“Silence is
Golden.”
King Midas*
Went Christmas
shopping with my brother today and bought presents for Dad, Mom and
CJ. As I traveled around the mall and saw all the salespeople I knew
that yes, Christmas time is when love and friendship is the time of
year where love and friendship joins hands with capitalism to bring
joy to the world. Huzzah!
Anyway onto the
flash fiction!
The Vampiric
Novelist and her Human Novels
For once why
can't my agent let me write a novel about ordinary vampires? She
forces me to write these repetitive cliché novels about humans. Over
and over again. I suppose its not my agent's fault. It's the market's
fault. It's what I have to do to make money. If I want to put food on
the table with writing I have to write these books. Everyone loves
these human books. They're waning in popularity a little. But I've
hit the formula so well I'm guaranteed to pay my bills by selling
these books. Humans are popular now. For some reason vampires are
falling head over heels for them. Without having those feelings
myself I've managed to figure out how to write them out and put out
the formulaic human genre books that vampires buy in bulk. Over time
writing these books by formula has become like droning away at a math
problem in school.
It's painful
and twisted. I'm a vampire writer. I should be using my craft, my
art, to explore the feelings and emotions of vampire characters not
those humans. I am better than that. I'm no factory for books. I'm an
artist! A painter! But words are what I use to paint a canvas of a
page. I am a genius! I am above writing these. I am above writing to
the market. I am above writing to anyone's standards! I still have to
pay the bills so I'll write these. But without my agent or publisher
knowing I'll write something no one has ever done before. Something
so unique, so different that I will no longer fit any formula! New
formats in the book at every chapter! New kinds of characters!
Sci-fi? Fantasy? Surreal? It'll blur all those lines only because the
reader will just know it isn't the reality and norm they're used to. And there
won't be a single human in it!
It took me
three years to write while keeping up with my other work despite the
fact I was so good at churning out those cliché novels. But my
masterpiece was made. I submitted anonymously to publishers. I got
rejections. As to be expected. They were all form rejections. They
probably didn't even read it. Probably already had their plate full
already or something.
I then got hit
hard in the gut when I got my first non-form rejection from an
editor. One with remarks personally written to me. It was short but
still managed to smack me right in the face.
“I could tell
by all the detail and the sheer length of this book that you put a
lot of work into it. But all this strange formatting without any
direction and refusal to even follow normal story set-up I couldn't
follow through past the first chapter without getting confused. I
wanted to give you a reality check before you try doing this again.
You should try learning basic storytelling by reading lots of books.
Try reading a few human genre books they're all the rage right now.”
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