Flights of Fancy

Let’s put the disclaimer first: I didn’t say good writing, I said prolific writing. Had I been good, good enough to convince the professionals I was sending my work to, you would be finding my name across best-seller lists on every platform. You don’t, and I’m convinced that the quality of my writing is the reason. You can’t fake writing, at least you couldn’t in the days before CheatGPT and its ilk, and if a prospective publisher had read my manuscript and said, “This guy’s going to make us richer than Croesus,” I’d have been published. I believe that.

So, what was ol’ Smilin’ Jack doing going into the new century? Writing! I was still employed, but I had the job I would retire from, a basically unsupervised shiftwork position as a safety, fire, and environmental inspector at a major naval air station. No two days looked the same. I had plenty of time to put pen to paper, and boy, did I! After Temple of Exile, the rambling learning experience I wrote about in my Nineties post, I studied Evan Marshall’s book on how to construct a novel. My style went from completely undisciplined to tightly structured in every detail, and the first novel I completed under this new system was Chameleon, the story of an IRA terrorist, trained at her family’s knee, who reached maturity, grew a conscience, and became a paladin for the weak. I don’t have it in a file, but I have the original manuscript, and may look into serializing it here should that be desired.

Another novel I completed in this time bracket was Broken English. This was a police procedural with a twist in which the police think they’re dealing with a “simple” murder that turns out to be part of a much larger Cold War plot, and have to struggle to catch up. That one has only ever been posted on Writing-dot-com, a huge site where writers gather to share their wares and their encouragement. It was well-received there but never appeared on Amazon or any other platform.

One thing that did was Beyond the Rails. Self-published in 2013, this was a steampunk opus that grew into a trilogy and gained me a small but loyal following and my sobriquet of Blimprider. It has, during several months, brought in enough to pay my internet bill, but I’ve never approached the “Big Time,” and I was okay with that. I was having fun.

Another book that found its way to Amazon was The Stone Seekers, a cozy fantasy with a small cast but huge stakes. This originally had a different title which I will revert to should I decide to post it here, but let’s avoid the confusion right now. Several other books were started but never finished because I had so many projects going that I couldn’t focus on all of them. This was a great time in my writing life. I was enjoying stacking words and entertaining my followers, and I also got into writing short stories, mostly for Writing-dot-com, but a couple of them also landed in anthologies that appear on Amazon as well. These were largely horror stories, the last genre that had attracted me, and many can be read on the Diner of Dread pages here.

The Stone Seekers was the last book I published in 2018, but it had been finished in 2016, and that’s the last time I wrote anything meaningful. I’ve tried “everything,” as the expression goes, to get myself back on track, but nothing has held my attention long enough to complete anything, not even more short stories. I don’t want to not be a writer, and part of my hope for this blog is that, after a decade of the well being dry, my thoughts here, and the conversations I hope they’ll inspire, will get me back to the page and producing again.

Be that as it may, this will be my last scheduled post about my personal history. Henceforth, posts will look at my writing techniques and philosophies, and if you’re a writer yourself, maybe you’ll find something you can add to your own toolbox to improve your writing. Wisdom can be found in the most unexpected places, after all. Post day will remain Wednesday, and if I miss one, don’t worry, I just couldn’t think of one for that particular week. I’ll be back.

Finally, sometime next month I plan to begin serializing one of my novels here. Let me know if there’s one you’d like to see first.

1. Chameleon
2. Broken English
3. The Stone Seekers

Vote in the comments. I tentatively plan to start on May 17th, and the story with the most votes will be the one I go with. So you guys have a great week. Vote early and vote often, and I’ll see you with another short this coming Sunday.

Be safe!
~ Jack