Happy Day After Veteran's Day to everyone. I sincerely hope all of you bank employees enjoy your day off. You seem to be the only ones still unilaterally observing Federal Holidays.
A week or so ago I published a response to an email question about what to do with material that you, as the author, just can't stand or think is horrible. Well, due to a nagging back injury and a lot of quality time over the weekend with a heating pad, I've had some time to consider it and I feel like I may have left out something that I personally found applicable over the weekend.
To begin, let me paraphrase my earlier response. I advised the person that wrote in to keep everything, no matter how crappy they may believe it to be. I have a very bad habit of wanting to discard stuff I create that I don't care for at that moment for some odd reason. I've learned to write it and file it and move on if necessary. Dropbox is my friend dear reader, as in my less than humble opinion it should be for all writers. Just make sure you don't post anything in the public folders!
Moving on, I feel like I erred in omitting one major component of this issue. Once you've got a little experience under your belt as a writer, a little seasoning if you will, you will (hopefully) begin to develop an audience. You will probably publish at some point. You may even develop a few fans (still the hardest part of this entire enterprise for me). Then one day you're going to write something that has an awesome premise. Your story plan seems dead on the money, your characters seem interesting and real enough to carry the story, and the best part of it is that in your head it's clever and sheer genius.
And then you write it.
And you've seen more interesting piles of dog vomit.
On your shoes.
My Halloween short story "Tell Me Everything" has become one of those piles o'puke. I really liked the idea, everything seemed to work and it was ready to publish. Blogger had a minor technical issue for a few days and I couldn't get the file to post correctly, so I took that time to read and reread to check for issues, errors, and the like. About halfway through the first read something started to nag at me. By the time I'd finished the second read I realized what it was.
THE STORY FLAT OUT SUCKED.
Now make sure you don't misunderstand me here. I'm no Hemingway by any means and I'm fully comfortable with that. However, I do feel like I have a degree of standards when it comes to what I put out there for my audience. There's no faster way to lose readers and fans than to follow up something they enjoyed with gar-bage.
In the end, meaning last Sunday, I finally made the decision that no amount of rework was going to fix this beast. It was time to pull the plug, throw in the towel and drop it in the file for later. Maybe it will show up someday. Maybe it just wasn't the right genre for me or the right time or something. Maybe it was just in exercise in completing a project even after you lose faith in it. Maybe, just maybe, it was a lesson learned to stick with what I do best.
All in all though, I'm not publishing the story and I'm satisfied it's for the right reason.
Well, back to the mines kiddies. More to come later this week.
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