OGWiseman Recycles!
I wrote a story and it sucked. Enjoy this old, good one instead!
Write a hundred stories, and if you’re really talented and work really hard, then ten of them will be great, thirty will be good, twenty-five will be interesting, twenty-five will be bad, and ten will be embarrassing.
Another thing I’ve found from doing this: When it comes to my own stories, I can tell which ones are great. It’s obvious, and I’d bet the mortgage on a survey of random readers agreeing. However, I can’t really tell the difference between good, interesting, and bad. I’m not sure there’s any general agreement at all, to be honest—it’s almost completely subjective.
At the other end, not only can I tell which ones are embarrassing, I can *feel* which ones are embarrassing when I read them back. Would a random reader agree? I’ll never know! I wouldn’t let my dog read one of them.
The story I had for you today was one of those, unfortunately. Too simple to be interesting and yet somehow still confusing. Yikes! I like the concept and I may just try it again next week, but it’s late Saturday as I type this and I’m out of time for this one.
So, instead, please feel free to read (or re-read) this trio of stories from early in my project, with which many of my newer readers probably are not even familiar:
SKIN POCKETS - My funniest story.
OUTSIDE THE WALL - A poem that I think resonates on multiple levels. I’m proud of its prescience, coming up on four years later.
LIFE IN THE LONG NOW - I had forgotten about this story until I was going through my archive, looking for recycling candidates. I started reading this one, and ended up rereading the whole thing, despite it being pretty long, which is a pretty decent gauge of how I feel about it.
Hope you pick one or three of these to enjoy. Have a great week, and I will be back next Sunday with another original story.