Well, after 2+ weeks of not blogging, at least I can report I’m not dead. Not that you care. Not one of you came to my fake funeral service that I staged to see if anyone would come. Of course, it would have helped if I had notified you that I had died and there was a funeral service for me. But that would have been impossible with me being dead. I may have been fake dead, but I demanded authenticity. It turns out nobody at all came to my fake funeral. My wife blabbed to family and friends that I was faking my death. It was just a closed coffin, the funeral director, and me in a fake beard.
Yeah, George Clooney. I wish. So does my wife!
Anyway, after winning second in a short story contest, I got my head out a little bit too far over my skis. I decided to enter a favorite short story of mine in one of the Reedsy Blog weekly contests. However, it exceeded the 3000 word limit, so I did some abridging. I wonder if the story lost something in the process. Perhaps I abridged too far. Get it?
You can read my truncated story here. I wasn’t expecting to win, but I thought I had a chance at an Honorable Mention. Nope. Best I got was one favorable comment that made some sense. But did that stop me and bring me back down to earth? Nah! I decided to write and submit to this horror anthology.
Full details here for now. I whipped up a little musical horror story about a vampire and her familiar, and I sent it off to some trusted readers for feedback. Well, my editor/cousin/godmother has no time for lazy writing and summed up her thoughts in 3 words: flat, predictable, and cliched. Yes, but did she like it?
It took me a while to understand her point. I went back to the website and spotted this under the “What We Don’t Want” section.
Mine was an obvious story. And maybe not even a story. It was more like a one-act play. And there was no twisting whatsoever. So, I did a Chubby Checker and added not just one, but two twists to make it a proper story.
Except, it wasn’t. It was more of a one-act play with a couple twists tacked on followed by a quick story conclusion in the last couple paragraphs that spanned two years of time. I tried to fix it, but it was a certifiable hot mess by the time I was done.
On the plus side, there was no cost to submit it, so what the hell, right? I finally got rid of that story by submitting it, and I was finally able to clear my head to go back to writing this nonsense. Is that a good thing?
I should know in July if my messy musical horror story is accepted for the anthology. I also checked the box on my submission that indicated I would like feedback. Could the feedback be worse than flat, predictable, and cliched? I guess we’ll see.
One positive takeaway from this exercise is that I learned that song lyrics cannot be used in a short story without the author’s permission. I am fixing a couple of my stories now.
Jim Flanigan Looks at the World 