Submission

          What's the news? I submitted three stories to the Trembles website. However, as I didn't write them especially for Trembles, but had them lying around, I'm not holding my breath.

          I also submitted a story to Microhorror. Again, I didn't write it from scratch, it was a story which was sitting there doing nothing. But it had been previously published, sort of. I entered a horror story competition about a year ago. It was the most convoluted competition I've ever known. And I realized afterwards that you needed some sort of smartphone or tablet in order to read the other entries and vote for them. I didn't have either device, and furthermore, I didn't have friends with these devices, because I gathered that there were a lot of friends voting for each other's stories. You live and learn.

          So there I was with this ghost story, a perfectly good one, I thought, and I couldn't do anything with it. Well, Microhorror doesn't mind if a story has been published before. So I set to work editing it. The original was about 2,000 words, and Microhorror's limit is 666 words, so I had to prune and hack ruthlessly.

          I don't think, actually, Microhorror will accept it. I hope they do, but I've got a feeling that Nathan Rosen, the editor, will think it's too oblique. I was trying to write something like M.R. James's The Mezzotint, which is a subtle and elliptical ghost story. And maybe my story was better at 2,000 words. We shall see.

          I discovered three other websites which publish horror fiction online: Paragraph Planet, Flashes In The Dark and Everyday Fiction (Everyday Fiction publishes stories of all genres, actually). Paragraph Planet has a word limit of 75, including the title, so it's a real challenge. I got a story published on it, but stories here appear for one day, and afterwards vanish. I got an email telling me when my story was going to appear, but I forgot all about it, and missed basking in the glory. Oh well.

          I was going to say that I hadn't written much lately, although the previous paragraphs might have left you wondering. I thought that I was encountering a block, but thinking about it, I realize that I've been panicking.

          I suppose what I mean is, I haven't been losing myself in the writing of a story lately. I haven't woken up looking forward to continuing from where I left off yesterday. The story I sent off to Paragraph Planet was written from scratch, but I polished it off in one day- including editing and submitting it. Since I last posted here, I've completed one other flash fiction, but this was more like pulling teeth. I could never look forward to writing it, even though I found that I enjoyed it once I buckled down.

          Sending stories off, for me, is like betting on horses: there's a feeling of exhilaration, hope. Lately in my private life, I haven't really felt hope. I'm short of money, my job drives me up the wall, I'm still in the middle of a long, drawn-out legal business, my wife's health isn't good, etc;etc. My writing seems to be the only thing that's going at all well, the only area where I seem to be making some headway. It led me to feel desperate, and when the ideas don't come to me as quickly as I'd like, I get panicky.

          But I took a few days off about a week ago. Didn't write, didn't read much. Got a few chores done, but mostly I relaxed, and got some exercise. So that when I did go back to work, I was a blank page all over again, ready to begin.