I had the stupidest dream last night. In it, I was the mother of a manipulative, evil kid with supernatural powers. It’s an overdone subgenre already, and my subconscious was also busily stealing plotlines such as a woman being coerced into eating glass, like in Choose or Die or Oculus. The resulting solution was that David Tennant shows up, because the day before I saw him on the cover of a Doctor Who DVD at work, and proposes we send the kid to space. Space?! That kind of flaccid, sloppy writing is reserved for at least two sequels into the franchise!
Silliness aside, I did once write fiction. When I was eleven, my classmates and I were prompted to write short stories, and I wrote about a murderous ventriloquist’s dummy. I got in trouble, but I continued to write other, terribly unoriginal bits of rubbish: a woman is obsessed with an actor, so she kidnaps him; a kid moves to a town where once a year everyone turns into monsters; a girl is jealous of her older sisters, who have the ability to make men fall in love with them. The ones I can remember are all thinly veiled dramatizations of my various tween neuroses. I wrote a novel when I was a young teen, including my sisters and friends as characters. It was so, so bad. When I was twenty I was still at it, and still struggling with including enough detail and possessing a tin ear for dialogue. That’s why I enjoy the occasional microfiction, and why I haven’t deleted the ones on my site–stories that are 50 words long aren’t supposed to have details, and no one has to say anything.
All told, I don’t miss writing fiction. What a relief to wake up in a world where I dole out criticism instead of rightfully earning it.
GhoulieJoe 