NANOWRIMO AND SIGNUM U.

Hello, imaginary readers!

Due to my recently signing on with Signum University as a volunteer creative writer, things are shaking up for me this November – I’m participating in NaNoWriMo, maintaining a discussion board on Signum U’s website, and working with renewed vigor on my Werewolf novel, which you will not find here because it’s not even in a fit state for this quasi-respectable forum.  Look me up at either place (bkozlowski2) and shoot me a message if you, for some mad reason, stumble on this site first (can’t imagine why that would be the case).

Once I get something readable, it’ll show up here.  Until then, there should be plenty of other things to keep you occupied, even with your voracious and terribly-flattering hunger for more material.

NEW SILENT DRAFT

That’s right: A Small Queer Silence is in its fourth draft!  In preparation for actually sending out some pitches and query letters and trying to go from driven amateur to snazzy professional, I’m polishing up and shipping out my most finished works, including Silence.

Practically, this doesn’t mean a whole lot of differences from draft three: mostly some technical cleanup and the occasional addition for the sake of thematic robustness (screw you, Hemingway!), but go read it anyway, or you’ll lose the opportunity to gloat to your friends when I’m big and famous about how you read my work before it was cool.

SURPRISE ATTACK!

It’s another random story!  After watching Up in the Air, I felt obliged to correct the sort of status quo bias that movie (albeit brilliantly) perpetrates, and produced this.  It’s mostly just a thought-experiment following naturally from the initial line, that ended abruptly after I realized I had nothing else to add. I suspect it turned out a bit cutesy/New-Yorker-ish for my taste, and more crass than I prefer, but still is worth a look.  Mostly I still just like the first line:

“I met me at the airport some weeks ago, and I knew immediately that I wasn’t going to like me very much.”

GO READ IT.

LAMP-POSTED!

And now it’s official!  An Ambiguous Lamppost [working title] is typed up here in its entirety, as a finished first draft!  It’s a weird, disjointed work, roughly novella-length, about Victorian London, infrastructure, reality, miscommunication, and conflict, written in a style one part Dickens, one part Chesterton, with a bit of Beckett and Dostoevsky thrown in for good measure.  The story features ranting by many different grumpy white men, piratical unionized children, bad philosophy of varying stripes, incompetent nearsighted bureaucrats, an idiot narrator, angelic visitation, and a lamppost of uncertain reality.  Also possibly God.

So please set aside your sensibilities, consign yourself to absurdity, and enjoy the mess of mundanity that is An Ambiguous Lamppost [working title].

LAMP-POST

I haven’t updated anything in a while, due to an alarming amount of consecutive life-setbacks, but whatever.  The Internet is no place for whining.  Wait.  Never mind.

Anyway, I have found some time recently to start typing up the prodigal lamppost story, as well as write another short piece that will appear soon.  The first half of An Ambiguous Lamppost (working title) can be found here; I’ll hopefully have the rest presented shortly.  It’s very rough (he whined, currying gentle criticism), and I can’t imagine it will every be terribly polished, but I justify it to myself as “deliberately disjointed” because I can and nobody corrects me anyway.  Ha.

Enjoy the madness.

UPDATE AND OTHER SHTUFF

Good news, everyone!

“The Clockwork Butterfly” is now in its second draft, now available for your reading pleasure in its original location.  It has been revised to my liking and I’ll soon be shopping for a place to publish it, so if you catch any horrific errors or have suggestions on who might be interested in circulating a ~20,000 word fairy tale, feel free to let me know before I completely embarrass myself.

As for the lamppost story, it is now in a finished first draft, but wholly handwritten, and thus unable to be posted here.  I hope to soon bring it into the digital age, but that usually involves a battery of early revisions (especially because it is so rough at the moment) and I expect it may be the better part of a month before it will be seen here.

COMING SOON

Business and traffic have been slow since the supposedly-grand opening of the site, but do not despair, I have a new short story in progress about a lamppost of questionable ontology.  I am (what I imagine to be) halfway through the first (handwritten) draft, and I hope to have the first typed draft finished by the end of October (a generous estimate at best).  If you like quasi-philosophical literature, Victorian satire, farce, or ranting, this will be right up your alley.  More information as it becomes a thing.

GRAND OPENING!

IT’S A NEW BLOG!

(just like all the other blogs)

What’s different about this one?  Well, obviously it’s mine, which means I like it better than most, because biases and specialness and things.

Second, this is basically a fiction repository.  All updates will be related to the fiction, including but not limited to: announcements about new fiction projects (and possible inclusion of those projects); announcements about revisions, new drafts, and the like; wretched whining about failures to publish; equally ebullient success stories; etc., etc.  Not creative non-fiction.  NO MEMOIRS.  Also not unrelated garbage about my cat or how I hate people who cut in line at the store or pictures about my vacation to Cincinnati.  Fiction.  Stories.

It’s also huge.  This reflects more than ten years of work, admittedly inconsistent, but often productive.  At last count, there are eighteen separate projects included here, amassing nearly a half-million words, in a wide variety of short stories, novellas and novels.

It’s also much better than 95% of the crap fiction blogs you’ll find.  Even the worst of it.  No, seriously.  Your objections are unfounded; go read my stuff if you’re unconvinced.

No fan-fiction, either.  I grew out of that phase in 7th grade.

Overwhelmed?  Start with The Clockwork Butterfly for a fairy tale fix, A Small Queer Silence for something more serious and artistic, or Eric McMallus’s Miracle for something shorter, punchier, and philosophical.  Or visit the Ground Rules or About the Author page for some more background.

And SHARE everything.  This is an exercise in blatant, unapologetic self-promotion.  Publishers want a safe bet and I want to get the attention of publishers.  You share my stuff, I get more time and opportunity to write more stuff for you to read. (Intermediary steps omitted for concision)

So go read.  If you don’t read, feel free to like everything and share this page with someone who does and let them govern your judgment.

WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE

Congratulations!

If you’re reading this, it means that you have somehow navigated to my fiction site without my promoting it or polishing it or anything like that.  Good for you.  I’d give you a cookie but, you know, the Internet and everything…

I suspect this works-in-progress business will be going on for some days weeks UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE for the rest of the blog’s duration, so please bear with me and watch that you don’t accidentally tip over a load-bearing strut in the meantime or we’ll all die and it will be YOUR FAULT.

But, more importantly, check back later and there will be more stories here.  Or poke about the menu now and find whatever atrocious bile I’ve already managed to attach to this site.  Whatever it looks like now, I’m sure there will be more (and better) content, more accessibly arranged, possibly with pictures or videos or audio files attached for the attention-deficit.  Because popularity.

Also, go like things.  Follow my blog.  It makes me a better writer.  I promise.

-The Management