Manure

This is the blog I created that I don't know why I created. Mostly nobody will ever read it. Somehow Chaz will probably read it (not really sure how you stumbled upon it, Charles, but good job). So its existence is largely just to give me a place to type random things when I am procrastinating. So here's a story. Sometime in, I believe, 1995, I watched a documentary about children in the Holocaust on CNN. I have no idea why I watched it. I must have stumbled upon it and just somehow got hooked. I also don't know if I watched the whole thing, but I must have. In fact, the only reason I know I watched a documentary about children in the Holocaust on CNN is because I was keeping a journal at the time. This was not one of those in-depth emotion-oriented journals, but the kind I used to keep periodically where I wrote one or two sentences only, describing the most significant things I had done that day ("significant" being a relative term).

Anyway (I am starting another paragraph at a random place in my story, so as to break up the monotony of the wall of text and not because I am transitioning to a new topic), and again, I only know this because I mentioned it in the journal, after watching the documentary, I wrote a science fiction story called "Stick Boys" about these little malnourished kids who have spent their whole lives living in this tiny, dark room, polishing pieces of metal, while being guarded (and punished) by these robots called Watchers. It was a bleak story, probably not all that well written, but I turned it in as a creative writing assignment. I recall that some of the students, maybe most of them, liked it (one girl in particular, whose name escapes me, really liked it), and the creative writing TA, Ms. Apothekar (sic), was troubled by it and not sure how to critique it (she actually said, "I don't know how to critique a story like this").

It was a short story I fiddled with periodically over the years and eventually sent it to a magazine called "Lost Worlds of Science Fiction and Fantasy." This was not a major publication, but one of those little magazines that pays only in contributer's copies (two, as I recall). Anyway, they accepted "Stick Boys" for publication. It eventually appeared (with typos) in print around about, oh I don't know, 1998-99 (not really sure, I may be way off). I remember I liked that they had some artist draw a Watcher and put it on the page. Even though it was a basic line drawing, it was cool to see an artist's rendering of something I had written about.

So the magazine got passed around amongst a few family and friends, I suppose. I only know this because Trevor remembers the story to this day and mentions it occasionally. He liked it. Also, I got a letter from the editor sometime later telling me that the story was a hit with readers, and that they had received quite a bit of positive feedback. So the editor asked me if I had any more stories about the world of the Stick Boys. I didn't, really, although I had thought about their world outside of the particulars of the story. But I found time in the following years to write a few short stories (complete and incomplete) about that world. Three stories, to be exact. I think I only finished one of them. I came close to finishing another one of them. And the third was mostly just an idea and a few paragraphs.

Those stories just sat around for a long time. Until last year, actually, when I stumbled upon them on an old hard drive. Four stories taking place in the same world. I scarcely remembered writing them. One of the stories, interestingly, tied directly into the original "Stick Boys" at the end. So I wove the short stories together to see how they would look as chapters on a novel. Wound up with about 60 pages worth of story (double spaced), and then it just sat there. I was working on another novel at the time. That novel, "Mindy Lightbearer," is now just sort of floating around the ether waves.

So I have been recently working on the Stick Boys novel. I have 144 pages (doubled spaced), 55,000 words. Is it worth writing? Who knows. Writing is, honestly, just about the only thing I enjoy doing (well, except playing computer games, RPGs, or reading, etc. etc.). All I really want to do is write, to be honest. If I never publish a novel, I will still keep writing them. I could work on publishing short stories, as I once did, and maybe have some succes, but I really prefer writing novels. I published half a dozen or so short stories at one point in my life in various little magazines and a couple online (in fact, I just remembered that "Stick Boys" appeared online in an early draft at http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/ )

Whoa, I just went and looked. It is still there in their archives, along with another story I wrote called "Woman of Fire" (about a woman who has a rifle for an arm who is trying to break the mad scientist who gave her the arm out of a hospital for the criminally insane). http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/authors/MillerJeff.html Wow, it really is a rough draft. Badly written. Both of those stories. But, hey, they are still archived on the internets for all to love.

Okay, enough rambling. I am tired all the time these days because I spend almost every night from midnight to 3am working on the book. I have trouble writing at any other time of the day (probably because people are awake, but also because I am a night owl). It is 1:35am. I should go work on the book. I feel better about life when I go to bed knowing I wrote at least a 1000 words of a novel.

jeff