) Fingerless. This is a novel without any trace of the speculative or fantastic, which, now that I think about it, is a natural sort of extension of my development as a writer. Fingerless is about a character I’ve had in mind for several years, now, so it’s unlike anything else I’ve ever attempted. I’m not sure if the things I’m putting in this character’s mouth are worth sharing, yet, but I’m trying to invest her with enough distinct experiences to make her at least interesting to read. Currently, I’m getting a couple thousand words done each week, sneaking off to a coffee shop with my laptop on Saturday and Sunday in the morning after my graveyard shift wife goes to sleep.

3) The stories of The Great Wide World Gone Dark. My short story output can be roughly divided into periods, based on the length of time and associated change of manner and voice in between spurts of creativity. The recent stories, the ones out to editors right now, have all be linked by being moody fantasies in which some element of the unreal challenges a character with solitude in some way, either imposing it or removing it. When this topic stops fascinating me, there will probably be another break for a while, and then I’ll get another raft of short stories with a different feel. I categorize these ones by the first story I wrote in this mode: The Great Wide World Gone Dark, which hasn’t been published yet.

So far, the stories I have finished under this heading are: The One-Way Cave, The Kid’s All Out of Time, The Parting of the Sea, and The Great Wide World Gone Dark. There are at least three more sketched out. 

And that’s what occupies my creative time, these days.

I have posted the first block of stories. In the past couple of years, when my productivity has lessened, MungBeing has been the primary outlet for my creativity. It’s a terrific zine, and I encourage everyone to visit it. The stories are below as regular posts, but I’m making them more easily accessible — and with brief summaries — on the stories page in the menu above. 

More will be coming! I’ve got at least another dozen published shorts that don’t make me cringe when I look back on them.

Formatting stories so that all the (good) fiction I’ve written will be easily accessible in this one location. Poked around with a lot of free content management software, but came back to Wordpress. 

It is December. There is no snow on the ground. I’m shirking laundry duties.