Sometimes A Mind Is A Wonky Thing To Have

I've been going through a boatload of stress as of late and it looks like it will stay that way for the bulk of the summer. The problem with having this much stress (work and home, specifically the wife laid up with a shattered ankle) is that it takes a serious toll on my writing, in that it's becoming increasingly difficult to concentrate on my current project at hand, which is rewriting my self pubbed chapbook.

Because it has become increasing difficult to keep my mind on the task at hand, I decided to think about something else. That something else is taking another crack at self-publishing. Now, unlike last time in which I went deep into debt to self-publish a mediocre novel and an okay novella, this time I plan on spending only what I really need (ISBN number and maybe a cover) to publish a little something that I can use as what the retail industry likes to call "a loss leader".

Which in this case is a couple of short stories that were featured years ago in my now closed short story blog "Flashing Georgie's Shorts".

Over the years I've managed to tighten up and rewrite about a half dozen of my personal short story faves from that blog, and so far, I've found two that I really like and quite proud of as well.

One is called "The Right Thing" and it uses the backdrop of Newington's town festival as a setting for a new romance. I tweaked it quite a bit and strangely enough, it remains one of the few stories that I've written that is not interracial (i.e Line 21) that I'm quite fond of.

The other one has a bit of a convoluted background. Originally, they were five separate two page shorts called in no particular order for this post: Black & Black; Uncomfortable; Wthwyt (aka What The Hell Were You Thinking); Wysiwyg (aka What You See Is What You Get) and Wysinwyg (What You See Is Not What You Get), that contained the running theme of friends with semi-benefits.

About several months after I had posted the last story (August 2009), I got to thinking about how they would make one very cool short story. So I spent the next few months tweaking the stories to make them fit, and thus, a very cool short story was born.

However, having to come up with a good title proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be. For the longest time, the title was "Friends With Benefits", which was a bit too cliche for me to use. Next came a title that I pulled from the underlying current of girl on boy violence (not heavy but more like the modern version of Walter Mitty), "Masochism Has Its Privileges". Appropriate, but ultimately not very appealing to the general public.

Then I came up with the perfect title, "Singularly Married", which was inspired by the final paragraph of the story.

Rolling off, she then gave my manhood a hard squeeze, before giving the top of my sunburned head the briefest of kisses. Then, like a pleasant nightmare, she was gone, while I sat there trying to figure out how, in the span of two days, I had gained a wife.

So for the moment, these are the only stories that I deem worthy enough to self publish as an e-book (probably through Smashwords).

I probably do have my work cut out for me, but I do like a challenge, and right now, the challenge for me is to get something else out there that people can get on the cheap, read it, and like it enough to check out my novel, which if you like expanding your horizons with a never-given-it-a-second-thought genre, may just surprise you in the end.

For those of you who are new to this blog or even new to me, the trailer for my commercial debut, Line 21, which is available not only at all major online retailers but from me as well.