Success

So, I'm getting published! I've been published a few times before, but they never paid anything. Granted, this new publisher isn't offering much, but I'm still in the wee stages of getting myself out there and making my name recognisable (have you heard of me? Fantastic.), so there's really quite a lot of work to be done before I can reasonably begin to expect anything sizable. Of course, this piece is what I consider to be my best work to date, which makes it a little frustrating that the pay isn't higher, but I'm willing to concede that you can't have it all in the beginning. Here's an excerpt:


"I don't know," I said, unsure. "I guess…" I trailed off. What was there now? Did I know where I was going when I picked up my pack and left this little village? Thinking, planning, anticipating… it seemed alien. It felt like an intruder in my consciousness, a tugging sensation that pulled me by the hair up and out of the pit I'd been digging, forcing me to admit, to recognise…I didn't want to think about it. I couldn't. I stared at the cracked boards in the disintegrating bar top, traced the aging lines with my eyes. I followed their rifts and canyons and trails and imagined slipping into one of them, finding the darkness inside and filing it up. What is it to be as small as an insect?

"So… you're just going, then?" Tucker asked. I didn't respond, and he nodded slowly after a moment. "I see." He scratched his beard, and then sat pulling on the wiry bristles about his chin for a little while. 

Something deep in me had moved. There was a touch of the cosmos that had been awakened, a faint feeling of eternity that stretched vast and limitless before my eyes. A future full of wandering and motion and meaningless movement, directed towards nothing and accomplishing nothing and filling me so full of nothing that I couldn't breathe. Subconsciously I reached into my pocket and took a hit from my inhaler. I held my breath, counting the seconds in my head. Tucker watched me from the corner of his eye, still pulling on his chin. What was this place? this little, green, rotten hole in the black heart of nothingness? In the heart of me?"

I'll post a link to the website when it gets published. Oh yeah, did I mention that? It's an online publication. Apparently that's the way to go these days. In any case, I'm pretty excited, and rather than cash my cheque, I think I'll just save it and keep it for framing someday. 

It's sort of inspiring to motivate me towards keeping my novel on the road to completion. I take consolation in that Tolkien finished his book only after a lifetime of compiling notes and doing research. Actually writing his book was a feat of no less than twelve (12) years. While what I'm writing isn't quite on that scale, it's certainly complicated and much more intricate than the average book. No excuses though, I'm getting this baby done. 

New goal? Before the summer. Wish me luck.