This Wednesday’s Story Time is an original piece of flash fiction titled “Could Be Worse.” Whether it could or not is up for the reader to decide, but that’s always the case. It was written as a writer’s group exercise on the key word “Warning.”
Consider yourself.
Standard Note: “Could Be Worse” will stay online until next Wednesday, March 14th. After that…likely not.
There should have been a blog post up earlier, but that was out of the question. See, this is a nothing day. The only appropriate activity on a nothing day is, well, nothing. The mind spins in circles and goes nowhere. All your interests, passions, odd trains of thought, all derailed, and the only mental image available is one of those old fashioned tv test patterns. Do they still do those, by the way? Haven’t seen one lately, not that it’s important, but even on a nothing day, those random thoughts and images will appear.
See? Doing nothing is hard. We’re not designed for it. Active creatures are we, in a physical if not always imaginative sense. Doing nothing, and doing it well? That’s rare. I’ve never had the knack. Wasting time? Sure. Past and future master of the form, but that’s not the same thing. Wasting time is to have something to do and decide to do something else, something not considered “productive,” but that’s not necessarily so. I’ve done some of the very best writing I’ve ever done when I was “supposed” to be doing something else. From the perspective of anyone expecting what I was “supposed” to be doing to get done, it was a waste of time. Not from mine.
Neither do I see doing “nothing” as a problem. Sometimes the mind needs to spin. Sometimes nothing, as the commercial says, is exactly the right thing to do. I have trouble with that. I tend to pound my head, figuratively—usually—at the brick wall I imagine between myself and what I should be doing, when really what I should be doing is nothing, and until I do, that wall isn’t shifting an inch.
So I did nothing, various sorts, imperfectly, but with resigned competence.
And the wall came tumbling down.
When I went looking for the text of this story I thought for a while it had gone missing. I mean, sure I could recover the story from its book appearance so it wasn’t really lost, but my original file was apparently gone. Then I found it in an old format under a name I wasn’t looking for, in a font that was just weird. It took some cleaning up to get here, but today’s Story Time is “How Konti Scrounged the World, from the February 2000 issue of Realms of Fantasy. I’m including the introduction, written after the fact as all these are, so take it for what it’s worth.
“This story may be unique among all the stories I’ve written to date. Not because of its subject matter, or tone, or approach, or any of the likely culprits. No, it has to do with the way I work, and when it comes to deciding what story to write, I’m not in charge. Stories come from anything and anywhere: bits of an overheard conversation, an old legend combined with a new understanding, an image, an emotion. That’s why “where do you get your ideas” is such a silly question to ask a writer. Everyone above the mental level of an eggplant has ideas all the time, but not all of those ideas are stories. The real trick to writing is being able to recognize a story when one comes calling.
Except, of course, for “How Konti Scrounged the World.” It didn’t come calling ‑‑ I went and got it. I’ve always had a fondness for Creation Myths, and the clever and fun ways our ancestors answered the “how did we get here?” question. I mean, really. Mud? Transformed ants? Leftovers from the carcass of a slaughtered giant? A god’s dream? Nifty stuff. Anyway, we’d just moved into a new house and I was feeling a bit detached and out of place. Perhaps to bring some order out of the chaos I was feeling, I thought it would be fun to write a Creation Myth and I sat down with the conscious intention of doing just that. All I can figure is that there must have been some subconscious prep work going on, because in that instant Konti and his little sack appeared and the story, as they say, practically wrote itself. Wish I could do that more often. However, it would be nice if I didn’t have to pack every time.”
As always, “How Konti Scrounged the World” will be online until next Wednesday, March 7, 2018. Then it won’t be.
View of the Pinta and Nina Replicas, Hudson River 2017
Photo by Carol Parks
I blame the Matriarchy. Which is a silly way of saying it’s First Reader’s fault. She’s the one who bought me one of those DNA tests for Christmas. And yes, I know—they really can’t tell you a great deal of specifics, more in broad swaths, and to be fair this one didn’t say anything I either didn’t already know or strongly suspect, though I was open to surprises. There weren’t any, but that’s neither here nor there. The real trouble started because the test included a temporary membership in an online genealogy site.
Oh, dear.
One of my compulsions is research. It’s proved to be a very handy compulsion, especially in tackling projects like the Yamada saga, but unfocused it can be a time sink, and now I was staring right at one. Being a child of divorce was part of the problem, but even on my mother’s side the family memory didn’t go back much before the Depression. In short I grew up knowing almost nothing about the origins of either side of the family, and I admit to being curious. Anyway, combine opportunity with curiosity and there was no way I could resist.
So what did I learn? Bits of trivia of little interest to anyone else, really. Not that I’m not going to bore you with them. I admit to being a little surprised—my father’s family emigrated much earlier than I’d supposed, mid 1600’s, and arrived just twenty years after Virginia was granted its royal charter. Right now I’m stuck at about 1595 on that side. My mother’s side, on the other hand, easily traces back to some guy named Ralph in the 14th century. The only surprise there was that they were of the knightly class and had a “seat” near London, which they later sold to the Tufnells. (Spinal Tap fans will appreciate the reference). They came over about the same time as my father’s family, or possibly a little earlier.
One thing both sides of the family had in common was just this—they were immigrants, arriving much to the annoyance of the people who were already here. And I don’t want to hear “legal vs illegal”–if you were able to (or forced to) come here, you did. That’s how it worked.
So maybe we should cut the new people a little slack? Just saying.
Today’s Story Time is something a little different–an actual science fiction story, “Keeping Lalande Station,” originally published in Future Orbits #2, back in 2001. I wish I had something relative to say about the story. I remember the process of writing it, but the genesis? No clue. Then again, it’s a story about illusion and reality, so whatever I think about it might not be relevant. I wrote it, I know that much. After that, it all gets a little fuzzy, not unlike my protagonist’s mental state.
Standard Note: “Keeping Lalande Station” will stay online until next Wednesday, February 28th, when it will be replaced by…something.
