23-04-26
Greetings from the edge,
I’ve been digging through my deepest, darkest of desk drawers, looking for anything worth saving from the tepid bathwater of my early attempts at fiction, and, as it turns out, there was a very good reason I shoved them into an oubliette in the first place.
Every writer has one of these. A dead zone, a morgue, a graveyard of ideas. Some half-finished, some half-arsed, all left to die… for very good reasons.
I wrote a story, Dead Stream, about a hitman who was part of an elaborate game in which rich patrons paid to watch two assassins play a deadly game of hit-and-mouse, with their fights to the death live-streamed on the dark web. It was one of my first serious attempts at writing and… well, if you gave an edgy teen a Tarantino box set and a crate of sugary cereal, you would get something as hilariously earnest and mean-spirited as that story.
Part of the problem with it was that I had blatantly ripped the core idea from a 2000 AD comic I read in the early 90s called Button Man, my updated version was… well, let’s just say that I have no intention of posting it here, not even as an April Fool’s Day prank.
Then there was a series of stories based on a character I played in a zombie-apocalypse TTRPG. A word then, on taking your beloved Character from an interactive medium like an RPG and putting them into a story: DON’T!
For real, you end up twisting things to make your beloved Mary Sue look cool, you write dialogue just to make it sound good, and you end up with fiction that feels like it is one run-on sentence away from becoming erotic fan fiction (Not that that ever hurt Fifty Shades of Grey)
The strange thing is, even the bad ones aren’t useless. They are like early drafts of a person you used to be. You can see what you were trying to do, where you overreached, where you panicked, and where you accidentally stumbled onto something that still works.
That’s why The Bone Garden feels different. Somewhere between the earnest young man trying far too hard to be a writer and the slightly less clueless wordsmith typing this now… I stopped trying to be a writer and just started telling good stories.
So I am not throwing these old stories away. I am leaving them where they belong, in the ground.
But I am keeping a spade handy.
Just in case something in there is still alive.
See you in the margins,
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