Market Theocracy

…I have decided to keep The Ballad off the ‘net. In fact, I’ve decided to finish up three long stories that I began on TCF and — for all intents and purposes — stop posting fiction fo’ free.

Oddly, this is going to be a tough resolution to adhere to. I like posting my stuff for the whole world to see. I write so that people can read my stories. It’s a rough idea to digest, that I should keep the stories to myself until and unless I’m paid a certain amount per word for them. It’s not that I don’t like money, or that I dislike being paid. It’s that my writing has — since childhood — been the way that I let people into my life. For many years I found it almost impossible to verbalize things to people I hadn’t known all my life. I could do it with the written word, though. From notes and letters to stories, writing is how I got to know people and let them know me.

This carried over to internet communication.

But the fact remains that I’m deeply sick of laboring for a living. I detest having a ‘boss’ even more than labor. The only way a person of my’official’ educational level can be self employed is via contracting the sweat of the brow. This didn’t bother me for a long time. But I’m getting older. I have screwed up knees and a screwed up shoulder.

I dismissed the idea of writing for a living mainly because I had no discipline, wrote very slowly and took forever too finish even the shortest of works. Over the past few years, this has changed. I can now quite easily knock out 2000 words or more per day. And, as I continue to meet that quota, I find more and more of those words are usable.

I doubt I’ll be able to ‘quit the day job’ any time soon. But that possibility now no longer seems far fetched. It actually now seems quite logical and the only goal I should be striving for.

To do that means I’ll have to start submitting stuff to the magazines and markets that do pay.

So, these last three stories are to be the last.

They are:

Coyote Laid Low (about 10-12000 words)

Trenching (about 15,000)

King Of The Road (16-20,000 for the main segment)

First up is Coyote, a strange little combination of mid-term future building and the trickster mythos. I’m not quite sure how many parts it will be, but I’m going to try and stick to the Mon/Wed/Fri publishing schedule. Of all three stories, Coyote is probably the most interesting to anachist-libertarians. The world it takes place in is a few decades before the much stabler system depicted in Roberta — a mixture of free zones, mini-states and the like.

When those are done I will probably, eventually, post my sequel to Roberta — mainly because I doubt any paying market would be willing to buy it.