Well, actually, the town name was Hölle, which is German for both Abyss and Hell. Southern Germany, near the Czech border, pre-unification. Part of my platoon was on an orientation tour of THE WALL. Yeah, that wall. Hölle was the last little town outside the five kilometer zone before you reached it.
Sometime last month, I decided that I didn’t want to write anymore. Why? Well, to tell the truth, writing has done nothing for me over the last couple years except to feed my feelings of inadequacy and guilt. It has made me feel, in order: Incompetent, lazy, unsympathetic, rude, dull, stupid and, of course, ridiculous for believing I could possibly ever rise to the level of skill I wanted.
Is it just me, or does Google’s position on orphaned works sound a little like this:
1. I’m announcing to everyone that I’m going to rape your wife . . .
I’m not sure when it happened, but happen it did: The world woke up one morning and decided that individuality is a bad thing.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
As I’m terrifically busy today, I thought I’d post a flash piece today that originally appeared in Shadowed Realms Magazine, issue #7. Hope you all enjoy! Triad in the Key of Lies by Joseph Paul Haines The first time she visited, the weather was nothing like the day we met. The late autumn winds hummed a dirge through the trees just outside [...]
Yeah, it happens. You get a certain number of words into your work-in-progress and come to a stunning realization that requires you to set aside the pages you’ve written and start over from scratch. As I was writing, I realized that the emotional content, while relevant, lacked a certain . . . something. For the life of me, I couldn’t [...]
Another thousand words in today on the work-in-progress, which goes by a variety of names depending on my mood. Last week got bogged down in life, but I’m back at it. Going to finish this book by May if it kills me. (Which it won’t, I just felt like being melodramatic.) And here’s a lesson for all the writers out [...]
There are days I’m very glad that writing is a solitary occupation, because truth be told, if I had to spend all day in an office with some of the writers I’ve seen lately, blood would stain my keyboard. Now please, most writers I know are good people working in earnest in an incredibly difficult profession. Some of them do [...]
Beneath a Watchful Sky 9,050 / 75,000(11.0%) So I’m moving forward, not at the pace I’d wanted, but at a good clip. At this rate I should be finished with the first draft around the end of May. Hopefully things are going to speed up a bit now as I’ve reached a point where things are going to race toward [...]
