Sometimes I surprise myself.

Recently I started moving all my old writings into a piece of software called WhizFolders. I've had it for a while now, based on the recommendation of a writer friend of mine. It's designed in such a way as to make it easy to organize thoughts and various ramblings into a more coherent order, to catalog notes and other bits and pieces so that one can make some sense of them. It's a much better piece of software to use for the purpose than a program like MS Word, since it's not set up so much to format content as it is to put one's thoughts into place when writing anything of any length.

Back in the early 90's while I was still on GEnie, General Electric's information network and a competitor to Prodigy and AOL at the time, I used to take part in the Writers Boards. These were a great place for trying out ideas, for writing various prose and/or poetry. Others would either add or would comment or offer constructive criticism. I never came across anyone just running a piece down, although sometimes some pieces would receive praise that was not necessarily in line with the quality of the work. Generally it was a positive place, and I "met" a few published authors there who commented once or twice--Joe Haldeman was one such--with some positive feedback.

While on those boards I wrote extensively in one particular category. I got very involved with writing that one piece, creating post after post until I brought the story to a conclusion, and the final effort ended up being almost of book length. I had not looked at it pretty much since I wrote originally it, but in the transcribing effort I started to read it again, curious to see what I thought of it after all this time.

The beginning of it was a bit rough, mainly due to trying to fit in with the general theme of the category and include some of the other "characters" who had been developed by others. The idea in the category was to have multiple people writing and developing a storyline en masse. But I got into my own ideas pretty quickly and moved away from those other storylines, and the others, seeing what was going on, soon dropped out of their own accord.

Surprisingly, at least to me, the story was pretty well written overall. I was working on developing writing skills at the time and it was definitely showing... with some additional work and editing, it might just be publishable material. That's something I will need to think about as I go through it and read more critically, but the main point here is that the writing skills are there, they just need some refreshing. I did a lot better with it than I thought I had.

What this all comes back to is that I do plan to pick up on my writing again....

Just prior to when I was separated from my ex I had been working on writing short stories and submitting them to various publications with an eye to getting them published. When my marriage went south, all of that got set aside as I tried to deal with the emotional trauma of divorce and the struggle to find employment that paid enough for me to survive financially. During that time of submitting stories, a science fiction story I sent out to Amazing Stories (a publication now sadly defunct) came very close to the mark, making it all the way up to the editor's cut (that's the last cut before being published, for those of you who have never tried to get anything published) and receiving some praise from the editor with encouragement to please submit more work. Without question, had I continued to submit the story it would have been picked up by a fanzine at least. One starts at the top and works down, I got cut off when I was only just beginning to submit. Had I continued writing I would likely have gotten some stories published in the better science fiction magazines by now, but sometimes life throws a curve ball and we put things off in order to deal with it.

Rereading this old piece from days gone by, I felt very encouraged; it reinforces a desire I have long held to get back into writing and produce some work worthy of publication. I don't know when or if I will succeed in getting something published--time have changed and I have a lot of catching up to do--but I enjoy writing and I would like to get back into it again. I just need to develop the ability and skills some more, then see where it leads me.