. Spinning .

Discovered Hypertextopia and have already started writing a hypertext story online into it.  Actually, Yolanda and her bottle of beer from a couple posts down seemed perfect to play with the method and means.

Or anything silly, or just lift the restrictions that keep us tied to a pompous and pious reality.  Then will the stories, unshackled by learned inhibitions, become the fun uplifting narratives that come from eggplant dreams.

Wandering from one  server to another, lost between the hostels then setting up the sticks and buffalo hide to rest a season, maybe more.

Carolyn aka Chameleon, Serendipity, et al, has settled in (fer shure this time) at The Koala Kafe (I think). It’s been there for 24 hours so I’m linking to it now. Ah the flakey nature of the artiste!

There is a tendency these days to build upon success, what used to be known in the old days as riding someone else’s coattails, and we see this particularly in the area of television drama.  CSI worked in Vegas, so it’s set to play in Miami and New York. Law & Order breeds L&O SVU and Criminal Intent.  And the reality shows of course are breeding like rabbits.

So I figure that Fox’s Breaking Bad about a chemistry teacher who, upon learning he has terminal cancer, decides to supplement his current low paying salary and provide for his family by using his expertise in the field to have his own meth lab. 

Well, this show’s a goodie so we’ll have to imagine that the following variations are already in the works:

An English Professor discovers that he is facing early onset Alzheimers and plans to write a couple best selling novels before his eventual loss of memory and mental capacity; the humanities devotee could never stoop to selling academic papers which would pay well but not well enough.  He does well with his first and second novel, but just as he’s starting to hit his stride and get the big bucks, his short term memory loss becomes more insidious and without realizing it, he starts writing from long term memory, and produces outstanding work that unfortunately has already been written by Faulkner, Marquez and McCarthy.

What’s also kind of neat–although I can’t write on demand yet–is that I can take a simple scenario from reality and turn it into something that grows from there.  Purist that I’ve been, I’ve always avoided taking anything from reality –and yes, I know, all fiction, even sci-fi and fantasy is seeded in reality–and in particular, my reality, and turned it into story.  I seem to be more flexible about that with the infusion of the short form of fiction that this course has introduced for study. 

It’s okay to knowingly take a bit of real and twist it into something else completely. 

Odd; I’ve been through this course before and I’ve read all the Flash Fiction anthologies and never without some type of constipated pain was able to easily write the short-short-short story.  I’m spitting them out lately though and they appear to have a beginning, middle, and an end, all within less than–well under 600 words, but that’s real good for me.

It would be nice if this influence does remain with me and is not just a time and place imprint.  After all, it took me years to get rid of the Poe-ness of my earlier writings. 

There’s always been a purpose for the quickie, it’s just a matter of perception and need, not quality.

Following the rules of story arc, the writing of a story goes through the same conflicts (loss of inspiration, technical glitches, losing the file) and builds to a climax and resolution.  The climax is: the story’s finished–or at least as finished as it’s ever going to be.  You’ve twiddled with it enough already; leave it alone and move on.  Which brings us to the resolution.

That means submission first of all.  And submission on the dark side is complete masochism and while I may have dabbled in that, I’m not a diehard fan.

Not in the mood today to rant about the submission process; it is what it is and them’s in control are the same them’s who make the rules and that’s all there is to it.  But a point must be made here: you can’t blame all your rejections on lack of MFA, agent connections, or the crappy direction fiction’s taking.  You have to face facts eventually and the fact is simply that no one wants to publish your work.  Fact #2: If it was really really good, someone will publish it.

Which brings me to the alternative ending of the self publishing route.  And here, I’ve been thinking about it again because of the hypertext nature of what I’ve been doing lately and for some reason I looked at it differently because of that nature of medium.  But you know what?  It still comes down to the same thing for me–if no one else thinks its good enough to publish, then most likely it really isn’t and why on earth do I want to embarrass myself and spend money to do so?

Developing a thicker skin is not necessarily the answer when accepting reality would be the more obvious and less painful thing to do.