An Unpublished Guy visitor made an insightful comment to a previous post about fiction writing. This individual, who has a blog of her own, observed that I used the writing equivalent of leftovers and recommended that I try starting fresh. For example, throughout August I posted on my experience with the July Novel Writing Contest. What did I do? I used a lot of leftover short stories and attempted to string them together into a novel. It didn't work. By the end of the month, I had a malformed, not quite novella-length, postmodern, science fiction story.
What am I going to do with this sad and dilapidated fictional work? Retire it and start with something fresh? Alas, no. I am going to enter my leftovers in a short story writing contest this month.
Why wouldn't I follow such sensible advice? My response is similar to my RAD bipolar daughter when I ask her why she has engaged in some dysfunctional behavior. "Because it is what I do. You know that." You might recognize this situation as a variation on the Scorpion and Frog parable. I have given my daughter plenty of sensible advice that is rarely followed. (Actually, I have made some progress. When I dumped my open source fiction story, I was basically letting go of some leftovers that had been reheated over and over again.)
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