Lessons Learned From Writing

Looking Back on Seven Stories

I have a mixed record with the earliest stories I’ve enjoyed the privilege of being published. That is to say, by consensus of the internet, I’ve published some slop and perhaps even hot garbage. But I say it is a privilege nonetheless. It is a privilege to learn from one’s mistakes and mistakes I’ve surely made.

Why self-flagellate and say I’ve made a number of mistakes when I could rather say I’ve learned a great deal in sharing my work? Slice it however you want. In this essay, or general ramble, I’ll go over what stories I’ve written, the inspirations behind them (as I find that an interesting topic), where I faltered, and what I learned.

I should open that before I started writing short stories I already made the mistake of writing two novels beforehand. Or one novel and an epic. Both dumped to the pits of KDP and since lost to time. Perhaps for the best. I’ll only elaborate by saying that the happiest moment of my life was when I wrote the final passage of my first book. In that moment, I understood that I did something special. I wrote an entire book and, most importantly, realized it could be done. Then I went on to write an 800 page epic nobody has ever read. Oh yes, I learned I could write a book and I learned I could write too much of one as well.

MONSTER DEER

If we don’t include borderline harassment joke texts from high school (and we won’t include them), the first short story I wrote was “Monster Deer.” The inspiration behind it was primitive. It was hunting season and my father was a hunter. I wanted to write something he would have the tolerance to read. I also discovered a certain online magazine around that time. &amp Magazine, which has featured five of the seven stories I intend to discuss. The most recent issue, 21, is the inspiration for this post since it gave way to some thought and reflections on how I got to that latest story. But, going back to this first story, it occurred to me I could write something for my dad and also attempt to see it published.

“Monster Deer” is a horror story. Looking back on it, I think it was a mistake to send anything horror adjacent to &amp. The magazine runs better on more abstract and absurdist writings. Though it’ll publish literally anything thrown its way, I am convinced horror is a poor complement to her. As for the story, the horror inspiration to it is actually quite silly. I would occasionally come across schizo posts online that ran along the lines of the following:

“I was watching Lord of the Rings the other day when something strange happened. Legolas looked right at the camera, said my name, my birthday, and a date a few years from now. Anyone else experience this or is this just on the Blu-ray edition?”

It’s a shitpost but one that always amuses me to think about. And while “Monster Deer” wasn’t written as a joke, I took that premise and applied it to a deer. A hunter goes into the woods and, yeah, a deer stands on its back legs and tells him the day he’ll die. The idea was the hunt would be turned on its head. You can shoot the titular monster deer but he’s already marked you so-to-speak. And instead of a quick death you get to languish and dread its coming.

A pretentious story? I don’t know. While I’m more quick to criticize my other bastards I actually do still like the premise here. It’s clunky since it’s the first but maybe because it’s the first I hold it in a special place in my heart. In fact, since my dad has a copy of the issue the story was printed in, he actually got me a mouse pad featuring the image accompanying it. A small Christmas present. I still use it too.

Final verdict? I stand by this story. And I sit by the image of a monster deer quite literally.

LIVING WITH THE REEDS

Hot off of realizing I could get published through &amp I took to quickly writing a second story. This time with the express desire of getting another story in there for strangers on the net to read. Unfortunately, I was still subscribed to the idea of writing horror. Maybe that’s my natural baseline. At least with this second story, I did keep it a touch more abstract.

“Living with the Reeds” is the account of a man obsessed with a sitcom featuring the Reed family. Except that’s all a misdirect. He goes on and on about how watching this family changed his life for the better but the reveal at the end is he comes out of the walls and literally watches one of the daughters as she sleeps. The inspiration was the ‘I’m living in your walls’ meme. I thought it could be reimagined into a story.

My biggest critique for this story is that I don’t think I made the Reeds stand out as well as I could have. I feel they could’ve been more unique. The narrator goes on about how their issues are more ‘realistic,’ a hint that they are indeed a real family. But I spun them as just a regular family with a daughter who fought with a crack addiction. I’m sure that’s sadly typical on some level.

Strangely, and disappointingly, I do not think people understood the twist ending. It appears they interpreted the story as just a man obsessed with a sitcom family which on its own is…I don’t know, that sounds pretty whatever. Yet despite that, I was sought out by someone online, asking if I was the author, and told by this person that they really liked that story. Maybe it’s because I thought the story was just okay but I was a little paranoid and didn’t know how sincere they were. But yes, because of that exchange, and other posts I’ve read online, it would appear that “Living with the Reeds” is my best written story in &amp.

Final verdict? I think it’s just okay and it’s unfortunate to regard it as a better received story when I don’t think people ‘got it.’ I suppose the trick is to make your twists more explicit?

HELL ON WHEELS

Kill me now. Here’s my first bloody beat down. Perhaps high now on seeing that I could get read, I made the terrible mistake of thinking more is more. Once again, I decided I wanted to write a story explicitly for &amp and this time I thought if I wrote something longer that would equal more awesomesauce or something ridiculous along those lines. I was wrong. May God forgive me because I’ll never forgive myself.

“Hell on Wheels” might have the cringiest inspiration too. A warning sign perhaps? While playing Cyberpunk 2077, I realized something mischievous if I waited outside the city limits. I could have fun roleplaying as a psychopath, effectively playing Mad Max or Hitcher, chasing after NPCs driving away from the ‘safety’ of Night City. I would follow them a bit, get on their ass with my own car, finally bump them, keep at it until it was a full blown chase in the night. It was actually super fun and a testament to the enjoyment you could pull from that game.

In hindsight, I do think the story could work, but “Hell on Wheels” did it wrong. It was bloated. 20 something pages. To think I was proud of that when I finished writing it! Fun aside, I wrote “Hell on Wheels” mostly at work. I was training a new employee and seeing that they had a decent handle on the wheel (heh), I sat in my office cranking the story out. Ironically, that particular employee went on to steal several thousand dollars while employed at my place of work. “Hell on Wheels” was fucking cursed.

The idea was largely taking two protagonists, a pair of road rage psychos, and turning the tables on them. Similar to “Monster Deer” I suppose, though this one was more literal. The two punks drive a woman off the road before coming across a Stephen King-esque haunted, eternally burning car that chases them through the desert. I recall having fun building the world with this one, lots of asides about other dangers going on elsewhere, but they didn’t apply to the story and it quickly got bloated.

People tore the story apart and remember, rightfully, that reading it was a slog. While I am ashamed of tripping so hard with this story, it did come with the biggest learning lesson. Less is more and if it’s not going to be a novella, keep it short. &amp literally introduced a word limit after “Hell on Wheels” disgraced its pages.

Now, despite my shame, I do find the nerve to look back on this one. I consider what I might do differently with it now. For starters, I spent a number of pages developing the characters who weren’t even meant to be very well liked. If I were to rewrite it, I’d start the story with an actual hook instead of visual descriptions of the city behind them. I’d plop them right at the part where they encounter the infernal car and the initial chase sequence with the woman would all be a passing remark. Maybe “Hell on Wheels” worked good as a movie in my head, or a five minute spell in 2077, but it failed as a story as it was.

Final verdict: I deserved the beating I got.

ECOFREAK

I definitely learned my lesson of keeping stories shorter with this next one but it’s still part of a losing streak. After licking my wounds from “Hell on Wheels,” I avoided &amp for a time with my well earned humiliation. Thus, “Ecofreak” wasn’t written because I felt compelled to keep writing for the magazine for the sake of it. I wrote it because of a dream. A lesson in which I learned to not always trust what’s cool in your head.

Ironically, I think the ideal “Ecofreak” experience will be right here, right now, as I simply describe the dream I had, rather than the story I wrote forcing it into misshapen reality. As you know, most dreams are nonsense, but here is what I recall dreaming one night.

Whether I was a participant or a mere observer, I don’t remember, but the dream was just off the script Harry Potter. There was a student who got into some trouble and it must have been bad enough to warrant the dementors getting involved. As you know if you’re a Potterhead, you do not fucking want that. Thus, the student, perhaps going to Snape, fled and made a nightmarish bargain to avoid having his soul sucked out by spooky Halloween decorations. Very jumbled so far, isn’t it?

Anyways, it was the ending of the dream which struck me. At the end of all this noise and Hogwarts set dressing, Harry, Ron, and Hermione track down this renegade student. It is revealed he was transformed into a “biosystem organism” (How very Harry Potter sounding). But you must understand! What my brain showed me was HORRIFYING.

The student retained his physical shape but he was all green now and appeared to be made up of a series of different vegetated appendages. He looked like a monster, a being who had lost their humanity. Even half his skull was turned to a transparent dome displaying a micro biome where his brain was supposed to be. The camera zoomed in on his head and Hemione said in horror, with a delivery that haunted me, “He’s eating himself.”

I guess that was the work around. Every five minutes this poor Hogwarts student’s body would eat itself and reproduce new genetic material in real time. He would be a new person every five minutes and that would be enough to legally excuse him of whatever the hell he did, because that was technically another person. I know, very jumbled, it was a dream. But I loved that ending and I wanted to write a story to earn that punch.

I didn’t earn the punch.

“Ecofreak” simply isn’t anything special. A girl goes searching for her cousin who is wanted for murder and makes a deal with a mad scientist to get him out of trouble. I like the opening, talking about how despised the scientist is and how his inventions always harm society somehow. But the story itself is clunky and could’ve been done better. The reader must suffer an uninteresting build up of the protagonist having tea with the scientist, finding her cousin, and by the time we get to the ending as described in my dream, the reader has likely already dropped the story.

If the story is boring then what is the point?

The caveat is that this story introduces the character Gene Rene Tabolt who is important to other stories I’ve written. So, while “Ecofreak” might be an abridged slog of “Hell on Wheels,” I still got characters worth keeping out of it.

The idea behind Tabolt is that he’s such a brilliant scientist he can make literally anything he wants. However, by the events of most of the stories I’ve written or plan to write one day, he’s already gone insane and the world just sort of lives with the consequences of all his inventions which, while successful, lower everyone’s standard of living in some way. His assistant, Virgo, I plan to use as an antagonist in other stories as well. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll use that detective girl again. Maybe. Her niche has been filled by more interesting characters I’ve come up with.

Final verdict: “Ecofreak” isn’t worth a read. It helped me find footing elsewhere but as a story it’s another dud. Dreams are like a drug. They seem amazing when you’re in them but you might break down later. Simply put, dreams might not be worth trying to write a one for one story about.

ARE YOU WATCHING?

Terrible, terrible title. But I think a small comeback for me. “Are You Watching?” isn’t a great story, and on a technical level there are mistakes which I regret allowing to see print, but it still has a hook, interesting premise, bearable dialogue, and a decent ending. My first story to really nail all those aspects, I think.

“Are You Watching?” was my first story published through Tales of the Unreal. Volume 4, to be exact. The inspiration is hard for me to recall exactly. By now I’ve read a number of pulp stories and other stories simply published through Unreal. So I ran with the pulpy premise of what if there’s a guy that goes to another world when he dreams? And what if he spends two days in that world for every one day in ours. It’s my first story that really explores an interesting question like that and I suppose for that reason I don’t scorn this one.

The only trouble with this one is that the protagonist is someone else and his own story, well, it could be its own thing. The protagonist is a cancelled streamer who until recently lived ‘in another world,’ that world being streaming. I used him to juxtapose a schizo who claims to literally visit another world. The gimmick of the story is that the reader never really knows if the man is truly visiting another world or if he’s just a schizo rambling to the protagonist. When he puts a knife to his own throat in order to show a spell, it’s a zero sum game, and I wanted the reader to wonder if the ending is tragic or not.

I notice I have less to say now. Perhaps it stands to reason by this point, if I may be so bold to say, my writing has improved. Also, between “Ecofreak” and “Are You Watching?” I befriended a fellow writer by the name of Alex Beyman. Alex is a tremendous writer with a brilliant, restless mind. Find any of his stories and you won’t be disappointed.

Might I suggest starting with his substack?

https://linktr.ee/alexbeyman

All my stories up to “Ecofreak” weren’t read by anyone else before submission. That’s why they mostly sucked. Nobody was there to help point out issues and help me clean it up. Thus I was going from beating to beating to learn what I could do better next time. When I started offering my writing to Alex for critique, he taught me on how I could hone the craft (You can start this training regiment by removing all use of the word “had” in your writing).

Final verdict: I don’t love “Are you Watching?” but I guess you don’t have to skip over it if you ever find yourself reading Tales of the Unreal: Volume 4. Big take away though? It helps to have a friend who writes and is willing to read your work.

BENEATH THE WAVES

At last we arrive at the first story I can say I’m proud of. “Beneath the Waves” was published in Tales of the Unreal: Volume 6. The nautical edition. Now, when I heard Unreal Press was taking submissions for nautical themed stories, I didn’t think I’d be up to the challenge. I mean, boats? Riffing off of Lovecraft? I assumed I’d pass on the chance. But I meditated on it. The nice thing about driving long distances is the time to think of stories playing out in your head!

I am terrified of the ocean. Vast reaches of deep blue water fill me with fear of the unknown. If you want to know the extent of anxiety the ocean strikes into me then simply go read “Beneath the Waves.” That’s all it is. I channeled my fear of the ocean and so I feel that story has a piece of my soul in it. And like the protagonist, I’m also depressed. In the story, the protagonist is like a day away from killing himself before getting his ‘call to adventure.’ I’ve never made plans to end my own life but I think about it sometimes. So I channeled that into the protagonist as well. Another piece of ugly, honest soul. I think that’s why “Beneath the Waves” worked.

Write what you know, right? Not that I know much about nuclear submarines, where I set most of the story. Thank you, Alex, for giving me the low down on them. I do wonder though. Is it selfish of me that I just wrote myself at my absolute most vulnerable? Is a story that’s intimate to me also enjoyable to someone else? I can’t say. But I wrote about what would scare me the most, being trapped at the bottom of the ocean, and what I can say is that I do like this story.

The story culminates with the protagonist trapped in a pocket of air in an underwater cave. He is confronted by a siren who keeps reminding him (I just wrote ‘me’ by mistake there so you know) that if he doesn’t accept her offer and become a sea creature he will suffer alone forever. Thus, I wrote about a man who is so incapable of finding respite in others, in changing, that he would scream for eternity in a cave of isolation. Dark and from the soul, what art ought to be.

I’ve gained clarity that my earlier stories were inspired by shitposts, video games, and dreams. Not very high art. But reaching for something inside you? That might just be the spice (But the others were still fun too, mind you).

Final verdict: It was a long journey, and it still isn’t much more beyond pulp, but I did finally write something I’m proud of. Go read “Beneath the Waves.”

I WILL ASTRAL PROJECT

As it was just published I haven’t seen this one get its lashing yet. “I will Astral Project” is flash fiction, exactly one page in a word document. I wrote it purely in response to a writing prompt labeled ‘Astral Projection.’ It’s not a story. It’s a mood and little more.

I was told recently by a Romanian twink (who I hope is well) that writing is easy. I argued otherwise. Some people can jump into a word document and enter the flow effortlessly and that’s great if you can do that. I tell you, not everyone can do that.

I’m a member of a writing server. I won’t name which one but, unless everyone is busy writing their own 800 page epics, it doesn’t seem like there’s that much writing going on there these days. God, I hope that changes, because I do like the place. In this server, there’s a channel for writing prompts. A whole excel sheet was created with a different writing prompt for every week this year! The results? Maybe for a month or two people participated. Ultimately, even when I tagged people in that channel, ‘Hey, here’s a fun prompt, let’s get writing,’ not much writing was done in the writing server.

I did write a couple stories on behalf of these exercises but I’ll clump them all together in this section. They were meant to be practice. And that’s all “I Will Astral Project” is. Practice and I hope something sweet for the magazine which graciously accepted it. But it is disappointing to know most people, in the course of a year, did not find too much time to sit down, accept the challenge of a weekly prompt, and bang something out. So no, perhaps without a muse, a mood, or men with guns trained on you, writing is not so easy as it seems.

I’ve come a long way since “Hell on Wheels” and it’s my esteemed hope that anyone who reads that story will give me a second chance. I’m still trying, I’m still learning, and above all, I’m still writing.