I’ve now written and submitted three short stories to three different outlets. And now the waiting game begins. For one of those, I was number 487 on the submission list, so I suppose I’ll be waiting a long time. In the meantime, I’ve started a draft of a fourth story. I’m just finding the process of drafting an initial story and then slowly combing through it and refining it to be so satisfying. Here are summaries of those stories:
A story about tragedy and the memories that such a tragedy imprints on you. Ghosts of a memory haunt a lonely woman, and as she chases those ghosts, she has to decide if they are real or not.
A story about a meditation podcast gone demonic. Or is it the woman who has lost her mind? I wrote this one specifically for an audio podcast, and it was fun to write the dialogue and soundscapes for it.
A story about a tree full of crows and what it means to a woman visiting her parents after a crisis. Odd things keep happening around the tree, and the woman investigates and starts to discover what she really wants from her life.
I wrote all of these stories after my own crisis (being laid off), and of course that feeling of loss seeped into all of them. It was super cathartic to write them, and I found that even though I took a fantastical approach to all of them, I had fun weaving in details from my own life. Of course, I had to assure my husband that no, no, the story where the woman decides to leave her husband has nothing to do with our life, of course not -- hah! The beauty of writing these stories is that I can pour out all of the fear, anger, sadness but also wonder, amazement, and joy that I feel from just living my life and witnessing what is going on around me and in the world. It feels so much more satisfying to write these things down then it does to scroll through Twitter and feel like the world is constantly burning down.
And now that I’ve opened up the creativity floodgates, I’ve also started thinking that everything can be a short story idea. Watching the TV series, Dark Tourist, and seeing that one guy sadly eating his sandwich next to an irradiated city that people pay to tour -- what’s he thinking? Is he slowly being irradiated? There’s a story there. Or that guy I saw on my daily walk, reaching into his pocket after his dog has taken a poo and discovering that he’s left his poop bags at home. The horror of realization, and then the sly looking around to see if anybody has seen him (yeah, buddy, I saw you!), and then the indecision. What does he do? There’s a story there. That super long train I saw on my 9-hour drive from Vegas to Albuquerque. It was so long it didn’t even seem real. What was it carrying, and was there someone maybe hiding there? What about the driver? Maybe he’s tired of driving trains and has taken to killing vagrants on his route, hiding the bodies in that insanely long train. There’s a story there.
I’ve taken to writing down all these notes on my Notes app, and now, whenever I feel restless and am tempted to doomscroll, I just take out that app and then start typing away in Google docs. So much better for my soul!
Comentarios