After finishing up the rough draft of my first story, “Killing the Immortals,” a few weeks ago, I needed to kill some time while I got a bit of space from it. If you can help it, you never want to edit something you just wrote. It’s hard to catch all your stupid mistakes when you’re that close to it.
But I didn’t want to just sit here watching Netflix while it collected a bit of dust. So I immediately dove into writing a shorter piece that I could put in my bank for doing something with later. The working title for it is “Tomorrow’s News Today,” and it’s about a journalist who accidentally discovers that anything he writes will happen exactly as he wrote it. If someone compared it to a Twilight Zone episode, I’d be pretty damn pleased. Hell, let’s be honest, I’ll be happy if anyone is just willing to read it, especially if they pay to do so. But I’d definitely love to have people see a little Rod Serling there.
What I’ll do with it, I’m not quite sure. There are a few options: 1) Release it as a stand-alone work, probably charging $1.99 or $2.99 as a regular list price; 2) Keep writing these shorter pieces and package 4-5 of them into a collection that I release as a novel-length book that sells for $4.99 or so; 3) Keep it in my back pocket for potential entry into a contest or submission to go into an anthology when a publisher is looking for stories; 4) Give it away for free on my site, potentially for people to sign up for an email list I’ll be building soon. And, keep in mind, these aren’t mutually exclusive. I could, over time, do all four if I choose.
In the meantime, here’s a little tease to the story. Below, you can read the first few paragraphs of the rough draft, so you can get a look at the beginning, and the mood of the story:
Standing in the shower, water pouring down my aging face and trickling down over my narrow, hunched shoulders, I wished each morning I had the balls to just off myself. Everyone would be better off, right? My wife could stop trying to pretend I wasn’t there. My editor could have one fewer bullshit wannabe reporter to yell at. My cousin David wouldn’t have to figure out a way to end a male friendship—how do you do that, anyway? My parents died years ago, and the rest of my family was too spread out and caught up in their own new family circles to keep track of me. Lots of people told me I should get on Facebook and reconnect. But what was I going to share? The latest story I wrote for the tiny, near-pointless Adamstown Press on some lady’s chicken farm, and the extraordinary production she gets? Yeah, that’d rekindle some flames, right there.
The only person who would probably miss me was Davis, my 8-year-old son who we called “DJ.” DJ had been unexpected—for various reasons, Sara and I had decided years before not to have children—but he was my lifeline, not only the precarious glue that was holding my marriage of seventeen years together, but likely the one streak of sunlight in an otherwise dark room. With his sandy hair and beaming smile, when he ran to the door to wrap himself around me at the end of a work day, it made it all worthwhile. It made not getting a gun and wrapping my lips around it worthwhile. One more day, was always what I thought when I woke up in the morning. It’s the mantra my psychiatrist taught me. You don’t need to make it to next year or next month or even next week. Just make it through one more day. Today. We’ll deal with tomorrow tomorrow.
I turned off the water and stepped out of the shower onto the cold tile, the chilly air of the house clashing with the steam from the shower to practically create the room’s own weather pattern. I would have only been half surprised to have a thunderstorm break out above me. Sara liked to keep the thermostat at sixty-two in the winter, and she’d sit around the house in two undershirts, a sweatshirt and a coat, like she was a fucking eskimo. I wanted it to be seventy-two in the house year round, and I was willing to sacrifice in other areas—clothes, food, water, whatever it took—to be able to afford it. But I stopped trying to get what I wanted from Sara awhile back; I didn’t even try to negotiate anymore. I might as well have been a ghost to her at this point.
Comments, thoughts, critiques and indiscriminate insults welcome, of course!
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