"As he lay dying, Bug Boy remembered the first spider, the Argiope Aurantia, curled up against the glass of the Ragu jar that his father pulled from the freezer."
In the Summer of 2020, my first fiction story "Get a Life" was published by the website The Write Launch, which was the culmination of a very long journey for a story that survived several iterations, edits, lonely days collecting dust on my computer's hard drive and at least one massive overhaul. By the time it was published, it had been alive in my head and then in words at least 15 years.
The story grew from a few ideas and images I had. Those ideas rattled around my head for a long time before I finally started piecing together a draft. The first idea has its seeds in my journalism days. A news story has two lives. The one leading up to the news event and then the consequences. So, I wanted to write a story that simultaneously led to an event and depicted the consequences of an event, in this case, a murder. One storyline follows the wake of the murderer first through his eyes and then those around him. The second is the victim, told through the people in her life, leading to the murder. The story crescendos with the murder through the eyes of the victim.
The second idea is the flip expression "Get a Life." Something you tell the fellow giving you too much flak on social media, perhaps. In the story, Bug Boy doesn't get a life after taking a life. Julia is trying to figure out how to have a life as a young, single mother, and the people around both characters are trying to understand their lives and this tragedy. Finally, I knew early on this was better than most anything I'd ever written, and I hoped this story would help me get the life I wanted as a writer.
While the publication on the website hasn't yet sparked my ascension to the top of the literary world, I can tell it's already helped as I submit other stories. That one credit says to the editor, hey, someone else took a chance on this guy.
The life of this story isn't over. The published story is just under 11,000 words, a total too long for some and too short for others. I have a series of short stories each a similar length to "Get a Life," that build off the people and places in "Get a Life." It's been sitting while I wait out a time agreement in a contract I regretted signing, and after that I hope to cast a line with an editor or two before finding either an agent or publisher. Just me, trying to get a life, again.
Anyways, I wanted to begin this blog with this story, because it's really the starting point for everything that lies ahead. I hope you stick around to see where all this goes.
Below is the link to "Get a Life" posted on The Write Launch, if you desire to read it.
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