One Over X News

Creation and Welcome

This is the beginning of what I hope will be a productive and informative vehicle for staying in contact with readers. First of all, today is my sister's birthday. I just realized that and I probably should send her an email.

There is nothing odd in my forgetting a birthday. I almost never send cards. It is not that I do not care or even that I do not remember. It is just that I have never done it. And so if I started doing it now it might create suspicions of a paradym shift in my personality.

My sisters generally remember my birthday and send a card, usually something warped or humorous. They know how I am.

My siblings and I determined a while back that our family was dysfunctional. We were together for our mother's funeral at the time.

I have the day off from my day job, which would ordinarily mean that I would be writing, revising or editing. I stayed up late last night working on a short story "In The Way of Humanity". I have been writing it for a little over two months.

The story was originally extracted from the first book Small Change of the second series Two: The Power of X. The main character is Brent. Those who know me, including my family know that my middle initial is 'B' and that for a time I went by the name Brent even though I really don't have a middle name, just an initial. There is a story behind that, of course. I will cover that in a later posting.

"In The Way of Humanity" is unlike most of my writing. I suppose there are stretches in One Over X in which I introduce some rather personal feelings that are related to events from real life. I won't go into what is real and what is not real in my writing. I will say that I fictionalize things to a very large degree. None of my characters are me but there is some of me in every one of my characters.

I have told people that my Brent character in the series is an alter ego. That is basically the truth. He does things that I would not do. He is a writer and he is warped. Sometimes those two things go hand in hand so the fact that he is a writer in itself does not necessarily connect him to me. He is from Ohio. That would connect the two of us. From there our paths diverge only to cross and then diverge again.

I hope to publish the short story with a traditional literary magazine. It will at least be published online. There are web based magazines that will accept unsolicited short stories. The reason for writing a short story is largely promotional. The books have sold but have not made the impact I had hoped they would. So I am trying other avenues. A very close friend suggested that I start writing the stories I tell to other people, which I have already done almost at book length. It is book #12 in the order that they were written. My daughters have read some of it and from their thumbs up review, I am very hopeful that some of that material may turn inspire more short stories.

The subject of "In The Way of Humanity" is the impact of racism on two children that grew up in the 1960's. There are some parallels to my real life in the story. The subject is one that is important to me. I usually stay away from contraversy and political hot buttons in my writing. But a man without strong beliefs is not much of a man. One of the things that I refuse to tolerate is racism. If the message I present in the short story persuades even one person that we are all more the same than the sum of our differences, then the story was worth the effort of writing it.

I suppose I am a creature of my times. I was thinking of all the people that I know personally and realized that I know at least 20 times that number from chatting on the Internet. That is why I am beginning this Blog. For a long time I have been intending to do this. Here it is.

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posted by Unknown @ 9:06 AM