The roses bloom. The sunflower seedlings thicken. The tomatoes start to set their first fruit. It's raining today for the first time in, oh, I'd say, three weeks. Everyone says it's an unusual spring. Prognostications of drought find their way into our ears. Rumblings of a rough fire season ahead. Mostly, so far, we just need to make sure to water the lawn.
I've really been on a roll with the short stories. Back in March's Pandemic Periodical post, I spoke about a new direction that I wanted to take my craft in. To focus on the veterans stories, the military stories, the war stories. Well, I've done just that.My folders and notes have exploded with ideas for shorts and longer works. So many self-addressed emails of scenes and scenarios I woke up one morning or another still dreaming about. Jots of thematic parallelisms. Inspirations from films or books I'm watching and reading.
It seems, in giving myself permission, so to speak, to pursue solely the military-veteran-war writing route, I've kaboomed with stories. The levee's broken open. The wrath cometh.
I have submitted to two contests, the Proud To Be, Volume 10, from Southeast Missouri State University Press, and the Line of Advance 2021 Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards. I especially composed one story for each, because I'll take placement in both if I can get it.
And I haven't stopped there.
I have more submissions into The Wrath-Bearing Tree, War, Literature & the Arts, Collateral, and a whole collection of short stories submitted to the Veterans Writing Award by Syracuse University Press. Plus submissions to an upcoming anthology on Alternative War from B Cubed Press. Plus, plus I'm aiming to submit to Consequence Forum this July, when they reopen their fiction submissions. Plus, plus, plus I've discovered another somewhat new literary journal that specializes in veterans writing, called The Line Veterans Literary Review. So I'll have to come up with something to submit to them as well.
August will be a busy month. The two contests will complete with their results by then (crossing my fingers they ask me for my DD 214 because that means they need to verify I am, indeed, a military veteran and, hence, in the running for inclusion in their anthologies) and several of my other submissions have estimated two- to three-month review periods.
Till then, of course, I continue scribbling, scribbling, scribbling away...
Yesterday, I finished what you might call an initial draft of a new story, A Square of Dirt. It's—bit of a spoiler alert here—the life of a combat outpost as told from the point of view of the outpost itself. And it's not short by the standards of short stories. So, I'll have to poke around for places who accept longer short fiction. Which, in my experience, means it will not get published by a lit mag. But who knows, it's worth finishing this one up and getting it betaread and re-edited and so on, so that's it's done. The story alone is worth the effort, even I never manage to find someone willing to publish it.
Is all of this new direction in my writing due to the pandemic?
Yes and no.
The pandemic has exacerbated limitations on daycare in this area and made the prospect of putting an unvaccinated child in a petri dish daycare setting less palatable. But it's really more a result of our cross-continental move to Oregon which has progenerated this new focus and intensity in my writing.
The move required a resignation of my previous employment and the establishment of yours truly as the de facto stay-at-home parent. But being a stay-at-home parent from dawn (often predawn) to dusk doesn't necessarily mean I get to write more...
No, I manage to write only twice in a typical 24-hour period.
Once, during Alder's midday nap, for a half hour or an hour of actual writing time, and again when he goes to bed for the night, for another hour, maybe two, depending on how long it took to put him to sleep and how much sleep I'm willing to lose.
I joke with my wife sometimes that if I were back at work full-time, I'd get more of a chance to write than I do staying at home (my jobs for the last five years or so requiring me to sit in front of a screen and keyboard all the live long day).
But I don't have any regrets.
I will say that I'm not really willing to tackle a rewrite of my novel while working as a stay-at-home parent; it's just too much. (Though I do believe a novel is the path to wider recognition and, perhaps, a part-time career as a writer—books are really what the publishing industry sells—so a novel will be necessary in the near future.)
Short stories, however, I can manage.
That is, perhaps, where the focus and intensity in my war-military-veterans stories—this new direction—really comes from.
The limits on my time require a compression of the writing; a breaking up of the story into five-thousand word batches instead of producing a long chain of eighty-some-odd-thousand words required of a novel-length work.
That, plus all of the contests and submission deadlines...
Well, that's all from the end of the river that drains into another this perhaps weekly. I'll see you here, next time, in about a month or so. Bub-bye.