Oopdate

I like to keep my active computer files very organized, and try to go through them every quarter or so, to keep some sort of sense of where I’m at in terms of my creative life. (I move files I’m definitely not likely to work on in the near to middle future onto a memory stick and some into a cloudy place.)
Here are some files found while working my way through them one hot, smoky day in late August to avoid finishing up a short story:

– A couple of files holding poems I’ve decided I’ll let go into the great yonder after-life of poetry that never gets published

– A file optimistically labeled “Summer Routine” – which, while it did not fully take into account the reality of living in southern BC in the summer and therefore wildly over-estimated the amount of time I would be actually outside during the day, does thoughtfully include “drink water” on its to-do list.

– “Untitled” which was not only unnamed but also empty

– Multiple drafts of multiple stories, most complete and hopefully waiting for publication

– One of the two or maybe three poems I’ve written which I really like, but this one no-one else wants to publish, so it is still biding its time in my “Keep for Future” file

– A “File for Future Radio Writing” which makes me feel a bit guilty I haven’t progressed more than a few milimeters along the path to writing another radio-cookbook. But I don’t feel too guilty.

– “Best Books 2004” – I’m not sure how this file survived previous organizing days, but it does remind me to mention to you that I am now down to the last three books on my physical to-be-read pile (if we don’t include two more elsewhere in the house that I haven’t read, and also if we don’t include five – no six – German-related books.)
There remain eighty books still on my “borrow from the library” list. I was hoping to get my physical pile all read by the end of August, but it is what it is. I’ve puzzled and podcasted a bit more instead of reading. Also I’ve worked a bit on that other side-project I’m still not talking about here.

– In my “under construction” folder, I spotted a mysterious file titled “I Only Understand Train Station” – I thought this was going to be another poem, a rather downbeat one I wrote not that long after my dog died, but it turns out this document instead holds three rather cryptic lines I assume I intended to connect with a short story that is… actually maybe set in a train station. (But not really.)*

I have now sent various stories and poems out 173 times so far this year.
Since I last updated, I’ve caught up on a lot of microfiction prompts. I think I’ve written six or maybe seven sometimes very short pieces in the past month. I haven’t been keeping great track, as some of them have been of the type where I write them, I share them with the prompt group, and then I forget them. Most of them will be showing up on the blog later, and there are two that are out on submission.

In a blog post back in April, I listed seven stories that were in my “under construction” folder at that time. Shall we do a progress check? In the order they appear in the April blog post:

• Story set in South America with spies – I don’t think I’ve even opened this document since April, but it is still in my “under construction” file

• 19th century Crimean War tall ships and grave robbers story. I also haven’t opened this file, but I am currently holding it on my mental short list, as it should be a horror story, and as previously mentioned recently, there is a demand for horror stories

• Young adult novel set in Canada – I’m still holding on to the start of this, although I am unsure of why, exactly.

• American Revolution flash fiction – I have actually completed this one and sent it out to seek publication. However, after reading it again this week, I doubt it will be picked up, and while it is actively out to a small handful of literary magazines at the moment, I don’t think I’ll make any further attempts to sell it. I am glad that I wrote it, but I don’t think it has much of a market.

• Chatty letters assassin. I came very close to removing this from the folder today. I had an idea for this story to be the beginning of a series (the assassin could send all sorts of letters about all sorts of “jobs”) but the purpose of the potential series is no longer something I’m interested in actively pursuing. This will probably go away the next time I review this folder.

• Radio/podcast detective series notes – I forgot I had this in my to-get-to file. I was about to delete this from my active files, but then I had a peek inside. And you know what, I’ll likely never get around to doing anything with it – for one thing I have a different, quarter-finished scripted podcast series I should complete before even drafting a first script for this one – that’s not in this folder of things to do because it has it’s own separate folder to itself – but when I read some of my notes, I start smiling and thinking it could be fun. So I’ll keep it around for awhile longer.

• Story “inspired” (not sure inspired is the right word here) by the Berlin Wall. *This is, it turns out, the file mysteriously entitled “I Only Understand Train Station” (which makes the title no longer quite so mysterious, right?)
  The problem is – the rest of that short story is gone. I know what happened to it – I started writing it in a notebook. And then I decided that I would have to start the story again from scratch anyway, and I threw it out (along with all the other stuff that was in that notebook.) I’m not saying that was a bad decision, necessarily, but it does mean that I now have a “under construction” story that consists of three random lines and my memories of what I was trying to do.
  
• I am newly adding a story I’ve alluded to a couple of times now on the blog and which has currently a 3/4s of the way done first draft – it is, in fact, the short story I’m avoiding working on by writing this blog post instead – the SF short story with bees. I’ve allowed myself to be distracted with catching up on all the other prompts over the past month or so, but i really do want to finish this story.

So, there we are. There are still seven stories in my “under construction” folder.

And here is a potential opener note from the detective podcast brainstorming file (in the tradition of most radio detectives I’ve encountered, it seems our hero enjoys talking to themselves):

“Birds are in their element when they find thermals to float through, fish don’t do well out of water, and a pig is happiest uprooting your vegetables. People, they say, whoever they are, are designed for striding across open, relatively flat, Savannah land, but me, me, I find, I’m best at going downhill.
I was just starting to come down the mountain when my phone rang that Wednesday…”