I hate short stories. Tonight, instead of drawing I decided to scribble out something of a short story I've had bouncing around in my head for at least two weeks. It's another Karen Underwood story called Lil' Fuzzy and here's the intro....

Up on stage Karen was spinning her nipple tassels like Bruce Lee with a pair of nunchucks, knocking back and knocking down a pack of sex-starved Chinese business men who were in town visiting the convention center. It had something to do with finding cheap alternatives to manufacturing overseas by setting up factories in America's most destitute cities. For that they had us cinched here in Syracuse. However I'd need a better business analyst than myself to know if employing the local rabble at minimum wage would offset the rising cost of fuel. On the whole I hoped they did, if only so Karen could have more nights like tonight. Her garters were so packed with bills they looked like Christmas wreaths made of money, sweet dirty green money wrapped tightly around her naked thighs.

Yowsa! I like it! But it's got a problem. Nobody in their right mind would ever publish it. (Looking around my room) Not Glimmertrain, not Asimovs, not F&SF, not Playboy, certainly not Ploughshares or the New Yorker, Not even my current target market Wierd Tales. Irony upon irony WT has a new fiction editor, Ann Vandermeer, who lives right here in Tallahassee. Unfortunately I remember Ann from her critically acclaimed stint at the now defunct Silver Web, and so far as tastes go we might as well be worlds apart. She does high-brow literary goth. I do b-movie pulp. Which points to a larger problem I think I've been having with my literary career. I'm writing for an audience which no longer reads.

This doesn't pertain to the novel. The novel is doing well by the way. I ended up the last draft at 464 pages and am currently at page 50 in the tweak of it. The novel I see (or brilliantly dream of seeing) on the metal wire rack which sits at the front of every supermarket from coast to coast and then some (sweeeet luscious paper-back rights, like doughnuts for Homer).

But my mind - the infidel between my ears! - keeps churning out short story ideas as if this were 1927 with pulp fiction in full bloom, or even 1987 with Twilight Zone Magazine paying no-name authors almost half a grand for their work. Unfortunately the written word has hit the bottom of the media barrel, and the short story has hit the bottom of the written word barrel. And the periodicals which still print short fiction cater to a very select audience - namely those short fiction writers who want to get their work in print so they can grow up to become long fiction writers. Nothing is quite so astringently Machiavellian as the literary world.

Gggggggrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr....

So what do I do with all of these wasted words. I could continue to send them out for rejection from journals I can't bring myself to read. (I might even get paid $50 for thirty to forty hours of work. Thanks for the substandard wages literary world! I got a college degree in this crap? Was I really that stupid once?) Or sell it online to some website (and simply never get paid or read). Or post it here on DA (and never get paid or read, but do get mobbed by people wanting me to read their stories - since I'm into fiction and all). Or I could anthologize them into a collection which will not get printed anywhere because - hey! - none of these stories have been published anywhere. Oh yes, and people just don't buy short fiction collections. Not unless your name happens to be Stephen King.

The crazy things we do for love.

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