A few random thoughts...

(I still have them.)

I started writing this page knowing that I’d have the time to devote to it. I mean, I’m still not working, so I guess I still have the time, but that’s neither here nor there because that’s not going to last, is it? I’m not working because there was that issue at work that we won’t be getting into right now. Basically, I started this page because I couldn’t get magazines to publish my stories. They were just too long. Also, since I wasn’t getting published—except on the once-in-a-blue-moon sites that published but didn’t pay—I thought I’d take things into my own hands and see what I could do with it. I came into this with the idea that if you have a good story, people will read it.

But you have to have a good story.

Ah, there’s the rub, as the old Bard says, because I haven’t written a story this year. Oh sure, I worked on JACK OF DIAMONDS and was putting it up on another platform, VOCAL.MEDIA, but (and I’ve said this before) VOCAL was too restricting. So I left. I didn’t leave because I was pissed, I left because someone sent me an email with a link to this site. I looked at his story, and then I looked around the site and thought: This is what I’ve been looking for all along. I could break my stories into sections of 2000-2500 words—sometimes longer—and put them up once a week. It was a no-brainer, as they say.

The first story I put up was THE AFRICAN SONGBOOK. It’s a story about the Mau Mau in Kenya, set sometime during the 50s. A tragic love story, (in 5 acts), I put it up on my PAID page because I didn’t know what I was doing when I did it. (I’ve since fixed that.) The only story that’s going on my PAID page is JACK OF DIAMONDS. I offer readers a chance to help edit it, and even help with the plot, but I don’t expect a lot of people will want to buy into it, and I don’t mind that. JACK OF DIAMONDS will be going up for a long time. I have 70-something chapters already written. I have other stories I can put up on the FREE page.

The problem with that is that I haven’t written a single short (okay, long) story this year. I don’t know if that’s because something’s holding me back mentally, or I’m just lazy. I don’t know. But I started a new story this week. I don’t know how long it will be, or how long it will take me to write it. I’m hoping I’ll finish it next month. Right now, I don’t even have a thousand words. I have a title. That’s actually what prompted me to write it in the first place. MY FATHER’S CHINESE WHORE. An interesting title, I thought. I don’t know if I’ll stick with it, but for right now, I’m good with it.

I don’t write my stories with any thoughts toward political correctness, or this new WOKE shit. I don’t pay attention to those things too much when I write, because I usually base my stories in a time when there was none of that. I mean, I understand political correctness. I used to think of it as a form of censorship, but I’ve since changed my stance on that. Now, I look at it as society’s way of being polite. But I work in a sawmill, and there’s not a lot of politeness there.

When you’re writing a story that takes place in the past—say in the 50s, or the 60s—you tell yourself that you have to use the slang of that time. If a story takes place in the Deep South, you’re going to use words that are considered offensive by today’s standards. But what are today’s standards? There’s a new movement afoot that’s called “presentism.” With Presentism, people are looking at the past and judging what happened then with today’s mindset : an attitude toward the past dominated by present-day attitudes and experiences, according to Webster’s. So, they feel that writing shouldn’t reflect what the age was like, but what we think it should have been like, according to today’s standards. So, if I write a story about the Deep South during the Civil Rights Movement, then I shouldn’t mention that the Police used water cannons against the protestors? Well, that wouldn’t be right, would it? I mean, I watched it on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Just like I did the Viet Nam War. I mean, I saw a man get shot in the head. I watched a Buddhist monk douse himself in gasoline in the middle of the street as a form of protest. I don’t know what he was protesting because I was too young to understand, but I never forgot it. And now, Presentism wants me to what, not mention it? Pretend it didn’t happen? How does that show today’s world what the world was like back then?How does that honour the memory of the Buddhist monk?

But that’s the shit I write; that’s what interests me. I don’t write for a specific demographic (although I have to say the demographic that follows me tends to be female, and close to my age—60’ish). But being 60…ish, I guess you could say I’ve lived through a lot of interesting things. JFK; RFK; MLK; the moon landing; a shit-load of things. Am I supposed to, or am I expected to, write a different history than the one I lived through?

So, MY FATHER’S CHINESE WHORE might sound like a degrading title. But is it? What word, exactly, is degrading? The word Chinese? Or is it Whore? That’s sort of judging a book by it’s cover, don’t you think? I might have called it, Italian whore, or French whore. But it takes place in Italy, as told through the eyes of a child, in hindsight, after he’s lived through it. The fact that the title came to me while I was driving, thinking that I had to come up with a story because I was eventually going to run out of things to post, leads me to believe that it’s meant to be. Serendipitous, I guess you’d call that; at least I do. Titles are a hard thing to come up with: THE BASHFUL COURTESAN; THE AFRICAN SONGBOOK: A Tragedy In Five Acts; IN DAYS OF VAST DARING. These are titles that just happened. The Courtesan story was originally going to be THE ICONOCLAST. That was its working title. And then I had to come up with a name for the painting the dwarf was working on, and it all just seemed to fall into place. Of course, the fact that it’s a story involving a dwarf is in itself politically incorrect, but they didn’t call them Little People back then, did they? Was I supposed to call him a Little Person in order not to offend the sensitivity of my readers?

I will always write politically incorrect stories that offend the Woke Culture and go against Presentism because what I write is more or less a mirror of the times. I suppose there’s only one thing you can say about writing in this day and age, and that is, if you don’t want to read something that offends you, turn the page.