Digging through the cobwebs of the writing addict...I mean attic

I've been working on a personal project lately now that other things aren't falling into place (like a job and survivability...little things like that). Some of you know that I have over 100 short stories that I've written over the years, plus a number I've lost count of concerning articles, plays and other such stuff. So, I've been trying to nail down all of my short stories so I can start sending them back out again.

You see, I used to have a writing career. I really did. It was starting up and looking pretty good. Then I started dating a woman who I loved more than the world itself, and she kind of messed with my head by convincing me that I wasn't a good enough writer to be writing professionally. I was so in love with her that I actually believed her and stopped writing. Later on, I realized what had actually happened; she considered herself a writer, even though she had never written anything, and it bothered her that I was prolific and actually producing a lot of writing. At the time, she was too perfect in my mind for me to ever believe that something like this might be going on. Anyway, we don't need to watch network television to realize that sometimes guys are stupid. I certainly was.

Anyway, I was actually producing a lot of stuff back then, and I was actually becoming somewhat known. Editors would comment on my submissions, talking about previous publications of mine, and it just felt like it was only a matter of time. And then stupid Duane stopped writing and selling for over a decade. Yeah, really.

So over the last few years, I've been trying to relaunch my writing career. Two years ago, I finished what was obviously my hardest novel ever to write, which was a Greek epic foundation novel (that's also my first humorous novel as well). Then just recently, I completed the rewrite of a series called The Deck Const, which I intend to be writing for the rest of my life (just finished the first novel of the series, called Rumors of War).

Now, I'm going through agent rejection hell, which is really bizarre but part of the game. Most agents have switched to wanting to receive emails instead of letters, and while this might seem like a good thing because of the cost, I have this theory that people don't take email as seriously as they do regular mail, so when they get query letters, they really don't take them all that serious. So far, I have gotten the impression that most agents tend to take some kind of weird pleasure in automatically rejecting anything that comes into their email boxes. I get the impression that I have as much luck sending spam to a sex site than I do getting a writing job from an agent.

Anyway, so now I'm working on my old short stories, and it's like visiting old family because some of these stories were written two decades ago, back when I was a much different writer. Some are newer, like my latest short story "Precipice" and the previously published and award receiving "Buried Memories". But others are really old, like my very first short story, "Looking for Gold in a Lead-Lined World" which was a combination of humor, Dystopian science fiction and US-icon criticism. It's such an interesting little experiment to look over some of this old stuff and then think, "is that something I would write today?"

Anyway, just some thoughts as I quickly run out of money and embrace homelessness, insanity and glorious levels of depravity.

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