I’ve been looking through my files of stories, or I should say fragments that I have abandoned. Some of them I remember, and I remember why I abandoned them. They were just plain awful, or weren’t going anywhere, or I knew that I would never have time to finish them. Some were just completely out of the genres that I write in. That’s not really a bad thing.
Some, I just don’t remember at all. There were a few that were written for drabble contests, and one of them I just posted on TCoA, called decommissioning. It’s a sad piece written by someone whose body is falling apart (i.e. me). It’s from 2011, when I was still living in the UK, but frankly, I don’t remember its background, other than I had some surgery around that time.
My guess is that I posted it on Chrons (Sci-Fi and Fantasy Chronicles) to get someone to notice me there. That’s the thing. They have regular writing competitions, with no awards other than prestige. If you enter enough, you start getting votes, but the same few people win all the time. That’s why I don’t frequent it much anymore. Some of their stories are good but don’t follow the prompt, some are just jokes, some are just bad. Me? I think they just don’t understand me. I just don’t fit genre stereotypes, even when I make it a point to write in a specific genre. Erotica readers want porn, sci-fi and fantasy readers want a little erotica to spice things up, and I just want to write good fiction that contains all these elements with a little magical realism thrown in.
I just don’t fit.
Annema 