Bad Stories

      Bad Stories is finally available for purchase. I know it's over a month late but I underestimated how difficult it would be to edit my own work. Of course, I have edited my own work before. I edited my first published work, Someone Sinister, but that was poetry. I don't even know how you edit poetry. It's supposed to be free (despite chosen restrictions) there aren't many rules of grammar it has to follow. Poetry is disorder, it can be anything and still be itself. That's why I love poetry. You can change the meanings of words and phrases. You can be completely coherent but muddled and dumb. Your words can be as unpredictable as emotions or reactions to any incidental stimuli. 

      That's poetry. When writing any sort of narrative (poems can also be narrative, more of their beauty!) you don't have to be intelligible but in my opinion it is helpful. I feel that the reader connects to short stories and novels like they do a poem but they're more relatable. I have read poems that traverse the depths of a novel and are expansive like the details in a novel. Langton Hughes simple but revealing poem "Bad Morning" ;

Here I sit

With my shoes mismated.
Lawdy-mercy!
I's frustrated! 

      I see the man who needs shoes to keep his feet from sores, from the landscape, from the cold but I also see the vain man that recognizes that his mismatched shoes have the same function as his chastiser's shoes but will be shunned because his loafers, sneakers, boots or whatever weren't meant for each other. I also assume that he is vain and that he has a chastiser. I see why he may have lost a half of pair of shoes twice. I see that they may be hand-me-downs or he had to choose from a huge bin field with all types of shoes and was late for basketball practice. He knew that his couch would be angry with him if he was late again, he knew that his teammates would laugh at him practicing with a penny loafer on his right foot and a sandal on his left. So he ran to the gym pouting sure of what was to befall him. I see a fairly linear story with characters I can love and get to know or hate or empathize. I see a lot. Langston probably knows I don't see anything but the mismated shoes. He also sees that I inferred a lot. 

     With narratives you fill in those details for the reader. You give the coach a name, you make the chastiser a bully. You give the man/woman/child a background story you find out how their shoes became mismated. It is thrilling or chilling, it's a mystery, or it's a comedy laden with blunder. 

      I did this for myself. The more I write, I always hear or read from some source "Don't edit your own writing." I took that as a challenge. More than that, it was just something I had to do. I had an honest inclination to step back from my work and read it like I was never there creating it, like my mind didn't inform this universe that I had written and like my mind didn't control everything in it. 

      I have gained too much fucking respect for book editors for any type of editor. Please feel free to tear my work apart. 

      The entire collection was "reworked" four times. I got tired of looking at it so I published it. It is available now on CreateSpace and soon to be available at just about every online book retailer. Hopefully, actual bookstores across the country.

      If you ever get a chance to read it I hope you enjoy. I hope you feel whatever you're inclined to feel. I hope you see everything including the mismated shoes.