4/9/2012
Greetings earthlings,
I figure I'll provide an update every once in a while if something of importance is happening. Two of my works were published and released last week (actually, both on the same day). I'll start with "The Intergalactic Book Club," which I wrote in 2011 in my Senior year of college. I wanted to compose a light-hearted, humorous piece that simultaneously critiqued and recognized my debt to the science fiction genre in general. "The Intergalactic Book Club" was what came out of that. I remember getting several rejections before the piece was accepted in the Flush Fiction anthology. In fact, I almost forgot about the story, which was a shame because the ending left the two aliens, Grux and Flezno, poised to continue their intergalactic adventures. Maybe I'll continue those adventures after all. As an aside, I read Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad after writing "The Intergalactic Book Club," which is just as well because my story appears to be in part a rip-off of Lem's tales. I, however, think that Lem anachronistically plagiarized my story, but of course that is my opinion.
("The Intergalactic Book Club" is not available online, but click Here for the Flush Fiction release page and Here for the amazon page.)
The second release is "Sons of the Desert," which I wrote directly after my trip to Israel over the summer of 2011. The setting, a Bedouin encampment in the Negev desert, as well as a few major and minor details (such as my own telling of the Bedouin story), I stole directly from my memory of the experience. The plot itself, the two boys and their dangerous journey through the desert, is, thankfully, completely fictional. After writing the piece, I sent it out to one or two publications, JewishFiction.net got back to me pretty quickly, and that was that. Easy enough! Now if only getting the rest of my stories published were this quick and simple!
(Click Here to read "Sons of the Desert")
In case anyone's wondering how my recent stories are going, last semester I wrote a novelette called "Clockwork." Most of the writing took place at night after classes discussing Dostoyevsky, Woolf, and Faulkner, and I'm sure some of that found its way into my story. As a brief synopsis: a recent law has made suicide illegal. It is now permissible for those who commit suicide to be brought back to life and tried for their crimes. In reaction to this, a man commits suicide in an act of protest. That's all I'll say for now, as I try to find a publisher. But, again, I'm really excited about this story, and I will not rest until it finds a home!
Otherwise, I completed another short story which melds and confuses science fiction and fantasy (trying to find a magazine for that one as well), and recently I've been rewriting a past story, "Into the Light," which is on this blog (at least for now). "Into the Light" had way more potential that I'm trying to flesh out, but I also have to say that this story is extremely difficult to write. I'm at 35 pages or so (almost done with the first draft), and each time I sit down and force myself to write, I almost always swear the tale off as horrible. But for the sake of my sanity, I'm completing the first draft, and from there I'll take inventory. If I can do any justice at all to the original premise (an envoy from the world of darkness journeys for the first time into the world of light), I'll have something special on my hands.
That's it for now. Hopefully I'll have more reasons to update soon!
Until then,
Daniel Kason
