The great experiment is done. I spent all of 2024 not working on novels, but short stories. Some revising, but mostly composing. My goal was to produce one per week–52 new short stories to send to publications and editors to augment my CV. Did I do it?
Yes I did.
I made 52 new short stories… if you put your thumb on the scale, or smudge the bottom line, sure, it’s 52, it’s a 52-like number. Fifty-two-ish. My plan is to take the top half, the ones I think have the best chance of being sold, and submit them for critiques. Then revisions and submissions. I’m optimistic that this will add credence to my writing credits. It’s all for the query.
They mostly turned out to be fantasy, science fiction, and horror, with some humor in there. (If I wasn’t able to write what I wanted, I would never have completed this.) Nothing that’s literary, like I’ve been reading. And hey, at worst, I can compile them into a collection and self-publish them. That would earn me about six cents.
So after finishing this year, would I say the experiment was a success? Sure, I guess. “Mission accomplished” and all that.
But I wouldn’t do it again.
For one thing, it cost progress on my novels, but I knew that going in. For another, I think it was harder to write first draft after first draft than revise, rethink, and correct. Now that I’m working on novels again, the time goes much faster. But you can’t form a diamond without pressure. You can’t sharpen a blade without a grindstone.
But have I learned anything? Have I honed my craft? Am I any better a writer now? I think I might be.
But I will say it did nothing to turn my affection. I still dislike short stories. The form is just too small to get a good story going, a good yarn. There’s barely enough time to develop an A-to-B-to-C plot, let alone characterization, setting, or themes. I mean, you could certainly make an argument that those who master the short story are the true geniuses, because they can do in 5,000 that what it takes me 90,000 to do.
But I don’t think this is going to turn me into a short story writer. Even the name is stupid–“short story”. Ooh, I’m going to write a short story. A quaint little dinky thing. The stuff kids read when they’re learning how to read. A story that’s short. Like a dwarf or a Christmas elf.
I’m glad I don’t have to do this anymore. I mean, I do have revisions on the plate, I don’t know when I’ll do those–maybe between novels–but revisions are easy compared to composing. They take about half the time it does to create the first draft. There were so many times I came to the blank page with nothing. Feeling like everything I was producing was garbage. And when November came around, motivation really dropped off. And I feel like the only way I can keep going is just to give up and be selfish, think only about myself, because… well, that seems to be what everyone else is thinking now.
It just feels like there’s no point anymore. The bad guys won. Put a wrestler in charge of education? Sure. A TV doctor in charge of medicare? Why not. Anti-vaxxer leading the department of health and human services? Makes sense to me. Everything’s trash now. I can see the plaster on the ceiling falling down.
I was born in the eighties. I saw the rise of America in the last half of the 20th century. The birth of the Internet, advancements in technology, economic blossoms, LGBT acceptance, no wars, no Cold War anymore, video games get a third dimension, Y2K turned out to be nothing, classic sitcoms like Friends and Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Good times. But we’ve reached the top of the hill and now it’s only downhill. My kids are going to grow up with red skies and burned out buildings like Fallout: New Vegas.
And if America somehow isn’t taken over by Russians, if Trump doesn’t become dictator for life, it’ll be a miracle. I don’t know if this is going to tank this country, it might, but for damn sure, everything’s going to be going backwards for a while. Women’s rights, vaccines, immigration. Going to be an era of stopping things. Of taking things away, not giving. Not creating new things. Say goodbye to advances in health care, aging infrastructure, or fixing any little things. We’re going to be spending our taxes and time on deporting Mexicans, because that’s the most important issue. Spend the budget on a corner-cut border-long wall that will not work. And billionaires will be making the rules.
We could’ve learned from our mistakes, but nope. We looked at 2016 – 2020 and thought “Four more years of that, please!” Children were in cages, and we thought “this is fine” or at least “nothing we can do about this”. That’s our life now. Billionaires get to dictate what happens in our life now. They’re the rulers. They have all the money and money is power. And they have so much money they have absolute power. But nothing happens to them, no matter how many crimes they do. They have so much money they can put everything in perpetual delay. That’s just how money works. Al Capone once killed a guy at a golf course, then paid everyone around him $1800 ($30,000 today) to keep quiet. For us ants who have to budget their crumbs, that means the world to us. But to the billionaire’s, that’s nothing. That’s .00003% of their wealth. That’s magic. There’s no sacrifice in that.
Sure revoke the polio vaccine. No one gets polio anymore, so the vaccine must be useless. Thanks, Jenny McCarthy, for starting this whole thing. For planting that seed that vaccines are dangerous despite 100% of the scientific evidence saying the opposite. My kids always wanted to sleep in an iron lung. We just do what anyone tells us to. No need to think critically about anything. That’s too hard. I just want to be long to a cult. We don’t listen to the smartest person anymore, we listen to the loudest.
And it’s not like we can do anything about it. Protests don’t do shit. I marched in the March for Science. Nothing changed. I marched in the anti-gun protests after the Parkland High School Shootings. Nothing happened. Millions across America stood in the 2017 Women’s March. Nothing happened. In fact, worse happened. And with no justifiable reason other than “they wanted to”. But Luigi Mangione happened, and then the powerful people started to worry. Millions of people can’t make a difference, but one person with a gun can.
So what’s the point of making art anymore? You can’t even get it published in a good world. What am I supposed to do? “When things get tough, when life is hard, ‘make good art‘.” Except the guy who said that, one of my writing role models, turned out to be a sexual predator. Everyone I admire is a bad person now. J.K. Rowling actively fights against transgender people. Bill Cosby, a childhood hero, raped 30 women and he’s walking free because of a legal technicality. Yippee.
So what’s the point to following rules anymore? You can commit all sorts of crimes and get rewarded for it. What’s the point of helping people? They want a king. They want to be ruled. They want to not think. To be sheep. Everything I learned about critical thinking, research & analysis, useless. I’m tired of defending against grifts and misinformation. They want the grifts. They want the illusion that they have power, that they belong to something. Doesn’t matter if it’s a good something or bad something.
Sure, just become a consumer. Fuck everyone else, just get yours. I’m tired of pushing against the water, trying to keep my nose above it. Just do whatever you want. L.A. is consumed by fire and instead of helping, politicians are saying that they deserve to burn. Gulf of America? Sure. Canada’s the fifty-first state? You bet. Fuck it all. Let it burn. When America looks and acts like a crappy bombed-out Eastern European city like in Half-Life 2, I’ll say “isn’t this what you wanted?”
