My Big Friday “Thing”

Not to be confused with “the Friday thing”.

Here’s where I make excuses for what’s going to happen every Friday on this bloggie here, so all my peeps won’t judge me as harshly as they have every right to. This is where I go on and on about how I started writing so long ago, before anything like ‘rules’ and ‘cliches-to-avoid’ became a part of my vocabulary.

In this post I explain how green I was, even a mere 10 years ago, as to the publishing world and my own burgeoning talents. (this is also where I confess that I can’t spell burgeoning, and Spell Check offered up bludgeoning). I’m not sure which is more apropos. This is all called: Making Excuses 😀

Okay, so what’s this all leading up to, you ask?

Well, Lori made me do it. But we can blame Pete, since he wasn’t even in the room when Lori made me agree to do it.

And to hear Lori tell the story, she’ll say it might have been her idea but all she had to do after that was sit back and chuckle at me as I came up with twenty-six and one half reasons not to do it when what I was really saying was “Sure, heck, I’d love to – just help me talk myself into it.”

“Just tell us, for cryin’ out loud!”

Fine. Whatever.

Back in the days of my youth (ten years ago, or something) the fiction I was writing in my very first ever attempts to write original fiction and show it to people, was put out on the interwebbies for download. Now, understand, I was never paid for it. See, I figured back then no one would ever pay to read a novel that wasn’t available for purchase at Barnes & Noble! And they’d sure as hell never pay to read anything I wrote. I mean lord, I was a nobody, completely lacking in talent and credits.

So what I did was allow this novel to be downloaded for free. And that suited me at the time. After all, I was doing what made me happy – writing original fiction, whiling away the days entertaining myself and discovering this true love and passion for storytelling.

Then the emails started rolling in. I was watching my numbers grow – seeing how often the novel was being downloaded – and it surprised me greatly. A website that tracks fiction posted on the ‘net for reader download listed me, then I won some awards from them – all meaningless in the real world. Then the – what I like to call fan mail – started coming in.

It still comes in, actually, to this day, from people who somehow wind up with a copy of the file that some friend emailed them. I don’t mind it, mind you – this is a novel that can’t be published and never would have made the cut anyway. But that mail was surprising me.

Nearly everyone was asking if I had published books out, because they would pay to read more of my work.

Well first you could have knocked me over with a light, wispy-like thing that birds use to attain flight. Second, I was doing the ol’ head-desk after that, on account of the fact that they hadn’t paid to read me. And yes, it occurs to me they were lying, but we all like to be lied to now and again.

“Get to the POINT, for the love of poodles!”

Okay, okay. Sheesh. What I’m trying to impart here is that, starting this Friday if I can get my shitzu together, I’m going to take this big huge epic opus thing (it’s 240,993 words – I shitz you not) and post it, one chapter at a time, every Friday. It’s been so long since I’ve looked this novel over, I kept forgetting – and was telling people incorrectly – how long it was. I thought it was a 240k epic that I’d whittled down to a more manageable 190k.

Nope. It was a 320k Warts and Peas that I whittled down to 240,993.

Yeah, it even embarasses me. 😀

What do I expect to accomplish by doing this? Um . . . to have something I can call my Friday thing? I dunno. Why not, I guess. I don’t expect anyone to read it, I don’t expect comments – so don’t worry there. I don’t expect feedback. I will never ask you if you’ve been reading it, and I won’t sit around chewing my nails at having just shown how badly I can write when I’m not trying!  I really don’t expect anything. Like I said, I wrote this novel 10 years ago when I was still very green and stupid. And I already know this novel has fans, for whatever reasons, so I’m secure in the knowledge that – in its current form – it was able to entertain.

In fact that’s the only reason I praise this novel with a happy little sigh of satisfaction. It was the novel that made me understand how much fun writing can be, and it proved to my little pea brain that I actually can entertain with my words.

And I love that feeling.

God, I love that feeling.