Writing is smacking me around a bit. The Jacob Cable book I’m working on has got a case of the stubborns. Meanwhile, all of the short stories I sent out got rejected. As an added bonus, all other aspects of life are now 27 percent busier, leaving less time for writing.

Is that whining?

Perhaps, but I’m viewing it as information. The above paragraph is the present state of my writing, and this blog is about said writing.

What’s the solution to get things back on track? Nothing magical or instantaneous. Simply ride it out and keep things moving forward, even if the movement is snipped-sized and tortoise-paced.

On a productive note, I got more film reviews done at The Last Movie Outpost. Plus, I continue to put the final touches on a longer work. If I buckle down on Jacob Cable, I can still have a decent draft done before winter. Just got to keep on keeping on.

Expounding a bit on the short story situation — they are a thorn in my side. One would think short stories are easier because they are short, but it is difficult to fit them into my schedule. Plus, I no longer understand what publishers want when it comes to short fiction. I see a lot of requests for politicized stories, which doesn’t appeal to me. I find it hard to believe such stores appeal to the general audience either. If one looks to the golden age of short stories, politics certainly entered into them, but politics was not the main reason they existed.

When I compare my rejected short stories to stories that were accepted, I don’t find my stuff that far off when it comes to technique. Ergo, there is really nothing to do but keep throwing them out there. When it comes to politics, the pendulum will start to swing back the other way, and the fad will die out. Even now, one can see the pendulum swinging the other way.

Back when I wrote DogSS of War, I noticed politicized preaching leaking into movies, books and stories, which is why I thought it would be funny to have a character literally preach in the book. Even back then, the phenomenon was getting obvious enough to skewer, but it has reached another level where I don’t see how it can survive much longer. Still, you never know. Maybe customers don’t care anymore. They just want to consume product and move on to the next thing, and creators will continue to grind their axes and laugh all the way to the bank. Time will tell…

Meanwhile, here is a written-to-order flash-fiction piece I put together for a contest. I’ll post it here because I can’t imagine having a lot of use for it anywhere else…

EVERYONE SINKS

Paien got thrown from his bunk. Panic gave confusion the bum’s rush when he realized he laid on a slanting floor. He staggered into the passageway, climbed the ladder and emerged on deck. Water rushed over his feet. Paien had a moment to wonder what the ship might have hit, but a moment was all that he had. The Vivant was already sliding beneath the waves. The only thing that could sink a ship that fast was a cross between an iceberg and a torpedo.

The world hates by giving no time. Paien jumped over the railing. Cold water hit him with a closed fist, and he struggled to the surface. The suction of the sinking ship drew Paien backwards, and he slammed against the railing he had just leapt. Paien kicked off the steel bars once more and attempted to swim clear, only to be dragged back yet again.

Paien rued the spite of fortune as water closed over his head. He thrashed to get free of the whirlpool action. His lungs burned. As things started going black, a sudden blast of pressure — likely the boilers exploding — blasted Paien free. He had a violent, queasy sensation of acceleration, and then he was sucking in great whooping breaths on the surface of the sea.

Paien was a drop spilled from a bucket of loss. Fog cocooned him, and a full moon gave it an eldritch cast. The creaks and groans of the Vivant as it went to the bottom sounded like tortured whale song. The vessel had a crew of twenty-five. Paien wondered if any of the others had made it. To think he was the only one scoped his heart with something that might have been sorrow. Being alone reduced his chances of survival by a demoralizing amount.

“Hello!” Paien shouted. “Anyone!”

Multiple cries, vibrato with fear, answered on the wind.

“Here!”

“Help me!”

“I’m hurt!”

The laments of others were songs of hope. Paien couldn’t tell how many replied. Perhaps three. Perhaps five. The voices echoed and reechoed in the fog. Finding the owners of the voices would be futile until daylight, but by then they’d drift apart. Paien picked a direction and swam.

Maybe the others had time to grab life vests and rations. One of them might even be calling from a lifeboat. If Paien could reach them, his odds would be much improved. If he relieved the other survivors of life vest, rations or boat, his odds would improve even more…

“Hello!” Paien shouted again.

“My arm is broken!”

“I’m bleeding!”

Paien came across bits of flotsam that marred the surface of the sea like petty griefs: papers, a sock, plastic cups and more. Paien grabbed a small garbage can greedily. He turned it upside down and clung to it. The air trapped inside made it a flotation device.

“There’s something in the water! It’s huge!”

Paien stopped swimming, chilled with something more than cold.

“It’s got me! It’s—”

The screamer abruptly cut off. Paien tried to look everywhere at once, but the only thing he saw was silver fog and dark water. The vast expanse below unnerved him, but everyone floated over the abyss whether they realized it or not. They floated on money, home, love and a thousand other things while the abyss yawned beneath them regardless. Eventually, everyone sinks.

“Oh God!” another voice screamed. “Oh, God! OH GUH—”

It had to be sharks. Paien imagined them biting into his legs and sawing them off with serrated teeth. Paien stayed as still as possible. Perhaps the sharks would ignore him. Perhaps they would not turn their black eyes on him and tear him apart piece-by-piece while he screamed and gurgled his life away in water tinted red with his own blood.

Yet, staying quiet created a damned-if-he-did-and-damned-if-he-didn’t situation. Staying still meant he would not find the others. On land and on ships, it was easy to factor equations that offered the most benefit to oneself. In matters of life and death, solutions had remainders.

Paien didn’t want to think about it anymore. He closed his eyes. To think further was to realize how much trouble he was in and to realize how close the onset of death. Paien tasted mortality on his tongue, and it tasted like a penny because it was cheap enough for everyone to lose.

Closing his eyes forced Paien to stare into an interior landscape where things that might have been a life flashed. No god deigned to serve him on the journey, so he served no god. An old man that might have been a father got brushed aside for a woman whose heart Paien bit into like an apple while other women laughed and cavorted and pulled up black dresses. A chest of jewels belonged to someone else, and Paien stuffed handfuls into his mouth. In between swallows the words that came out were lies. On the outskirts of that landscape were things Paien coveted, and when he reached them, they weren’t enough to fill the gaping void within.

Paien awoke from his dreams, coughing and sputtering on seawater. It was not yet dawn, but the fog around Paien was lighter, as if the sun was close to rising. Paien checked his watch, but it had stopped shortly after six. Paien tentatively called out again.

“Hello!”

No answer came. Either the other survivors had drifted away or the sharks had gotten them. The worst of fortune’s might fell on Paien and left him abandoned.

“Hello, anyone!”

Paien bobbed up and down as a swell rolled past. The swell was not caused by the wind or the tide. Something had passed beneath him, something huge. Paien thrashed in a circle, teeth chattering. It hadn’t been a shark. The largest shark that ever existed could not have created such a swell. The wave had lifted Paien high enough to see even more nothing. Paien imagined a great beast below, gazing up at him like he was a fig, ripe to pluck off a tree.

The vague, diffuse light of the fog grew dark before Paien. A great shadow rose from the sea, hidden in the mist, up it rose, higher and higher — a giant black blot in all of that white, taller than was possible, up and up, a titanic shape — mountainous and imperious and lord of the depths.

Paien whimpered in the back of his throat. He might have swum away in terror, but the shape was too immense. He’d be swimming forever to get out of its shadow. And still it rose, and the wind that strained across the water might have whispered the word woe.

Paien gasped as his hair went white. Compared with all that one clung to, what was any of it in the face of such inevitability? Now Paien knew what caused the Vivant to sink so quickly. This thing could slap a vessel to the bottom of the ocean the way one slaps away a gnat.

“Jesus,” Paien tried to pray, but it came out as practiced blasphemy.

The shape began to sink back into the water. Another swell formed by its descent and carried Paien a great distance. At last, the behemoth disappeared into the sea once more.

Time passed. It passed neither fast nor slow. The end is in no rush. It is only beginnings and middles that insist on getting ahead of themselves.

Paien was not aware he was weeping when something touched his ankle, tentatively — something warm and slimy. It might have been a tongue, tasting him. Even a monster so large had parts so small that they could sample the dust mote that was man. The appendage slithered up Paien’s shin, wrapped around his calf and clenched with enough force to snap Paien’s leg like pasta.

Paien opened his mouth to shriek but was jerked underwater before any sound could rip itself from his throat. The bruised color of the depths prevented Paien from seeing the leviathan. His heart pounded in his ears as he held what breath he had. And still he went down…and down…and down. A crushing pressure enveloped him. Paien’s heart pounded louder and louder, until it no longer sounded like a heart at all. It sounded like a gong announcing a red and blighted arrival.

Somehow, Paien was able to scream despite being fathoms deep.

“Please, no! PLEASE!”

Eventually, the fog dissipated. The sun shined down on the sea and turned its waters a pleasing blue. Whitecaps traveled to the horizon and over it. Clouds floated across the sky. Night came and then the stars and then the waxing moon.

Nothing to mark the watery grave of Paien existed, but for a floating garbage can.